You may well ask, “What have you been up to since we last heard from you?”  Short answer is enjoying the wonderful weather and scenery of the desert Southwest.  Long answer follows.

It took us a couple months to get all moved in and settled in our fab new house.  And suddenly it was Thanksgiving and subsequent holidays.  When we lived in North Carolina our friends, the Tymas, came to our house for Thanksgiving right before they moved to Phoenix.  That was 18 years ago but they reciprocated in fine style by having us and our nephew, Matt, for a feast we will not soon forget.  Thanks, guys!!

Christmas came and so did our daughters.  We loved our adventures during the visit.

The Desert Botanical Garden at night was magical!  We enjoyed dinner and music and froze our buttooties off.

 Desert Botanical Garden at night

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West.  The beautiful and FLW style of bizarre.  We missed the Lego model of house and grounds.

We also went for a hike at the White Tank Mountains but apparently I didn’t take any pictures of that.  Saw petroglyphs and just had a really enjoyable day.

We were sorry to see the girls leave but eagerly awaited Mark’s brother Doug and wife Susie’s arrival.  While they were here we helped Matt remodel his new house.  Tore down walls, painted the whole thing, put in new woodwork, and laid down new flooring.  Haven’t worked that hard in a long time!  It looks great now, though.

Ok  I have to confess now.  When she was here, Kallie took all my pictures off my iPad so I could download the new operating system and I don’t know how to retrieve them without all of them reloading.  Soooo, I’m going to post this blog and switch to the laptop and figure this out.  Be back soon!!