Category Archives: Flock Together

Chirps that bring family and friends together through gatherings, gifting, crafting, or celebrations.

Easter Gatherings – From a Distance!

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Chirped by Tina

The stay-at-home orders can’t keep the holidays from arriving on schedule, and it’s Easter weekend already! While we can’t do our big family get-togethers in person this year, here are a few last minute tips for enjoying a fun Easter gathering – from a distance!

Zoom It!

Whatever your preferred virtual meeting platform is, schedule a big family meetup on Easter Sunday! Where else do they all need to be this weekend, right? Zoom, WebEx, Skype, FaceTime… whatever works and can handle multiple families joining in. We’ve been having a great time doing Zoom and FaceTime happy hours with friends and family. Facetime is easy if everyone has an iPhone, but for the Android users, sign up for one of the other services. We successfully hosted 14 people on a book club Zoom meeting a couple of weeks ago, and it worked quite well! A lot of students have upgraded Zoom accounts that will allow unlimited meeting lengths, unlike the free version, that cuts you off at 40 minutes. Continue reading →

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March’s Cheep Trills – 10 Ways to Keep Busy at Home

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Chirped by Cass and Tina

We hope that all of you and your family and friends are doing well during this crazy time. So many of us had to adjust our work, school and lifestyles due to this virus. This month’s Cheep Trills post details how we are keeping busy at home in this new norm. We have listed five things we are doing for others, and five things we are doing for ourselves.

For Others:

Homemade Masks

Homemade MasksTina and her crafting groups have been researching and sewing homemade cloth masks for health care and other essential workers, as well as friends and family. There is some research that questions the utility of cloth masks. However, healthcare and safety specialists that they’ve talked to say that at the very least, the homemade masks:

  1. physically remind people not to touch their faces,
  2. visually remind people to give each other a wide berth, and
  3. protect other people from the bulk of any cough or sneeze that the wearer might project into the air.

If you want to join the cause, check online for local Mask Makers groups – we have a really well-organized Facebook group near us: Mask Makers of Doylestown, PA, but there are others out there. Ours has a porch pick-up/drop-off spot where you can donate materials, grab more supplies, or drop off finished masks. Also check out this Continue reading →

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Flight Paths: Escape to Savannah

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Chirped by Tina

Just before the COVID-19 craziness really started to set in, my hubbie and I flew (gasp!) down to Savannah, GA to meet up with some friends we hadn’t seen in ten years. (As a side note, there was no shortage of travelers and no sign of masks in either the Philadelphia or Savannah airports the first weekend of March. I did notice we weren’t the only ones sanitizing our immediate area on the plane though!) Since that weekend, our kids’ colleges decided to send everyone home for “remote learning” while they assess the situation. Our status as empty nesters has been revoked! Luckily, reading our blog comes with no risk of contagion. We’ve got a whole backlog of projects and adventures to tell you about! So let me start by sharing some highlights from our long weekend escape to Savannah…

I started this post before the schools, restaurants, wine stores, and everything else started shutting down here in PA and around the US. We’re now embracing social distancing! I liked one sentiment that I read, to the effect that we’ll never know if we overreacted to this pandemic, but we will definitely know if we under-reacted… For the sake of our parents, grandparents, and immuno-compromised friends and neighbors, why not err on the side of caution and stay home? We’ll try to focus on some make-at-home projects in upcoming posts, but for now, please indulge me while I celebrate this recent trip to Georgia, that occurred just before the “spit” hit the fan…

Perry Lane Hotel

Long weekend escape to SavannahWhat a gorgeously appointed hotel, right in downtown Savannah! The decor is eclectic but elegant. Our suite offered little touches like a small cloisonné panda and a framed family letter addressed to “Sweet Pea”. The Perry Lane features a fantastic restaurant Continue reading →

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After the Holidays Cheep Trills

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Chirped by Cass and Tina

The holidays have come and gone, along with the college boys, and we are back and resettling into our empty nest routines. Time to compile a top ten list of cheep trills from our long hiatus!

Favorite Book

Cheep Trills - Favorite BookIf you’ve never ventured into the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction, A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World, by C. A. Fletcher, is a perfect place to dabble your toes. I can also heartily recommend the Audible version, voiced by the author himself. Fletcher does a fantastic job of narrating, and you know you’re getting all the right nuances when the writer is also the story teller. Plus, it’s a terrific story, at least as stories of what happens after the apocalypse go. It’s easy to be transported to this future landscape, a hundred years or more after most of the world’s population has died of old age. It’s a world Continue reading →

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Ten Christmas Decorating Joys

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Chirped by Tina (and Cass)

We love having an excuse to mix up our decor for the holidays, especially at Christmas time. Unboxed memories catapult us into the past, then boomerang back to brighten our season. Here’s a list of ten Christmas decorating joys, and why they make us happy…

#1: The Tree

Ten Christmas Decorating Joys

For me, the tree is the show-stopper. My family loves the look and smell of a real Frazier fir. Fraziers tend to have branches strong enough to support our heavier ornaments, too! In our house, the motto (ever since the boys got big enough to help haul it in) has been “Go Big or Go Home!” This year’s specimen is 10′ 8″ – but that includes the “antenna” that my husband refused to let me trim down to size. I love the afternoon we spend each year trimming our tree. I even look forward to the day I devote to taking it down by myself. It gives me a chance to savor every ornament, and Continue reading →

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