PTCPapa

The women are eating healthy, losing weight, and running fast, the man...men if I include the son-in laws, are also fitness regulars, and in better shape now, in their middle adult years than they were 15 years ago, I suspect. It's VERY satisfying to see them all happily managing to a healthy, sustainable lifestyle, balancing good nutrition, and plenty of physical activity. H & H have enthusiastically embraced running and are now contemplating a Triathalon sprint. Swim Bike Run You go, Girls! What a great example to their kids, and a gift to all of us who love them. Priceless

What adult doesn't remember the fun of licking the bowl, the beaters, the spoon as some Big Person was finishing up a baking project. Yum.

She runs, cooks, writes, blogs, photographs, and works as a full-time at-home mom for her family. And trust me, when the dish is hot, she uses an oven mitt. She plans ahead easily and organizes automatically. We love you Viv!

The friendship among the Eyes, the Imms and the Esses is probably 30 years old, and it is supported by marriages which are even older. We met recently for supper and prayer, as we do periodically, thanks to the generous planning, and gracious hosting within the group, with this blogger mostly missing the requisite hospitality traits. This is by no means an exclusive group. These people have lots of friends who could mesh every bit as smoothly as we did the other evening The dinner was delicious and plentiful, the conversation, wide-ranging and consistently-caring. We wrapped it up several hours later, praying for each other and for each other's families, immensely thankful that our God cares about us so deeply, and understands us so completely. Pastor J used to remind me/us, "things are not as they seem, they are as God says they are." What a good truth to hold onto during this period of accelerated change all around us.

A & S worked together at the Fed, until they hired on at P., where I met them. When gas went to $4.00/gal, S & I began carpooling together. The three of us meet occasionally over lunch or coffee and talk about how things change, which they do in a wide variety of ways for all of us. A & S are friendly and focused about their lives and families, and I like that we've kept in touch since I retired from P.

The grocer smiles when I walk in because I love to go to the grocery...Have ever since I started going to the A&P every Saturday in Westfield Mass. I love my Massachusetts roots, and I love my 45 years in Minnesota, and my visit to the grocery yesterday proves my point. I bought New England Brown Bread (as I often do). I bought New England Coffee (hard to find). I bought Minnesota Twins salted-in-the shell peanuts packaged in a white pinstripe bag. It beckoned me to take it home so that I could send it to my Twins-loving Colorado family while it's still early in the season. So Luke and Katy, the picture of the peanuts is on the blog, and the peanuts themselves are on their way to you after getting mailed tomorrow. Enjoy them when you have a chance to catch a game. Isn't Spring a great time of year?

I'm thinking this will be the first of a perhaps short series of favorite photos. Some will be shots I took and liked, others may be shots taken by other people, whose photo(s) I like. Let's see where this leads. I always thought it would be clever to make a tower out of my family. Eventually they were all willing to humor me at the same time, so a friend cooperated by snapping a picture of us all stacked up on the deck And that's the way it was in about 1989. Boy I love these 5 people! and now there are 20 of us.

This is a favorite of mine, taken in a photobooth in 1966, as we were just beginning to hang out together. Very very happy days. Such an energizing relationship.

I've liked trees for a LONG time. Used to climb a copper beach tree when I was a kid growing up in western Mass. Love to run in the woods in suburban Minnesota. Very fun to do it on a clear night with a full moon. I'm awed by big trees like very tall pines. Closer to home, the title of BIG TREE usually goes to a cottonwood, which seems to thrive in our soil and climate.

We met in 1966 when she was 18 and I was 22. We began dating soon afterward, and as I recall never disagreed on much. Our childhood homes were 3000 miles apart and we loved Minnesota and each other, so we got engaged in July 67, married in December and moved into a house with a teenage foster daughter. This was followed by , Daughter 1 the following September, Daughter 2 three years later, Daughter 3, a year and a half later, ..and eventually Son, 3 years later. There were also about 15 different short-term teen-foster boys in those years. The gentle matriarch has worked her whole life, hard. I went to college nights for a few years, she worked outside the home part-time while the kids were growing. She spent frugally, loved lavishly, and has always cared first and foremost about her family. She is a gentle giant who has brought love, fun, discipline, imagination, good food, and artistic, creative homemaking to our big family....and as I write this she's preparing for Easter Dinner...

Ya know, 13 can be an awkward age for some young people. Different parts of the body seem to develop and grow on their own schedule, with little sensitivity to the 13 year-old's interest in or readiness for such change. The good thing is that the picture generally starts to improve noticeably beginning maybe as early as 14, and fully complete for most by the end of the 17th year. (My amateur observations, not necessarily the views shared by knowledgeable professionals.) So here I am at 13, on a farm field in Louisiana in 1957

I've become a convert to the idea of being a fitness center member. I fought it for a long time because I took pride in running (ok, jogging really) outside, year-round, except in conditions of dangerously-poor footing, or strong in-your-face wind. Something in me has changed so that now I don't mind the treadmill like I used to, I like the hubbub of the busy LifeTime Fitness center that I attend just 2 miles from home. I get a kick out of seeing all the pre-school kids that come in with their moms, and the little snippets of the kids' conversations that I catch as they walk through LifeTime holding their moms' hands. I've increased the length of my not-quite daily runs there from 3mi to 5mi, occasionally dropping to 1-mile when I get a message from a body part that it's working on a problem, and "please hold, pain-free service should be restored shortly." I reply, "thank you," and gladly oblige. For the past 21 years (years before then were...

Sal and I both like tulips, so while winter still has a loose grip on Minnesota, we're enjoying some "bottled freshness". I remember planting tulip bulbs with my Mom when I was a kid growing up in Massachsetts I can still recall the frangrance of the bone meal that we always poured into the hole before pressing the bulb gently into place. I think they might be my favorite flower.