Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Home Again from Live Journal 7-25-11

We had such a great weekend!
We left late morning on Thursday and got to the Twin Cities early evening. It was a beautiful drive down. We had a nice drive down and missed the worst of rush hour traffic by leaving later in the morning. The dogs were boarded at Ellie's Playhouse for the weekend. Tom will pick them up later this morning. We had a lovely suite at Country Inn and Suites in Brooklyn Center, aside from YOUR house, our favorite "home away from home". They're pretty much always a fabulous stay! We actually ate fairly healthy on this trip as I'd packed some sandwich makings, fruits and veggies for salads and munching. We packed our own beverages. Thursday night we ordered a pizza and bread sticks to have with a salad I made in the room and that meant leftover pizza for lunch on Friday! :-) We had a lovely relaxing evening just watching baseball and hanging out in our room or on the "porch" of the hotel. The hotel has really good hot breakfasts with a lot of choices, and really good coffee available all day! We'd brought some Caribou Coffee to use with our in room coffee pot. The hotel has ceramic mugs available by the coffee pot downstairs so we had that small luxury as well! No Styrofoam cups! Yay!

As always Tom and I ended up talking to people about their troubles. LOL

I had the pool to myself for an hour on Friday morning to splash and exercise for about an hour, and then the whirlpool after. We spent the day just reading and I had some time to play with watercolor pencils and pen on a journal page. The rehearsal at the golf club went smoothly. We had pizza and salad again at the rehearsal dinner on Friday night. Perfect! No such thing as too many meals of pizza and salad as far as I'm concerned! LOL It was hot hot hot and the mosquitoes were horrible so we stopped at Target on the way back to the hotel to buy bug spray, Benadryl itch relief and umbrellas for the next day. There were some heavy thunderstorms in the area on Friday night and off and on through the day on Saturday.

Saturday I got to work on the journal page again, and prepped some pages for future use. I didn't get to use the pool on Saturday as there were dozens of families staying there for the Schwan's USA Cup boys and girl’s soccer tournament. Kids and families from a dozen countries were there for the tournament. All the kids were so well behaved at the hotel! Amazing! There was also a block of rooms for families there for a wedding, NOT as polite or well behaved as the soccer kids and families!

The wedding on Saturday was an outdoor wedding; thankfully the golf club has two sites for weddings! The site where Nick and Cara were getting married was flooded by torrential rains that came with the thunderstorms, so the wedding was set back about half an hour while we all waited for the other wedding at the other site to clear. Aside from that everything went off without a hitch! It was a lovely wedding. Cara was a stunning bride! She is model gorgeous! Such a sweet amazing young woman who comes with a lot of family baggage that she has overcome. Her mother was not invited to the wedding but showed up anyway and thankfully so far as we know didn't make a scene. Her mother was really pretty at one time, but now looks like she was "rode hard and put away wet." Nick is just a doll! He reminds us so much of Noah. They both are cut from the same cloth. The food was delicious! The rain and lightening stopped before the ceremony so they still got lots of beautiful pictures, and held off while the wedding was taking place. We sat with Phyllis and Harry, (Nick's and Kay's parents) and Harry's sister and brother and their spouses at the reception. Harry and Phyllis are the best in-laws anyone would ever wish for their child! We just love them and they adore Noah. They had a photo booth for the guest book, we got our picture taken, half the sheet went to the guest book into which we wrote our wishes alongside our photo strip. We danced danced danced at the wedding. Tom wore out before I did. LOL What a change that is! It used to be me who could only dance for a short while! We had a blast. It was 103 and humid! But the new dress I'd bought in Indiana last month and hadn't worn yet was perfect, light and comfy and loose! Glad I bought it even though it's a hand wash item which I usually avoid like the plague!

It was a bit hard on Tom to do the wedding in light of what has happened to our son John, and I admit that it pained me a bit as well, but it was also a joy for both of us as we love Nick and Cara so much. We got an email from John on Friday that he was coming to the wedding reception. He and Angie had been invited but he NEVER saw the invitation! Evidently Angie had intercepted the mail and thrown it out without mentioning it to him. It's come to light that she's done this several times with other family invitations. He messaged us that he'd gotten to the Twin Cities and was staying at the hotel where Noah was staying. He messaged me a short time later that he was not coming, that he was going home, he just couldn't make himself come and didn't want to be a downer at a time that was supposed to be about joy for Nick and Cara. I called him and had to go off to the bathroom to lock myself in the stall for a cry because of the raw pain in his voice, and to pull myself back together before going back into the reception. I am not letting my anger at Angie ruin any moments of joy in my life or anyone else’s! If I can help it. He went back to Fargo, and let me know later that he'd gotten home safely, and was at his friends' house, they were having a fire outside and I think that was probably better for him. I had thought it too soon for him to go to the wedding reception, so was glad that he did what he needed to take care of himself. I was especially glad that he wasn't there for the Bride and Groom's first dance as it was the song John and Angie chose for their dance song, "Come away with me" (Norah Jones)

We were back at our hotel about 10:30 Saturday night and after spending some time outside after we got back so Tom could smoke his pipe we were in bed reading before midnight. Man did that bed feel good! My body ached in a good way the next morning! (The scales say that all the pizza this weekend didn't do any damage because of the exercise of swimming and dancing. Yay me! LOL)

We were on the road about 10:30 after a nice breakfast at the hotel, and got home about 7:30 after stopping for a picnic lunch along the way. We also stopped in Grand Rapids MN at a vegetable stand to buy some produce and then went to Wal-Mart to buy some good yogurt and other fresh salad stuff for the week. We gassed up the car when we got to Baudette, and now I don't have to leave the house again until tomorrow unless I want to.

I have a bit of paperwork to do today and then I'm going to do some cleaning. I have to work tomorrow and then Wednesday my little friend Becca is coming for lunch and to spend some time with me. We're going to bake a "Singing Cake”, maybe some cookies, and do a couple of little crafty things (as yet to be decided upon) play a couple of games or so before she goes home.

Tom's busy this week with church things, I’m not so busy due to my light caseload at the moment. I do so hope that I can get down to Fargo to see John and Ashlyn maybe this weekend. Ashlyn has been doing some interesting things in her play that John has been curious about. Yesterday he sent me a photo of some of the little scenarios she sets up in her play, there's only a Daddy doll and an Ashlyn doll when they play in the doll house which she calls Ashlyn's house. She wants to take the Daddy and Ashlyn dolls with her to the playground and everywhere else she has to go, no Mommy doll. He says this is a pattern. Ashlyn says, "Ashlyn doesn't want to go to Ashlyn's new house, Ashlyn wants to stay here." So she's working out structuring her little world in play. It would be interesting to see what she plays at Angie and Whiting's townhome. I cautioned him not to read too much into the play unless he sees something that really seems scary, and that I’m hesitant to say too much because of my own bias.

Well, I'd better get off the computer and get some work done! So hard to get back into work and think about cleaning after such a long break away.

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