From Roseburg, OR

First of all, Happy New Year!  I’ve got three days worth to report on.

My family has a tradition of having our biggest party of the year on New Year’s Eve.  It’s good, clean, sober fun!  We have lots of good food; and this year my younger sister, Lauryn, brought a game called Bubbles where one person chooses a picture and the rest of the people turn in cards with sayings on them that seem to match the picture.  That was good for quite a few laughs!  There was also a White Elephant gift exchange and lots of fun story telling.  Here are some pictures from New Years Eve, 2017:

My sister, Sherill, and her husband, Fred, playing with their gifts.  They are the ones we’ve been spending the last month and a half with.

My son, Jamey, and a friend of my younger sister’s who hates to have her picture taken. Jamey loaned her the pillow he got and she’s holding the giant peanut butter cups she got.

Jamey and his cousin, Nate, have played piggy back ever since Nate was a wee tyke!

Mark hamming it up for the camera.

After the party, I helped Sherill clean up and then I headed out to our RV.  I was so struck by the moon that I took a picture:

Moonrise, New Year’s Eve, 2017


New Year’s Day, Mark and I were busy all day getting our RV ready to go.  In the evening, we met Jamey and Sage at Pieology for dinner.  Pieology, for those of you who haven’t heard of it, is a pizza place that’s kind of like Subway where you walk along a counter and tell the server what you want on your pizza.  Mine had spinach, cucumbers, Canadian bacon, pineapple, and cranberries!

Jamey and Sage, who is non-binary.

When Mark and I got home, there was a phenomenon I’ve never seen before.  The moon had a really wide ring around it and the center between the moon and the edges of the ring was fairly black.  It was almost like looking into the eye of God!

Moon, New Year’s night, 2018


This morning there were still things to do before we could leave.  Around 11:00, we circled up with Fred and Sherill and they prayed for us.  We all hugged each other and Sherill and Fred waved as we drove away.

Even then, we had things to do before we could leave the area.  Mark drove the RV and I drove the truck.  He needed to get gas in the RV and he asked me to drive on to Les Schwab Tire Store to forewarn them that he would be coming to have the air in the RV tires checked.  After he got air in the tires, we drove down to Clackamette Park (where we got married in 2008) and hooked the truck onto the back of the RV.  Then we walked over to McDonalds for lunch.  From there we went to Sherwood where Mark has been working for the last month as a pre-delivery inspector for used RVs.  He had some things to return, and when he went in, his boss asked if he’d be returning next year.  Yay!  We were hoping they’d be willing to hire him again when we come back.  🙂

It was around 1:30 pm when we finally hit the open highway and headed south.  We had an uneventful ride, and as we were coming into southern Oregon, we had our choice of Walmarts to stay at.  We called ahead to the one in Grant’s Pass which was the farthest we thought we could make while it was still daylight, but they don’t allow overnight parking.  Then we called the Walmart in Roseburg, quite a bit further north than we really wanted to be, but when we learned that they do allow overnight parking, that’s where we headed.  When we parked and got out to do some shopping, this was what we saw:

Beauty even from a Walmart parking lot!

As I was working on this post, Sherill called.  She said that she and Fred had gotten something for me in the mail shortly after we left, so they jumped in their car and tried to find us.  They were excited at the possibility of seeing us one more time, but they looked in the wrong place and couldn’t reach us on our phone, so they went back home.  I am sorry to have missed them.  It was hard to leave them behind this morning.

Sherill also had some good news… She has been having a really gimpy leg for the last week, and the muscles in her arms and hands have been weakening too.  She had an ultrasound of her leg today and there was nothing bad there.  The nurse commented that she should be taking Lasix to get rid of the water build-up she has from her chemo treatments.  Sherill said she has been taking Lasix, and the nurse asked if she was taking potassium?  Turns out that if you’ve been on Lasix an extended amount of time without taking potassium, it can make your muscles weaker.  What a relief to know that’s all she has to do to get stronger!

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