upon realizing how fast time flies

Good Sunday to you my friends and family from here along the Western Slopes where the snow has fallen as well as the temperature outside.  It's the early morning hours here, about 5:44 a.m. MST and by my calculations I think that I must have slept in for a change.  It feels good once in a while to not set an alarm and to allow your body to wake you up when it's dang good and ready.  We all need a little extra rest from time to time.  I hope your night's sleep was good and that the dreams you dreamt were peaceful and sweet.

I can hardly believe it as I look at the calendar along the west wall of the kitchen and realize that today is already the 8th day of December, 2013.  For crying out loud, where did this year go?  Just a show of hands here, do you feel the same?  Yep, that's what I figured~it's unanimous.  As I think back on the nearly 365 days that have gone by for this year, I'm pretty positive that I've never had a year in my life with so many changes.  Many of those changes seemed to have happened in the proverbial "blink of an eye".  From where I started the new year and to where I will be ending it, are a span of over 600 miles, one gigantic hill,  and a time zone to the west.  If you would have told me on January 1st that I'd be married, retired twice from teaching and yet back in the classroom AGAIN while living in a place called Montrose, Colorado I would have said that you were out of your ever loving mind.   Things change, life goes on and on.  

In one of my last blog posts of 2012, I remembered all of the special events that had happened in my life through pictures for the year.  It was fun to, month by month, remember in a pictorial way all that happened to me.  As this year makes its way toward conclusion, I choose to do the same.  As you  pause to think about the things in your own lives that have occurred, may your heart be filled abundantly with  happy things and blessings beyond imagination.  My heart is filled with so many that I've had to "skoosh" things over from time to time in order to make room for more.  God has been so good to me. 

So, here's LIFE from 2013, well at least the first 6 months of it that is......

January~

What in the heck would the odds have been for two kids from the "land of long ago and far, far away" to meet up with one another again after 40 years had passed from being in the same high school back in south central Kansas?  Slim and None~  (The Black Canyon of the Gunnison near Montrose, Colorado)

It was so much fun to be one of the sponsors for our 4H group at Lincoln Elementary back in Hutchinson, KS.  What a joy it was to watch those kids grow, change and learn through their participation in the many projects that they chose to do.  Two little people from the first grade that I loved to see each day.  They were having lots of fun at the Reno County 4H Fun Night that our school hosted in late January.  The little one on the left in the photo is NaDonna, a co-member of the "broken arm" club with me :)  She was the little flower girl when Mike and I were married in May.  

February~

Before this photo was taken in mid-February, I was a 57-year old woman who had never ONCE in life made a snowman.  Now I can definitely say that I have.  With the strong arms and back of my son Grahame, we moved enough snow over to make this little snow person that was actually shorter than I am.  Her name was Eleanore and she lasted for the better part of a week before the mild temperatures took her away.  It was freezing cold outside but actually a lot fun to stop being an adult for a couple of hours.  The 8-year old kid that still lives inside my "grown up"  body was glad to be "let out" to play that Saturday afternoon. 

I began to learn how to climb over Monarch Pass as I made my second trip out to visit Mike in Colorado.  This was the trip that I actually slid into the snowy ditch near the igloo at Blue Mesa.  I definitely learned to respect what life is like at over 11,000 feet straight up, more or less, into the air.  I remember stopping to pause only for a brief moment to take this photo at the summit.  I didn't tarry long that day.  Monarch Pass is where we go from one side of the mountain to the other.  This photo is taken from the "Kansas" side (Atlantic Ocean) and just a few hundred yards more, I crossed over to the "Colorado" side (Pacific Ocean).  I know that's weird to look at it in that way but it's how I do it :)  

March~

I will always remember March of this year for the journey that my youngest child (Ursela) and I took to New York.  I had not flown, in fact was petrified of the thought of boarding an airplane again, after the terrorist attacks of 9-11.  Ursela convinced me that we would be just fine and that a trip to NYC to see my niece Jessica would be a lot of fun.  Here we are right before leaving for the airport in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  We were both so excited about the journey.  Little did we know that only a few hours later, I'd have an unfortunate encounter with those stupid moving stairs they call escalators in the airport in Detroit, Michigan.  I got from the top to the bottom the hard way after losing my balance and crashing head first down.  A couple of very broken ribs later, my part of the journey was nearly over.  Even though I was injured, we were at least able to spend 3 days together visiting the village of Owego, New York before Ursela went on to NYC alone and I flew back home to Kansas.  It was yet another case of "Miller's uncanny bad luck" a second cousin on my mother's side of the family to "Murphy's Law".  

While visiting Owego, I was glad to meet my Facebook friend and Owego's mayor, Kevin Millar.  He has the responsibility of seeing to the needs of one of the most beautiful places in New York and shoot, maybe even the world.  I fell in love with that little village while on the way to Maine in 2012 and wanted to return to see it once again.  

Thanks to my friend on Facebook and now in "real life", Diana Higdon Chandler, for helping me to connect with students at St. Patrick's Catholic School in Owego.  They were our penpals last year and part of my reason for returning to Owego was to deliver letters to them from the fourth graders at Lincoln Elementary in Hutchinson.  It was fun to visit their school and teach a geography lesson about life in the great state of Kansas.  They asked such interesting questions and of course, the number one question was nearly always about tornadoes and the Wizard of Oz. St. Patrick's is a great school, filled with wonderful kids and adults.  I loved my visit there.

April~

Trip number 4 to Montrose.  It was during this trip that Mike and I went up to Grand Junction for the very first time together.  There I met folks who were to become my very first real friends here in Colorado.  Mel and Margaret Southam are about as good of people as you could want to meet. They have been Mike's friends for many years and now they are mine as well.  I kind of like Grand Junction and even though you have to go through the "desert" (LOL) to get there, it's a nice place to visit.

Since I knew by this time that I'd be leaving Kansas and moving to Colorado, I decided I'd better bring a little bit of home with me.  One warm April morning while I was visiting here, I planted a couple hundred Russian Mammoth sunflower seeds alongside the fence row next to the alfalfa patch.  I was sure that all 200 would arise from the earth and stand tall against the wind off of Cerro Summit.  When less than a dozen actually made it, I was pretty disappointed.  But those few "ambassadors" of my life back home in Kansas thrived to maturity and were harvested for their seeds in the fall.  All was not lost, believe me :)

May~

It became the month of "saying good-byes" to friends and family that I had known and loved for nearly 58 years of life.  One Saturday morning I met up with my former teaching cohorts from Lincoln Elementary and bicycling buddies, Patti Mazur and Tonya Saiz.  These ladies have been my friends for several years now and I miss them along with about 44,000 other people.  Tonya did not realize it but at the time this picture was taken, she was pregnant with little twin girls who will very soon be born into this world.  God has blessed me with so many good friends in my life.  These two ladies are some of them.

Dang it, I was thinking something else happened in May but what was it??  Wait a minute, just let me think a moment...oh yeah, that's right~I got married. 

In front of a couple hundred students, staff, family and friends.....two kids from the "land of long ago and far, far, away got married.  The gymnasium of Lincoln Elementary became the sanctuary on the very last day of school on May 21st.  I've got to say that I've never seen an event like that  pulled off so quickly and a barren gym transformed into a wedding in such a short span of time.  People from everywhere helped us that afternoon and from the moment "on your mark, get set, GO!" was signalled and chairs, decorations, an archway under the basketball goal,  cookies and punch tables were put into place...well it was like a scene reminiscent from the TV show, "Extreme Home Makeover".  We'll forever be grateful to the family and friends who loved us enough not only to help with the details but to be witnesses as well to our wedding service.  Two days later, we were gone from Kansas.

June~
A month of changes, homesickness, challenges, more homesickness, things that saved me, and oh yeah, did I mention being homesick?  Life was about as lonely as it could be during that month's span of time.  I think I cried about every other day and when I wasn't crying , I was surely thinking about it.  My camera became my friend as I started the quest of looking for my "niche" here along the Western Slopes.  Leaving Reno County and moving here to Colorado was not easy, in fact it was probably one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life.  I didn't die from missing "home" back in Kansas.  I only thought I might :)  Grateful for the memories of the little things that I found in my midst here in the beginning.  They were the blessings that kept me going through those first really hard and trying days of life in south western Colorado.

   I watched the deer herd each day as they came through the front yard of our home just outside of Montrose.  They became some of the very first friends I had here.  Beautiful creatures that I really had never been exposed to before in life, at least not this close up.

My sunflowers finally started coming to life and image of this beautiful one on a very late day in June was a most welcome sight to my "homesick" heart.  I remember well the day this photo was taken.  The western sky was a brilliant shade of blue and the stately Cottonwood tree in the background had leaves of shimmering emerald green.  I loved how the yellow petals of the sunflower looked in this photo, an interesting mix that made this one of my favourite photos of the summer of 2013.

I finally got tired of enough of being lonely and made myself start to get out and learn more about my new community.  This is one cool place to visit in Montrose~our public library.  I love the "smell" of a building filled with the printed word. I loved this statue, just inside of the foyer of the library because I was actually taller than the little person on the right. :)  And once again I make the very famous plea....IF you can read this blog post then you know who it is that you should thank.  AMEN!



Well, the other 6 months of 2013 will have to wait until the next blog post.  Time to get busy and prepare things for the last two weeks of school before our Christmas break.  Have a great day family and friends.  Please be safe in winter's cold temperatures to all of you struggling with the current storms.  To my friends and family in the warmer parts of the earth, hey I am happy for you.  Enjoy a ray or two of sunshine just for me, ok?  Love you guys, all!