It is Thanksgiving weekend a time to be thankful for all our blessings and to reflect on the year past. Margaret and I had Thanksgiving dinner with friends and then spent Black Friday working around the house and putting up our Christmas decorations. And as we transition to the Christmas Season we want to extend our greetings and blessings to all our friends and family.
WORK
Margaret continues to work for ATI and this year traveled from coast to coast and places in between. On occasion her travels allowed her the opportunity to visit family and friends in the various locations. I again worked for H&R Block during the tax season and recently went back to work to help out with the Emerald Advance or holiday loan program and with tax audit problems. Before Christmas last year I completed all my testing for the Enrolled Agent certification program with the IRS.
TRAVEL
We ended last year spending Christmas in Las Vegas. I drove up to LV and Margaret flew in from Florida where she had been on a work assignment. LV is a rather surreal place to spend Christmas. The highlight of our visit was attending an Andy Williams Christmas concert at the Hilton Hotel. We attended Christmas morning Mass at a Catholic Church which sits in the shadow of the Wynn and Encore Casinos. Following the Mass we made our way down Las Vegas Boulevard mingling amongst the crowd which from my point of view was mostly made up of foreign tourists.
This past year we mainly did our traveling separately. In April Margaret went to Nashville, TN, to participate in a Country Music half-marathon with her sister Carol, a birthday gift for Carol to mark a “milestone” birthday. The weekend they were in Nashville it rained and there was a tornado watch, but it was nothing like the rain and flooding that hit the area a week later. While they were there they visited the Country Music Hall of Fame.
At the end of June Margaret was in Dallas for work and at the end of that assignment flew to Fargo, ND, to visit her mother at Dorset, MN, over the 4th of July weekend. I traveled to North Dakota at the end of June and attended a Backman Family Reunion on July 4th. The reunion was considerably smaller than the event five years ago but was attended by many of us who came from some distance to attend it. Also while I was in ND I attended the wedding of Martina Wolf and Greg Dovorak at Hannover and my 45th High School Reunion in Bismarck.
In June before I departed for ND I had a call from a friend, Ken Carpenter who I hadn’t heard from in several years. Ken and I had traveled together to Russia in 1993 with the Farmer-to-Farmer program. He had never visited ND, (one of six that he hadn’t) and wanted to do so with someone he knew. So from July 7th to the 14th I traveled with him for a week. We met up in Dorset and journeyed from there to western ND in a week’s time. During that time we packed a lot of “things” into the time allotted. I utilized my cadre of friends and relatives to provide Ken with a good overview of sights and events including: Dining at Companeros Restaurant and at Logging Camp in the Dorset area; walking across the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Itasca State Park; a ride around Round Lake on a pontoon boat; visiting the ND Aviation Museum in Fargo and the Red Trail Vineyard near Buffalo, ND and the National Buffalo Visitors Center at Jamestown; toured my farm and my cousin’s farm and saw up close construction material for the next expansion of the Grass Lake wind farm all near Wilton; visited the Lewis and Clark Foundation Visitor’s Center at Washburn; visited the Heritage Center in Bismarck and Ft. Abraham Lincoln south of Mandan; attended auto races at Mandan; saw Salem Sue, the largest milk cow in the world on a hill at New Salem; drove the Enchanted Highway from I-94 to Regent; stopped in New England, ND since Ken had lived in most of the states of the real New England and wanted to see the town named after that area; ate at the pitch fork fondue in Medora and attended the Medora Musical; saw the coal gasification plant and reclamation north of Beulah and toured the BNI Coal Mine near Center where Ken was able to ride on the dragline and in a 180 ton coal truck. After all that we drove back to Dorset where he dropped me off and proceeded on to the Twin Cities where he caught his plane back to Richmond, VA having seen a lot of ND in a week’s time.
To help out with this travel itinerary I have to thank Margaret’s mother Betty Fairfield, Betty’s Uncle Mike Kempnich, my college friends Larry & Nancy Ness, a former co-worker Rudy Radke, my cousins Archie and Eldo Johnson, my cousin Gary & Kathy Speten and their sons Nathan and Troy (the car racers!), and my friends Allen & Lorraine Schmidt and Walter & Sarah Wolf.
On my drive back to Bismarck I stopped in Jamestown to visit my mother’s cousin Reuben Gums. His mother and my maternal grandmother were Vossler sisters. Reuben organized a dinner with his family members at the Spiritwood Lake Resort north of Jamestown at which we brought everyone up to date on our lives.
At the beginning of October I took a quick trip to Portland, OR to attend the wedding of my cousin Arnold Keller’s daughter Lisa. It was a beautiful wedding and the weather even cooperated in Portland for it. I had a chance to “catch up” with my Keller cousins. In early November I went to Denver, CO for a week to help out my cousin Ruthann who underwent back surgery. She needed someone to take care of her dog Bijou and help her out around the house for the two days that she was in the hospital and during her initial recovery after she got home.
HOME IMPROVEMENTS
This year was a big year for home improvements at our house. After contemplating it for several years we took the plunge and replaced all of the windows in our house. So far we have been very pleased with the outcome. Then this fall we decided to remodel our master bathroom. We did all the bath work ourselves except for refinishing the bath tub. We hired that task out and the results were very good. The tub looks like a new one.
“OLD WINDOW ART”
When I returned from ND I brought along a couple of old windows and we had one of them painted with a scene of the barn on the farm that I had restored. I had met the artist, Sandra Montgomery, from Old Window Art, last year when she had a showing of her work at the Campus Christian Center at the University of Arizona. I liked the concept and decided that I would contact her this year after I found a suitable window. It turned out that Sandra lives only a few blocks from where we do! Que sera sera!!
LOCAL EVENTS
On May 1st we hosted a party to celebrate a number of events including our 19th anniversary and the end of the tax season. We had a number of people at the party including Margaret’s brother Leonard who drove over from San Diego to join us.
At the end of May I accompanied Margaret on one of her training sessions to Page, AZ and we visited the Glen Canyon Dam. While she was working I also took a tour of Antelope Valley and went for a boat ride on Lake Powell. Then in the middle of October I went with her to Mesquite, NV when she had a training job at Littlefield, AZ on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. The main reason for my accompanying her was that we were meeting up with our friends Walt & Sarah Wolf from Center, ND. They were visiting LV with Sarah’s parents. We spend the day with them and had a good visit seeing some of the sights in LV including the Shark Reef Aquarium at the Mandalay Bay and the fountain at the Bellagio Hotel.
Margaret continues donating her time to Literacy Volunteers of Tucson as a substitute English instructor. With her busy work schedule, it’s difficult to have a weekly class; however, she does enjoy the opportunity to assist the community.
As we bring 2010 to a close we again want to wish each and every one of you all the blessings of the Christmas Season and want to extend to everyone our hopes for a Happy New Year in 2011.
