The weather this month has been so perfect, hate to see it end! It gets pretty cold and rainy here in the winter. I'm determined that I will bundle up and get outside instead of staying in the house so much this winter. We have a couple days left of warm weather then some not-so-warm so I'll try and do some work in the yard and on the house outside. Pat's on strike with Boeing but is still over in the Puget Sound area doing some work on our trailer, etc. I've gone over there for the past 4 weekends. One of those weekends he redid my brakes on my car, something that was long overdue. Last weekend I had a blow-out on my car as you see from the picture here. In all my years of driving I don't think I've had a flat and never bothered to learn to change one. Luckily Pat said he would come there and change it, it was 11:30 at night on a dark highway about half-way between here and Seattle. A state patrol officer stopped to check on me and said he'd help me fix it but Pat was on his way. I was shocked when I got out of the car to look at it, could have turned out so much worse.

Last week it was my birthday and also my mom's and one of my sisters. Thankfully I don't feel any older than I already feel. I was making a quilt for my mom but didn't quite get it done by her birthday. Luckily I had bought her a set of cd's that she and dad liked. It's hard to stay inside and work on sewing when the weather is so nice. I've been doing alot of weeding and mowing outside and my blueberries are finally ripe enough to start picking them. Now that I'm thinking of it I'd better get out there and pick the ripe ones and also check the apple trees before the deer come by and start raiding them like they do.

It's been awhile again since I posted. I put a new picture of the house on here with it's new roof!! I thought it would never happen but we finally got it. The old shake roof was 30+ years old and had bats living under the shakes and I hate bats!! We had to get new skylights too but it was worth it in the end. We got opening skylights in the bedroom and upstairs bathroom which is nice when it's hot out but it never seems to get hot out here. This summer and last summer had very few hot days. I'm so glad I picked the 2 guys that ended up doing our roof. They are so nice and easy going and we ended up having them do other things too, like the lattice under the porches and deck, and doing some wiring in the garage, installed a "new" door in the garage (one I got for free a couple years ago) and put in a new window in the garage. We're going to have them do more but we're taking a break from it until we see if Pat goes on strike next week.

Mom is doing better so that's sure good. Her birthday is coming up soon, September 10th she'll be 83! I really need to finish this quilt I started last Fall for her. When she was in the nursing home last Fall she was talking about how much she loves the Fall colors and I decided then to give her this quilt. This picture of the unfinished quilt doesn't show the richness of the colors but you get the idea. It's also very, very soft with all flannels. I just need to finish tying it and do the binding and then I'll be done. I guess I'll end this posting here for now. I have so much to do today. Pat hasn't been home in weeks and I think he'll be coming home tonight or soon. He's going to do my brakes today. I left my car over there and brought his home a few days ago. My brakes were so bad I just couldn't drive it anymore. The rotor on the front drivers side had deep grooves in it.

Wow, it's been about 8 months since I've posted. So much has happened in that time and I doubt I'll remember it all.

The highlights are that my in-laws flew out here the first part of September and we went up to this resort in Canada where Pat and I spent our honeymoon almost 19 years ago. It's called Tigh-na-mara. We stayed in a log cabin and it was pretty cool. The bad thing was that by the time we got up there it was late evening, time for bed and we had to check out the next day in time to make the long drive back to Victoria, B.C. to catch our ferry. All in all we had lots of fun. I have pictures on here somewhere, will post when I find them.

In October my Mom had sort of a breakdown, I guess you'd call it, and ended up having to go into a nursing home but the good news is that she was much better by Christmas and Dad was able to bring her home to enjoy Christmas with him and stay there. According to Dad she's doing fine and she's seemed fine when I've seen her. It was all a very scary, very stressful time for all of us but I'm thankful that she's ok now. She went to a geriatric hospital for a couple weeks before the nursing home and it was so, so hard to see her like that. She kept begging me to get her out of there and there was nothing I could do.

Very soon after all this started with my Mom I found out that my ex-mother-in-law had cancer and it was pretty bad. Her husband took it very hard and within a couple days he had a heart attack and died. My son Shane, who's in the Army in Georgia, flew home for the funeral. It was sure nice to spend some time with him, I miss him so much! He got to spend some time with his grandma which was good because she died soon after too, about 3 weeks after her husband. They were such good, loving people and were so good to me when I married their son when we were 17.

I had what I had thought would be minor surgery for a cyst in November and had a really hard time getting better from that until the first part of January. Now here it is February and time is flying along. During all of January we had snow and ice the whole month but recently it's actually been fairly decent out although I saw that our neighbor still has some snow at his place where it had been kind of piled up. I saw buds on a flowering cherry tree this afternoon which gives me hope that it will be warmer soon. 2007 was the rainiest, coldest year we've had here, even all summer long. We had about 5 days of really nice weather around the 4th of July and that was it. Even my chickens seem to be happier lately since it's been getting nicer out.

I've been working on putting energy seal between the logs inside the house during the cold months and did some on the outside along with staining, etc when it was somewhat warm still during Fall. I've also been sanding the inside logs, and probably will still be working on that when I'm 80, very slow going.

I have to pick up Tim from a sports awards program at school but I will post some pictures on here soon and will also try to post what's going on in my life.