June 10, 2019

I'm Back!

Sorry About the Long Break

June 10, 2019

It has been almost 8 months since I have added a new posting to my blog.  I was so pleased to notice that although I have been away for such a long time, that last month there were almost 500 page views.

I may have to "ease" back into this slowly since I think I have forgotten how to do this in my sleep, which was often the case in the past.  We will see how this goes.  Since the last writing, I have a new computer at home and it includes a new keyboard.  The keyboard is wider and so I make a lot of errors in my typing.  Please be patient.

Many things have happened during these last eight months and they were factors in me not updating my life with my Cochlear Implant.  I think it has not just been those things going on in our lives, but also that in the beginning of the break, not much seemed to be different in my life with my implant and things in that respect were rather boring.  Now I am having some problems with the assorted equipment and those cause frustrations.

The biggest thing that has happened in our lives is that some major changes are in the works for our business.  The business, Landreth's Locksmith Service, has been at its current location for about 80 years.  The business belongs to my husband and me, but the building has belonged to my mother.  The local school district decided that they would like to buy up a large area next to the football stadium (which included Mom's property) and negotiations started about the end of this past September for them to buy Mom's building.  She consulted us, and my siblings at each step along the way.  It is not something she entered into lightly.

Moving or closing our business, was not in our plans at this point, but it seemed the time was right to do it.  It was April 15, 2019 before the papers were signed and in the agreement, Ron and I have a year to move out of the building.  Knowing that the final decision would probably be to sell, Ron began working in our huge warehouse in the fall, clearing things out.

Over the early months of this year, each of our sons, took time to come for a few days or a week, to help.  Each had things of their own stored in the warehouse and they needed to make decisions the same as we did, what to keep and what to let go.  Those decisions have been hard for each of us (some harder than others), and many remain to be decided.

The countless hours my husband has put in have been productive, but have also been hard on us.  A final decision has still not been made about whether we will try to continue the business in some form or change direction.  I am ready to retire.  Ron is not as eager to do so.  For many reasons, we see things from different perspectives.  Someone asked him what he would do if he retired.  He said his daughters-in-law all had lists for him.  He is a "handy" man and top of the list is the daughter-in-law in McAllen who wants a chicken coop built.

The most fun thing we have done during these months is to take a LONG overdue vacation.  It was a combination of a trip to our grandson's wedding which was in Michigan, and a vacation doing some things that we enjoy doing  Sadly, Ron had been too busy to do much research on our route and missed a couple of places close to our route that he would have enjoyed visiting.

During these months I have taken few bird photos, but I did take some great photos of blooming plants and blooming trees on our trip.  We also traveled home through some of the severe flooding in the Mid-West, mostly in Missouri and Oklahoma.  It was so sad to pass farm fields for hour after hour that were under water, with the water levels still rising.  God protected us along our route and with the many storms rumbling through the areas we were traveling in, a tornado 30 miles south of our route one night was the closest we came to serious weather.  We did have heavy rain and lightening on the last hour of our trip that evening.

The grandson who got married is the oldest of the grandchildren in McAllen.  Our son from there, his wife, and 8 of their 9 children traveled together (the groom met the rest of his family in Michigan, as he had been away at college).  They first went to visit family in Kansas before going to Michigan.  My sister from Idaho flew to Dallas and my mom also flew to Dallas and my sister who lives in that area did the driving of the three of them to go to the wedding.  Ron and I traveled together.  After the wedding all of us traveled to the replica of Noah's Ark that is in Kentucky and spent a day touring that amazing structure.

This seems to be a good place for me to stop the blog for this evening, and I will try to get back to it soon with more on our trip, my Cochlear situation, and our business situation.  For this posting, all the photos are from the trip.  The wedding was the middle of May and Spring had just arrived in central Michigan.  There were so many beautiful blooming trees but I don't know what any of them are so I am willing to hear from those of you who do know.

Mornings were in the upper 30s in Michigan and this past week in Brownsville we have had unusually high temperatures right at 100 and with a heat index (feel like temperature) of up to 123 degrees. What a change. One friend asked if I had fallen in love with Michigan and  was considering not returning.  I told her that as much as I loved the cool, crisp mornings, all I had to do was think of their winters and I was not interested in staying.