It has been many weeks since I have added anything to the blog. We sure have been busy for not having anything to do. The company lost the contract I was working on in Virginia and its sister site in New Mexico. It had a huge impact as those two sites kept6- 8 people busy full time. So we are still trying to recover. They laid off two people in the electrical department, a mechanical designer and an architect. Work is starting to pick up a little bit as the stimulus money starts to hit the engineering tables, I think people expected miracles with the stimulus money but from the engineering and construction it typically takes 4-6 months to write the scope and prepare the request for proposal, another two months to get bids, 4-6 months to design the project another 3 months to bid before the actual construction starts. We are proposing on two air force projects right now and the schedule to start construction is third quarter 2010. Anyway they have my name in the pot for some projects in Virginia with the same group I was working with but at a different site.

We are staying home for Thanksgiving. Jean has invited us there for dinner and to spend the day. Do not know yet what we will do for Christmas. Travel someplace if the office decides to shut down for the week between Christmas and New Year.

Jana and I made a trip down to El Paso for church meetings in October. We had a good trip- took the BWM and weather nice enough to ride with the tip down. It has turned cold here so have had the top up for over a week, probably a record since I have had the car (almost two years).

I decided to take piano lessons so will have my first lesson today. My teacher is an older man named Craig Brown. He has a studio here in Albuquerque. I post the outcome when I have the first lesson under my belt.

Jet Lag

Well it has been almost a month since we returned from Scotland and we still haven't come out of the clouds. I took close to 3500 photos during our three week stay an it is a task to sort and make since out of that many slides. Many I have posted to Shutterfly and we have had a couple of photo books made up by Shutterfly. They are really nice, or the first one is we haven't seen the second one yet, it should come early next week We will probably do a couple more books as it is much less expensive with shutterfly then if I try to do it myself. The first book had 102 photos and cost less than $30. I can't print them at home for that price. The second book has 158 photos and it costs $42 with shipping. I completed my outfit while in Scotland by buying the Gillie Brogues, jacket and vest, shirt and cravat and, of course, the sgian dubh. We have had several people ask us what we liked best about Scotland. I think I finally found the answer; what we liked best about Scotland was Scotland. We didn't have a bad day or a bad experience- if it rained which it did some of most days well that is Scotland. When the wind blew and if did most of the time, that too is Scotland. And they even have sunshine in Scotland and we saw much of it almost every day. Some might say we were there during the good weather months but everything I read indicated wind rain and sun almost every month of the year. Most people hear will say wait a few hours and the weather will change; there I heard several of them say wait a few hours and the season will change. The Isle of Skye (misty island) was where we saw the most rain and wind and still in the afternoon we had sun shine and clouds playing on the mountain tops.

And yes, we really were there as can be seen. Not many photos of us and especially me as I usually carried both cameras. Must go for now but will write more next time.

Home from Scotland

The flowers in George Square, Glasgow were beautiful as they were everywhere in Scotland.

Wow! what a trip. We had a great time and really hated to come home so soon, Three weeks is a long time, though, but we enjoyed every minute. the first twelve days we were on a bus tour with 21 other travelers, 19 Americans and 2 Canadians. Our tour guide and bus driver was very good and very knowledgeable of the local history and geology. The final ten days we spent driving around Scotland. A challenge but I was not doing to bad driving on the left after the first couple of days.

Jana in George Square, Glasgow

Scotland and the people were everything were expected and more. We both fell in love with the country and already thinking about our next trip. We covered over 1000 miles on the bus tour and 1200 miles on our self driving tour. We traveled to the farthest point north on the main island and to the Orkney Islands, to the southern most point at Port Logan and Galloway light house, west coast to the east coast and even spent half a day in England. We saw a great deal but not everything so we must go back.

The Millinium Hotel in Glasgow where we stayed on our first night on tour.

Almost time

It is Sunday August 9 and we are starting the countdown. Have are bags nearly packed, passports ready, travelers checks and British pounds. Registered all of our electronics so we do not have to pay duty on them when we return. The flight leaves Albuquerque on Friday around 7AM and we arrive in Glasgow Saturday at 10AM. We will send complete itineraries to family before we leave. I am also taking my computer so hopefully will be able to upload a few photos as we travel.

New Humming Bird Feeder

We bought new humming bird feeders and has it ever been exciting. We have two feeders and there are 6 to 8 humming birds almost all of the time. Four varieties as best we can tell. The photo is taken with my new camera and telephoto lens I purchased for our upcoming trip to Scotland. the lens is a 75- 300mm zoom lens with auto focus and anti-shake. The new camera is a Canon D50. I plan to take a lot of photos.

We are really getting excited about our trip. Less than three weeks and we leave. I'll send itineraries this next week to all so you can contact us if you need. I will have my cell phone but I do not know how good the coverage will be on the north leg of our tour.

The yard has been beautiful this year and we have had a lot of nice comments from golfers. The fence and patio and plantings have all been enjoyable to look at and use. We have especially gotten a lot of use out of the new patio.

Time to eat so will close.

We had a nice rain yesterday. It is supposed to be beautiful today. Hope to start/finish planting flowers and probably pick a few weeds. Will let Sharon, our house keeper/gardener do the bulk.

This is Port William, Scotland, one of the places we hope to visit. One of my classmates lives in Port William. We can hardly wait. Now wish we had booked sooner. Something to plan for and dream about. We are working on the itinerary so that we can send contact information. We should still be available on our cell phone, hopefully with the same number. We'll let you know.

Talked with Amy earlier in the week. The Gray's had all been down with the flu. Hope you are all feeling better now. They were planting their garden a few weeks ago, So Mary Mary......How does you garden grow?

We haven't talked to Charlie and Cat. Need to give them a call today. I did talk to Steve, Connie was in Texas visiting her mother due to return this week. I also talked to Judie. She and Floyd doing fine and getting ready to make their move from Mesa to Lost Trail for the summer.

After all of my travelling last year it has slowed down enough that I am starting to look at what it will take for me to retire. Not yet, but at least starting to think along those lines.

Time to fix breakfast and get ready for church.

Pre-summer

No pictures this post. Just a note to let people know how we are doing. It is that time of year to start planting the garden. We moved plants that had wintered in the house outside over the weekend. We need to pick up some bedding plants, annuals and perennials, and fix the drip system and we should be set for the summer.

I had a nice visit with both my sister and brother. Both are doing fine. Steve's better was in Texas visiting her mother and will be back Thursday. Judie and Floyd finishing up doctors appointments and getting ready to head for Colorado for the summer. Judie may stop by Albuquerque to pick up Katrina when she flies in for the summer visit. We will try to get up to Lost Trail sometime during the summer.

We would like to go to Delta and pick up Jana's mother and aunt and bring them down to Albuquerque for a short visit and to see our church. We still need to start the process to encourage them to visit.

About all for now will add more the next blog.

Planning a trip

We are very excited here in the Crawford household. We are going to Scotland. We signed up for a tour and will travel to Scotland leaving Albuquerque Aug 14, 2009 and will return Sept 04, 2009. The tour is for 12 days and starts in Glasgow and goes to the nethermost island and back to Edinburgh viewing castles old towns, gardens, lochs and a distillery along the way. We will then pick up a car and drive back to Glasgow where we will stay at the Glasgow Grosvenor Hotel for nine days. we will use the hotel as a base for day trips to places not on the tour or that we want to visit on our own.

On the home side, we had a wonderful Easter Season in our new church. All of the services were wonderful and the altar beautiful.

The Nambe candlesticks and the processional cross and flower vas were all gifts given to the church by and really made a nice setting. Our church family has been truly blessed.

Not much else to report now. we will update family on travel details and i have registered the trip with the state department so that we can be reached in an emergency.

Back in Albuquerque

Hi all,

We are back in Albuquerque for the past week from a two week stay in Virginia. I went out for two weeks work. We used some of my frequent flyer miles on southwest to bring Jana out the second week and then we flew home together. Work was work, I walked my legs off so if I look shorter you will understand why! Jana and I had a great time when I wasn't working.

I picked Jana up at the airport in Baltimore on Friday of my first week there. Saturday we got on the metro and rode into Washington DC and toured the space museum and the new American Indian museum. I had never been to the latter so a great new experience. The outside perimeter of the American Indian museum is this fountain and reflecting pools that run the entire length of the building. This gave Jana the courage to ride the metro when I was at work so she was able to see some of the other memorials that are located on the mall.

We were to early for the cherry blossoms. but the gardens are beautiful and a few of the trees starting to bloom. These pictures are of a garden in front of the castle at the Smithsonian. The pink trees are the magnolias. Very beautiful and very fragrant.

Probably the greatest news we have from out trip is that Southwest has started flying into Minneapolis through Chicago.

Speaking of Chicago, Denver just traded their quarterback to Chicago. I was not overly enthralled with Cutler but I wish him luck with his new team. It will be interesting to see what Denver does with a new coach and a new quarterback.

Hot tub up and running

The final touches to the yard includes the addition of the canopy over the hot tub and of course getting the hot tub up and running again after being off line much of the winter. The canopy looks nice and ties the hot tub into the patio. All that is left for the summer is to start planting flowers. The last frost is historically mid April but it is probably safe to plant by the end of March. Will put pansies in the ground this next week as they can survive a light frost.

I am heading for Virginia tomorrow, Sunday and will be there for two weeks. I am doing some work out there on site that I can not do in the home office. Hopefully I will be able to bring some additional work home. Pending projects, however, will require extensive field time so will probably have to travel back out in the near future.

Jana will fly out on Friday, March 20 and stay until we both return March 28. The weather is supposed to be nice and we should catch at least part of the cherry blossoms. We will be staying in Alexandria Old Town at my usual and preferred hotel.

All the family made it home safe if not tired from their travels. Amy, William and Coleen managed to miss storms on their way home. They forgot to box up some of the warm in phoenix for use at home so have had some cold weather.

I have lots to get done today as I travel early Sunday morning and will arrive in Baltimore around 2:00 pm. It should allow a nice leisurely lunch at Baltimore Harbor before driving down to Alexandria. It is about a 45 min drive with normal traffic and has never taken more than75 minutes.

Family visit

Grandma and granddaughter having some fun in the kitchen. What a delight it is to have Coleen visit from Wisconsin.

And, of course, it would not be a family get together without a puzzle to work on . Charlie, Amy, and Don are the puzzle workers. That is Charlie and Amy in the picture.

Charlie and Cat were able to stay all week. It gave us a chance for a really nice visit, finished the puzzle and they even had time to visit with some of Charlie's friends. they left to return to Seattle Saturday around 2:00PM.

Amy, William, and Coleen collaborating on the construction of Coleen's loom. The loom was a birthday present for Coleen's 10th birthday. Coleen wove a scarf that she left hear for Toulouse. All in all we had a grand time and it was so nice to be able to get all of the family together if even for only a couple of days. I had also taken the week off so was able to enjoy all and not have to be at work.

Praise the Lord, that He, full fills so many of our wishes. and thank you, Lord, for safe travel for the Crawford's on their way to Seattle and the Gray's on their way back to Wisconsin.

Fence finished at last

Well, the fence is finally finished. It turned very nice or at least we are pleased with the outcome.

The next to last section is a gate that opens onto the golf course.








The butterflies were added for decoration. At first we were going to center them in the circle but decided they looked better randomly placed.

The fence and the gates at the front of the house all match in design. There are 18 pieces with 26 welds required for each section. The welds are continuous for each piece so we think the fence will be standing for a long time.

The exciting news for our family is that Amy, Coleen and William are leaving Wisconsin on their drive to Albuquerque this afternoon, in fact, may be on the road as I write this. They hope to spend tonight in Kansas City and be in Albuquerque late Saturday night. Charlie and Cat, meanwhile, are packing and getting ready to get on a Plane Sunday morning and will be here about 2PM Sunday afternoon. We are really excited.

I had a nice visit with my favorite sister today, Friday, as I took the day off to help get ready for our company. I will be off all next week also and am looking forward to showing Cat some of Albuquerque and New Mexico as she has never been to the Land of Enchantment. Judy and Floyd have been going like crazy and expecting more company this week. It sound like they are really enjoying themselves. Makes me want to start thinking about retiring.

Another year older

After a very short time at being young I am now old again. It is a yearly ritual between the 20th of January and the 17th of February, exactly 4 weeks, when I am young or at the very least the same age as the other half of this Crawford household. Like everything, when you are growing older, time passes faster and faster. Maybe we can blame it all on seemingly being busier and busier; or again the fault may lie with being slower and slower. Whatever it is it is certainly over analyzed!

They have finally finished our gates and fences and I was going to take a couple of pictures to add to this blog but it has turned windy and cold and we need to spit and polish a little so that we present the best pictures. It took Bobby longer that anticipated as has happened with other projects he has done for us. I guess we need to double the time for our expectations.

We will have some steak this evening to honor my getting older and also will attend a Healing Prayer service this evening, where I am one of the singers and then share a walnut torte to finish celebrating my birthday. I say walnut torte but it may actually be a pecan torte because so many of our friends are allergic to peanuts and walnuts. I know that it will be delicious.

Up and running

http://ahsclass1960.com is up and running. It is not a very fancy page but it will grow over the next year. My challenge now is to get my updated data base in Access 2007 to save as a file for Access 2003 so I can pass this information on to Frank. I know just enough to get in trouble and that makes everything I do just that musc harder and takes that much longer to accomplish.

I have a link to this blog from the web page so hopefully some of our classmates will drop by and take a look.

Web challenged

Well, I spent most of the weekend rewriting our web page for our 50th class reunion. I had started the page several weeks ago and just wasn't happy with how it was going together. The information was okay just not very imaginative. To make the long story short I did get the page rewritten and although it is not finished it was far enough along to publish for the first time. Our reunion is in July of 2010 so we have a bit of time. I submitted the page but so far it has not come up when requested. I am working with Aplusnet for publishing the page and for the domain location. I had one chat with them and now have a help ticket into them to see if they can find the problem the page is supposed to be located at http://ahsclass1960.com/ Hopefully it will be up and running soon. I have a lot of names and address I want to add and hopefully get most of our classmates connected. I also have an email address there as don.crawford@ahsclass1960.com but I haven't tried it out yet. I may also start a blog associated with the web page and link it to this page if I can figure that out. I may need your help, Amy or yours, William.



Another beautiful church service today. It seems so natural to go to the new building and people hang around after the service. Maybe we all think we are forgetting to do something. They are nearly complete, the landscaping should be finished next week, basically we have zero-scape with a few trees and shrubs and one small lawn area on the south side of the building adjacent to a covered area that will be used for outdoor weddings and the and many other things in the future. We have such beautiful weather here most of the year and evenings or early morning can be absolutely beautiful. I will take some pictures of the landscaping for you to view in the near future.



I took pictures for Gary Ruthven of the Altar and book stand that he made for out church. Gary does wonderful work.

We are looking forward to visits from the Gray's and Crawford's in three more weeks. Their visits will be brief so work load permitting I will take a few days off so I can enjoy their visit. I expect to start traveling back to Virginia but hopefully the trips will hold off or if they start I can work around that week.

The beat goes on

Time does seem to fly as you get older. I think we spend too much time trying to analyze our aches and pains and not concentrating on all of the beautiful things around us. Even with these economic challenges there is much to be thankful for and I thank God every day for all that he does and for his blessings. It has been almost two weeks since last I posted to my blog, so here goes.

January 20, 2009 we celebrated Jana's birthday by going to a Taize service, I sing and Jana helps set up the service (part of our Altar Guild responsibilities- the setting up that is). Jana's birthday is always important as I get to be young for a month until my birthday when I turn old again. I did take Jana to dinner the Saturday following her birthday for a very nice meal at Vernon's Steak House. it is located behind the Calico Cafe on North 4th street. It is a wonderful place to eat. It is in the "speak easy " theme. You enter the restaurant through a liquor store and a man name Joe who is dressed in thirties style clothes takes you a door at the back and gives you the history of the speak easy and then asks if you know the pass word. If you do not he tells you that it is "Joe sent me". You then knock on the door and a window on the door opens and a man asks you for the pass word. You tell him the pass word and he lets you in. Dinner takes over an hour, and though expensive for Albuquerque, well worth the money. The food and service was wonderful.

New Church Building

After meeting in s school cafeteria for 9 1/2 years with setup ;and tear down every week we finally have our new church Building and it is beautiful. the shot below is of the altar with Nambe altar candle holders we gave to the church to honor Jana's mother, Nellie. The flowers are in one of the two vases we gave to the church to honor Jana's Aunt Sula Anne.

The view of the altar from the nave shows the Sandias in the back ground. A beautiful site any time of the year.

The processional cross is the cross Jana and I gave to the church. It is finished in silver and very stunning.

It is only fitting that I wear the Tartan for both our first service last week and our consecration of the church building this passed Saturday.

The exterior of the Church has several shades of brown to tan stucco with lots of natural lighting. This next photo shows the bell town not quite finished but finished enough that we could ring the chimes for our consecration service.

A Winter shot two weeks ago before the building was completely finished or I should say finished enough that we can move into. They still have punch list items and landscaping to complete the project. Through it all we are very pleased and very blessed to have such a beautiful place to worship.

We have been having work done around the house since this past summer. New patio, new storage shed, new gates and fences at the front of the house and just starting on a new fence at the Golf course side of the house.

The shed is 7' x 10' with enough height to walk in and a 5' wide door with locking handle and dead bolt. Welded steel frame with 2" tubular steel and shelves on two walls

This is one panel of the vehicle gate. It is twelve ' wide and hinged on one side only. The circle in the center is cut out of 12" steel pipe.

The side fence on the west side of the yard is made up of three 6' wide panels. the center panel is a gate. The back fence at the golf course will be similar to this with a total of 24 panels. Only one panel toward the southeast corner of the yard will be a gate. They have torn out the chain link fence and finished placing all of the posts today.

Aside from the house we will have our first service in the new Church this coming Sunday. I was by there today and the pews have been installed and the contractors are working frantically to get things finished enough so the city will grant temporary occupancy. Plumbing passed while I was there, the electrical to come later today or first thing in the morning.

I flew to Virginia on business Monday afternoon. Had some very good meetings Tuesday but Tuesday evening my right arm got to hurting so bad I finally changed my schedule and flew home on Wednesday. the arm is better today but I could barely lift my hand above by waste Tuesday evening and early Wednesday. Probably should go see the doctor but when I have had similar occurrences in the past they just blamed it on a pinched nerve, gave me some muscle relaxant and never looked for a cause. Could be and probably is related to old age but I haven't gotten older in years (tee hee).

Hope all are doing well.

Don

Happy New Year 2009

Happy New Year



I hope all of you had a fun but safe New Years eve. Ours was very quiet. We had a quiet evening at home. Decided to celebrate the new year with Dave and Alice Dawson, they live in the UK so it meant we could go to bed at a reasonable hour, rough getting old!!



The utility finally got the power on at our new church building. We still will not be able to move in until probably the second weekend in January. We had hoped to move this coming Saturday, Jan 3, but still need the certificate of occupancy from the city.








I have been working on an update to Alamosa High School Class of 1960 data base. Do any of you, Dave, Marge, Tom and Frank, have Microsoft Access on your computers? I am working in 2007 version but I can save the file down to 2003 or 2000 if you have an older version.