Mobile, Alabama

I have accepted a position as an Administrative Law Judge in Mobile, Alabama. I am so excited about moving someplace warm! I will be reporting on Monday May 12, 2008. After a couple of weeks in the office, to orient myself to the office and problably begin to give them a schedule for my docket, I will report to Baltimore for a four week training session. So I will settle down to really working about June 23rd.

I will be about six or seven hours from Beth and about ten hours from Joye. It looks like it is about 14 hours from Salina. It is almost 1500 miles from Manchester. That is about a 22 hour drive! I just checked about airlines, neither Jet Blue nor Southwest Air fly to Mobile. But US Air does fly into Mobile! I hope I can expect a lot of visitors in Mobile.

I am excited about the opportunity of a new adventure. But I know that leaving Manchester will be extremely hard.

Atlanta!

We had a great time in Atlanta. It was warm and there was no snow! We visited the Coca Cola Museum. I am a Pepsi fan, but it was still fun to see how the "other one" is done.





This is Beth and Marybeth in the Museum beside an old car that was used to advertise and deliver the Coke products.








Standing with Marybeth outside of the Museum is Mr. Pemberton, the pharmacist that invented Coke. (Now you know why I prefer Pepsi, Coke tastes like medicine!)












We ate a Montana Buffalo - it was pretty good, but none of us had the interest in trying the Bison meat. Chicken and steaks were our choices.












After Atlanta we were back at Beth's for a few days. I got to meet Solomon and this was the first that I had seen Walter and Laura since their wedding. I enjoyed getting a chance to look through their wedding album. They brought some chocolate fondu with strawberries and pound cake! Yum!








I had the chance to go to Beth's classroom and see her kids and the computer lab. She is really quite something keeping 30 computers running while monitoring a bunch of kids. I enjoyed meeting some of the teachers and seeing Beth at work!









Do you love our Funky Glasses?













We didn't tour CNN, but we did take a few pictures of their logo and ate in their food court.













I had fun with Kush and Kishan. They posed this picture, wanting to get a good picture in front of this fountain at their school. You can tell that Beth has trained them well in the fine art of taking pictures!

Nubble Lighthouse

On Saturday I went to the Maine coast with my friends Tony and Susan. We visited Nubble Lighthouse. I had taken Tyler over there when he was here. Thomas and Steven had gone with us. By the time we got there it was dark, so we didn't get pictures. It was bitterly cold and windy on Saturday. But it was a beautiful day.

You can see how windy it was. We were freezing. This is my friend Susan. We stopped in Dover at the Salmon Falls pottery. Then we stopped in Kittery, Maine at the "When Pigs Fly" bread store! We sampled just about everything they sold in the store! It was sooooo good.

These are surfers in the water. In the height of summer the water temperature does not go much over 65 degrees. It had to have been bitterly cold! Surfing only in wet suits. These people had to be nuts!

Countdown to the NH Primary!

I love the Primary season here in New Hampshire. It has been fun to follow the debates, the candidates and the ads. But I will be glad when my phone stops ringing and the mailings stop coming! This year the candidates have really inundated us with ads on the television, radio and by telephone. We have also had mounds of mailings! I think I have finally made up my mind and feel pretty certain about who I will vote for when I step in the booth on Tuesday. I thought I would give you all a little picture of the signs that are covering all our snow mounds around the state! It is quite a colorful sight. My favorite though, are the "STOP GLOBAL WARMING" signs that are planted into the six foot high snow piles!

SNOW

I had said yesterday that December may have been the snowiest December in New Hampshire history. I read this morning on WMUR TV 9 website:

With 10.1" of snow out of this past storm, December 2007 has become the snowiest December on record with an amazing 44.5", breaking the old record of 43.0" set back in 1876. To take it a step further December 2007 also becomes the 5th snowiest month on record! Bear in mind those records go all the way back into the 1870s.

We are set to have more snow starting this afternoon. New Hampshire still is a great place to live.

We had more snow overnight. We have had snow enough now that they are saying we may have broken some records for the most snow in December. So much for Global Warming. Here is a picture of the snow in the front of my house. We are supposed to get more snow tomorrow.















I am running out of room to pile it by my driveway and sidewalks. Well, not me really, but the guys that plow out my driveway and shovel the walks. They are making a killing this year in fees. But I guess it will make up for last year when they hardly had anything to shovel.













I am going to some friends for the evening and then I am having some others over for lunch tomorrow. I am going to be serving a Mexican turkey chili. But I am saving the pork and saurkraut for later in the evening. I didn't think it would be a big hit to serve to non-Germans on New Years Day (or any day for that matter).

My friend Susan gave me a recipe for some "Fluffy Stuff" that is very tasty, and very low in calories and fat. It is extremely easy to make. Here is the recipe:

Susan's Fluffy Stuff

Servings: 8
Preparation Time: 5 min
Level of Difficulty: Easy
Course: desserts

Ingredients
· 8 oz Cool Whip Free Whipped Topping
· 2 pound fat-free vanilla yogurt
· 1 cup canned crushed pineapple in juice
· 2 Small boxes Jell-O Sugar Free, Fat Free Instant White Chocolate Pudding. Do not prepare this – just mix it with the yogurt dry.

Instructions
Mix pudding with the yogurt. Then fold in the Cool Whip and the pineapple. It is good eaten just as you prepare it, but it is even better if it is chilled for a few hours.

I hope you all have a Happy New Year.

Here are a few pictures from Christmas Day at Tommy and Kathy's House. I had an absolutely wonderful time.

Christmas morning in front of the Christmas tree in new pajamas.

Tranformer Star Wars Death Star.

New racing video game!

The Princess opening her monkey from Grandma and Grandpa.

Still going after all the wrapping, cooking and transforming the Star Wars Death Star.

Happy Daddy.

Aunt Linda and the kids. We had a great day, playing, eating, laughing, and even a little napping!

Saturday Chantelle and Doug were married. They had a beautiful wedding and for my first "Texas" wedding, I was very impressed. We had barbeque for the meal, the music was "country" and the bride wore a cowboy hat at the reception! It was great to meet so many of Joye and David's friends - ones that I have heard about over the years.

I have heard a lot of you asking for an update to my Blog. I know it has been awhile. I am going to take just a quick minute to upload a couple of pictures. This first picture is Dad, Mick and Mick's boy Dustin. They stopped in to visit today.

This picture, of course, is the "greats" again on Christmas Day. They were having fun playing with each other.

This is a picture of Tom, Kathy and the kids, taken just before Christmas.

Pennsylvania in the Fall!

This picture was taken at the top of Yaw's Hill. It was so pretty this past weekend that we were in Pennsylvania.









1966 or 2006? It is hard to tell from this picture whether it is Bill Evans or Brady Evans on that old garden tractor! I think it is still the same tractor we used to ride in when we were kids. This is Brady Evans, by the way. I think he said he is ten. He is in the 5th grade.









Mike and Kim standing by the "hole" that will eventually be the foundation for the basement of their new house. They are building on a property in Liberty, PA. This is Ethan, Kati's son, standing with them.








Aunt Mary and Mom after church. Aunt Mary will be 80 in December. Last week she replaced the ceiling tiles in her kitchen. It is a drop ceiling but is about 10 feet high! She fixed lunch for us on Friday! Cole slaw, baked turbin squash (tasted like pumpkin pie) and chicken pot pie with cheese biscuits on top! Then she had apple pie for dessert! We were so stuffed. It was the best. She is one awsome lady!





This is Mom and Aunt Ann in front of Ruth and Aldie's house. David Holdren made the siding for this house. It is really gorgeous. Ruth was recovering from her first chemo treatment while we were there. She is a trouper and will beat this cancer and she isn't going to let the treatment keep her down. She was up at Kim's property on Sunday when I was up there. Keep Ruth and her family in your prayers.




Dad, Aunt Betty and Uncle Jerry. Dad told Uncle Jerry he was better off than him, so he would get up for the picture and Uncle Jerry could sit still. We got a good laugh at that at Uncle Jerry's expense. We had such a good visit with all of them.









I loved this picture of Mom. It was taken at Greenfield. We were out there with Thomas' cub scout den.













Here is a new picture of Thomas, Steven and Lauren. We were walking through the woods.

I have posted more pictures at Winkflash. You can click on the link on the side of my blog.

Thomas, Steven and I picked apples on Saturday at my friend Paul's house. Paul has a professionally maintained apple orchard surrounding his house. He also has about 80 trees on his own land. He and his wife lease them to the orchard owners. The orchard then maintains them and Paul has access to them. It is always a fun day and I usually think of it as the beginning of Fall.




Lauren had a cold on Saturday, so she and Kathy stayed home (Tom was working). But she had put on her boots to go with us. As you can see, the boots didn't match and one was about three sizes too big for her. She is such fun!



This is Thomas and Paul's son Zachery playing "Star Wars." Zachery is only five years old. But he is a tall boy. The left side of the house in the background is the old cape that Paul is restoring. It was built in 1733!










The boys each picked an entire grocery bag of apples. We had fun. We went out for lunch afterwards at Shorty's. The boys wanted to go there because they love the espinaca dip!

I have posted some new pictures to my winkflash site. With Amy's help this link on the side should take you to my pictures and it should let you see all my folders. Right now I have three folders there.

I am going to put a few of my favorite pictures here of course, just in case my link doesn't work. This first picture of Emily, Haley and Aiden mirrors the one of Tom and Kathy's kids. Mom has that one as her wallpaper on her computer. The girls were looking at it and I mentioned that I would like to take their picture like that. Haley, at only three, immediately said "so I will be behind Aiden because he will be on the bottom, and Emily will be behind Aiden and me." I was so impressed that she could look at the picture of Thomas, Steven and Lauren and figure out the order of the kids, then how that would be mirrored in her own family. We had fun taking this picture.

This is a picture of RaeLynne and Josh's house in Smolan. It is a really cute house, with a full fenced in back yard. I think it has three bedrooms and a bath upstairs, a living room, dining room, kitchen and full bath on the first floor. The back porch is enclosed and has a washer and dryer on it. The house has central air conditioning and has that great front porch. I think it is a great house.








These next three pictures are of Madi. Here she is with her parents. I liked this picture. Madi is so alert!





This is Madi with one set of her grandparents. I thought this was a particularly good picture of Dan and Jane. Boy don't they look like the proud grandparents!

Just as an aside, I am going to have to do another study when next I am in Kansas. I am going to see how frequently husbands and wives wear the similar colored shirts as both Dan and Jane and Chris and Amy did on the day of these pictures.




Then here is Madi with her great grandparents. What a rich family history this little girl gets to experience!








This final picture was just too precious. This little tiny girl has the complete attention of all three of these guys (Dad, Ray and Chris). You Go Girl, keep up the good work!