This and That

     I want to thank everyone for their kinds words and thoughts about the loss of our much loved Nike last week. It has been very different at our house without her. After 16 years of stepping out of the shower to find her waiting outside the bathroom door for me, it seems so odd not to have her there. Many of you have asked if Zoe has shown signs of missing Nike. I can only say that she looked for her the first few hours and then she started to "party, party" with the excitement of having the house to herself. She is a wild one and we just keep hoping that between the classes she will have in July and a bit of maturing she will settle down a bit.

     We didn't have any plans for the holiday weekend, which was nice because it was so hot here that I was glad I got to spend the heat of the day indoors. We spent Saturday looking for new carpet for the living room and the three bedrooms on the main floor of our house. We haven't shopped for carpet in a dozen years, so I had to do some research to even know what I might want. The past several months with a failing dog had sealed the deal on having to recarpet the house, so we have known that as soon as we lost her, carpet would be an immediate purchase. I had a bit of "sticker shock" when I saw the prices and I had lots of confusion about what material and brand to buy after reading reviews online. We finally decided on something that we both liked (at least in the sample) and now we just wait and hope that we like it when it covers so much of our house! There will certainly be pictures in a few weeks.

     While my husband was working on outdoor projects, I finally went through some old pictures and magazines that I have collected over the years. Some of the pictures my father-in-law gave me before he died, others I had picked up at garage sales. I had way too many and finally decided that all those craft projects I thought I would do with them, weren't going to happen. I put a few things so far on Ebay and still have the postcards and sheet music to get listed. I hadn't tried Ebay for quite a while even though I should do it more often. I have to push myself to list things. Once I get started though, I tend to stick with it for at least a few listings.

     We were talking over the weekend about a Memorial Day weekend a few years back when we went to visit my in-laws, who were living in Marion, IL at the time. I looked up the date and realized that today is the 30th anniversary of that day. On that afternoon, as we drove into Marion, the sky was dark and the weather looked ominous. As I told my husband yesterday, "the me I was back then, was very uncomfortable". The "me I am today, would have been screaming and yelling until he turned the car around"! You see, we drove into what we didn't know was a tornado. As we pulled into town, we saw many emergency vehicles and assumed there must be a large fire or wreck. We soon learned that there had been a massive tornado just minutes before we arrived in town. What I learned yesterday when I looked up the date of May 29th, 1982...was that it was a Category 4 tornado. As we pulled into town that day, we still had no idea of what we would see next. We noticed some damage and figured out it was a bad storm. We arrived at my in-laws to learn it was a tornado. We soon learned that the damage was extensive and that 10 people died and many more were injured. I wanted to head for home and the officials wouldn't let anyone in or out of town. It was frightening, but I was too young to realize just how lucky we were. Yesterday I read that a car on the interstate that we were on, exploded from the storm. I couldn't believe as I read yesterday just how unaware I was at what we drove into and how lucky we all were.

I hope you all had a safe and happy Memorial Day weekend.

I will be getting around and visiting

your blogs in the next day or two!