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IT'S FRIDAY, MY FAVORITE DAY!!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I have been so blessed and have much to be thankful for starting with my wonderful husband, daughters, sons-in-law and granddaughters. They are without words my joy and inspiration. My health is the next on my list of thankfulness. Even though I have been diagnosed with cancer, I am thankful that it is a "good cancer" and that the doctors found it early enough. Following my "announcement" in last week's post, I've had a ton of positive response from family, friends and acquaintances. I just want to say a big "thank you" to everyone for their love and support. It really does help.

We had a rare time with the whole family together at our house for the holiday. Leslie and Jason arrived with Ashtin and Paige Wednesday evening, and they were followed about an hour later by Lara and Greg with Jadyn, Jaysa and Jordyn in tow. The girls are old enough to keep themselves occupied most of the time and the older ones helped to keep the three year old busy. So all six of the adults were actually able to visit from time to time! That doesn't happen very often with a houseful of kids! The rest of the time we were entertained by the grandgirls - they really are such a joy to have around.

Jason loves to cook and he helped me in the kitchen by making the stuffing for the turkey, preparing the turkey and making the gravy. It sure helps to have another set of hands in the kitchen for a big meal like Thanksgiving. Dave's sister Leanna joined us for dinner and she provided the turkey. It was one she had frozen and she volunteered the bird for the dinner, so we took her up on her offer. We were expecting another stormy day with high winds and we were hoping to get the dinner all prepared before we lost our electricity. As it turned out, this storm didn't amount to very much and didn't last very long and all went well. I really didn't want to face a power outage with a houseful of company and an uncooked bird!

We did have a pretty nasty storm a couple of days before Thanksgiving that packed quite a wallop. It wasn't as severe as the storm we had in 2007, but it did shake the house all night long and we didn't get a whole lot of sleep. We had gale force winds up to 58 mph here on the deck and lost our electricity for over three hours. The peak winds from this blow were in the upper 70's elsewhere in our area and since that was less than the one four years ago, there wasn't as much damage. I think we were better prepared this time as well. The next morning, the island in front of our house was completely under water due to the combination of flooding and some of the highest tides of the year. It was fun to identify some of the debris floating by. The local lodge lost several of their rental kayaks and had to retrieve the ones they found on the island in front of our place. After everything calmed down I went out in the yard and collected a pile of broken branches and raked up more leaves.

About the only other thing that happened this past week was when we went to the open house for our new fire station. We formed a new fire district in the region a couple of years ago, and built a new station. The grand opening was on Friday and as emergency volunteers, both Dave and I helped with the opening. I was assigned to the radio room where I was supposed to give tours, but there were so many other volunteers that I really didn't have to do anything. Since there was no way they were going to get all of the cars for the open house parked at the station, shuttle lots were set up nearby and Dave was one of those who was assigned to help park cars. He was outside from three in the afternoon until seven that night and it was cold, rainy, windy and wound up with something between hail and snow. He was frozen by the time he got home. Still, it was nice to be able to volunteer to help out with something as nice as the new station and we're glad we had a chance to do it.

As promised, an update on my surgery which will be scheduled for December 14th, at St. Vincent Hospital in Portland. It looks like I'm going to be first on the schedule as I have to be there at 5:30 a.m. Good grief. It is scheduled to be outpatient surgery, so I'm hoping I'll get to come home the same day. They wanted to schedule it on December 7th, but I choose to wait because I want to attend my Master Gardener's Award Banquet on the 8th and I just didn't want to take a chance on how I would feel the day after surgery. I worked hard for that Master Gardener's certification and I wanted to make sure I could be there for the "graduation". This will work out better anyway because Dave has a cardiologist appointment on the 13th. We will drive in for that and just stay in town for the night for my surgery the next morning.