Flat Top & Unconventional Anniversary

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Unsure what's "okay" to do in quarantine and what's not, our family get-together in Baltimore to remember Dave (celebrating what would have been his 80th birthday and remembering him 25 years after his death), was cancelled/post-poned. Again unsure what's really okay and what's not, Susan came to visit. It's been a long, hard spring for everyone, but living alone (in any scenario) has been particularly isolating. So after 10 years being here, we finally got up to Flat Top!

Bev has been a dear friend of Susan's since her days with Ward at Flat Top. Her cabin on the mountain is delightfully peaceful.

Beautiful views and some interesting houses on Flat Top!

Dean was a dear friend of Ward's. He built an Observatory on Flat Top that is still there!

View from Dean's Observatory.

Wonder what that was?!?

Can you see it?!? The wind caught the (merely 2-week old) drone and crashed it HIGH into a tree. The unwelcome adventure that followed (including bush-whacking, climbing, slashing and thrashing) was actually successfully, thank goodness!

Andrew asked if we could do communion for Grandma since her church hasn't been able to. What a sweet idea. Thanks to Olivet for the on-going elements!

And the Ukulele sessions with Grandma were in full swing!

What fun this is!!!!

"This Little Light of Mine"

Our 15th anniversary May 21 was not what we'd planned, to say the least. For more than year, we'd been making arrangements for a trip to Spain---our first kid-free adventure since Israel in 2011 (which was wonderful in so many ways, but not really vacation). But alas, COVID had other plans.

We'd had good attitudes about it all, even completing the Barcelona puzzle we got for Christmas to get us excited. But the actual day was tough...
1 - It was cold and rainy.
2 - The kids were bored, 2 months into being home with insufficient school work and no activities on the books.
3 - Michael was on the road.
4 - Greystone officially cancelled the entire summer. So very sad after celebrating 100 years in 2019.
5 - Our dear Janey was leaving Charlottesville for the last time and we had to say goodbye, without hugging:-(

But the kids did an amazing job of lifting our spirits with giftS we had no idea about.

They found this and ordered it all on their own! How appropriate during Quarantine when toilet paper is no where to be found!

And then, the video. Mostly working from home, I'm still in the church office Tuesdays. So apparently, Tuesdays this spring they plowed through their work quickly and then put this together....

The pictures are poor, perhaps because they were taken 15 year ago with traditional film, processed, then digitized, put in a digital album, printed, pictures taken with a phone of the album, then uploaded to a computer before finally landing in another video. Wow - the pictures must be exhausted!