Thanksgiving Trip to Chickamauga - part 1

The snowfalls of mid-week may have delayed our departure and slowed us down, but we timed our departure between storms here and braved bad roads and a snowstorm through the mountains to drive to Chickamauga to spend Thanksgiving with Norris' mother.  Cheryl took this picture of our neighborhood shortly before we left.

The interesting snow  pattern at the end of the driveway is where Norris had parked his Jeep. We only had to shovel a thin layer of snow just outside the garage - the rest had melted.

With just three of us for dinner, our Thanksgiving meal was traditional and casual, but it was special for reasons we would never have predicted.  We had woken up to very low water pressure, but some time after we put the turkey breast in the oven at around 11:30, there was no water at all. This turned out to be because of a water main leak right in front of the high school in downtown Chickamauga. The city crews were looking for it starting at 7:00 a.m. but didn't actually locate the leak until probably 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. The City Manager explained the outages, "Of course, we're sitting on caverns and rocks and everything else, so when we do get leaks, sometimes, it will get into the crevices and stuff. It will run for hundreds of yards before it ever comes out anywhere. Unfortunately, it's coming up in the springs here and not coming up in the surface where we can actually just pinpoint where the leak is."

Ella uses bottled water out of a large heater/cooler for drinking and Norris went to get six gallons of tap water in bottles before we sat down to eat, so we were able to cook potatoes for mashing and could rinse off our hands and utensils if necessary.  The water came back on around 7:00 in the evening, so we were finally able to do the dishes.  It was shut off again for part of the day on Friday. Cheryl had been out on foot and seen they were still working on the problem early in the day.  This photo was taken at around 4:00 in the afternoon.

It was back on again at dinnertime, but the bottled water did come in handy for the afternoon.

Cheryl took this photo of Norris and his mother in her living room as we were getting ready to leave.

It was a good visit with her, and the Chickamauga Thanksgiving With No Water is probably the way we will remember this trip!

An unusual family visits

My friends in suburban areas might not be captivated by our visitors today, but in these parts, where they are not uncommonly going to wind up in a freezer, we don't often see them near the house.

Like many of our neighbors, these came down the steps that lead to our personal forest preserve - here's the doe as seen from my seat at the laptop on the island -

 She moved toward the open meadow of our yard and, wary of my movement inside the house, stopped and let me catch her big ears and eyes.

That was when I noticed some movement in the open field below her - three additional, much smaller deer.

 I made sure Moki was aware of this rare sighting.

Back upstairs, my camera just missed catching Momma Deer munching on my overgrown cilantro patch.

 I took a few more photos, trying to show the relative size of the three youngsters after Momma Deer moved down and one hopped over to join her, upper left. Lower right, the other two continued their dining.

 

Here I caught one of them high-tailing it toward Mom.

 

Wikipedia says, "A doe generally has one or two fawns at a time (triplets, while not unknown, are uncommon)."  I found a quote from a Texas study that said twins are common but triplets showed up in less than 2% of the deer examined. Another website stated, "Twins are the norm in most populations, but as many as 15 to 20 percent of does will bear triplets when deer numbers are in balance with high-quality habitat." So perhaps our mountain, in this year of plentiful rainfall, qualifies as a high-quality habitat and not too many deer.

Dupont Search Exercise

For the past several years, Norris has participated in the annual DuPont State Forest Search Exercise.  He works there for three days setting up and operating various kinds of emergency communications systems that are deployed to the field as part of major disasters or searches.  This year, the one major new wrinkle was that Norris got on TV Saturday night when WLOS did a story on the exercise.  The photo below was from the WLOS website.

If you click on the link below, you can watch a video of the news story.  You should be able to see Norris in several different shots.  The TV crew took some video of the public information officer asking Norris some questions, but apparently the TV editing crew didn't find it that interesting and cut that part out.

Click here for video

One other new thing for this year was the communications team was able to use a new radio trailer which had just been delivered to the Asheville Fire Dept earlier in the week.

The exercise provided a chance to exercise all the bells and whistles on the new trailer and find a few bugs that will need to be corrected.  The trailer has its own satellite dish for internet and telephone connections, as well as a number of radios that can be patched together.  The photo above shows the outside of the trailer, which is heated and air conditioned and carries its own generator power supply.  This photo below shows some of the radio gear inside.

The trailer has several available interior light settings, including red lights for night time use.  With the red lighting, you can walk outside into the dark and still be able to see.  It made for an interesting photo below.

The next day at Dad's house

We met up with Cheryl's Dad, brothers Jeff and Roger and Roger's wife Laurie for dinner on Friday when we arrived.  Brother Carl couldn't make the trip because he was sick - hope he's feeling better.  We didn't think to get the camera out that night. But the day after the wedding, we went back to Dad's where Katy and Andrew had already arrived with the youngest member of the family, Josh, whom we had not met before.

Great Grandpa was upstairs when we arrived, pulling out some of the toys that were around for the previous generation, including his dad Andrew, seen here. Cousin Niki is in the background.

Josh is a fun, outgoing and curious young boy, born last year in mid-August so just over a year old and not talking very much.  He still manages to communicate quite a lot and has a happy attitude, even though he was not quite at the top of his game, fighting off some kind of virus.

The lighting on this next photo did not work out well - but this is my niece Lyn and her new husband Joel - they were married on Labor Day weekend.  Unfortunately we did not make it to that celebration which like Tanya and Nate's, was held outdoors.

After the other young people had left, I asked Norris to take a photo of my Dad, Joyce, Niki and me before we got back on the road.  Dad stood up next to us as we were talking about smiling and, in an Eeyore voice said, "I'm so saaaaad."  This got us laughing pretty hard.

 Norris took a few photos but mostly we all had our eyes closed and our mouths very wide.

At the end we got one photo where we had recovered some composure. 

And yes, Joyce was very nice and wore the sweater I knitted for her earlier this year. What a great color she picked!!

A few photos from Tanya's Wedding

We were in Chicago for Tanya's wedding this past weekend. It was a chilly day and later in the afternoon it rained pretty hard, but for the ceremony, it was only partly cloudy. 

The ceremony was held at the pool in Joyce's backyard. I took this photo of the crowd on the opposite side - the deck is larger on the side where I was, but some of my family is seated over there - brother Roger and his wife Laurie are both in hats; my nephew Andrew and his wife Katy are behind the fountain,  and brother Jeff and his wife Joanna are right behind them.

Some aspects of the wedding ceremony were quite traditional, but there was an unusual twist in that Tanya's brother Bobby, who is a little younger than Tanya, presided. He did a great job, but there were a couple of interesting moments between Little Brother and Big Sister that made us all laugh.

Two of the groomsmen were Nate's brothers, but the younger man just to the right of the couple is Nathan, Nate's teenaged son.  Joyce and Don are visible only from behind.

The pool formed the center aisle, so the couple turned to walk right by us as they left to start the reception line between the pool and the tent.

Tanya's dress was made totally from lace and she was beautiful in it.

Tanya's sister Nicole was also in the ceremony, as Maid of Honor, shown here with Nathan. Nicole's dress was beautiful on her, too.

It's never so flattering to take a photo from inches away from the subject's face with our camera, but I took one anyway - and it shows some of the flowers decorating the pool area.

It was a little chilly, although the wedding party said they were not cold - perhaps it was nerves for them. I intended to wear my new teal sweater, but the one I made late last winter from the New Zealand possum yarn was much warmer - and went much better with the decor.  I should have gotten a photo of the flowers on the tables in the tent as they were really gorgeous.

Joyce made and decorated the cake so I went into the tent early to get this photo before anything happened to it.  It was more than enough cake for the gathering and it was really delicious white cake with a chocolate filling between the layers.

 The colors of the flowers show up much better in this photo I took of Tanya's cousin Becky and her husband Daniel - they were just married in August.

As I mentioned earlier, some aspects of this wedding were completely traditional, and since Joyce made the cake, we have to show this little cake sequence.

After the dinner and cake was the dancing. Before we left, we sneaked back in the house so that Tanya and Nate could open the quilt I made for them (photos of the quilt are here at this link to my projects blog). 

Brother Bobby and Nate are standing by. Tanya and Nate did seem happy with the quilt with the dancing Tanyas.

New Backsplash

We had to have a tile man out to replace some tiles in our bathroom shower this week, so while we were at it, we picked out some tiles for a kitchen backsplash.  We didn't want anything too flashy or busy as it would clash with the granite countertop, so we chose a more muted stone tile for the backsplash. Below are two pictures of the general area and the bottom picture is a closeup of the marble pattern.

We picked this particular tile because it has subtle orange-toned veins so it seems to partner well with the granite.

At the beginning of fall

Two years ago, Cheryl visited Last Penny Alpaca farm (photos in the post at this link) but Norris was out of town. So last Saturday we both went so Norris could see the alpacas up close and personal. They are not particularly friendly, as they are not treated as pets, but they aren't afraid either, so they posed for photos.

Back at our house, construction on a new house two lots over from ours started about six weeks ago. There is a lot of activity and noise five days a week. The cul de sac right next to our driveway is a constantly changing collection of trucks and construction vehicles.   This photo, taken on a relatively quiet morning last week, shows a couple of them parked in front of our house, out of the way for the gravel delivery that had just taken place.

The new house will be to the right of the driveway you can see curving up the slope edged with black erosion control barriers.  This driveway is longer than ours, steeper in some parts, and has that curve.  Happily for the owners, their drive has the same sun exposure as ours, so snowfall will melt very quickly.  You can see one tree has already changed colors.  We're seeing bits of color everywhere, though it is not certain how pretty our fall will be this year after the unusually high rainfall of the summer.