My dear friend Heather (hi, friend!) and I have made a pact to wake up our respective blogs again, in part so we have something fun to read while drinking our coffee. If we were still living in Texas, I'm sure we would be together, sitting in the sun near her pool and drinking our coffee. Instead, we're separated by 500 miles (I miss you, friend!), and I'm certainly not beside any pool, although I am trying to decide if I want to take a bath. Also, the coffee I'm currently drinking is absolutely sub-par; I drink a lot of sub-par coffee out here on the road.
Anyway, as I've not shared anything here in almost a year, I have lots of pictures and experiences from which to choose. I think I'll start with events surrounding our anniversary and birthdays in May. We were in Atlanta for our anniversary, and celebrated with a trip to the botanical garden, a trip to an Indian buffet, and a nap.
As a post-anniversary/pre-birthday outing, we spent a little bit of time at the Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge near Marion, IL, not too far from the Kentucky border. We saw no evidence of crabs, or any other wildlife really, but read that it hosts a very large number (up to 200,000) of Canadian geese in the winter. Seeing and hearing even a fraction of those birds would be something to behold, I think.
By the time our birthdays rolled around, we were in northern Illinois. Jan Michael took me to breakfast where I ate a large quantity of Swedish pancakes, after which we took a trip to Rock Cut State Park for a walk. The weather was so pleasant and the colors everywhere were so pretty; the pictures we took there are some of my favorites of the year. And then, later that evening, while the sun was setting, we ate ice cream with two co-workers-turned-friends under a tree strung with twinkly lights. From start to finish, it was a lovely way to welcome 43.
As a general rule, Jan Michael requires far less fanfare on his birthday than I, and as such we have no pictures, but he did spend it just as he wanted (lots of quiet time with a break in the middle to watch Avengers: Endgame; we both cried into our Sour Patch Kids.)
