Rest in Peace, Pap Bressler

WILLIS O.“WOODY” BRESSLER

IRVONA – Woody Bressler, 80, passed away Monday, March 10,
2008, due to complications following heart surgery. He was born on June 5, 1927,
to the late Willis and Elzada (Ogden) Bressler. 

       He married the former Vivian J. Lippert of
Curwensville on February 27, 1948, who survives. This year marked their
60^th year as a married couple.   

       After more than 30 years, Woody retired from the
Ironworkers Union Local 772. He also taught in their Apprentice School for
several years.

    Woody was a talented and skilled marksman. He held a
Masters card with the NRA and was a member of the Green Mountain League. He was
also a gunsmith who created and designed some masterpiece custom rifles. He
loved the outdoors and was an avid hunter, fisherman and camper.

     He was his children’s most avid sports fan.  From the
time they were in Little League and through their college years, he never missed
a football game, a wrestling match or a baseball game in which his children
participated.  In later years, the same held true for his grandchildren. If he
couldn’t be there in person, he was certainly there in spirit.

    In his retirement years, Woody built a house on top of a
mountain where he raised horses and became an avid gardener. He was also a
woodworker, a builder, an inventor, and a mechanic. Woody has always been known
for his ingenious engineering skills, his strong work ethic, his perfectionism,
and his love of a good joke.  He was loved by many and will be missed by all who
knew him.

      Left to cherish his memory are his wife, Vivian
Bressler, his children, Elwood Bressler, and his wife, Andrea, of Curwensville,
Les Bressler and his long-time companion, Karen Purvis, of Waterville, Wendy
Baranak and her husband, Matt, of Smithfield, Virginia, Larrie Kim Bressler, of
Curwensville, and Lance Bressler and his wife, Beth, of Curwensville. His
surviving grandchildren are Mary Leigh Sellers, Brad, Markay, and Ashley
Bressler, (Elwood),Terry Bressler, (Les), Chase Baranak (Wendy), Hannah and Sam
Bressler (Lance), and adopted grandchild, Ben Reinhart. Eleven
great-grandchildren survive him. Also surviving are his brothers Gerald Bressler
of Curwensville, Merle Bressler of New Millport, and Ardell Bressler of Glen
Richey.

He was preceded in death by his parents, siblings Audrey
Brown, Lila Spath, Roy Bressler and grandchild, Shawn Bressler.

   A memorial service will be held on Saturday, March 15,
2008, at 4:00 at Chidboy’s Funeral Home in Curwensville.  A Celebration of Life
Ceremony will follow immediately at the Curwensville Presbyterian Church on
Locust Street.

Safely Here

GhostFroggy, BlueSmurfGirl, and Eatyourweightincheesepuffs have all safely arrived. Whee! I have friends here to visit! I’m hoping for lots of fun and travels.  But, they are all jet lagged and asleep right now.

Speaking of visits, Thursday we went to London. It was 14 hours of travel and sightseeing, but I’ll just give you one bit right now, The British Library.

This is the entrance to the courtyard.



This is me, looking squinty-eyed and tired in front of the door.  You can barely make out “The British Library” on the door behind me.

Why did we go to the library if we weren’t going to check out books?  Well, they also have a display room which set my literary heart to pounding.  If pictures had been allowed, I’d be regaling you with dozens, but they were not.  What did I see in the British Library?

• A Gutenberg Bible
• The Lindisfarne Gospels
• A page from the book of Hebrews from 200 AD
• A letter from Elizabeth I explaining to her counselors why she would not marry
• Edward VI’s diary
• Captain James Cook’s journal
• Original scores in their own handwriting from Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin
• One of W.H. Auden’s notebooks
• A handwritten draft of Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol
• Jane Eyre written by hand by Charlotte Bronte
• Lewis Carroll’s diary
  
• A history book Jane Austen and her sister made and illustrated as children
• John Milton’s commonplace book
• A First Folio of Shakespeare
• The Magna Charta (four copies!)
• A Wycliffe Bible
• Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and notes
• The first drafts of many Beatles songs including Hard Day’s Night which was written on the back of a birthday card
• The most exquisitely drawn and painted scrolls from China and the Middle East which were hundreds of  years old.

This bibliophile was in alt! The children sat on a bench or amused themselves with the coolest touch-screen thing. You could select a book and then turn the pages via the computer screen. Nifty!

What treasure would you like to see?

Stupid Questions

It has been said, “There are no stupid questions.” Or perhaps you’ve heard it said, “The only stupid question is the one that doesn’t get asked.” Those adage-creators have obviously never spent time with my family.

We were in London today, and I was pelted with inane queries.

Can I climb out there? (asked two times by someone about the bridge supports as we were crossing the Millennium Bridge)

Can I jump into the river? (asked three times while crossing the Millennium Bridge)

Can I throw this apple core into the river? (asked while standing in a crowd by the Thames)

Can I open this to see if anything is in it? (asked by someone of an Egyptian sarcophagus in the British Museum while standing next to the hundredth “DO NOT TOUCH” sign)

Can I slide down this? (asked by someone of the five-inch gap of metal between the up and down escalators in a jam-packed Tate Modern, a museum of modern art)

Still, the day was great fun with visits to the British Library, Tate Modern, Shakespeare’s Globe, The Tower Bridge, and The British Museum.  I’m too tired to write more now.  Phew!

What’s the silliest question you’ve been asked (or have asked) lately?

Bits of Fun

If you like to play online flash games (type of file, not flashers), Wit has a great site he updates often:  http://www.thesellers.org/David/Games.  I know he’d love to have more people check it out.

I found this list on jaelbee2′s site, and I thought it was hilarious.  If you weren’t a girl in the 1970′s, you won’t find it nearly so amusing.  (I made the comments in brackets.)

If You Were a Little Girl in the 70′s……

You had that Fisher Price Doctor’s Kit with a stethoscope that actually worked.

You owned a bicycle with a banana seat and a plastic basket with flowers on it. [Mine was purple.]

You learned to skate with actual skates (not roller blades) that had metal wheels.

You had either a bowl cut or pixie, not to mention the “Dorothy Hamill.” People sometimes thought you were a boy.

You had rubber boots for rainy days and Moon boots for snowy days.

You owned a Slip-n-Slide, on which you injured yourself on a sprinkler head more than once. [I was always jealous of the Slip-n-Slide owners.]

Your Holly Hobbie sleeping bag was your most prized possession. [I had the Holly Hobbie dollhouse and a HH birthday cake one year]

You wore a poncho, gauchos, and knickers. [My knickers were brown corduroy with a matching blazer and vest which I wore with an off-white ruffled shirt. Oh, yeah.]

You begged Santa for the electronic game, Simon. [And I got it! I also got Merlin, which I loved.]

You had the Donnie and Marie dolls with those pink and purple satiny shredded outfits, or The Sunshine family [Remember them? They had flat feet. How about Malibu Barbie in the red-orange swimsuit?]

You spent hours in your backyard on your metal swing set with the trapeze. The swing set tipped over at least once.

You had homemade ribbon barrettes in every imaginable color.  

You wanted to be Laura Ingalls Wilder really badly. You wore that Little House on the Prairie-inspired plaid, ruffle shirt with the high neck in at least one school picture, and you despised Nellie Oleson!

Your hairstyle was described as having wings or feathers and you kept it pretty with the comb you kept in your back pocket. When you walked, the wings flapped up and down, looked like you were gonna ‘take off’. [Especially if you used hot rollers like I did. Oh, for a curling iron...]

You know who Strawberry Shortcake is, as well as her friends, Blueberry Muffin and Huckleberry Pie. [I'd pretend that Lemon Meringue married Huckleberry Pie and called her Lemon Meringue Pie. I can still remember how those dolls smell...]

You carried a Muppets lunch box to school and it was metal, not plastic with the thermos inside. Some were glass inside and broke the first time you dropped them.

You and your girlfriends would fight over which of the Dukes of Hazzard was your boyfriend. [I always went for Luke, the brunette.]

YOU had Star Wars action figures, too! [Well, I'd play with my brother's.]

It was a big event in your household each year when The Wizard of Oz would come on TV. Your mom would break out the popcorn and sleeping bags! [For us it was the Charlie Brown specials]

You tried to do lots of arts and crafts, like yarn and Popsicle-stick decoupage,or those weird potholders made on a plastic loom. [My mom still has some of those potholders.]

You made Shrinky-Dinks and put iron-on kittens on your t-shirts! [I also made fake stained glass with plastic pellets.]

You used to tape record songs off the radio by holding your portable tape player up to the speaker. [You may be wrong, but you may be ri-iight!]

You learned everything you needed to know about girl issues from Judy Blume books like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. [We must, we must. Increase our bust.]

You thought Olivia Newton John’s song Physical was about aerobics. [Aw, she looked so wholesome!  My childhood is shattered. Just like the guy who discovered his angel is a centerfold.]

You wore friendship pins on your tennis shoes, or shoelaces with heart or rainbow designs [I LOVED my velour rainbow shirt!]

You drowned yourself in Love’s Baby Soft – which was the first “real” perfume you ever owned. [My geometry teacher was allergic to it, so we'd spray ourselves copiously before we went into class.]

You glopped your lips in Strawberry Roll-on lip-gloss till it almost dripped off.

Bury Me in Credits!

10,006

That’s how many credits I have right now. Whee!  I’m 10% of the way to the 100,000 goal to purchase Lifetime.  Yes, I took a few surveys (2,000 credits a pop), but several times I didn’t get my 2,000 credits or I answered about 20 questions and was then told I didn’t qualify for the survey. Oh, well.

Today we walked to the American Cemetery which is about a mile from our house.  Yes, the AMERICAN Cemetery. It is the only WW II American cemetery in the British Isles. 3,812 Americans are buried here. The wall (where the statues are) lists the names of 5,127 Americans who are missing, lost at sea, or whose remains were never identified.

There was a room with a chapel in it. The ceiling and the chapel area were all mosaic. One wall was a huge carved map showing planes and flights to countries. Actually, I’m not really sure what it meant, even though there was a legend of which planes were American and British–something WW II.  Two walls were windows with the seals of the 50 states in each one in stained glass.



On one of the outside walls of the memorial chapel was another carved map, this one showing England and the invasion of Normandy.



One other neat thing about the cemetery is the view, since it is built on a bit of a hill. East Anglia (the area where Cambridge is located) is pretty flat. Most of it was drained swamp (er…fen land).  If you stand in a spot near the flagpole, you can see Ely Cathedral 14 miles away.  It was pretty tiny, but we saw it.  (You can read about Ely Cathedral HERE if you missed the earlier post.) I didn’t bother taking a picture of the view because, really, did you want me to post a picture of a hill with some shapes on it 14 miles away?



What did you do today?

Happy Mother’s Day!

Nope, I’m not two months early. Mother’s Day was celebrated today in England. I got beautiful pink, red, and variegated tulips, chocolate covered raisins and peanuts, two pieces of licorice, a Libby-cross-stitched bookmark, two cards (very English: “To my Mummy” and “I Love Mum”), and my traditional lunch at Pizza Hut. It was nice to be able to keep up the tradition even though we are overseas.

Speaking of overseas, TGD left today for a week-long jaunt to Norway. Yes, it would have been lovely if we all could have gone, and it would have been much cheaper to fly to Norway from England than from the USA, but… six plane tickets + six hotel nights + 18 meals out = um, not this time.  (TGD is there to meet up and research with a math colleague.)

I’ve found something that has helped me with my Bible time. Perhaps this idea will help you as well. Some days I take a chapter and copy it by hand into a notebook. Why do I do this? It helps me to slow down and concentrate on the words. I have the chance to notice things I might have missed if I were simply reading it. I notice connections between other passages and ponder what words and ask myself questions. I diagram the sentences in my mind and really look at what is going on.  Try it!

What Bible study tips have helped you?

What’s That We See?

It looks like spring!

Just a bit of taunting for my snowbound friends.