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IT'S FRIDAY, MY FAVORITE DAY!!

So much happening this week I hope that I can remember it all!

I will begin with last Saturday where Dave and I attended a "bird house" building class put on by the Master Gardeners. It was held at the Tillamook County Fairgrounds in the 4-H building and about 15 people attended. The class was put on by Rick and Janet Anderson and Rick had cut all the boards and so all we had to do was assemble and decorate them. They were being built to sell for the garden sale in May. Besides that, we had a demonstration on hypertufa and other garden art. Hypertufa is a man-made stone made from various aggregates such as peat moss, coir, perlite, sand and water which is bonded together with Portland cement. We didn't get to make any hypertufa but I got the instructions and some good ideas just in case I get inspired later on. After a potluck, we headed back home as we were expecting Lara and the girls for a visit during spring break.

Lara and her three girls arrived later on Saturday afternoon and so we went out to our favorite place to eat, the Pizza Garden in Nehalem. After we gorged ourselves with pizza we came back home and made plans for the rest of the week that they were going to be visiting us.

We have been having excellent weather for spring break and it has been perfect for the granddaughters to have fun on the beach. It was a little cold to go swimming but they had fun playing in the sand and collecting sea shells. They also planned a trip to the Tillamook Cheese Factory where they watched them make cheese and brought home some yummy ice cream for dessert. It was a trip to Cannon Beach one of the days and they also made it up to Seaside where they rode on some of the amusement rides that they have to offer. Of course, we have to bring back salt water taffy to eat.

The granddaughters were busy the whole time with other fun stuff. Granddad helped Jadyn make a bird house for her Girl Scout project and Jaysa wrote a little story about Stanley the lazy Basset Hound on the computer. It was fun to watch Jordyn play with her dolls. Grandma has a collection of Bratz dolls and Jordyn had them all lined up playing games with them. She kept herself entertained for hours. All three of the girls also enjoyed playing with the Pet Shop collection. These are toys that they don't have at home so it is always something fun and new to do while at Grandma and Granddad's. They also took turns on the Wii playing with that. I don't think the TV was on very much while they were here.

The girls also enjoyed taking Stanley for a walk and of course Stanley enjoyed all of the attention that he was getting. I did mention last week that he stops - nose the the ground - to check the "news" on these walks. Well, the girls were quick to correct me and say that it's not the "news" he's checking, it's his "p-mail"! Stanley did manage to sniff out the goodies that the girls had brought to snack on so that wasn't so good. Stanley found their stash and ate all of their Teddy Grams, Goldfish and Ritz crackers before he was discovered. He had quite the tummy ache the next day and wasn't feeling too great, but was back to his old self soon after that.

Dave and I are making plans to take a trip to the East Coast the first of May. We have some friends that live in Virginia and have wanted us to visit them for a long time. Since we aren't getting any younger, we decided to make it this year. They are anxious to show us around the Washington, D.C. area, Jamestown, Williamsburg, etc. so we are excited about that. We have no idea what to see or how long it will take us to see everything we want to see so we have allowed three weeks. If we have some extra time, we will go to Pennsylvania and New York City. Anyway, the other day we decided that we had better start making some plane reservations. What a hassle! We started out by looking at ticket prices on Hotwire. We then compared those prices with a few of the airlines to make sure the cut-rate price really was the cheapest. Once we confirmed that the prices were the same, we decided to book using an airline site rather than the middle man. We came back to the computer that evening to finish the project and discovered that the tickets had gone up by $40 each. About that time, we remembered that we have a rewards program on the credit card and that we should probably try that. Unfortunately, we couldn't log onto that site that evening and had to wait until the next day to contact them and get that sorted out. Once we checked the rewards program, we discovered that it would have used a bunch of points and still we'd have had to pay nearly the same price. Back to square one. We went back to the airline site and discovered that the price had gone up ANOTHER $25 dollars! Our daughter Lara warned us that the airlines have a way to find out when you return to their site and so they jack up the price when they know they have you hooked. That's probably what happened to us, but by that time we were so frustrated that we just went ahead and bought them anyway. When she found out Lara said, "Mom! I told you!" Anyway, the price is less than what we had budgeted, but if we had just bought them on the first try, we'd have saved $130 on the round trip. Oh well, it's done and we're now committed with non-refundable tickets.

I had to attend a special meeting for the Park and Rec. committee on Monday afternoon. The city is in the process of trying to acquire property on the north end of town and they want to look at the possibility of developing a park and apply for a grant. This was a brainstorming meeting to get everyone's ideas on what they would like to see in the new park. We invited people from the community so we would have a broader idea. That took about two hours of my time. I also managed to get in a work party on Wednesday to weed the park. Me, myself and I were the only ones who bothered to show up for that and so I worked for a couple of hours. I guess everyone else was busy over spring break.

We also had an arborist come by and prune a couple of trees on our property this week. I saw this guy trimming the neighbor's apple tree and so I asked him if he could do some pruning for me. He did a very good job and it really opened up the daylight around here. I don't mind pruning the smaller bushes, but I don't like to tackle the big trees.

We are getting ready to head into Portland today. Dave will be engineering a Blazer broadcast tonight and Leslie and her family will be at the game, so I'll probably go by and check it out too. I also promised my almost-ten-year old granddaughter (her birthday is April 3rd) that I would take her out for lunch at Red Robin and we would do a little shopping for her birthday. She is excited about that. There is also Easter on Sunday and we will be joining the family in Silverton to celebrate that.