Time Flys When Having FUN

And what a lot of fun (work) we’ve had!

We should explain our lack of recent blogs.  Most of our family-followers already know this, but maybe not our non-family readers.  We have been spending most of our springtime at the family cabin, north of Duluth.  It is peaceful and quiet here most of the time.  It is a good way to get “away from it all”, but this also means being away from cell towers.  We post blogs quite often when traveling, but we usually have a good cell signal on the road and we have been using our own Mi-Fi system for almost a year.  The trouble is that our cabin is located in one of Verizon’s few “can’t hear us now” zones.  Their towers are at least 20 air-miles away: south – ½ way to Duluth, or NW on the Iron Range.  As a result, we are in a hole in their coverage, and well behind our usual blog reading as well as blog writing.

Some things we have completed:

- got the dock into the lake
- stained a new window frame (with many more left to do)
- painted the sauna and garage
- trimmed some branches
- did a little electrical work and
- mowed the grass (after we obtained a replacement lawn mower).

All of this has taken place between rainstorms.  Although this area had a mild winter and early spring, and the lake's level was very low when we arrived, we have had a lot of rain, seems like about 3 days per week.  The lake has come up, to about its highest level ever, about 2 weeks ago, but is now back down to a near normal level. 

For Memorial Day weekend we had both sons and all 4 granddaughters here with us.  Since then, we also had a whirlwind trip to Minneapolis early in June.  We attended a couple of family gatherings on that trip: a dinner and a couple of graduations.  It was Paige’s mother’s first trip to Minneapolis since Easter of 2011.  Joyce was concerned about whether she could navigate well enough with her cane but she did great.  She was glad that she made the trip!  She met her Great-Granddaughter, Leah, for the first time; here are all 4 generations:         

We were also able to attend Valentina’s graduation ceremony from middle school.  She’s now a full-fledged high schooler!!

On Friday, we will return to Duluth to meet up with Brett and a couple of the granddaughters.  He will be running in Grandma’s Marathon on Saturday and will come up to the lake for part of Saturday and Sunday.