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.