Grandma Simpson Birthday Celebration

Uncle Roy Playing Grandpa to Seth

We enjoyed a wonderful day yesterday celebrating Grandma Simpson's 95th birthday. There were 29 of us there for the big event. Not just one beautiful cake, but 4 to choose from thanks to Roy! Fortunately the cold weather didn't set in yesterday as they predicted and only rain throughout the day and for the trip home.

Natalie Loved the "Big Glasses"

A Festive Buffet

Yup! Good Cake!

Figuring out how electronic scrabble works

Thanksgiving on Saturday

Grandpa teaching Natalie & Levi how to do Soduko

The traditional euchre game

As has been a tradition for a few years, our family gets together on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. This year we had hors doevre type foods for the entire meal - lots of finger foods and plenty of it. Teresa brought "brownie surprise" - a brownie made from a brownie mix, smashed black beans and water. You couldn't tell at all that it had beans in it. We had the missionaries for lunch and it turned out to be Elder Udy's birthday. A fun time was had by all.

George & Anna doing dishes after the festivities

Thanksgiving in Frankfort

We spent a wonderful Thanksgiving Day with Grandma Simpson. Wesley Manor puts on a Thanksgiving feast that rivals any home cookin'. Marleta & Larry, Anita & Mike and family were on hand for the festivities. On the way out of the dining room, the pianist providing music for the day was playing "Send in the Clowns", a song that Rachel sings and does beautifully. We encouraged her to sing and had the pianist start over. You could hear a hush from the dining room and the lobby as she got into the song and many gathered around to listen and then to join in some Christmas carols.

We got Grandma's apartment in Christmas mode, bringing all her decorations up from her storage room and filling the place with all her favorite Christmas things.

Counting the Days

Harry is just days away from retirement - 22 work days to be exact. So much is changing at his work that he knows this really is the best time to be retiring. Many employees are wondering about their future situations with some office closings likely and positions being eliminated. He worries about his colleagues and particularly his team. His guys gave him a couple retirement gifts at his team meeting this week, and he got a picture of his team at their Warsaw meeting. When he returned to work, he got his picture with his two Estimatics Coordinators.

I have been sorting/weeding things out in preparation for the holidays. Family will be in next Saturday and we will have our annual Thanksgiving "Saturday after" get-together. This year is "Finger Food" - we'll have things you can either eat with your hands or a toothpick. We'll see how that goes over. Next year I'll let someone else come up with the lunch plan, but I thought this would be fun one year. I plan to have many, many fruits and vegetables and found several heat in the oven things at "My Menu". Still looking for more ideas. Haven't decided if we will do the chocolate fountain - that is really a mess!! Sure is fun, though.

Logan Visit

Grandson Logan has been here for a short visit. Since he is being home schooled, he has some flexibility in his schedule and was able to be here for the honey harvest on Saturday and helped Grandpa with some garden cleanup today. He and Grandpa found some sweatbees or some sort of bees other than honey bees digging a nest in the ground near our porch.

Honey Time Again

This year's harvest of the honey crop included 3 newcomers - George, Grandson Logan and Grandpa Lyon (Anna's dad). It had lost some of the thrill for last year's participants (some of us are still excited) and they opted to ride the golf cart during part of the harvest process.

It was not as productive as last year when we got almost 5 gallons of honey. We harvested close to 2 gallons this year. Somewhere in our reading or through our local beekeepers group, we learned that we should put what was left of the honey supers (boxes with honey trays) in the yard somewhere not back in the hives as we did last year. The bees have been swarming to the boxes for the past couple hours since we put the boxes out. Supposedly, this will prevent the robber bees from getting into the hives as they did last year. We sure hope it works. It was sad to see our hive's demise last year from the robbers. They say the bees will come to the boxes and clean them up so well that we can then put them back on the hives and ready them for winter. We will start feeding them sugar water to give them plenty to build up their own honey for winter and we didn't take all of the honey - left a box on each hive to give them enough to make it through winter.

The end of another good day and season at the farm.

The Tree

After a fun picnic with Pat's family and the Elwood Branch (I forgot my camera as usual), we had an early birthday celebration for George's #32 by cutting down a dead tree in his yard.

FHE - Pears

The kids joined us for FHE on Monday. We picked the pear crop from our 2 trees and followed the work project with 'Smores. The most fun... no those aren't hot dogs, they're cattails - the kids had a great time picking cattails and spreading the fuzz all over the place and burning some of it in the campfire.