Scattered Thoughts . . .

L ukey and Kenzie's birthday is just a couple of weeks after Ellie and Gee's birthday so it is more like a birthday month! We picked up Lukey and Kenzie from their dad's house (he lives very near us while Liza lives an hour away so we saved her a couple of hours of traveling) and we spent the afternoon with them before we headed to Sarducci's for their usual birthday dinner.  There were no presents this year other than this nice meal since they will be joining us on our upcoming cross-country Amtrak journey.  We had to talk about clothes, packing and measure them for clothes so it was good we had some time to spend with them before heading to Sarducci's.   This annual birthday dinner at Sarducci's is always nice though!   We picked up Pop on the way to the restaurant... I always forget just how dark this restaurant is until I attempt to shoot some photos...  I believe this is the darkest restaurant we have ever visited!  I'm still learning about t...

I 've fallen way behind in blog entries once again!  I've been focused more on my health, daily physical therapy and resting in preparation of a hectic spring and summer.  We have a big cross-country rail journey coming up and I need to be as strong and as rested as possible.  Of course, I also have health struggles most days too so I always seem to be trying to recover.   About a month ago, we had a little celebration at our house for Ellie's seventh birthday.  She shares a birthday with Gee so it was also a little bit of a celebration for Gee as well.  This was mostly Ellie's day though... Ellie has a couple of Disney trips early this year so this year's gifts were geared toward travel and Disney... Gee made some brownies for Ellie's birthday rather than a cake since there were only a few of us present... Ellie is always fun and always smiling so we had a good time celebrating her birthday with her!

T he other day, I went looking for photos here in my blog of a hike we did with Lukey and Kenzie back a few years ago but I couldn't find them anywhere in my blog.  This sent me on an even longer search yesterday sorting through my old hard drives looking for these photos.  I couldn't remember the date.  I couldn't even remember the year but I knew that I shot a bunch of photos while on this hike with the kids.   I eventually found the photos from this hike in a folder from August 15th, 2022 which happens to be the same day that Lukey and Kenzie got to shutdown a running diesel locomotive at the Montpelier train station.  I guess I was in a hurry to post the photos of them shutting down the locomotive and then I forgot about the photos from the hike. So, on August 15th, 2022, we loaded Lukey and Kenzie into the car and headed down to Montpelier.  There is a short hike behind the Capitol building that Sheila often walked during her lunch break (when she...