Where do I begin....  We had a great time with Emily - three days of the Children's Museum, Zoo and Beach.  She was wonderful.  Only one meltdown and that was because she was WAY too tired.  We do have wonderful granddaughters!  Then Don & I went on to our "Cabin in the Woods."  Good times.  Some hiking, some shopping, relaxing  (Actually, we stopped at the outlet mall and found lots of wonderful deals!!).  All good.  Then this past week Don also had off and worked on a major "picture scanning" project.... the scanner is his new toy.  There were pictures spread all over the family room floor the whole week... but he did get it all cleaned up before he went back to work on Monday.  Today at 2pm is the meeting at his work for the owner & potential buyer to let the guys know the future of the shop...

Update on the Salt & Pepper Shaker Career.... no other offers have sprung up (the gal at the home suggested I let the women's group at my church know about this collection and maybe I could give a demonstration there.  tee hee.).  However, I was written up in the home's monthly paper (pictures and all!), so who knows.........

Happy Health News:  My cholesterol has dropped from 260 to 217!  I have to get it rechecked the end of the summer.  I was kind of hoping for it to drop to 150 or something so I could go back to eating everything wonderful, but guess not!  On well, this is progress.

G'ma asked me to come to a ladies thing there on May 23 - she figured I'd be extra interested since they are having someone show her collection of salt & pepper shakers - of which I have a bunch.  Of course, I'm delighted to be able to go with her.  Monday I got a call from GY (at first, I was ready to freak out - couldn't figure why they would be calling me and not Kay if there was something wrong!!)... Barb told me that the lady who was bringing her collection had a stroke and wouldn't be able to come - she'd heard that I have a collection and wondered if I wanted to bring it and give a little talk on them.  (Pause for hysterical laughter.)  Yep - I'm gonna do it.  After I hung up, I counted what I have, and I have almost 80!  That was a surprise.  But not anywhere near the 1100 the other lady had!!!!!  So I'm working on my little speech...  Barb said that they're not putting out any more info to inform the people of the change, so if I want to surprise G'ma, I can.  I'm thinking I'll tell her after I get there.  So stay tuned - this could be the start of my world-wide salt & pepper shaker tour.

Diemaker wrote about our majestic tree being torn limb by limb from its trunk and tossed uselessly into the sharp jaws of the wood shredder, leaving a sad, gaping hole in the back yard...  (tee hee... actually, the trunk hasn't been taken out yet, so no hole.)  So I will share about our anniversary celebration(s).

Of course, it was the Masters, so knew right off that we wouldn't do anything on Sunday.  So decided to go out Friday since that's not as important as Sat or Sun... well, by the time it got 6ish, diemaker really wanted to watch the rest, so just decided to go out afterwards.  So went to our favorite Chinese place... at around 8pm.  Then on Sat, he said we really should go out again... so decided to.  But with the delay, it was closer to 8:30 before we left.  And ended up with a late, candlelight dinner with entertainment.  Let me explain.

Went to a place called "Sam's Joint."  There's several in W. MI that we've gone to - this one is an old church, decorated with antique stuff on the walls and hanging from the ceiling.  And yes, there were candles on the tables.  And the entertainment came in two forms.  The first was a family next to us - actually, it looked like 4 or 5 couples that were siblings & spouses with 5 children between them - ages app. 1 1/2 to about 8...  you can imagine the entertainment - there were a couple push vacs out that the little ones had gotten ahold of and were running around with, one little girl ran up some steps and stood at the top and cried... the older girl shared a joke that only an 8 year old would think was funny (that in itself made me laugh)... and a boy about 5ish loudly proclaimed that he farted. (Excuse my french.)  The poor parents looked at us a couple times and said they were really sorry - we just laughed and told them we were totally enjoying it.  It got very quiet when they left!

Then the other entertainment.... we noticed on the balcony a couple large animated-type bears like they have at Disney and just thought they were part of the decoration.  When, lo and behold, the lights turned on and they started "singing!"  Country music, of course.  We cracked up!  Turned out to be quite the "romantic" date. 

Our anniversary was announced in church Sunday, so everyone made over us... it's always fun to be the center of attention.... and tell everyone who asked how long, that I was only 5 when we got married.  Tony & Sarah came for dinner & the afternoon, and that was nice.  Steve & Rachel came for dinner on Thursday, so we've gotten caught up with our kids.

Oh yeah... and some guy who's Tony & Sarah's age won the Masters.  Weird.

We had a wonderful time in Ohio with the granddarlings (and their mom... and Scott for the few hours we saw him).  Went to a children's museum, ate out, went to the library (where I found a great book by a guy who collects shopping lists - some of them are hilarious!!) and just hung out reading stories, playing make-believe and watching Veggie Tales.

Good Friday activities were cancelled because of the SEVEN INCHES OF SNOW that we got Friday... it did bring us to the second highest amount of snowfall for one season - 105".  whoopie.  I was out having a delightful day of going to the mall and grocery shopping, and praying that I wouldn't end up in a ditch.  So we spent Good Friday evening with a fire in the fireplace and drinking hot chocolate.  (And watched segments of 3 different movies... aarrgghhh!!!)

Had a very busy weekend with the Awana Games (formerly Olympics) on Saturday and finishing getting things ready for our Easter Community Breakfast at church.  It went well, although I don't think we had as many people as in the past. But to my knowledge, no one got food poisoning, so that's always good.  And we didn't run out of food.  T&S came over for dinner and we celebrated Sarah's b'day - which is today.  Had a very good day.  Now vacation's over.....