Yesterday I went out to eat lunch with Meg at Garden Cafe in York. I had not been to eat there much in the last few years, really, but Meg goes a good bit. I love this fountain that they had outside made out of a wringer washer :-). Meg says they sell them and are always putting new ones out. I love that.

After lunch we headed to Kings Mountain to check out a new little shop I’d heard about, Uncommon Artisans. A guy that was in Addie’s class in school (I think) makes the neatest wood stuff, and he told me that they were selling some of his items there. It was a great little store, and I saw his display as soon as we walked in the door. It was a neat place.

Saturday evening Lindee & family had us out to their house for supper, so we could get a report on her & Mallory’s trip to Paris. Such a special evening. I got this picture of Mallory giving her other grandmother Emmy a preview before the real program began :-).

After we ate Mal started showing us pictures, and then realized she could put them up on their TV so we could all see them at once. What an amazing week in Paris she & Lindee had. This picture is from the catacombs, once of the places Lindee most wanted to visit. Mallory was less excited but the pictures were incredible. This is a well they built at some point in time in the catacombs to do experiments on fish, but apparently that didn’t last long. The catacombs were created when all of the limestone was quarried out from underneath the city of Paris. The graves are all above ground there – much like New Orleans – and when they got full, they started moving the bones into all of those tunnels in the old limestone quarries. Those are bones stacked up, and the bigger pieces are the skulls. Very interesting.

Here is one more picture of the Sunset Beach Maze that I got when the tide was starting to erase it. Such a gorgeous day.

This past week I was at the beach for a few days on our annual buddy’s getaway. It was so much fun, as it always is. It actually rained most of the time while we were there, but we did get one absolutely perfect day, and spent that morning at the beach. This is my friend Evie and me enjoying the sun and sand.

We stayed three or four hours before we decided we’d better get out of the sun, but before we headed back to the house we went to check out the daily maze that was created by the Sunset Beach Maze Man. So much fun – and pretty challenging, too!

Last Thursday night Sherri came up & spent the night with us, and then we got up early to meet Cooper, Rachel, and the girls, & Zollie and Renee at the Qubein Children’s Museum there. That is where Amy works, but she & Andy were in Murfreesboro for a long weekend, so we didn’t get to spend time with her that day. We decided to visit the outside activities first, before it got any hotter, and the upper deck of the two tiered merry-go-round was a hit, for sure. That’s Mary riding her horse of choice up there.

We played at the museum until the girls were tired and hungry, then headed outside for our picnic, and then they were off to the beach for vacation. Sherri & I made a last minute decision to find the world’s largest chest-of-drawers before we left High Point. Such a fun day.

Our last day in Indiana Jeff & I spent with his cousin Johnny in Madison, the town Jeff’s family is from. Once it cooled off a little bit Johnny took us on a tour of Madison in his golf cart – and to an excellent Chinese buffet for supper. I had been to Madison many times, but he showed us some sights I can’t ever remember seeing before, so that was fun. There is a crazy curvy road up the hill that has been blocked to cars now – I cannot imagine how many people must have died on that mountain road before they did that – but we could ride the golf cart up it, and it went right beside the cemetery where Jeff’s great-grandfather is buried.

In driving around the old part of Madison, Johnny pointed out that you could see the spire on the top of the firehouse across the way, where many of his and Jeff’s family have served as volunteer firefighters over the decades, including Johnny himself. The original windvane, called Little Jimmy, was made by Jeff’s grandfather I don’t know how many decades ago, but it is now inside a display case inside the firehouse. A copper replica is on top of the building now.

…in Indiana this year was great fun. We spent the evening cooking out at Jeff’s nephew Christopher’s house, celebrating not only Independence Day, but his brother Mark’s birthday the next day. I got this picture of Jeff with his dad while we were all visiting while the grill was going.

As always one of the highlights of the day was spending time with great niece Dakota, who’s three years old now. So cute and funny.

We were in Indiana this week for the wake for the wife of a good friend of Jeff’s, Jim Cox. I had only met her once, and she was already in pretty bad shape with the early onset dementia that ended up taking her life, but it was a sweet time for Jim’s family and friends to be together.

Last night Jeff & I drove over to Fallston, NC, to see a band we really like perform at that small town’s 4th of July festival. A couple of the band members grew up near there, so it was fun listening to them tell their stories – and lots of people in the crowd knew them, or knew the places they were talking about. Here are a couple of pictures.