Wacky wonderful Texas

It was great being back in Texas. The "welcome" mat is my daughter's who goes all out to decorate for Halloween. She has a pink Halloween tree with black garland and little stretchy skeletons hanging by the neck from black ribbon. She also has a big sign on the door that says "morgue." The black cat is my son's. His name is Winston. Z is living in a house with a couple of guys. The one who owns the house is a friend from childhood. The house is beautiful and spacious. About as unlike a boys' apartment as you can imagine. I also got to visit with Wrecks, Feynman and Mikey, the animals that keep my daughter company.

I loved the sky in Texas even if it was gray. And the parking spaces! Oh my goodness, they were so huge! There's just a lot of room there. The house in the photo was a surprise. Click on the photo for a close-up view. I was driving up Old North road toward the church building and saw this shack on the side of the road. It was in an area that had been laid out for lots and then abandoned. My thought was, "I don't remember a shack being there." Then I realized that it was a new construction. The whole neighborhood looks like sharecropper houses to me. Siding and weird shingles, tin roofs on the porches. You get the picture. It's the newest (oldest) thing. The houses reminded me of a lot of old houses here in PA, houses built in the twenties and thirties. Weird.

It was wonderful to see lots of old friends. I cried in the Kroger. I miss it so much. I brought back a suitcase full of Biskits. And I went back to Denton High and had lunch with my former department. That was also a thrill.

Also, there seems to be no recession in North Texas. Things are still booming which was pleasant to see.

I've been happy here in PA but the feeling I got when I left Denton was that it was a great place to raise our kids. We chose that town and Michael managed his career so that we would end up there. I realized this trip that we had made an excellent choice. It has everything: it's near a huge city with amazing museums and music, it has a relaxed and friendly atmosphere, there are two big universities that offered our kids a lot of opportunities, our kids got a fine public education and Denton is home to lots and lots of church members. I'm glad we were able to live there as long as we did.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

The first half of my trip last week was for Dad's 90th birthday. I was in Shreveport from Friday to Sunday. The weather was gorgeous and the family came out in full force. All but three of the grandchildren were there for the party and two of the great-grandchildren. (All of the children, of course, as my brothers and I put on the party.) My brother Keith is a newlywed and his new bride was absolutely essential. She planned all the decorating and she and Keith did a huge amount of work to put the party together. So thanks to them.

I also got to see my favorite uncle. Uncle Jim was there to tell great stories and I even got to bring home tapes of his best ones from Forest Hill, LA. The photos are of me with my Uncle Jim and my dad who is seated in the photo. The other photos are of my mom and the gorgeous birthday cake.

It was an awesome party and I think it came off without too much worry on my mom's part. I especially loved seeing all the first cousins and some spouses have a great time outside. Except for one young one who is still in elementary school, there is only an eight-year spread between all the Jones cousins who are in their early thirties or twenties. So the kids had a great visit.

I have a wonderful family and this kind of family get-together gives me something to look forward to as my children get older. I'd really like to have all of my kids and their spouses and kids together for a celebration and family get-together for our 40th anniversary. So that gives us until 2011 to work out the details.

Denton High School and other places

I went to Denton High School for lunch today. It was as if I had never left. Old friends have remained true and faithful. However, Denton High has not stayed the same. It's vast. They've added a whole new wing at the end of what we used to call the freshman or "West" wing. And they're adding another whole building. They've also completed a huge new field house. How could they do that so quickly? I got to see oodles of great folks and it was wonderful to see a few of my former students. The last batch I taught as freshmen are now seniors so I actually recognized a few faces.

I also went out to lunch with an old friend. That was so much fun. I had coconut cream pie. It's pretty hard to find a good piece of pie in Wilkes-Barre. This was the real thing with homemade custard and honest-to-goodness homemade pie crust. We had such a lovely time. Our husbands' careers are similar and we both have unmarried children. There was a lot to talk about. I realized that although the people in Wilkes-Barre are amazingly great, I haven't had the opportunity to develop those close friendships like I had in Denton. Tomorrow I get to see more old friends and tonight dinner with the children. They get the speech. For the unitiated, whenever one of our children did something remarkable or when they made straight A's we took them out and treated them to a meal or ice cream. There was always a speech though. We told them how proud we were of them. So tonight's speech will feature some mighty good grades, a scholarship or two and other accomplishments. Fun, fun, fun. And to my other two, I'm sorry I can't take you out too because you both deserve a good speech as well.

Home Sweet Texas

The birthday party in Shreveport was wonderful. I'll be posting pictures when I get home. We got a great turnout and it was really fun to see all the cousins (two of my kids and all but one of the others) visiting together. My parents will be getting three new great grandkids next year so that was fun. One was announced to my parents on Dad's birthday. None of them will be mine which is also unusual. Keith will have two new ones and Kevin his first.

I'm in Texas now and it feels good to be home. On the way to and from DFW to Shreveport and back I don't think I drove on more than a few miles of dry pavement. On the way to Denton Sunday afternoon I counted six cars that had run off the road. There was so much water. I even saw a doe and her fawn wading up to their chests off the side of the Interstate. I don't think I've ever seen a deer on I-20.

I had a great visit with N and Z last night and today I eat lunch with my buds at Denton High. I hope to see a few more old friends while I'm here. There were no church meetings on Sunday since it was general conference so I missed out on an opportunity to see a whole lot of folk on Sunday. But it worked out. I really needed to stay and help mom get beds made and the house somewhat back in order after the big party.

Denton still feels like home, so does Louisiana. And when I get home to PA it will also feel like home. I guess that's a good thing. The more homes the better, right?

Pictures and trip to Texas/Louisiana

I promised pictures and here they are. The gorgeous canned goods are from the central market. This was an Amish booth. And the choo-choo is a real working small scale steam engine at the Strasburg Railroad. Strasburg has a full-size steam engine with dining car which you can ride and the Pennsylvania State Railroad Museum. Fun! We didn't see either the museum or ride but we got to watch the steam engine come and go which was a thrill. And we saw the big locomotives outside the museum. We'll have to go back for that.

I'm on my way to Texas and Louisiana. I hope to see friends there. I'll be in Denton beginning Sunday night and leaving Wednesday morning. Monday night is reserved for my best buds in Denton, my children Z and N. I'll be in Louisiana for my dad's 90th birthday. How cool is that? So I'm off.

Pennsylvania Dutch Country

Michael finally got a day off after working twenty in a row. Rather than stay around the house and do the stuff we needed to like mowing and weeding, he opted for a trip out of town just to get away. We went to Lancaster County which is southeast of us and not far from Philly. We had a heck of a time getting there because of traffic but we started in the city of Lancaster. We went to The Demuth Museum that is in the artist Charles Demuth's house. Big disappointment in that there were no works by Demuth displayed. Oh darn. But it was great to see his house. Michael is a big fan because Demuth was part of a movement called Precisionism. These guys liked painting pictures of factories and water towers. We also got to meet the director of the museum who had curated the exhibit we saw of works by Luigi Rist. Then we went to the Central Market. This is housed in a fabulous old building and you can buy goods ranging from foie gras to gummie bears. We bought lunch at one of the stalls, then had peanut butter fudge for dessert from another and bought plum jam to take home. Some of the stalls were run by Amish families, others were ethnic like Thai, African and Italian foods. It was one of the most amazing markets I've ever seen.

Then we headed down the road to the Pennsylvania Dutch country. I have to tell you that Michael and I felt like voyeurs. It seemed indecent to stare at these simple people in their buggies and on their farms. It was embarrassing to see people hopping out of their cars to take pictures of a family loading a wagon with hay. It's a real paradox. The Amish deserve their privacy and yet they depend on tourists to buy their goods. You can hardly make a living these days just by horse-drawn labor on a farm.

Michael was pleased to see that the Amish are able to live simple and healthy lives on beautifully kept farms. It was shocking to me to see farm houses unhooked to electricity even though the electrical poles line every road. You wouldn't think you would notice such a thing. But a house standing alone, with no lights on and with no electric or telephone lines is a pretty amazing sight. They do use electricity for some things like milking machines evidently. And they do use telephones although they do not have private lines in their homes. I learned that their objection to modern technologies are not that they are evil in themselves but that they detract from a simple lifestyle and that they make people prideful and covetous. This explains the odd rules that allow them to use gas powered string trimmers but not own an automobile.

I'll post some pictures tomorrow and tell about other stuff we saw.

Pattern mania

A lovely lady from church brought her patterns from her business to church to give away. They sat there for weeks and weeks and finally I took them home. GL is excited about all the costumes and will be getting a lot of kids' clothes patterns. ML will be getting women's patterns and kids' clothes as well. But since there were over 400 patterns in the group, what to do with the rest? I'm thinking about it. Right now, I'm tripping over pattern boxes in the living room. I actually love patterns. I love pulling out the instructions on patterns just to see how something is put together. Especially Vogue. They use so many fascinating techniques.

Other news is that my dad's 90th birthday approaches and my trip to Louisiana and Texas. Sure wish Michael could come with me but he says it's impossible.

We called S, our six-year-old grandson, for his birthday on Friday. "I love you a billion and six," he exclaimed. "There are a billion and six people on the earth and I love you that many!" What a cutie. He likes his birthday better than any one I know. One year he wanted us to sing the birthday song for him over and over. We'd finish and he'd say "Again, again!" Pretty cute. We gave him a corduroy coat and he was even excited about that. Luckily GL also included a big box o' Nerds in the present or else we might have dropped in our popularity rating.

Shipping to MF in the Czech Republic is always a challenge but I lucked out. Her husband N is coming to Dallas/Fort Worth next week, so I only have to ship the patterns that far. I'm also including some Christmas presents. When your kids live in Europe, you have to think ahead. MF and I had lined up their Christmas presents from the grandparents and their birthday presents. But I didn't have anything for the grownups. So I'll ship that to Texas too.

We're in the process of refinancing our mortgage. I know, I know. We just moved in last year. But the rates are advantageous enough that we can reduce our mortgage from 30 year to 15. Every time I think about the fact that the Denton house was close to being paid for, I makes me slightly ill. I mentioned this to a friend at church today. He's a real estate appraiser and we were talking about the ten-year-old kid who appraised my house. Okay not ten, but he looked no older than twenty or so. I asked him how long he'd been appraising houses and he said, "Not too long." Anyway, back to my story. I told him how hard it was to give up the perfect house. He looked at me and said, "From what I can tell about you, any house you and Michael could live in together would be the perfect house." What a great compliment. But I still hold to the fact that if this house in PA is perfect, then the house in Texas was perfecter.