Adventures in the New Jersey Woods

Sandra stepped on a snake when we were hiking the other week. She screamed and then Nancy stepped on it too. (it was under the fallen leaves and they couldn't see it) When Nancy stepped on it, the snake jumped into the air. I guess it was a friendly snake because no one was bitten. The colors in the woods were really pretty. We must have sounded like a herd of elephants walking through the leaves. Louis L'Amour would not have been impressed.

Richard drives under this walkway over I-287 every day on his commute. It is labled Cannonball Trail. So one afternoon we hiked in and walked over it. I rode his bike on part of the trail as well. The Cannonball Trail was used during the American Revolutionary Way to move supplies in secret from the British troops.

Some of the fallen leaves were yellow. Others were red. The colors on the trees and on the ground, and the filtered sunlight made the woods a beautiful place indeed.

Rainy Bonaire

The crew on Bonaire is painting another of our towers. They had to stop for a while because of Tropical Storm/Hurricane Omar. Sunny weather has returned to Bonaire, but the antenna fields at TWR are still flooded, as you can see here.

We've seen this before, but last year wasn't this wet.

Thanks go to George Zensen for these photos.

Sandra and I are hoping for a wet winter on Bonaire, so that the Olive bushes around the perimeter of our back yard, that we cut way back, will grow in nice and bushy.

An Apple a Day

Apples are one of the few raw fruits and/or vegitables that I can eat without various annoying allergic reactions. We've enjoyed some delicious (no pun intended) apples this fall, and had a great outing to the Cherry Hill Orchard, in Lancaster, to pick our own apples, fresh off of the trees.

The trees were fairly short and bushy. Some of them were really loaded with apples.

We picked a big bag full of Cortland apples and have been enjoying their crisp texture and slightly tart flavor. The Cortland apple trees were pretty picked over, so I had to reach waaaay high to get some.

Stained Glass Windows

My mom really likes stained glass art. I snapped these pictures at the First Baptist Church in Asbury Park, NJ.

Fall Foliage

It's chilly, windy and rainy here in PA today. But it has been a great fall up 'till now. We were in Perry Hall, MD last week. Had a good time with friends at the Perry Hall Baptist Church and got in a couple good bike rides on some very hilly MD roads. Here are a couple pictures of the views from NJ, not too far from where Richard and Nancy live.

All new TWR Web Site

The Trans World Radio website was completely overhauled this past summer. The home page is changed each month to highlight a different part of the worldwide TWR ministry.

Browsing through the drop down menus will uncover a wealth of information.

The month of October features our broadcasts to Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Other Side of New Jersey

I have to admit that some areas of New Jersey are less than picturesque, but during this past week we enjoyed some bike riding and hiking in a breathtakingly beautiful part of the state. The trees are beginning to get colorful and the weather has been perfect.
We could see the New York skyline in the far distance, but were far removed from its hustle and bustle.
Check out these overgrown ruins of the Van Slyke Castle located in the middle of the forest.

Swedish Coffee Bread

Here's a picture of Brad's mom, whipping up a batch of her yummy Swedish coffee bread. After all the secret ingredients are in the dough. It is rolled up and braided to make a loaf of the coffee bread.
These special snips seem to help the flavors mingle during baking.
Here's the final product shortly before is was consumed.

Book Bargains

Sandra and I recently attended one of the largest, if not the largest, used book sale in the USA. The selling prices got lower at the end of the three day event. Sandra and I were there, armed with a 12 page printout of our home library, and came away with 43 used hard back and paperback books for about 13 dollars.

I even spotted a copy of TWR founder, Dr. Paul Freed's book, "Towers to Eternity."

Click on the picture for a bigger version and see if you can spot Sandra towards the middle of the picture.

Brooks Tegler Big Band

I attended an interesting concert recently. The Brooks Tegler big band recreated a World War 2 Glen Miller Army Air Force Band concert, right down to the drum set and uniforms.



There were a surprising number of people in the audience who had actually heard an original Glen Miller band.

Asbury Park - Ocean Grove

We recently spent a weekend with the folks at the Asbury Park Baptist Church in New Jersey. This church has been involved with the ministry of Trans World Radio since before the Bonaire station was constructed. Richard and Nancy drove down for the weekend and stayed in neighboring Ocean Grove. It was a rainy and foggy weekend so the beach was deserted. When the fog really filled in, we couldn't even see the water from the street. The weather didn't dampen our spirits however.
We went for a walk in the evening and the foggy scene was really amazing, like something out of a Sherlock Holmes story.
This church has a Spanish speaking congregation as well as the English speaking one. They both met together for the missions emphasis weekend. Here we see Sandra singing a couple songs with the Hispanic group on Friday night.

Tuneful Tangemans

We saw Terri Tangeman and her sons, Benjamin and Cort, this week. I generally don't mention the names of young people on the blog, but these guys are part of an award winning music group, the Mountain Aires, and very much in the public eye. These young guys are accomplished musicians and I really enjoyed getting to hear them play.
Benjamin is on the far left in the group photo. Mentor, Marvin Heath can be seen in the white shirt at the center. The guys were working on one last song for their upcoming (November) Christmas CD. I did a Google search on them and found that songs from their first album, "Echo the Legacy," are available for download. The actual CD can also be found at the Great Smokey Mountain Association stores at parks in North Carolina, and from the group itself. These young musicians are budding businessmen as well.

Bonaire Birds

Well, we're in the States right now, but we've still got some great Bonaire memories on the laptop. We've also created some 8x10 photo books on www.winkflash.com that we'll use to share images of Bonaire with our family, friends, and ministry sponsors.

TWR Cary

Sandra and I were at the Trans World Radio office in Cary, North Carolina earlier this week. It was good to see some "old" friends and make some new ones. The photo above has the hopefully current statistics about TWR worldwide. You might have to click on the picture to see it big enough to read the info. There is a pdf that lists all those 225 languages available on the TWR web site.
The lobby has this big wall sized panel outlining the six ministry foci of TWR's Global Strategic Plan.

Bonaire Day - Biker Day

Today is Bonaire Day, hooray. The official festivities are at the community center in Antriol this year, running from about 8:30 am until late tonight.

It is also the umpteenth annual Bonaire Biker Day. Now these are not the sort of bikes that my buddies and I huff and puff around Bonaire on. These bikes are beeeeg Harleys. Lots of bikers come from Aruba and Curacao to join the Bonaire contingent. They have special organized rides, meals and other festivities all weekend.

I'm attaching a picture of some of the bikes resting between activities.

Early Morning Musings - Reflections on a Flamingo

When Miguel and I rode by Gotto Lake early Tuesday morning, we couldn't help but notice the beautiful reflections in the mirror like surface of the water. So I drove back on Wednesday morning, braved swarms of "nose gnats" and shot a ton of pictures.
Here are a few friendly Flamingos posing with their imaginary friends.
I've been wanting to get images like these for a long time, since Keith Johnston gave me the inspiration.
It is probably safe to click on these thumbnails, even if you have a fairly slow Internet connection, because the file sizes are about half of what my usual pictures are.

Wild Weather

The weather here on Bonaire has been hot and sultry for a couple weeks now. Basically when storms pass through the northern Caribbean, they shut down the trade winds down here in the south where we are. One night last week the southwest horizon was lit up with an amazing light show. The lightning flashes were bright and frequent enough that it reminded Sandra of the strobe lights one sees when having an EEG. It was awesome, but a little weird too.
I'm not sure how these pix will look for you. They are of a type that will depend a lot on how bright your monitor is compared to mine. Back in my youth when I was living, cycling, and skiing in the fridged winter months, we paid attention to the wind chill factor that made it seem colder than the thermometer was indicating. I had to be careful about my prone to frostbite nose.
Well, apparently there is a warm weather factor as well. A friend just told Sandra that the NOAA reported that considering the temperature, lack of wind, and humidity, (I'd throw in Sun intensity too, but I don't know if they do) it feels like 120 degrees F on Bonaire these days. That makes me feel better, (well mentally at least) 'cause the thermometer is only registering temps in the low 90s, yet we've been melting. I've had an amazing lack of energy, even on my early 6 to 7:30 am bike rides. When we take a shower at mid day, we set the tap to the hot water position, because the sun heated water coming out of the cold water line is unbearably hot, and the nice insulated water heater isn't set that high.
But it could be worse, we're not bearing the brunt of all those storms. We really have to laugh when we watch the so called Tropical Update on the Weather Channel. There'll be this big storm just beating the living !%$#**&! out of Hispanola and the people on the TV spend most of the session waxing eloquent about if the storm is likely to hit the USA.
The islands are taking a beating. Here is what Georgina, the director of the Trans World Radio ministries in the Dominican Republic has to report. "Please keep praying. Some times I prefer not say too much of our happenings because I’m afraid of sounding dramatic, but life here for me is like an action movie. The stormy season is giving us a lot of hard times. My heart is broken because of those homeless. Most of the city is suffering long power outages. Not all our activities are able to go on normally because they depend on whether or not our staff and guests are able to get to our offices. I am able to get here because I drive the office car and I live 8 minutes far, and usually my way is safe."

Yard Work

Once or twice a year we have to cut back the trees and bushes in and around our yard. They lie dormant most of the year, but when we get heavy rains, they go crazy and try to take over all available space.
The weather has been brutally hot, so we've just been working in the early morning and early evening hours each day. Sandra is always happy for any opportunity to use her "alligator" chain saw. It cuts surprisingly quickly and is much safer than a normal saw.
This year we also cut back the olive bushes that are in front of the walls around the perimeter of our back yard. They had gotten tall, unkempt, and scraggly. The yard kind of looks bare naked now, but we're hoping for a wet rainy season this year so that they will all grow back thick and bushy. We have aggressively cut back a few of these bushes in the past and they grew back and filled in wonderfully, so we're hoping that they'll do it again. There are also a few Wayaka trees back there that were getting crowded out. We're hoping that they'll start growing like crazy too, now that they have some space and sunlight. We really like the Wayaka.
We rented a dumpster from Selibon for the weekend. The hot setup is to fill it up with clippings and then Sandra would stomp and bounce them down, and we'd fill it up again, and again, and again...

Dog Days

Have you ever heard the expression "the dog days of August?" Well, as the tropical storms and hurricanes have been crossing the Caribbean to our north, it has been rather windless and hot here on Bonaire for the last couple weeks.

The dogs really like hanging out on the cool tile floors inside the house. They perk up at night when it becomes a little cooler.

Clouds of Stars and Mosquitoes

We had a slight backwards wind today, with clouds and a little rain. But the skies cleared up quite nicely in the evening. I zoomed out to the south end of Bonaire for some stargazing.

The stars were really great but the mosquitoes were absolutely brutal tonight. I was re-applying repellent every 10 minutes or so, but they were still attacking any time I quit moving around.

Kind of made it hard to look through the telescope. I didn't even get the binoculars out of their cases, but I did enjoy the views for an hour or so with my bare naked eyeballs. And I snapped a couple pictures, one of which came out pretty good.

This is a single three minute and 48 second exposure of the Milky Way star clouds in the constellation Scutum. M11 and M26 are visible towards the middle of the picture and to the right of the middle of the picture.

Blasts From the Past

Pat and Denny Hogan were vacationing here on Bonaire recently. They had a great time visiting Bonaire friends from when they lived here back in the day. Speaking of visiting, Sandra was visiting them in here in 1980, when we got engaged. Sergio and Amy Da Silva were here recently as well. They first met each other on Bonaire, while they were both serving with Trans World Radio, and wanted their kids to share the Bonaire experience. After many years with Radio Trans Mundial in Brazil, they are now living in Michigan in the USA.
Sergio has a doctorate in Psychology and teaches at Calvin College. He didn't psychoanalyze any of us while they were here, phew! But he did teach us a great song that he wrote in Brazil, following a missions trip to Africa.

Long Time no Blog

All my spare time, these last couple weeks has been spent glued to the boob tube watching the Olympics. Many of the events took place in the wee hours of the morning, or while I was at work. So we recorded tons of stuff at all hours of the day and night, and then watched our favorite events at our leisure.
For example, I recorded the mtn. biking while we slept last night, and then watched it before church this morning. :)

I've still been getting in my own mtn. biking of course. At my advanced age, it is much easier to maintain one's fitness than to try to regain it. There has been little to no wind here on Bonaire for the last week or more. That makes for great cycling, but hot and muggy living. The air temperature is only a degree or two warmer than it was a month ago, but the lack of wind makes it feel much hotter.

It's cloudy today, which makes it feel a little cooler. Sitting in front of a fan helps too! The clouds are a mixed blessing, however. Venus and Mercury are quite close together in the early evening sky, but I haven't been able to see them for a few days now. I'm hoping for clear skies at least once during the next week or so while the moon is out of the sky, so we can get in some major Milky Way star gazing.

Dirty Jobs

Have you ever seen Mike Rowe on the Discovery Channel trying his hand at all sorts of very yucky but totally necessary jobs? Well I thought of Mike a week ago Saturday, while I was shoveling chicken poo here on Bonaire. It turns out that well aged chicken poo doesn't smell bad at all, but it does make great fertilizer, something that the poor soil of Bonaire needs badly.

Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of this epic event...too busy shoveling.

Believe it or not, the whole adventure was a fundraiser for the building fund of the International Bible Church. A relative of the pastor's wife runs the chicken farm and graciously supplied the chicken manure. Wai-man Chan somehow obtained 250 unused giant bags, and Johann agreed to sell the bags of poo-fertilizer at the Green Lable Nursery.

So all we had to do was shovel, bag and deliver. Hawking poo on the street corner would have been above and beyond the call of duty.

Perseids and Planets

The peak of the Perseid meteor shower occurs tonight. The best viewing, here on Bonaire, should be between 2am and dawn, when the moon will have set and the shower radiant will be high in the sky. The sky has been reasonably clear lately, so maybe I'll head out for a look, if I can tear myself away from the live late night Olympics coverage on TV. Ha-ha, that's a good one.

I'll be out on the road by 6am tomorrow morning for our Tuesday group bike ride, so the trusty VCR will be recording any of those great late night Olympics events, like team handball, (Sandra played it while in high school in Monaco) that we might want to see.

I must confess that unlike some friends of ours, I'm rarely motivated to to bounce out of bed and venture outside in the wee hours of the morning in hopes of spotting those all to infrequent meteors. What I will do, however, is wake up and peak out the window just to make sure that some sort of once in a lifetime meteor storm isn't going on out there. That paid off in 1998 when the Leonids produced a display of bright meteors and fireballs that I'll never forget!

The planets are also putting on a good show this week, and it's right after sunset, so I don't have to loose any beauty sleep to see it. Venus and Saturn will be very close together on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. Venus is really easy to spot, here on Bonaire, but I might need to break out the binoculars to see Saturn.

By Thursday evening, Saturn will be placed exactly halfway between Venus and Mercury. That should be nice. And then by Saturday evening, Mercury will have moved up to be halfway between Venus and Saturn. If the skies remain clear, I should be able to watch the whole show each evening while cooking our nightly chicken on the grill. Now that's my kind of astronomy!

Cruising Curacao

Sandra and I were on our neighbor island, Curacao, all day Saturday. She had a mid morning doctor appointment, but the only flights we could get were at 6am and 9pm. So we had lots of time to visit a couple warehouse stores, walk around the downtown Punda shopping district, and visit the zoo. We also visited Burger King, Baskin Robbins and Pizza Hut. Fast food is a fun novelty, when you haven't had any for a few years.

I didn't bring a camera, but I wish I had. They had some very unusual large birds at the zoo, as well as a three day old baby monkey that was riding around on its mother's back.

The traffic was noticeably lighter on Saturday than the usual weekday, and the teeny tiny even-smaller-than-a-Toyota-Yaris car we rented from Budget was a lot of fun.

Moon and Planets

It's been pretty cloudy here on Bonaire, but the skies cleared just in time for us to spot a super skinny Moon and the planet Venus last night.

In this picture, the star Regulus is to the right of the Moon, and the planet Venus is pretty far to the Moon's lower right, just above the roof line of our neighbor's house.


If it is clear again tonight, I hope to zoom out somewhere that has photogenic cacti or palm trees in the foreground.


As this Sky and Telescope story reports, the Moon will be to the left of the planet Saturn tonight, and to the left of the planet Mars on Monday night. The chart included with this story shows the alignment of the moon and planets as seen from the USA. You can tell from my picture that the alignment appeared a bit different here on Bonaire.


The evening planets are actually easier to see here in the Tropics than they are up North.