Wedding invites

We printed the invitations (125 of them), then JVA decided that he wanted them done differently. He insisted on changing them and printing a sample one so that SLO could make up her mind. She looked at them and decided that JVA hadn't asked for much when it comes to wedding plans so he should get his way in this.

Printed 125 more, then noticed that 90 of them had a typo on them, a big "n" right in the middle. Great, printing a third time and hoping that this would be good enough. So after hours of stamping and folding and stuffing we finally got them into the mail.

Yes, they are home made, but they weren't cheap, after all, that much ink and paper can be pretty pricey.

Now only 150 more things to do to get ready for this mid March event. We should be ready by May.

End of Christmas

We sent Jesse over to G'mas to help fix her TV and he came home and told us that we needed to go over and take down her lights. I called Suzy and Malcolm and asked them if they wanted to help. Da familia dacheese went to the zoo with ragininaz so they didn't get to help.

We all showed up by 6 PM so that we could undecorate. Everytime we thought that we all had everything down we noticed one more thing. We stopped to eat pizza and then continued putting everything away and then put back all the treasures that she had taken down to put up all the Christmas glitz and glitter. With everyone's help, including the girls, we got a lot done in a short amount of time.

G'ma has been very depressed lately, she is still having dizzy spells and so she has been very confined to her house. She says that Christmas went by and it never seemed like a holiday at all. She also said that she feels so close to dad right now. I can't imagine how lonely it must be for her.

We don't spend enough time with her and it is sad when we realize that a week has gone by without us visiting her. I had made a resolution that we would get over there at least one time a week and then the first week of January we didn't make it over there. We will try better the rest of the year.

addiction

Monday was a great day, no work, so abe and I decided to go on a mini hike and find some new geocaches in the area. So early afternoon we headed out and found a mountain to climb - only half a mile up the hill and then back down, a really good 1 mile hike. The workout felt so good. We have been so bad about not hiking the way we used to. While we were driving to the next cache I was working on the solution to a puzzle to one of the caches - like the new sudoko puzzles that are everywhere right now. I solved the puzzle, but it was too late, abe had to be up early (12 AM) to go to work. I called Suzy the next day to see if they had solved this puzzle and see if they wanted to join us on a caching adventure. They had the solution - thanks to a friend of hairball. So we planned a trip to CG on Thursday early afternoon. We also had a few other puzzles to solve and find in the area.

We attempted to find one cache, but I knew that my solution was based on a vivid imagination. Nothing there, but it could have been. Then we worked on one that Suzy and Morris had worked on for quite awhile. We found three clues and headed off to the cache. After arriving in the middle of a field (on private property) we knew that we had something wrong. Morris checked the math for the coordinates and he found an error. Back four miles, the same four miles we had just driven, to the hill on the water tank. We drove around to the back and started climbing up, the gps told us it was on the "no trespassing" side of the fence, but we weren't going to be denied again. After slipping, sliding, endangering our lives we climbed to where the gps zeroed out. We looked for a really long time and then decided that we had something wrong. Carefully going back to the car we managed to not kill ourselves.

I took the paper with the information and found two little errors that Morris missed. Minor details like 4+2 = 2 ( I had subtracted, not added) . So moving on to the cache that we knew we could find. The sun was beginning to set and we had to drive 8 miles into the wilderness to find the cache. We parked as close as we could to the cache and then hiked the little bit to find the nicely hidden ammo box in the pile of rocks- aka an Arizona Cache.

Abe mentioned that geocaching was the one activity that would cause us to hike and climb places that we wouldn't otherwise, just say there is a cache and Suzy and I are ready to go and scale the alps.

So now that we have found almost 400 caches, we should be tired of this sport right? I went to the site to log in our find from yesterday and noticed that there is a new one in Casa Grande, just this morning. How soon before we can jump in the car and find this one........

Part two, I called Suzy and at 3 PM we ran back to CG to not only get the one cache we missed yesterday, we hit the new one. 100% on the day! No addiction here.

Christmas

We weren't able to spend Christmas with Garrett and family, so we drove to NV the next day and spent a few days with them. The weather was good, even though it snowed the day after Christmas. We stayed at a motel with an indoor pool and the kids got to swim then the next day they had a snowball fight with g'pa. The kids are growing up so fast.

It is so hard having them so far away, but they are within driving distance, so we have burned up the road three to four times a year every year. We don't need a map to get there anymore and know all the good places to stop.

There is nothing better than a great big hug from your grandchild, followed by a kiss and an I love you g'ma. Watching the little things they do and remembering their parent at that age and seeing those same attributes in these new special children.

We kept the kids overnight and watched Madagascar on the TV. The parents had some alone time, and we had some time with the kids. Donuts and hot chocolate in the morning with a few more laps in the pool before we had to check out of the motel. It was such a great visit. Today is Brendon's seventh birthday, and in nine days Garrett will turn 27, then Beth will turn eight on the 21st.