Swans

The strangest thing happened again. For a few years now, since my Mom passed away, I have had the pleasure of seeing swans out in the lake in front of my house. They are so very beautiful and graceful. Sometimes there are only a few and sometimes there are hundreds. I have always said that that was my Mom and friends coming to check on me. It has given me comfort but also gives me the heebie jeebies at times. So, today, I was looking out the window and saw a large number of Canadian geese swimming and making bunches of noise. Out loud, I said..."Gosh you guys are sure loud. Hey, MOM, where the heck are you? I haven't seen you in forever." Thought to myself....boy, you have really lost it now....talking out loud to no one. Shrugged my shoulders and g0t dressed to go to the store. Hang on....I come home and put down my groceries and go to the window and guess what? Out in the middle of all the geese are 2 beautiful swans....looking right at me. Isn't that something?

Benefit Spaghetti Dinner

Just when I thought the human race was once again a pile of garbage......I was wrong. A young couple trying to carrying their second child to full term, has been in the hospital now for 7 weeks in critical condition. Kelley has contracted a lung disease and has been on a ventilator, and a medical induced coma. She was recently moved to Ann Arbor, University of Michigan hospital. She is getting excellent care and has a neo-natal nurse with her 24 hours a day. As you can imagine, the costs are mounting. It was decided, between Ottawa River Yacht Club and River View Yacht Club, to hold a Benefit Spaghetti Dinner. Within one week, more than $1,000 has rolled in. Unbelievable donations for the auction and many, many people willing to volunteer. The willingness to help out someone, that is in such dire straights, has warmed my heart. There are good, no, great people out there. When times are tough, the tough get going, and I am seeing that first hand. And it makes me happy.
So, if anyone is hungry after the Cancer walk on Sunday, head to Ottawa River Yacht Club. Dinner starts at 3:00. Donation is $10.00 for adults and $5.00 for children. There will be music, drinks and a live auction.

A day on the lake

There is always a story to tell when you are a boater. Our very good friends, Glenn and Mona just purchased a used pontoon boat. They have been traveling on ours since we got ours in July. Mona is a fisherman and knew that is not our thing, so they found themselves a pontoon. Their maiden voyage was yesterday. The plan was, we were supposed to meet up with them on our pontoon and tie off each other and spend the day together. Well, we finally took the ferry out to our pontoon, which is another story in itself, and our boat would not start. After all attempts failed, we decided to take out one of our car batteries and jump it. First we argued over which car to take the battery from. Decided to take the battery from Gary's car.....nope, couldn't get it out, after about 1/2 hour. So, my car. We got the battery out of my car and hauled it to the ferry and out to the boat. No luck. So.......we haul the car battery and the boat battery back to shore and go to West Marine to get a brand new battery......HELLO!!!!!, why didn't we do that in the first place? Sure wasted a whole lot of time trying to jump a battery that we knew was bad. DUH!!!! So, now the boat starts.....it is 4:00 in the afternoon. We finally find Glenn and Mona and tied off of them and were having a good time. I was so happy for them. Mona was fishing and Glenn was climbing all over the pontoons like a monkey. Opening every nook and cranny and figuring out everything on his new boat. Was a great time. Gary tells Glenn, "If you keep climbing around like a monkey on a boat, you will eventually fall in". It was getting late and we decide we had better head for home. We start untying from each other and Glenn has one foot on a one-inch ledge on his boat and the other foot on a one-inch ledge on our boat. Once you untie from each other, you start to drift apart. YUP!!!....Glenn is now doing the splits and yells...."I'm in trouble now". Thankfully, he managed to do a leap (of faith) and lands in our boat. We all were laughing so hard we could hardly stop. Now we have Glenn on our boat and Mona is all alone on hers. We finally manuerved around and got Glenn back where he belonged and we waved goodbye. Of course, every time we think about it......the giggles start again.

Genealogy

First off, let me tell you that I am finding this blogging thing a little difficult to get started. My daughter keeps encouraging me, so I will try to keep at it.
About a month ago, I purchased a family tree book. When Jessica came to visit yesterday, I showed it to her and we started chatting about how we need to work on that this winter. There are pages for me to write down family stories that I might remember being told and pages for her Dad to do the same. I hope that he will do that because I think it is important that the children know their family histories. I suddenly remembered that my Grandmother's great-nephew (I think), published 3 books on his family genealogy. What a project that must have been for him. We started searching through those books...what fun! He had snippets from everywhere. Interviews, birth and death certificates, obituraries, pictures. My thought process started going wild. I need to get in touch with him and see what is going on in that side of my family. His name is Ronald Roberts and lives in South Lake Tahoe. Jessica is wonderful at finding people on the internet, so she is going to investigate this, but if anyone out there has some ideas for me to find Ronald Roberts, please let me know.