Hickory Hills Cookout with Old Friends

Kerry came by tonight and picked us up, with Beth & Twila also in the big SUV--Kerry's soccer mom vehicle--and drove us to Bill & Charlotte's home in Hickory Hills, where Bill & Charlotte hosted a hot dog cookout for us all. We spent a nice evening eating hot dogs, brownies, and roasted marshmallows, then sitting around in the house and chatting. In the photo above are Beth & Twila.

Charlotte & Bill, our hosts

Above: The old friends. It's hard to imagine these two young ladies being in their 40's now. You would never know it.

Bill & Charlotte's house has been damaged by the hurricane force wind storm we had about 3 weeks ago. A tree crushed an outbuilding, and the roof of their house was damaged. Their back yard had pile of cut up limbs and tree trunks. We feel fortunate not to have had more damage than we did.

Anyway, it was a very nice evening. We are going to make plans to visit Boston within a year. We hear that Beth is a great tour guide.

Weekend Projects

Here's a project that we are proud of. Here's Leslie standing next to yet another of her brilliant ideas: a new trellis designed to hide some of the ugliness of the garage apartment next door. Leslie bought two trellis panels that she felt would complement the trellises on the garage, or come close enough. But they were two...well, separate. So she found some rectangular molding in the workroom downstairs and cut 6 pieces to join the two panels. Then she thought she could use the leftover to create a vertical piece in the middle of the two. It looks like it was sold that way. After painting with the gray stain we used on the garage and letting it dry out overnight, she fastened it to the fence and voila! a nice Oriental-style trellis for training vines to run on.

Meanwhile, I built steps to the alley with leftover hexagonal flagstones, so now it's easier to get down to empty the trash. It involved a lot of digging and dirt work.

We had two great days for working, even with the mid-afternoon rain shower we had on Saturday. Maybe we can actually rest on Memorial Day.

Later on today we will be picked up by Kerry Gilb, who's in for a weekend visit, and be taken to a backyard hotdog cookout, where we will see Beth Fullerton, who's also in for a visit. It will be good for Dale to see Beth, whose wedding was the first he performed on New Year's Day, 1996. Just last Saturday he performed his 6th wedding.

Saturday in the Park

Dale had the pleasure of officiating at a wedding on May 16. Jill Halbach, one of his former students and one of my part-time employees at the Post Library, married Adam Boswell at Cunningham Park. It was a very sweet wedding with lots of personal touches due to the creativity of Jill.
Adam collects rubber ducks, so ducks figured prominently in the wedding festivities. Paula, who works in the library, made the delicious cakes. Jill was up all night preparing food for the reception. Everything was wonderful.

Jill made her bouquet--a lovely assortment of flowers crafted from duct tape.

She walked down the aisle, which was formed by pinwheels stuck into the ground.

The ceremony was briefly interrupted by the arrival of a helicopter at St. John's Hospital.

Here are the Merry Boswells taking their vows. They decided their original plan to promise faithfulness until "worms eat your face" was a tad disrespectful for the seriousness of the commitment.

Spring 2009

It's so exciting to see how everything looks in its second year. Also nice not to have to kill ourselves working in the yard every spare minute. I just wish we had some time to enjoy it now before it gets hot.

Girlfriends' Day

I needed a nice, relaxing Saturday after the trauma that was Friday. BTW, the anointing (see following posting) was just 1 of 3 disasters that transpired on Friday.

Anyway, Saturday was Mt. Hope's 2nd annual Girlfriends' Day. I didn't go last year, but after hearing how great it was, I decided I couldn't miss this one. And I wanted to take someone special with me, so I invited my friend Marian Kelly to go as my guest. She didn't have any idea what she was getting into, but she graciously accepted, and we had a swell time. There were lots of fun activities, most of which involved chocolate, so what's not to like about that?!

We took a cake decorating class, so here I am making chocolate curls.

We both got dermabrasion facials, courtesy of the White Rhino.

Here's Marian proudly showing off the card she made.

The Anointing with Oil

OK, so here it is Friday night, the end of the work week, and I am sitting at the dinner table with a nice meal of roasted salmon and eggplant with salad that Leslie has fixed. I start to pump up the spray olive oil bottle so that we can spray olive oil on our salad, when it blows up. With a force greater than a champagne bottle, the top hits the ceiling, the bottom blows out, my dinner plate breaks, I suffer a small cut on a finger, which starts to bleed, and olive oil sprays 360 degrees around the table, on my shirt and on the walls and anything in its way. And the olive oil puddles up on the table. Look at the pictures below to see the results.
And of course it got over my shirt at table-top height. I am fortunate not to have had my face over the spray bottle. I would be in the emergency room now instead of writing this. It was like a gun blast, really. Olive oil was everywhere. Leslie put the plate and the bottle on the table after the fact so that you could see what happened to them.

Pretty interesting, huh? Thank God I lived to tell the tale.

And that's how we began our kick-back Friday night.