Happy Days

I noticed this morning how light my heart is. Have you ever felt that? Things are going along so well and people I know are happy. I'm not saying that everything is rainbows and unicorns or that we haven't had a few speedbumps in our lives lately, but we are blessed. Largely I think it's from noticing things more around us - simple things really, but they mean so much.

This past weekend Keith, Joe (the golden retriever) and I went to the lake. Mostly we went to do some work and get things ready for the 4th of July weekend, but I guarantee we snuck in some fun time. The lake was perfect, we saw so many brilliant red cardinals flying around and had much laughing with neighbors. The next door neighbors had much of their family up (praise God she is feeling so much better and it looks like she's going to beat this cancer!) and they spent much time on their porch, which invites conversation from everybody. I got to hold and love on their new little dog named Bella, who was sweet as pie.

So we are busy, busy - it takes a lot of work making sure that everybody has a nice time on the holiday! But it is so worth it I cannot even begin to describe. And I'm looking forward to it immensely.

One of the errands we had last night was to take these two attractive jars that were filled with change up to the grocery store. They have one of the nifty machines that you just put the change in, it counts it and spits out a receipt that you then take to a register and get your money. Normally we do this much more often, but this time I got lazy and just got out another container. Keith told me to guess the total dollar amount for the two. Mind you, I've never won the 'guess how many jelly beans are in the jar' kind of contests, so I guessed $16. He laughed and laughed and told me to guess higher. $32? "No Elizabeth, exaggerate" $68? Again he laughed. Do you know there was $132 between the two jars? You could have knocked me over with a feather! I've always heard to put change in a jar and it adds up fast, but really I had no idea.

We did stop for dinner last night while running errands. We ate at Denny's, which proves we are definitely NOT party animals! But they do make a good sandwich and we discovered last night that you can get 'dippable veggies' in place of fries. Doesn't this plate look beautiful? And why don't more restaurants do this? I've said for some time that I wish McD would offer baby carrots and ranch dressing instead of fries. We enjoyed these veggies last night - perfect and cool for summer.

Good times.....