Thanksgiving

 Jared here, Kimmy is packing lunches so I stole her blog again.  Trying to remember Thanksgiving... seems there was a reoccurring theme over the holiday about aging and lack of memories.  So we headed out with a full van to Georgia on Tuesday.  Mykenzie came along again this year.  She's a lot of fun to have along.  We left Tuesday afternoon as soon as Mykenzie got out of school.  We drove until around 10:30 pm and stopped in Lexington, KY.  Although I was positive that the previous year we drove to the middle of Tennessee.  I was positive....that is until Kimmy showed me the previous years blog that showed we stopped in lexington KY....at the exact same exit.  Memories fade... I still think she doctored the previous years blog.  HA.  We got up Wednesday and headed out to stop at the Lego store north east of Atlanta.  We decided to take a short cut on the way to avoid Atlanta traffic... the short cut added instead of subtracted time...and that's all I'm going to say about that.  But the lego store was awesome as usual.  We eventually made it to the monastery around 6 pm ish.  We were the last to arrive.  Uncle Rick was waiting on pie.  Uncle Rick, Uncle Dee , mom and I headed to the grocery store for the annual spending of Uncle Rick's monthly paycheck.  Thanks for feeding us Uncle Rick.  Thanks for cooking Mom.  I also settled my hockey debt with Uncle Rick.   This is the first year ever that money had to flow south.  He was able to get that extra half gal of gas with his winnings. Uncle Rick distributed the hockey "stuff" to some excited boys and adults.  Cool stuff.   Thanks Uncle Rick.  A few bags of cardboard and tubes were brought back to MI as well.  We had a great time at the family house on the Monastery's property.  Nice visit with family, lots of banter and joking and teasing. Mykenzie is getting just at good as giving it as she is at taking it.  She is learning well.  Made a trip to the glass shop to pick up a few items of glass to play with back home.  Don, Rosemary and Stacey arrived Friday.  Don showed off a lot of his really nice wood working and stone polishing.   Lots of good ideas and fun stuff to try out.  And lots of great ideas for building stone polishing equipment.  I don't remember the pie count this year but I think it was down a bit from previous years.  A bit of the bug infected a few people.  Also Eli and Jacob had a bit of a fever.   For a day.  A fair bit of ice cream, and other items consumed... a fair bit of turkey as well.  Saw several Monks that we've come to know and enjoyed visiting with them as well.  Our trip through the cloister to see the goldfish this year involved the boys cleaning up lots of sticks/treasures in the court yard.  Cool sticks that seemed to need to be picked up.  Jacob brought home a couple of bamboo pieces that Grandpa helped collect.  Grandpa also showed Jacob how to carve pens out of the bamboo.  Kimmy and I put a few puzzles together with Dad's help, staying up a bit to late to finish.  We said our goodbye's and pulled out at 3:30am Sunday morning so we could make it home for Mckenzie's wrestling pictures.  Made it home with time to spare.... no land speed records were set.  Just a steady cruise control and very little traffic.  Pretty wiped out but another fun fun fun year.  House wasn't ice cold this year upon our return, heater apparently worked this year.   Looking forward to 2015, don't forget to reserve the house Uncle Dee.

  

 Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

 Friday

Sunday