Category: diary

From generation to generation

 

Grandma-Grandpa-LogiodiceTwo-Gens-of-PeteLOGIODICE, PETER PAUL, JR. Peter Paul Logiodice, Jr., age 85, of Orange, passed away on Thursday, March 27, 2014 peacefully in his home. He was born on June 25, 1928 in West Haven to the late Peter Paul and Anna Pucillo Logiodice, Sr. He was employed for over 35 years as a Cable Splicer for the Southern New England Telephone Company. After retiring, he drove a bus for the Orange School System. An active member of the community, he was a member of the Orange Volunteer Fire Department and was a coach for the Orange Little League, an avid gardener and camper in Cape Cod and in his spare time, he attended his grandchildren’s sporting events. Mr. Logiodice is survived by his loving wife, Veronica Molyneux Logiodice, devoted children Peter Paul (Dawn) Logiodice III of Maine, James (Jackie) Logiodice of Rhode Island, William (Roseann) Logiodice of Guilford, CT, Kathleen Logiodice of Madison, CT, Veronica (Louis) Pisano of Orange, CT, Russell (Bouaneung) Logiodice of Milford, CT and Jennifer (Paul Fischer) Logiodice of Idaho, 20 grandchildren, 15 great grandchildren, and sister Mary Benz of Orange. Besides his parents, he is predeceased by his son Thomas John Logiodice, grandson Louis Pisano Jr., brother Pasquale Logiodice and sister Ann Passariello. The family appreciates all the help and support of the nurses and staff at Milford Hospital and Life Choices Hospice. Calling hours are Monday, March 31, 2014 from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm at the Smith & Sefcik Funeral Home, 135 N. Broad St., Milford. A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated on Tuesday at 10:00 am directly in Holy Infant Church, RaceBrook Rd, Orange. Internment will follow in St. Lawrence Cemetery in West Haven. Donations may be made in his name to Life Choices Hospice, www.lifechoicehospice.com, or Orange Volunteer Fire Dept., 625 Orange Center Rd., P.O. Box 878, Orange ,CT 06477 or Leukemia Society, 300 Research Parkway, Suite 310 Meriden, CT 06450. To leave condolences or for directions, please visit our website at: www.georgejsmithandson.com

Published in The New Haven Register on Mar. 30, 2014

 

Four Generations of ‘Pete’

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Up and running (again)

The blog has been down for a couple months – blame it on the juniper; although the Cisco is still acting flakey.  In the mean time, life is about to change drastically for me (again).  This week marks the last week of my graduate level courses.

After friday, I will have conferred upon my personage the Degree of Master – and there will be time in my life for new and different things.  I think I shall require everyone to call me “Master Jediah” from now on.  It’s only fitting for the accomplishment, right? 😉

So in futuristic contemplation, I have no idea what I am going to do with my life yet.  School has consumed every waking free hour for the last 6.5 years. So this weekend, I will be celebrating the new life.  I guess.

I will break the posting silence by stating: and so the next chapter advances, the page turns, the sun cycles on yet another day: opportunities await.  To me, my next directive is to go forth and live – whatever living looks like.

To my children on father’s day 2013 – be yourselves!

As a parent, I want to encourage my children to think and act ‘out of the box’. When I was young, I was weird, I was among the first to start dying my hair different colors in our small town in Maine, I was among the first to start shaving designs into my head and my eyebrows. I was among the first to start wearing mismatching shoes or socks, wearing my ties around my forehead instead of around my neck… and the list goes on and on.

2013 Fathers day tie from Braeden
My Father’s day tie 2013 – making everyone jealous!

I want to encourage my children to think differently than everyone else, to march to the beat of their own drum… in fact, at least one of my children, not only march to the beat of his own drum, he invents new types of drum-sticks! I want to encourage that!

So to show my support, I wore my tie to Church today. Yes, there were thousands of people that don’t know me. yes, there are hundreds of people that stared awkwardly. Yes, there were even a few people that commented on and appreciated my tie.

These are the years that they will learn to dance and skip and hop to the music in their head, and not someone else’s tune.

It was very ironic today that Randy from Oak Hills church quoted one of his old professors when he said: “Everyone is born unique, but most die a copy”. Today was my day to remind my children to be themselves – no matter what.

I must say that I am lucky that I only had only one child that made me something wearable this year.

Yet, I wore this to church as I have never really been one to worry about what people think of me – just ask my own parents.

🙂

Happy Father’s day to all you Father’s out there.

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Lack of honesty, integrity, or do some people actually have alien children.

I spent the day watching the posts on social media; over and over. Amazing father, amazing kids, amazing this, amazing that. Blah, blah, blah.

Do any of you actually live on this planet? Are any of you actually honest with yourselves and the rest of the people in your glocal society. Or, are there actually some people out there that have alien’s instead of children. Let me tell you – that word child and hell aren’t all that far off.

We wake up to fighting, we hear fighting all day, we go to sleep to fighting. It’s non-stop, it’s incessant, it’s unyielding.

People tell me all the time “It’s because you have such smart children”, so I have to ask myself – does that mean everyone else’s children are so dumb? Maybe they just aren’t being honest. Maybe they put up this fake facade.

You see, not only do I have children of my own; but I grew up in a family of 6 children too. There was constant fighting and bickering. There was a general lack of showing love to one another, and caring and companionship.

We all care deeply for each other,, now that we are all grown up and have moved out from under a single roof… so maybe there is hope..

That said, I’m surprised my parent’s didn’t drown us all. Good thing they didn’t.

What about the house alarm?

So tonight while reading Little House in the Big Woods, we were reading the chapter about Pa and the Bear – and Donovan was surprised to find that the book is based on a true story.

I followed up the conversation telling Donovan about my bear story.

Back when we were kids we lived in a trailer that my father had bought, and he had used a chainsaw to cut some doors out of the trailer.  One such door went into a wood shed that dad had built onto the side of the trailer, and then out into the “tool shed”.

Because the trailer was up on cinderblocks, you had to step down into the woodshed before opening the door to go out into the toolshed.  Once in the toolshed, you had to walk through the shed, out into the night, up the hill and around “the path” to get to the outhouse.

One summer evening my mother had went out to go to the bathroom and when she walked down into the woodshed, she heard scratching and growling in the toolshed.  She immediately ran back into the “house” down the hall, and jumped into bed waking my father up telling him there was a bear stuck in the toolshed.

Dad grabbed his gun, went down the hall, down into the woodshed, and opened the door to the toolshed, at which time his pure white german Shepard named “Sam” came bounding into the house.  Apparently Sam had been left outside, and really wanted to get back in.

As I was wrapping up this story, Donovan turned and looked at me in bewilderment, and said: “I don’t get it, didn’t your dad have to disable the house alarm first”.  🙂

Little house in the Big Woods

When we were children there wasn’t much for entertainment; we had dirt, rocks, sticks and water.  Mix them together and you could make some mighty fine toys.  The closest store was probably 10+ miles away – that doesn’t seem that far by today’s standards, but on bikes or by foot – it was.

The water came from a hand pump well; you’d have to pump and prime it over and over to get anything out – but the water was ice, ice cold, and had a very slight taste of iron… it was a good taste.  Showering involved heating water over a hot stove, and pouring it out of “showering cans”.  I always thought everyone in the world knew what a showering can is – but I’m not so sure now.

The bathroom was a hole in the ground, covered at least by  four walls and a roof – but in the winter or at night it was a daunting, cold or scary undertaking.  At the same time, in summer evenings, it was a great opportunity to sneak out into the night and catch fireflies or raid the garden, although the coyotes, bears, moose and other wild critters that frequently were heard stalking through the night requires great courage to venture forth.

There was very little that we ate that wasn’t grown or raised, that’s just how it was.  The planting, the tilling the weeding the gathering, and the canning.  The vegetables, the rabbits, the chickens, the turkeys, the wild berries, apples, elderberries, blueberries, strawberries.  They were all handpicked, or raked.  I had to help in the butchering, it was part of life.

When it was 20 below outside, it was 20 below inside.  The layers and layers of blankets, cast off when needing to make a run outside to the outhouse; but there was always a warm stove burning in the center of the house built with slat boards and no insulation.

The single pane of glass, frosted over in the winter with cold air creeping through the cracks around the door, around the window, through the wall boards and up through the floor boards.  But the sound of crickets in the summer, like they were sitting in the same room… they probably were.

The root cellar full of fresh vegetables, and lizards; damp, cold, dirt.  Just a whole in the floor of the closet, and a whole dug into the earth.

Life is so much different now than it was then.  Was it better?  It’s hard to say.  You worked hard every day of your life, you slept hard each night.  Our world is a very different place now.  My kids will never understand what life WAS like.  Which brings me to the topic at hand.

I have started reading Little House on the Prairie to my children.  It is amazing the number of emotions it stirs in me, not only as I recall it being read to me when I was a child – we had no other entertainment at night when the sticks and rocks and dirt and water were put away.  But, I remember what it was like to live off the land – Jeremiah Johnson style, I remember what it was like to live in a house that was made of drafty slats, to live in the wild woods, I even, to some extent, remember how hard it was to live – none of the high tech, drive over to the store and run a piece of plastic through a machine and they bring out food prepared and ready to eat.

Not that life today is bad; I’m not sure I could go back to the “good ‘ole days” – but I wonder, sometimes I even yearn for those more simple days.

I am going to love reading this series to my children it makes me homesick for childhood, nostalgic – and perhaps, just perhaps, they will get a small amount of vision as to what life used to be like.

 

 

 

 

Guess who’s back…

What? My Name is..

Who? My Name is..

Huh? My Name is..

Slicky, slicky Jed Shady!

 

It has been more than a year, and I had gone silent.  Why?  Because my server traveled the world.  What?  Well, actually – I traveled the world – more specifically we have traveled the world.

Ok, so not really across the whole world, just to the other side of the country – which coming from a boy who grew up in a tiny little town in back-water Maine without running water, or sewer – it has seemed like I am a whole new world away.

We are now in Texas.

In July of 2012 I decided it was time to move on from my company of almost 13 years; I put my resume up on the internet.  Within a matter of days, I had been contacted by a couple different companies that were offering great salaries and benefits, but they were either in the North East (I wanted to get out of the cold) or were on the west coast (I didn’t want to go that far).

Then one day on vacation up in the mountains with my family I received a call from this company that I had not heard of (interestingly, I had heard a lot about them, but just didn’t realize it).  The recruiter left a message.  As a curtsy call, I left him a return message letting him know that I did not ever intend to move as far as Texas.  The recruiter called me back and asked if I was at least interested in hearing what he had to offer.

Rewind 13 years and that is exactly what happened at my previous place of employment, they had 3 managers that reached out to me from the one company for three different positions.  I called the first back to tell him I wasn’t interested in moving to the mid-west, he asked me if I was at least interested in hearing what he had to offer.

I met with the first manager, he offered me the job a few weeks later, the rest is history.

Fast forward back to 2012, the recruiter told me about the company and the position, and I thought he must be joking.  I jumped online in my spotty internet connection the next night, in between homework assignments and I sent him a resume.

A few weeks later I was on a plane to Texas (shudder), a few weeks after that I gave my notice at my current place of employment, and just a few more weeks I was pulling away from our ‘dream house’ that we had built – hauling a camper, a wife and five children half-way across the country to the unknown.

And to think, I once read the book “Who Moved My Cheese” and thought – “Hey, this could be about me”.

We took almost a month to travel from Maine to Texas, and stopped to visit family along the way.  Stopped to say hello to our favorite place on the east coast: Tybee Island.  Even took a short detour to bring our kids to Disney – something my wife had always wanted to do – but I was always too busy working to ever find the time.

So here we are, only about a month after hearing about this new company, we left our home, our family and traveled to the other side of the country.  Living out of our camper (7 people), wondering if we would be able to sell our house, wondering when we could buy a new house.

Fast forward 8 months later.  We miss our friends and family back home; but we’ve made new friends too.  My family couldn’t be happier (except if our friends and family came to live in Texas).  The job is wonderful, the weather is amazing, Texas is super…  where has it been all my life?  I belong in this state – while I will miss the seasons and the trees and the land, Maine was really not my true home.

And now I come to the end, and I must sign off by saying that YHWH has really taken care of me and my family.  I’ve never done anything to deserve it, that’s for sure.  But He has watched over us, and listened to us, and directed us, and He has told us and showed us what and when.

The pages have turned, the next chapter has begun.  May it always be, Soli Deo Gloria.

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The sun was bright, it was a self-timed photo-snap; but I have learned that I can go searching for happiness further than my back yard – because no matter where we are, as long as we are together – we are always at home!

Amanda on the beach

I think my beautiful wife is my second favorite thing to photograph (nature is still my #1 right now); here she is standing over a precipice on Marginal Way in Wells, Maine.

 

Amanda Beach

 

Here is a picture of the ocean on Marginal Way, it is beautiful out there!

Ocean