Now you see it, now you don't...

The weather has been so gorgeous here-warm and dry. Trees are budding out and blooming, grass is getting green and we've even had a couple of 80 F days!  Winter is back with a vengeance today-rain and wind and 40 F. We decided get out and drive around, stopping for lunch at a good barbecue place we like. Then we headed northeast an hour to a little German community named Muenster. They have a wonderful meat market where we got some smoked sausages and then to a bakery for an apple strudel. It was nice to just drive and talk and enjoy the North Hill Country scenery! Hope you all had a good day and are seeing some warmer temperatures.

My Baby Girl

Today is my daughter's 36th birthday. Doesn't seem like that many years since I held her for the first time. I had a long, difficult labor with her-she was my first baby. I remember thinking it was so surreal that I actually had a tiny baby. It was real enough when we got her home and spent that first sleepless night with her! She brought us both joy and tears from her sweet baby and little girl days to her tumultuous teenage years and early twenties. Now she's a wonderful wife and mother with 3 children of her own. She's a dear friend now in ways I hadn't ever dreamed-I'm so glad we live close. We have a lot of fun together.  Happy Birthday my lovely girl!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Today would have been my parents 70th wedding anniversary. Love and miss them everyday!

Just popping in...

to let you know I haven't fallen off the edge of the earth!  I've been cleaning out some of the "black holes" in our house. I just finished the room over the garage that I use for a sewing room and for storage. I got rid of so much stuff-I'm rather proud of myself! I unpacked every box of books and stacked them in the loft for us to go through. I have a huge stack to donate to the library, so now it's my better half's turn. It will probably be a while before he goes through them. He's been  busy building fence on our property in preparation for getting a couple of calves to raise for beef.  A chicken coop and chickens come next and then a good clean out of the garden! We learned a lot from our "test garden" last year-mainly that we will do raised beds this year and do a better job of planning. We just put things in the ground last year and ended up with a big, overgrown mess. Live and learn. These city folks may get the hang of this yet!

My next "black hole" will be the closet under the stairs. I'm almost afraid to think about what's in there, but with tornado season coming up I need to get it cleaned out. It's our safe place or as I like to call it, "the 'fraidy hole". (I can just see us frantically trying to pull and push boxes out of the way so we can crawl in if a bad storm comes up!)  It feels really good to be down-sizing what we have. I spent a lot of time going through 60 years of my parents belongings when they died and I don't want to do that to our kids. Plus, 20 years from now when we move to a smaller place we'll only have 20 years of stuff to go through!

Here We Go Again

How did this month slip by so quickly? It's more than half over! Usually January seems to last for 6 weeks, but not this year. That's not what my post title eludes to however. It's a presidential election year and the ads have begun. (Actually they began last year, but that's another rant for another time.) Unfortunately what this does for me is make me sick of all the candidates long before it's time to vote and I suspect I'm not the only one. If nothing else, it does make for some funny memes-possibly one of the only bright spots in the whole thing!