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July 25, 2008

IT'S FRIDAY, MY FAVORITE DAY!!

Saturday, we attended a wedding reception for my nephew Mark and his new bride, Brenda. They were married in June but waited to have the reception until her sisters could come out from Illinois. The party was held in a city park in Tualatin and it was potluck. Everyone brought food and we had more than enough to eat. One thing about a potluck is that you have to sample everything and then you are miserable because you ate too much. Mark was happy to see us and was glad that we came. Lara and her girls were there and enjoyed exploring the park. We had to leave early and head for home as we had lots of company to get ready for this week.

On Sunday, George and Margie spent the night with us. George is a friend of Dave's and lives in Redmond over in Central Oregon, and he brought his friend Margie. I hadn't seen George in years and have never met Margie before, but we had a great time. We took them for a steamboat ride and spent a lot of time eating and drinking wine and just enjoying each other's company. During the boat ride, Dave and George found a way to get the old shifter reconnected and a tiny steam whistle working again. George is an artist in both metal and wood, and took stuff back to his shop in Central Oregon. He custom-made the stuff we needed to get everything working and had it on the UPS truck by Wednesday. Dave can't wait to get it all on the boat, but that will have to wait until next week.

After George and Margie left on Monday morning, my sister and brother-in-law, Jeanne and Bob drove in from Arizona arrived that afternoon to spend a few days with us. So it was a quick change of the bed sheets and a clean bathroom. Bob and Jeanne had driven up the Pacific coast (Highway 101) and had planned on staying until Thursday. From our place they will head north to Seattle, then East to Spokane, Idaho and Montana and then South to Colorado, New Mexico and back to Arizona by mid-August.

While Bob and Jeanne were here, we drove over to Oswald West State Park and took a hike out to Short Sand Beach. It was a beautiful day and we had a wonderful hike. It is about a quarter of a mile hike from the highway down to the beach. Jeanne wanted to show Bob where she used to go surfing when she was younger. Short Sand Beach is a quiet little cove where there are a lot of surfers. The water is really cold and they have to wear wetsuits, but everyone seems to enjoy it there. Bob is kind of a self-taught computer fixer-upper. He and Dave worked on getting some files ready to shift over to the new server (no, we haven't done that yet) and Bob also went down to Kahrs' to help Donna with a Mac problem she was having. So I guess he earned his keep while he was here!

On Thursday, we all drove into Hillsboro where we met my other sister, Judy and watched the people from the cemetery place the grave marker that we had ordered on my mother's gravesite. We released three balloons and they immediately got caught in a tree so they didn't ascend into the sky as we had planned. We were only there for a few minutes, and we hugged everyone goodbye and headed for a couple of appointments we had scheduled. We made a quick trip to the grocery store and then raced back home, as Dave had to attend a City Council meeting at 6:00 that night. We made it with 15 minutes to spare!

We woke up to a big surprise on Thursday morning. Someone had visited us during the night and had tagged our old church with graffiti. Now, who would have thought that someone would spray paint graffiti in such a small town like Wheeler? I thought I had left the big city and all of this stuff behind me, but it has finally come around and left it's ugly mark again. I don't understand why people have to be so irresponsible with other people property by spray-painting it with graffiti. We called the sheriff's office and a detective came out to investigate, but there isn't really anything they can do about it. We will have to clean it up ourselves and I am not looking forward to that!

Dave is gone for the weekend - announcing car races in Portland, so I should be able to tackle a few projects around here. No company next week, so we should be able to stay busy all week. The project list is getting longer by the day!