Merry Christmas

For all my friends and family, I say thank you for all your kind thoughts, Christmas cards and support. Craig and family will be coming out on Christmas Day for a week. I can hardly wait. I did a (little) Christmas decorating--so I am getting into the Christmas spirit a little.

I have been going to a yoga class every Tues and Thurs with a great teacher. Lorrie joins me on some days. I just saw this picture and sent it to my yoga teacher who put it on her facebook page. I don't know much about facebook--need to see the movie I guess. But the guy was Time magazine's man of the year. I'm pretty out of touch.

For the last couple of weeks I have had the good fortune to find a woman friend who lives across the lake from me. She (Val) was a close friend of Sally's and likes the same sort of things that Sally liked. So it has been great to have

someone to have dinner with, go to the movies, and talk to. We went to our favorite park on Saturday--Brazos Bend. I blogged about this before when Sally and I went last Jan

uary (less than a year ago) and Sally felt pretty well and walked the whole 2 mile trail around a lake. We did the same trail. As always, we saw lots of stuff. I have never been there without seeing several alligators. Here is one of the ones we saw on Saturday--big guy. Lots of memories in that park.

Holidays

This has got to be one of the hardest times of the year for me. Someone told me that you have to go through a series of firsts when you lose someone. And this is the first holiday season. Fortunately, the whole family will be in Texas for Christmas. Craig, Kathie, Christopher, and Gavin are arriving on Christmas Day and will be here for a week. I think they will stay here with me, but we will have the Christmas dinner etc at Lorrie's. John has been planning fun things for everyone during this time. Thank goodness for family!!

I am still interested in the condo / townhouse area that I mentioned in the last note. I went back there this week to take another look. They are nice, but I think that were I to get serious, I would want an elevator in the unit. They are built with an elevator shaft, so I guess that is what a lot of people do as they get older. For now, taking the stairs would be good for me--like a stairmaster only real.

The swan is gone--at least for now. I don't know where she goes. I hope she comes back.

Interesting

After Thanksgiving I had a period of real sadness when I got home--kind of a relapse. It is still so hard to realize that Sally is really gone for good. But now I feel better--the swan appeared for a day and so that cheered me up. I am getting more busy doing consulting and that is good. It is fun thinking about problems and helping to come up with plans to address them.

Today, Lorrie and I went over to a new development in Sugar Land. It is a group of town homes that are in an area with lots of restaurants, a park like setting including a lake and a fitness club down the road. They were quite wonderful. They are new construction. There are a few bank foreclosures that were taken over by a real estate company and finished. So now I am thinking seriously about perhaps moving and simplifying my life. These are quite large places, bigger than I would really want, but they are in a great location. One potential problem is that they are three story homes so there are a lot of stairs. That is ok with me now, but who knows in the future. But the prices are pretty reasonable now and they might be a pretty good investment if the economy ever recovers. So that is something to think about.