How I spent my Christmas vacation

It was going to be a lonely Christmas this year as I was staying at home for the first time in years by myself. I am family oriented and the idea of not being with family was just impossible for me so Christmas day Don and I traveled to southern Pennsylvania to stay a week with my son Chris. Part of that time I visited Fredericksburg, Virginia to be with my two younger sisters. We always like to get together as often as we can and I have a tradition of visiting in December. What fun we always have…eating, shopping, laughing, but this year was even more special. I got to meet a blogging friend. I follow a lot of blogs from my sidebar and I became acquainted with Donna Hopkins from Like Medicine for Me through a comment on Kim Klassen’s blog. I always am looking for good photographers to follow in order to learn from them and Donna had a unique perspective. She goes out every day and takes pictures and posts them along with commentary. She is a talented writer as well as photographer but what I especially like about her is that her pictures are ordinary every day things that you would see on a walk. And that is what makes them so interesting. In one of her pictures she mentioned Fredericksburg so I wrote her about it and discovered that she lived in my sister’s home town. We struck up a correspondence and when I knew I was coming to her town we decided to meet for lunch. The four of us meet at Foode, a local restaurant, and spent an hour chatting away.

 

 

The food was great and this is how they presented the check.  Donna is such a delightful, bubbly personality that we hit it off right away. And what’s even nicer is that she and my sister Linda are planning a walk later on this week.

 

 

 

 

 

I returned to Chris to spend New Year’s weekend with him and his family. Don had caught a bug earlier in the week and was sick and then New year’s Eve Chris became sick…then Michele….then Leah…all throwing up and feeling miserable. On New Year’s Day I quickly packed and got out of there before the bug could catch me and was bragging that I escaped from it only to find that yesterday it caught up with me and I spent the day not far from the bathroom.

  Hopefully today I can get back to normal. There is a lot to do when returning from a trip…laundry, putting things away…but add undecorating for Christmas on top of that and putting away things that I bought on my trip and presents, well…I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me. And today I will meet girls in my high school class to play cards. One nice thing about retirement…you have time and don’t have to rush anything. things will get done.