Our updates for all of you

I thought I'd make a new post with a few photos from Stacy's Birthday. First photo is of the flowers the Prosecutor's Office sent over. Next photo is the 2 bundles of Tulips Sandy sent in their Flowers.com shipping box. And the slightly used birthday cupcake cake before the crash at home.  So the day is done and we get everything safely home.  We're getting inside the house, and I'm holding the cake. As I'm turning left to kind of rotate in through the screen door the cake container hits the door jam which knocked it out of my hand just enough to lose the balance.  And after "oh,....... oh,....... OH NO!" and almost saving it two of those oh no's, the cake lands upside down in the container on the porch. The last photos are the just after the crash with all the icing now attached to the top of the plastic box and then Stacy trying to reassemble the cake as best she could into individual cupcakes again...

Yes today, April 17th is Stacy's birthday. For the next almost 5 months she'll be "older" than I am. During this time she loves to occasionally mention that, it's OK, we're the same age more than not. Earlier in the week Stacy was down in McCall, Idaho, for two days of state level meetings, leaving last Sunday to drive down and coming back late Tuesday evening. Then Thursday she had to go to Coeur d'Alene for more meetings. So on Monday, with Stacy being gone, everyone was planning a lunch party for Stacy which was to be a bring your own salad, kind of buffet, luncheon. That sounded pretty good and would have been nice, but Tuesday one fellow employee decided she didn't want to come in on her day off, Friday, and wanted the party moved to the following Monday, then later that day she decided that trying out the new Mexican restaurant would be so much better than a salad lunch, this was still for Stacy, right? But to keep the peace, it was decided t...

Another post I'd forgotten to publish! The Trains, the trains! Where we live in rural North Idaho is a main railroad line in several directions, and being so, trains go by quite often. This train traffic has markedly increased over last few months with both coal and oil being transported from points east to the shipping ports far west in the Seattle area. The oil coming through is the main concern to a lot of people throughout the North West. Oil coming from the shale fields of the Dakotas is the concern due to so many recent derailment and explosion accidents in the Midwest and back East. It was recently said on the local NPR station that the, over 1 mile long oil trains, carry approximately 60,000 gallons of crude oil as those trains go lumbering through, with full trains going West, empty oil cars going back East for refills. And this is many times a day in a 24 hour day and seven days a week. The last 2 weeks I kept track of the daily trains during my hours at work, 8 t...

The phrase The Golden Years is heard less often nowadays, but when I was younger I remember hearing about those years to look forward too with desire as the leisure lifestyle of being retired. For many, in actuality, I think those Golden years are the ones you have while younger and generally in good health with those years set aside as supposedly the Golden ones more often than not problematic with health issues. Like right now for us but not us personally! Fred Davis, was the closest person to a father I had in my early teen years as well as a person I kept in contact with until his unexpected death several years ago. As he aged himself he often stated "the golden years? what's golden about them?". He very often said he suffered from only one thing, "A...G.....E..." He lived to his 90s and while mentally still sharp his health was far from good with bypass surgeries and loss of leg function and numbness that meant walkers and problems just standing or get...