Category Archives for Uncategorized

The Polar Express

A couple of weeks ago we kicked off the holiday season with a trip to the North Pole aboard the Polar Express. It’s really hard to get tickets because it’s such a popular event. I had to send a $10 donation and enter a lottery, and on October 22nd they drew names and called people in the order they were drawn. If you didn’t answer the phone, you lost your chance to buy tickets. I carried my cell phone around all day, and my heart stopped every time it rang. I had Ginny on back-up with a list of preferred dates, ticket quantities, and credit card numbers. When they finally called at 9:15 PM, I had given up hope so I was pleasantly surprised. I was able to get tickets on an evening ride, for us and the Fonsecas. We stayed at the Hampton Inn in North Conway, which has indoor water slides to tire the kids out. Our trip to the North Pole coincided with the ice storm that knocked out power to half of New England, but we were lucky and had fine weather for travelling.

The train ride was as magical as I remembered from my trip with Aliya, Karen, and Vic back in 2005. The kids wore their pjs and the bakers served hot chocolate and chocolates with nougat centers, just like in the Polar Express story. It took about a half hour to get to the North Pole, and we were greeted by about 60-70 elves with their lanterns to help us up the hill to Santa’s amphitheater. The elves sang a few carols and then a guy in his robe in pj’s read the story about when he was a little boy and went on the Polar Express. Santa made an appearance and walked through the crowd of several hundred, greeting the kids and giving hugs. Then he selected a child (a “plant”) from the audience to give the first gift of Christmas. Luckily he didn’t choose Adlani because I don’t think “SPEED RACER!!!” was the gift request he was looking for. If you’re not familiar with the story, the kid asks for a bell from Santa’s sleigh, and if you believe in Christmas you can hear the sound of the bell. All of the kids received bells on the ride home.

We did have one small mishap or almost-mishap…Adlani was sleeping in one room with Karen, Shane, and Ginny, while Ben and I were in the other room with Aliya, Vic, and Norah. Around 5 a.m. I woke up out of a dead sleep because I could hear someone crying “Mommy…Mommy” over and over. Adlani had woken up and left Karen’s room to find me, and he was out in the hall crying outside my door. Oy. All’s well that ends well. And the 50%-off sale on kids’ clothes at LL Bean ensured that all ended well.


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Canine Wanderings

Last week Ben found a beautiful, gigantic, and very gentle greyhound wandering the neighborhood. Her name was Daisy and we called her owner (who was away from home and didn’t know she had escaped) and entertained her until he arrived. That reminded me that Annie has done some wandering of her own lately.
Considering where we live and the busy streets that surround our house, it’s a miracle that Annie has survived her wanderings. Once she ran off and while we were all out looking for her, someone came walking up the street with her on a leash. One morning she squeezed out the front door as I was getting the kids off to school and when I ran after her I asked a woman in the parking lot across the street to hang out with the kids until I came back. Another time she ran across 2 neighbors’ yards, across a busy street, and over to the church before Ben caught up with her. She is extremely fast…she even caught a squirrel the other day. I was amazed. I screamed at her to drop it, and miraculously she did and it limped up a tree.

Back in November I was sound asleep at 6 a.m. and I suddenly jumped up and yelled to Ben because I thought Annie had run off again. He said, “She’s right here…just go back to sleep.” It must have been a premonition because not more than 10 minutes later he was yelling up the stairs that she had run off. I went out looking for her and didn’t see her anywhere, so we drove around looking for what we thought would be a squished dog on the road. We didn’t find her so I called Animal Control and left a message. As soon as the office opened I got a call from the animal control officer and she said, “It looks like your dog made it all the way to Boston this morning.” What??? It turned out that she ran out the end of our dead-end street at the intersection and a guy sitting at the light saw her. He said she ran across Route 30 a couple of times so he followed her and she went right to him. He drove around looking for someone looking for a dog (she had taken the tag off her collar) and didn’t see us, so he took her to work at an elementary school in West Roxbury. She had such a fun adventure that she escaped AGAIN about a week later and was found by a neighbor.

I have since purchased a wireless fence and when the weather improves I’m going to start training her to stay put.
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Cracker Barrel / Cracker Box

In two recent unrelated incidents coincidentally linked by “crackers”, honest people returned large sums of found money to their rightful owners. I think these stories are amazing.

Woman Returns $100,000 found at Cracker Barrel

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. – A Murfreesboro, Tenn., woman chose not to follow the old saying “Finders keepers, losers weepers” when she discovered nearly $100,000 in a bag at a local Cracker Barrel restaurant. But it wasn’t that the thought didn’t cross her mind.

“Satan will tempt you,” said Billie Watts, 75. “I have been having real bad teeth problems. I thought, ‘I’ll get my teeth fixed.’ “

She ultimately decided to return the money she found in a bag in the women’s restroom to its

Watts had to be coaxed by Michael Peralta, one of her 12 grandchildren, to tell her story.

“I’m proud of her because if anyone in the world deserved to find $97,000 it was them,” Peralta, 31, said of his grandparents, who live in an apartment and depend on their Social Security checks.

The excitement began when Watts stopped by the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store with her husband, Malcolm, Thursday afternoon. In the bathroom, she found a tapestry bag hanging on a hook on one of the stall doors.

“It had a Manila envelope that was sticking out of the bag,” she said. “It couldn’t zip up; it was too full.”

She searched the bag for the identity of its owner. Inside the envelope was a picture of two women and a child, but no names. Then she spotted the money.

“I said ‘Oh my goodness,’ ” Watts recalled Monday. “I have never seen that much money in my whole life. I counted the money. There was $97,000 in $1,000 bills. They were neatly stacked inside the bag. “

Watts decided to leave the restaurant with the money.

“I was afraid to go to the counter,” she said. “Maybe the wrong person could get ahold of it.”

After the couple returned home, Watts called the Cracker Barrel restaurant.

“I told them I found something in the bathroom. I just left my number and asked them to call me.”

In 10 to 15 minutes, a woman called.

“I knew it was the right person when she called. She identified the picture, the envelope and the money,” said Watts. “I met her in front of the Cracker Barrel about 15 to 20 minutes after she called me.”

In the restaurant’s parking lot, the woman who left the money got out of her car and approached Watts.

“She run up and hugged me. She got excited and didn’t even look at the bag except to pull out the picture to show it to me,” said Watts. “She said it was the only picture she had of her daughter and her daughter’s child, who are both deceased.”

The money, the woman told Watts, was the proceeds from the sale of her home and all the belongings in it.

“She was going to start her new life in Florida with her son,” said Watts.

The woman offered to pay Watts $1,000, but Watts refused it.

“(The woman) told me she needed every penny she could to start over,” said Watts. “(The money) wasn’t mine. I had no right to it. My mom and dad told me never to take anything that didn’t belong to me.”

Family Finds $10G in Box of Crackers

IRVINE, California — The box of crackers Debra Rogoff bought from the grocery store had some crackerjack in it — an envelope stuffed with $10,000.

Yet the Irvine woman was more curious than ecstatic about her daughter’s find. After all, who would leave money in such a place?

“We just thought, ‘This is someone’s money,”‘ she said. “We would never feel good about spending it.”

Rather than go on a shopping spree, the family called police and was initially told the money could be part of a drug drop.

Police later heard from store managers at Whole Foods in Tustin that an elderly woman had come in a few days earlier, hysterical because she had mistakenly returned a box of crackers with her life savings inside. In a mix-up the store restocked the box rather than composting it.

The Lake Forest woman, whose identity was not released, had lost faith in her bank and decided the box would be a safer place for the money.

Luckily for her, the box of Annie’s Sour Cream and Onion Cheddar Bunny crackers were bought by the Rogoffs, who discovered the crisp $100 bills in an unmarked white envelope on Oct. 10.

The Rogoffs never heard from the woman and didn’t receive a reward, but Rogoff did return to Whole Foods a couple weeks later.

“I asked them if I could have another box of crackers,” she said with a laugh. The store obliged.
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