It has been an interesting year! I have not been present on the board as I have in the past.

Please forgive me! I do miss it.

It started with the busy-ness of Lent and Easter. Then, a number of winter storms dropped branches and trees at the cabin up north. This forced me to spend much free time either there - or traveling back and forth. As I do not have decent data up there, and I refuse to pay for Wi-Fi, I cannot access the boards up there.

Then I was up there for a week with some Pastor friends and we went fishing, enjoyed cigars or pipe, eight together, and had gemutlichkeit.

A strong storm came through shortly after that and took off some soffit material. Getting under it, realizing there it was some rotting, so some work had to be done to replace that. In the process I decided to have the whole roof looked at. And in consultation, decided it was time to replace the whole thing, taking it down to the wood. Thankfully, none of the plywood needed to be replaced. Everything else was. Roofing work is not cheap.

June 15th. Pauline and I celebrated our 40th anniversary. After services on Sunday we drove to Minneapolis, and on the 16th we flew to Portland where we rented a car to spend a bit over 2 weeks in Oregon and Washington. 2100 miles later we were headed home.

We did historical sites like Ft. Clatsop, which was built by Lewis and Clark at the end of their trek. We also visited a couple of museums, the Maritime Museum in Astoria, end of the Oregon trail Museum just to name a few. We saw beautiful sights like Mount Hood, and Olympic National Park. Crater Lake, but we didn't get to see the lake cuz it was snowing and foggy. We went out on a whale watch and a a sunset sailboat cruise on the Pacific.
It was a GREAT trip!

I was home for 5 days before I left again for the last week with the youth from church to a Higher Things conference.

Now that I am home, I look at my schedule and see how busy it's going to continue to be this summer. I thought summers were supposed to be relaxing!?!?!?

At any rate, I just wanted to say hello and and let you guys all know that you were in my thoughts and prayers even though I don't get here as often as I'd like!

Peace of the Lord be with you all!
[Reply]