Holiday Post

I’m off for a Thanksgiving Feast with family and friends. I hope you have/had a wonderful day!

More Later!  Beth

Happy Halloween!

As am adult I don’t go in for the Halloween holiday… its not what it used to be and Axel goes nuts at the door. But when I did the World Wide Photo Walk earlier this month, I saw these tombstones and what better time to post grave markers than on ‘All Hollows Eve’?

A Lot Going ON…

Since the Surprise post…. there has  been a few days of quiet and many days hectic of activity!!!! Some sewing, some cleaning, some family, some travel, some baseball and some holidays, and site seeing!!!

SEWING…. (I’ll tell a bit more about these projects in another post)

no pictures of cleaning…. well because who really wants to see that? and none of travel, because it was a quick trip back to Chicagoland.

FAMILY…. this little guy, Darling Grandson (DSG), just 2- and his parents , moved to the area in the middle of April. So we have spent lots of time with family!! I have a Sister in Law and her family here, and an Aunt and family here as well! Some of my missing time has been spent one on one with the DSG….

  

BASEBALL….  in addition to moving, we have taken in some baseball- our 7 year old nephew at Little League and of course the Nationals!!!

  

MEMORIA DAY…. We were on the Mall and witnessed Rolling Thunder-200,000+ motorcycles rolling in a protest ride and honors our HEROs

  

we also honored our HEROs with carnations. This was at the WW2 memorial.

SIGHT SEEING…. some canons from Harpers Ferry West Virginia

  

and the new monument to Martin Luther King. It is very striking, both in size and concept.

So now you know why things have been very quiet on the blog… but I will endeavor to be more…. informative… and post more pictures.

More Later--

Beth

Gifts and a Wish

It’s hard to believe but Christmas is here again. I want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas!!!

Down here in South Africa, it doesn’t look or feel like Christmas!!!! Up until today it was sunny, with some big clouds floating and occasionally stacking up for a bit to produce a quick thunderstorm. But today, on Christmas Eve day, we have a dull gray sky that is spitting out a misty rain. The forecast is the same through Monday…. boo!!!

Our Christmas celebration is like last year very low key. This year I am cooking a turkey, (but the soup will wait until winter-July here). We both like the stuffing, mashed potatoes, a salad and gravy part of the meal, so we will have that along with the turkey. For dessert we are going to have apple crisp.

Our gifts this year- to our friends and family (you are probably one or the other if you are reading this), was donations, in their name to the Heifer Project. We donated Hope Gift Baskets and Promise Gift Baskets, along with other smaller Gifts of rabbits, bees, geese, ducks and chickens.  I have also made a donation in the name of all my online friends- A flock of chickens, which will help a family and a community, with eggs, meat and fertilizer.

The driving force behind this choice, is the poverty we see daily. It is heartbreaking, and my husband tells me of some of the places he visits for work. And it is more of the same. One of the reasons we chose Heifer Project is that it is world wide and more of the ‘teach a man/woman to fish’ where they can see some real progress and benefits from their own two hands.If you haven’t heard of the Heifer Project before now… check it out.

I don’t know if you saw the previous post about the generator… well it’s out there working now!!! A power failure in the neighborhood… It might even be load shedding (this is when there isn’t enough power being produced to cover all the homes, so they cut some off).

In closing… I hope you all have a HAPPY AND SAFE HOLIDAY, that Santa brought you a little something too.

Stay tuned for more later…. Postcards?

Beth

Home Again!

I’m home!!! There is so much to tell that I scarcely know where to begin….

Posting a blog from a tablet or any device with a virtual keyboard is NOT fun. As portable as the tablet was, it does have it’s limitations, so I found it less than optimum for posting to the blog. While the tablet has 2 cameras, they are not really built for taking pictures… I did snap a few on the way home and post them to Facebook, but it was a little unwieldy.

The 3 weeks we were gone was way to short in some respects and much to long in others. I did miss the dogs… Once we were home here… Saturday morning, we unpacked and collected the dogs from the kennel. They were as happy to see us as we were to see them. Things really went down hill after that!!! By Monday evening, if you were to have handed us plane tickets for home, we would have gladly gone!!!

While we were away, the power went out several times, twice were for 20 plus hours, which means everything in the refrigerator and freezers had to go. To top it off, another power outage over night from Saturday to Sunday morning, which meant no coffee -- another not so good thing. This will hopefully become a thing of the past, as we are FINALLY getting the compound generator installed. We’ve only been here a year and a half… It’s a monster of a thing and will reside in my back yard, and will be affectionately be called ‘big blue’. Hopefully we won’t every have to find out how loud it is.

On our visit back to the states we saw doctors, friends, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, nieces, nephews and a grandbaby!!!!

I’ll share a little more on all of that later. In the meantime, here is a ladybug.

 

Holidays

Since the last blog post we have had a week of days off or so it seems. Most of the time between posts I don’t think I have much to tell and then it sort of explodes and there are lots of small topics… So I’ll start with the days off or South African holidays. From the Friday April 22, before Easter to Monday May 2, if you took 3 days off work you get something like 11 days off.

The first one was Good Friday, we all got to stay home from work and since my Dear Husband, (DH) is away again. He is currently in Wichita, Kansas and was there for Good Friday (he had to work) and Easter Sunday. I didn’t do anything special for Good Friday. I did do some quilting until I ran out of thread, (see previous post and as luck would have it -its just below this one).

On Saturday evening I went to the local BIG mall to see a movie with a coworker. We opted for ‘Water for Elephants’, but that is because I’d read the book and it was a good story. The movie was good too. After the movie we grabbed a bite.

Sunday (Easter), a bunch of us made plans for a late breakfast / early lunch and to see a local music review. The theme was ‘Rough Diamonds and Divas’ and some of it was really rough….  It was fun. I left the house at 10:30 and didn’t get home until a bit after 4. It was only $25 for breakfast and the entertainment. Not bad. I think we are making plans to do the next one too, ‘Super Troopers’ featuring the tunes from Abba and the Bee Gees.

The Monday (April 25) following Easter is also a Holiday here, it’s called Family Day and I had a very relaxing day at home.

And just when you think we have to go back to work we had Wednesday off (April 27), for Freedom Day. Very similar to our Independence Day. Marks the end of Apartheid and open and free elections. On Sunday and Monday the Air Force and several other pilots were practicing some air displays, right over my house. I did get a couple of shots…

Now just when you think we are out of holidays… nope we have one more on Monday May 2- Workers Day or the equivalent of our Labor Day. It will be very difficult to go back to a 5 day work week.

The last few days we have been experiencing cooler weather…, mostly the nights, but definitely cooler. I have a daisy plant that is full of flowers  and the other day a small butterfly came by for a visit. The sun was shining in such a way that the blue was showing all sparkly. This little guy is about the size of a quarter, not really big. The one on the flower is cool… but I think I like the one with him in the air better.

Well that’s all for now… more later-

Beth