Friday gathering

Had the family over for spaghetti this evening. 10 kids, 8 adults. Campfire. Big mess. Who cares? We love the life and the living inspired by noisy kids and laughing adults. Life is very, very good.

Today is Sunday. My husband's favorite place to eat on Sunday (if I'm not cooking) is an Asian restaurant some 20 plus miles from our home. Near the Asian restaurant is a favorite discount department store. After lunch, we visited the store and made purchases of two cheap outdoor rattan-type chairs and a small grossly inexpensive mosaic table. When we arrived back out at our vehicle, I apparently set it down in his blind spot (I want it to be his fault, so I'll just say that apparently men have blind spots that women don't have). When we arrived home we were without small table. I called the store and they had our table, which we then set out to retrieve, happy that someone had the honesty to take it inside. On arriving back home, I noticed that five mosaic square tiles were missing. They weren't in the SUV, nor were they dribbled along the driveway into the house. We have decided to leave it that way and call it a lesson learned (whatever the lesson might be, and we might not know that until a later date), rather than turn what should have been a 40 mile adventure into a 120 mile adventure (the second trip made it an 80 mile adventure). In all of this we concluded one thing, not having given anything much deep thought: My husband observed that when gas prices go up they go up in sizeable increments. When gas prices go down, they dribble down in pennies, and never is it more evident than when you're inanely running up and down the freeway.

This early morning view was outside my kitchen window. This is my new husband's first spring at this place (I've been here 27 years). He's in awe. He would hear me rambling on about my life outside the four walls of my house and just couldn't connect with my uncurtailed enthusiasm. However, he's now begun to wander aimlessly throughout the interior and comes through the door regularly with, "My word, my word, my word," charges across the room and hugs me. He's overwhelmed by the "life" going on around us, and I think a bit in wonderment about the fact that he hadn't really noticed such things in the former part of his life.

The kids are back

I live on 28 acres. We have trees and ponds and wildlife, including coyotes, foxes, raccoons, opossums, woodchucks, deer, etc. They wander around the periphery of our home with abandon, just as these three Canada goslings. One day, their mother left them in the pond to the west of the house and flew away. They couldn't fly, so they did the next best thing. They bolted out of the pond and followed her, they came charging through the yard, past our bedroom windows, down our driveway and crossed over to the property next to us, peeping frantically all the while. My husband said, "Should we go after them?" and I asked, "And do what with them?" An hour later I looked toward the pond. There were the three young geese with their mother. The mood around here lightened considerably, as we'd watched these youngsters for weeks.