Views from our new house

Here are a few sunset pics Dave snapped out our front door last night. The other is a rainbow out our back patio door. The views are great out our front door- during the day we see farmland and acres of fields (which I'm sure will get built on someday) and these sunsets at night. Best of all we're up on a hill so we get lots of wind which means no mosquitoes and we seem to be the only neighborhood that didn't have water in the basement after the recent storms~5 inches in two days.

The Wolf Pack

Some of you may have known about this, but Allysa and I changed our names a couple of weeks back.

We had always wanted to change our names together when we got married, but it's taken us over a year to actually do it.

In honor of Ethan, we've taken the last name of Wolf. Allysa kept her middle name, but I changed mine to Ethan- so my name is now Nathaniel Ethan Wolf, officially.

I've got a new email address, but I'll probably still check the old one for quite some time.

Bye, and what a welcome back to winter!

Fine howdy do, huh? We were able to meet Nathan and Allysa in Atlanta for dinner. Had a wonderful talk about their possible plans. Sounds like they have an opportunity to enter an exciting and more relaxing phase of their lives. Hope it all works out for them. Unfortunately we had to duck out on meeting them for lunch the next day. Weather forecast forced us to leave a few hours earlier than we wanted. A bad accident that closed the interstate at the TN/GA border delayed us just enough so we ran into bad weather in Paducah for about an hour. Could have been much worse as a blizzard hit KY,TN,IN and dumped up to a foot of snow that day. Once we entered IL, everything calmed down and an hour in it cleared competely up. Other than being cold again (20), it was a smooth trip from there. Our thanks to Mom and Dad for having us for a week. It was a great vacation!

Hideout

Here Valerie is hiding from the baseball game so she wouldn't jinx the Twins.

BASEBALL!!!!!!!!

This was our view from the grass seats. The Twins trailed in the bottom of the ninth with two out and two strikes on the batter. Thinking, hey lets beat the traffic by a whopping one minute, we decided to duck out. As we were leaving the stadium we heard a CRACK, and guess what? The batter hit a homer to win the game! Oh well, Valerie always says if she doesn't watch the game, the Pack wins. Guess it works for baseball too!

BASEBALL!!!!!!!!

Caught a spring training game, Twins vs Reds in Ft Meyers. If you look very closely, you might find GGM&GGP Teske in the top middle of the grassy hill.

GOLF!!!!!

The course was in great shape! First round was a 98, my worst in years. After shaking off the rust, I had a 76 on the next day! If you look closely, in the picture you can see a 6 foot gator (over Grandmothers right shoulder on the rock in the water), a heron, a cormorant, jumping carp, a large white egret, a naked woman, and of course, Waldo.

gramma talks to Livy

how did people enjoy themselves on vacation before cell phones?

pointy beaked something or other

actually it's an egret. supposedly rare at the seashore, but we saw a lot of them.

curved snout ibis

Yes, they are both looking for the same things. someone should give the smaller one a satchel so it can compete better.

pelicans diving

A few beach friends

Sun

I spent most of my beach time standing in bird poop. It's supposed to be good for your feet!

Beach

Valerie spent most of the time at the beach looking for treasure and avoiding bird poop.

First taste of warmth

Actually, it wasn't that warm. Only 50, but compared to -10, it seemed a lot warmer. This is an actual saturn rocket at the welcome center in Alabama.

Off to Sunny FLA!

these guys should have come along! It wasn't hard to leave all that behind for a while.

Happy Groundhog Day

Every year the groundhog finishes delivering his packages, and crawls under the deck, only to emerge on February 2nd and stick his tongue on the festivus pole. If it freezes on, he dies and spring never comes. If he can pull it away, he goes back to sleep 'cause there's nothing else to do in winter.

OOPS, sorry that's the wrong tale. You can look up the real won at punxatawny phil's website.

Go Frogs!

Me and my new best buddy.

Livy's first birthday

Here are some pics from Livy's first birthday party. The theme was winter "one"derland. She didn't like the frosting, but loved the cake. She had a great time and she was really well behaved all day. Mom and I made the cake, not too shabby, huh? It was a wonderful year.

NUTS

Shot of Vince before the NFC championship game.

here birdie birdie

this is a cute story. a hawk came and perched in the lilacs by the bird feeders. valerie thought it was really cool that it came to have a little bird seed and decided to take it's photo. while in the process, the hawk swooped down, grabbed a sparrow and CHOMP, she got these photos. didn't know hawks liked bird seed at all. i guess indirectly, they do.