Serenity

Today was one of those days.  You know the one.  It’s the one that at the end of it every thing just feels right.

It wasn’t a day of vacation.  It was a normal work day for me doing the normal bookkeeping stuff, visiting with customers, answering phone calls and cleaning up cars.  It wasn’t extraordinary in any particular way but it felt right.

After work I took the top off the Corvette and drove a half hour through beautiful countryside to meet friends for dinner.  Wires must have been crossed because when I got there no one was there that I was supposed to meet but it was okay because it was a beautiful evening for a ride.

When I got home I stood outside taking clothes in off the clothesline and just listened.  In the distance I could hear the kids singing from the local bible camp across the road, loons calling in the distance, and an occasional fish jumping in the water.

I watched the changing colors across the lake as the sun was setting and a bat swooping down to the surface collecting bugs for its dinner.

It’s been a while since I’ve taken the time to appreciate all that surrounds me.  It’s beautiful and serene.

 

Life goes on and on…..

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here.  Life has been busy since last year when I spent a month in the hospital after a ruptured brain aneurysm.

Life is good.  All the headaches are gone after the surgery to place the two stents and two coils last November.  I recently went back to Milwaukee for my one year checkup and they threw in an angiogram just for fun.  After the angiogram I met with the surgeon and he told me see you in five years.  I was expected it to be an annual event.  God is so good!

I’m back working full-time for the past 9 months.  My oldest daughter got married and bought a home in October.  My youngest daughter will graduate from college on December 21.  We made our final college tuition payment the first week in November.  Twelve years of tuition payments were at times difficult to do but well worth getting all four of our kids through college with minimal debt.

Looking ahead my husband Dean and I will be taking a 8 day mission trip to Jamaica in July.  I can hardly wait for the trip.  It was something we’ve wanted to do for some time but college tuition made it impossible until now.

In Minnesota the weather is changing from cool to downright cold.  The lake was busy making ice last night and this morning.

Hope to be posting occasionally and catch up with all my favorite blogging buddies!

 

Lessons From Grandma

Today would have been my grandma’s 110th birthday if she were still living and even though she is gone she is still teaching me about life through how she lived her life.

1. Family is important. She was a mother of nine children and was the least stressed person that I know. She loved being surrounded by the ones she loved.

2. Nothing beats a home cooked meal especially when it includes home-made bread. She baked homemade bread almost daily when her family was young and then weekly. The meal was always eaten at the table not in front of the television. It was always the kids job to set the table properly and it was where we learned good table manners

3. Go with the flow. Whatever life sends your way make the most of it. She was widowed at the age of 59 and lived into her 90’s. I never heard a pity party come from her mouth.

4. Focus on what is truly important and don’t let the other stuff bother you. Once while talking to one of her daughters on the phone she kept talking while a bat circled her head. She just continued talking and took a swat at the bat every so often as it circled. She wasn’t going to let a small thing like a bat interrupt her time with her daughter who lived out-of-state.

5. Make time for play. Grandma loved to play cards. It was a big deal when you were old enough as a grandchild to join in with the adults playing cards. Oh the stories that were told around the table were some of the best first person history lessons.

6. Make time to laugh. Grandma loved a good story. I can still picture her with tears running down her face from laughter.

7. Make gifts personal. I still have a small cookbook that my grandma hand wrote her favorite recipes. Over the years she made several homemade gifts for each grandchild. I have a large granny square afghan that she crocheted for me, hand embroidered kitchen towel, one for each day of the week, and hand embroidered pillow cases for my bed.

8. Love those around you. When her children were young and her neighbor was quarantined because of some childhood disease in their neighborhood. Grandma would sneak over to her friend’s home to spend time helping her care for her children who were sick. Grandma was always willing to share. If she knew someone needed something, she was always ready to share.

9. Faith is important. Grandma always went to church and encouraged others to go as well. Her bible was always handy.

 

So Still

This morning I was sitting in my living chair and noticed how still the lake was this morning. I decided to walk down to the lake and take a picture of the reflection of the fall colors on the lake. As I was standing focusing my camera this bird came into the photo. It circled and then landed on the lake. It was a beautiful way to begin the day.

This week promises to bring out of season temperatures here with 80-85 degree highs over the next few days. I’ll take the warm weather for sure. CNN reported this morning that somewhere in Pennsylvania received their first snow. I’m glad it was there and not here.

 

Detroit Reflections and Investigating the Thumb

We are on the road again. My husband and I flew out of Mpls. on Tuesday afternoon for Milwaukee, WI with a destination of Flint, Michigan. We are once again combining business and pleasure. We decided to seek out some fall colors. He purchased two cars both in Michigan that we will drive back to Minnesota through a northern route of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

We had an hour lay over in Milwaukee around sunset. Loved our flight with Frontier except for the sales rep that sat two seats behind us and never stopped talking to a women also sitting behind us. I think he tried to impart all his wisdom in that one hour. It’s a good thing that our flight wasn’t any longer I fear he might have run out of knowledge to impart.

Before we left our Super 8 in Flint, Michigan this morning I had to take a picture of one of the oddest things I’ve seen in a motel.

I don’t know about you but the last place I want to talk on the phone is in the bathroom. There was another phone on the night stand in the room. I forgot to ask before we left if all the rooms had a phone in the bathroom or was it just our room.

We headed for downtown Detroit because neither of us had been there before. We found a great restaurant downtown The Sweetwater Tavern. They had excellent food and it reminded me a little of the Cheers bar from the tv show.

My favorite part of downtown was the reflections I saw on buildings of other buildings. Both looked like paintings on the other buildings.

This was my favorite of the two but both were fun to photograph.

We rode the People Mover around downtown before we left. It took about 15 minutes for a lap around the city above the street. Just 50 cents a piece to ride. What a bargain.

After we left Detroit we headed north up the east side of Michigan affectionately called the thumb of Michigan. We stopped at Port Sanilac, MI

After we left Port Sanilac we continued north to Harbor Beach, MI where we planned on finding a room to spend the night. We tried to find a hotel using the Magellan navigation system that we purchased in Detroit. We followed the directions and ended up on a dead-end street near this pier but no hotel.

 We didn’t find a hotel to stay in this town so we headed west to Bad Axe, MI which was where we planned on going in the morning to pick up our second car that we are driving home. We looked to see if there was a hotel in Bad Axe for the night. Our Magellan told us there was a Holiday Express in Bad Axe. We followed the directions which took us all the way through town and out-of-town, right off the main road out on a gravel road and proudly announced “You have arrived”.

I don’t think so, we were surrounded by corn fields. We turned around and went back into town and found out that everything in town was booked. Apparently there are a lot of construction workers erecting wind generators and have snatched up all the rooms. We asked at the Econolodge if there was a Holiday Express in town and they directed us to it.

I waited in the car while my husband went inside to see if they had any rooms. He was in there for a long time while the desk clerk called all over town for a room for us. There were none. He said “We have one more possibility.” Someone had a reservation but had not arrived yet. They tried to run their card for the room but could not get it to go through. They tried calling the phone number provided to confirm the card number for the reservation but could not reach the party. It was 9:30 already and they hadn’t checked in yet. They gave us their room.

I am thankful for the room but can’t help but wonder if someone will arrive later this evening to no room in a town with no vacancies.

Tomorrow the adventure continues north and west.

 

What’s This? A Photo Mystery

Tonight after work I took this photo. Can you guess what it is or where it was taken?

It’s really not that hard to guess what it is given that we have seen more than our share of it this year. That’s right…More snow.

The photo is an enlargement of a reflected tree on the hood of a black truck in our backlot with snow flakes mixed with the rain. The good news is they are only predicting one inch of snow tonight and it should melt tomorrow. I feel like a broken record talking about snow once again. I should count my blessings that it is not destructive tornadoes.

Here is the original photo before I cropped it for the above photo. I like both. It looks like I was taking black and white photos but I wasn’t. That’s just how gray and dark it is here once again.

On a sunny note I have another adventure in the works for this weekend. I won’t let the cat out of the bag yet but will post photos for my mystery adventure. One clue…it involves an airplane(of course). More details(photos) to follow.