New house...

I thought I would post a couple of pictures of our new house. If it looks big on the outside - it is. The back yard is beautiful. The large apple tree - over the deck - is terrible about shedding its fruit. The deck is covered constantly with little apples and leaves and the little flowers. This is the only thing I don't like about the house. We will trim it back - which it desperately needs. What I would like to do is build a cover over the deck. That would solve most of the problem. I would really like to have a nice shady spot to sit and visit with friends without little apples plopping onto our heads.

We are headed to Bible camp this next week. This is one of the highlights of our year. The lessons are always wonderful and the fellowship is beyond compare. I wish everyone had this sort of experience at least once in their lives. As for us, this is our 18th year. Yeah!!!

Here is my quote for the day:
Family isn't about whose blood you have. It's about who you care about.

No more storage unit...

This weekend we finally cleaned out our storage unit. We now have all of our junk in one central location. Yeah!! When we moved from Dillon to Billings, we didn't have time to do a garage sale, so we just packed it all up and hauled it over here. Now we have the time to sort through our "treasures" and se what we want to keep and what we want to discard. The discard pile is growing by leaps and bounds!!!
In one way it was very nice to be able to get my collectibles back with me. I really missed my elephants!!! ( I just didn't remember that I had so many.) Now the hard part comes with finding places for all the things we kept. Bruce has quite a job in front of him in organizing his work shop - also known as the basement.
Sunday was Father's Day. I have been without my dad since 1977. Bruce's dad is still with us and we are always glad when we get to visit him and play golf with him. On a more personal note...Bruce is a great father and father-in-law! When the girls were growing up, he did special things with them all the time. When the girls were in High School and played soccer, he became a referee so that he could travel and see all their games. In the 6 years of their high school soccer careers, between the two of us, we only missed 3 games. He loved it when the girls wanted to go hiking or fishing with him. Now he has two "sons" with which to spend special times outdoors doing fun things or working or projects. Now he can also be a GREAT grand-pa (Geezer).
Here's to you Bruce - a great, great Dad!!! (not to mention a pretty terrific husband!!!!!!!!!)

Loss...

Being the youngest of 12 children has had its benefits - lots of teasing, several "mothers & fathers" when I was young, great big family reunions and christmases, scads of nieces & nephews, etc. - but it also has its down sides. There are 25 years between me an the oldest sibling. This age difference means that I will be losing my siblings as time goes by. This happened for the second time this weekend. My brother Donald passed away. He was 20 years older than me and was gone from the home by the time I was born. However, he lived in OKC for the majority of his adult life so I did get to know him very well. Of all my brothers (6 in all), he reminded me most of my Daddy. I will miss him, but I know the angels are rejoicing at his arrival. Don - Say hi to Momma & Daddy for me.

Moving....again

We have just moved into our "new-to-us" house in Billings. When we first moved to Billings, we wanted to down size. Our only problem was we down sized too much. Bruce had no place to ply his favorite hobby of woodworking. So we have now Up sized!!! We are moving from a 1766 square foot house to a 47oo square foot house. (2,000 square feet are an unfinished basement - Bruce's new workshop!!) Everything we use on a daily basis - Master bedroom, office, kitchen, laundry, living area - are on the main floor, so I don't have to do stairs too often. It will take us a while to become all settled. Mostly because we still have a huge storage unit to empty - Yippee!! It will be like Christmas, then we'll have a garage sale!!!!!

Now that we have extra room, we expect visitors. Ya'll come!!