Loving Life

20 February 2014

Some days, lately, I've felt like too much is happening — actually, make that "I have too many irons in the fire." Yet, I'm loving my life right now.

I have several projects I'm working on — a painting and some quilting — and am enjoying the process of each of these. We're making efforts to expand our social calendar a bit more — inviting family, and others, over for dinner now and then. Loving those visits. We're also getting to know a couple of our neighbors. It's good.

And, we had a couple of really fun things happen in the past week. On Valentine's Day our son, John, prepared an awesome dinner for us and then we went to see Les Miserables on stage in Raleigh. (Laura and Travis gave us the tickets for Christmas.) When we got to the parking garage, a man walked up to the driver's side of the car and asked if we had a parking pass. We said, "No." So he handed us one and said, "Here. You can have this one. I had an extra." Sweet!! (The music and the performances were great that night, but the set design and the staging weren't nearly as good as previous performances of this show that I've seen. That was disappointing.)

On Sunday, a woman contacted me on ancestry.com. (I did the ancestry.com DNA test a few months ago and she linked to me through that.) She is really interested in getting as much info on our Wade line as possible and asked if I had a brother who'd be willing to take the Y-DNA test and she'd pay for it! My oldest brother has expressed more interest in genealogy than my other two, so I contacted him and he said he would do it. So, it's been an interesting process to be part of this. There is a surname project on Family Tree - and this woman prefers the DNA tests from family tree over the one from ancestry.com. They evidently track more data (and this one also cost almost twice what I paid.) I'm going to be the administrator for my brother's DNA page on Family Tree (he didn't want to do that part) and I've also linked into the Wade Surname Project there. Can hardly wait to see the results!

Bob and I are also going to China and to Bali!! So excited about this trip! It's something I've wanted to do for a long time — and we're finally doing it!! We leave the middle of May, spend two weeks in China, seeing lots of natural and man-made wonders, then we travel to Bali and spend six days just relaxing. I'm loving thinking about it!

We've also talked with a landscape designer and we're going to do a lot of work in our yard this year. (Some in the spring and some in the fall.) Besides doing some plantings in both the front and the back, we're going to add a patio with a fire pit and a seating wall in one part, and with a pergola covering the other part. I'm looking forward to toasting marshmallows with the grandkids at the fire pit once that's in place!

The Lord has blessed us in SO many ways!! As I said . . . lots happening!