So I got an email from United saying that one of our frequent flyer accounts was going to expire if not used by Jan 31st. Looking up the account found that it was belonging to my husband. Since he has nearly enough miles for a free ticket we decided that we didn’t want to lose the miles. First I got into the United site and started looking at flights to San Francisco; we could make a quick trip up to our son’s plus see our 2 granddaughters. $260 for that. Then I looked up a flight to Albuquerque, NM and that was only $218. HUM! A flight to NM with 2 legs is less than a straight thru to SFO. Crazy but true. I booked the flight to NM for 2 weeks from today with a ... read more

Blogging has been difficult for the past couple of months, hard to focus, hard to always find that little something that would be of interest in a blog. I mostly think about blogging about the difficulties of our granddaughter’s medical situation; my niece has a blog about her cancer journey. Or about our life with the mostly DIY remodel that has dragged on for months upon months. This is not what I wanted for my blogs to be, they have been about those off thing that happen. Unfortunately, most of our life for the past couple of months has been consumed with both of the above. Flying to San Francisco several Sunday’s to stay for a week to care for our 15 month old granddaughter, visiting our new granddaughter when possible (driving 1 hour each way) ... read more

Our niece, Heidi lives in Indiana so our 1st stop was to be at a birthday party for her husband. They were holding the party at a park and we made the party just as food was being served. We’d planned to make something for the potluck but alas, we arrived too late to take the time to cook. We shared our disposable cups with them. Heidi looks good but steroids have left her bloated and red from the radiation. She was wearing a hat at the picnic so that we didn’t see the baldness. Even with a bunch of people attending the party we found time to sit and talk a bit. We did go on to Heidi’s house from the party spending the afternoon doing cake stuff and then visited with my sister-in-law in ... read more

When visiting Gettysburg, I recommend seeing the movie after an orientation tour. We saw the movie first but many places in the following diorama didn’t make much sense to us. 1st thing in the morning we went on a bus tour, we wanted the private car tour but those are not easy to find, 1st come/1st serve. The bus tour is fine for getting a feel of the area; the tour guides are volunteers and are good for some basic info. Our guide was eager to impart as much info as he could and did some by examples; how the regiments were lined up. But they cover the entire park in a loop so there is mostly general info. We then took a ranger led hike at 3:30 from the cemetery. The ranger led the hike ... read more

Yesterday morning I finished up the last of my work. I found that I’d gotten and closed 77 claims, now that is a decent storm. As it turns out 1 must wait for an estimate from the insured and another need the report to be tweaked but I got to those when I could. I finished up by about 9 a.m.; Dale was making a celebration breakfast already so it was good timing. We had some Iron Horse champagne that we’d been saving for a couple of years for this celebration so we popped that and had a champagne breakfast celebrating his stopping work, meeting some financial goals and my finishing up a big storm. After breakfast I was so tired and drained I went back to bed and slept soundly for an hour but woke ... read more

Now it is the push to get finished. I have 2 days of inspections left but several days of actual claims to write up. It is always hard at the end to take the time necessary to get everything done properly, I just want out of here. Funny because it is so exciting to start a storm but then so great to finish working. But like a supervisor said today, it is so great to go driving off for home with some money in the bank and a job behind you. So tonight Dale and I started looking more seriously at the end game here. We have a bunch of people we need to see but we also had ideas of things we wanted to do. We mapped it out and found that seeing a few ... read more

Today I had an inspection scheduled at a large construction site where the earthquake damaged a 5 story parking garage. Now the damage is minimal but we had to inspect nevertheless. The insurance company had hired an engineer to inspect at the same time and since we were meeting on his schedule it was imperative that this inspection go on as planned. The morning started with rain but when talking we decided to just meet and chance the rain. As it turned out the rain stopped and we were fine. 1st we could not find the location, we passed the engineer several times going up and down the road, finally finding out that they gave us the wrong street name. So we ended up at the office at the same time and found the person we ... read more

Dale and Dolly arrived earlier than we had originally thought they would. Dale called as he was coming off the I-97 onto the 50 and I ran from my room all the way to the sidewalk getting there just as he turned onto the road from the freeway. It was so great to see familiar faces after being gone for a while. We have now moved to a campground south of Annapolis but it is really nice, lots of tall trees between sites. Of course it is ½ empty since summer is over so we have no neighbors. And the price is right, about ½ of the price of other campgrounds or the motel so we can’t complain. It is a little out of the way but we figure we can drive a little extra and ... read more