January's News

I’ve fallen rather beyond. It’s amazing how busy we can get and have very little to show for it.

To start things off – the rash Diane and Jon had turned out not to be the chicken pox. It lasted about a week, was gone a week, then came back. It left for two weeks then Diane got it again. We are pretty sure it’s from the hot tub and are working on resolving the problem. Otherwise the hot tub has been wonderful and we use at least every other day/night.

We have had a lot of snow this year, and it has yet to melt away so we can see the ground. There are some places under the trees that have melted off and we see patches of pine needles. So we are hopeful that spring is coming. Even so, looking out the back doors of the dining room – all you see is white, white, and more white.

As for January, Jon had an unexpected business trip to Washington, DC come up. Diane and I went with him. He had one day of meetings and one day of sight seeing, and Diane and I had two days of sight seeing.

Diane was in charge of the camera and she took pictures of the White House and the Washington Monument. She also took lots of art pictures. Here is one from the sculptures outside the “new” American Indian Museum.

The big red piece is on the mall itself and the black on is outside the Hirshhorn Museum. Unfortunately we don’t have the names of the pieces. Diane had taken pictures of the plaques, as she always does, but they were too blurry to read.

We came back and I celebrated my birthday. Nothing big, out to dinner and family games at home. The next week we went to a Chihuly exhibit. For those of you who have not seen his work, you really should check him out. He and his team do HUGE masterpieces in blown glass. We also discovered one of the disadvantages to traveling around the country so much. We have been able to see whole exhibits of just his work. We have seen room and room after room stuffed full of these organic looking glass pieces that look directly from the sea or Mars or something. So the quiet, but very nice, exhibit of modern glass blowers was a bit of a let down. There were probably 30 pieces total and less than 5 were Chihuly’s. We weren’t allowed to take pictures, but you can see a lot of his work on the Internet.

We finished off the month, we a weekend cruise to Nassau. It was for business, but with time to go into the city on the day we docked. Here’s a picture of the ship and one of the Governor’s House. Since she got to baby sit a younger friend, she had a great time. Life’s rough when you spend most of the day at the pool.

Jon also started taking Spanish lesson from a lady who was in The Emperor’s New Clothes with us. He wanted to get in as much as he could before his trip to Guatemala in March for Habitat for Humanity.

The bookcases were coming along, but with so much other stuff going on, they were not completed as soon as we had hoped. We also rounded the month out with making plans for our garden – both fruit and veggies, making plans for the barn, and picking colors to paint the inside of the house.