6-19-16  a different kind of Father's Day!

Just like my birthday, this is another day to sit in the car for hours and hours and hours ... .  Our little trip was coming to an end.  But first, Darryl cooked us a delicious breakfast of pancakes!   Then they took off to church and we took off to Atlanta.
Our view from the dining room table.  I thought it was ingenious how the old hot tub was turned into a koi pond.  

 on the road again!  Love the Tennessee mountains.

 and back to the traffic of the Atlanta outer belt! 

Now to start doing some vacationing in Georgia!

6-18-16 baby shower at the winery!

I wouldn't have thought of Belleville, Illinois, as a place to put a winery!  But they have one and that's where the baby shower was held.  In fact, they were also set up for a wedding and what looked like another shower.  It was all outdoors, but we did have a roof for shade.  There was a nice breeze blowing through the pavilion so it wasn't too bad---even for a very sunny midwest sunny day.
Heading down to our pavilion.

 here comes the mother to be and some friends.

 I thought these were really cute favors!  We actually used our glasses for our bubblie.

 The mother to be.

 view of the pond next to us.

 looking towards the main building.  I was surprised to see a lot of people showed up who weren't even part of the wedding or showers.

I don't think this baby will be lacking anything he needs.  He'll certainly be loved and well cared for.
Back on the west side of the Mississippi, we met back up with Carol and Darryl Hicks and we all went to dinner.  Another great dinner and great company!

6-17-16  trying to fix everything!!!!

Last time we were in St. Louis, I went to my Dr.s to get my prescriptions refilled.  As it turned out, my heart Dr. wanted me to wear a heart monitor for 10 days and come see him again to discuss the results.  This trip worked out being a good time for the followup.  So this morning I went to my followup for the next of my not too fun revelations.  Good news was my EKG and Echo-cardiogram were normal.  Bad news was my A-fib was much worse.  I didn't really think it bother me too much since I've been taking a low dose of Atenolol to keep my heart rate down, but I did feel it for a few minutes almost every evening.  Turned out that the monitor showed I'm in A-fib 22% of the time with the longest episode being about 5.5 hours with 13 episodes over an hour long, and during some of the episodes my heart rate was over 170 beats/minute.  That pretty much shocked me!  He had talked a little about a medicine to help eliminate the A-fib at our last meeting and I expected to hear more about that.  But he bypassed that and went straight to I should have an ablation.  That pretty well shocked me.  Maybe I'm not feeling as good as I can?  He doesn't do the ablation though, so referred me to his practice partner.  Now I have another appointment to go see the new Dr. next month. But I figure I'll go through with the procedure. 
Done with that exciting news, I went to the Ford dealer near my house to see if they'd check out the engine light.  They were having a grand opening with valet parking, high school band, and lots of police directing traffic.  It was quite confusing just getting to the service department.  But once I finally got there, they were very nice and ran the code for me.  I have no idea what it means, but he said I didn't need to worry about it.  So I'm not.

From there I ran back by the house.  Got a few more things to take back to Atlanta.  Also grabbed an extra key and took it to James to give to his Dad to fix our a/c problem before we come back next month.  With the a/c being about 25 years old, I figure it means getting a new one put in. 
Finally got back to the the Hicks's house about 3:30.  I knew Angie would be working on a news letter for her church most of the weekend, so didn't hurry back from the Dr.s office.   She even worked on it out on their patio for awhile.

 I love their yard.  Don't think I could do all the work that they do to it, but I sure do enjoy sitting back there looking at it.  Sure beats looking at the apartments behind our house in Florissant.

 They even had a flag flying.

 More of their yard.

 That evening Angie and I joined the mother-to-be and her mom for dinner.  It was nice seeing them again. 

6-16-16  bright and early to the airport and off to STL, again:

A couple of Angie's friends whose wedding pictures I took at the Biltmore in N. Carolina, recently found out they've been selected as adoptive parents for a little boy who is to be born in Aug.  Angie and I were invited to the baby shower, so we went.  Airfare to STL from ATL isn't bad, so we left bright and early for the airport---somewhere around 6 am!  I even spent the night at Angie and Josh's so I didn't have to have an earlier start!  Turned out Josh was flying out, too, about 15 minutes after us---only he was going to Puerto Rico, not STL.  
Not too often I see the sun rise!  But when I do, it's usually from an airport!

Last time I left through ATL it was quite a bit more crowded.  Took almost an hour just to get through security that time.  Today we got through in about 15-20 minutes.   Our flight was even on time and non-eventful.  That doesn't happen too often anymore! Too bad the rest of our trip didn't go so smoothly!!
Josh's folks picked us up and took us to Gingham's for breakfast.  Then dropped us off at our house.  That's when the annoying stuff of this trip started.  It was still early, but the temperature in the house was reading about 86 degrees.  The a/c was running, but not putting out cool air.  The floor grates weren't even cool, let alone cold.  The 6 pounds of Freon that were added a couple weeks before were gone.  With temps over 100 expected, we weren't about to stay there.  So we started checking out hotels.  Earlier Josh's folks had told us that we were welcome there if the a/c wasn't working, so we ended up taking them up on the offer.  Turned out to be a very good decision.  They made us feel very welcome without making us feel like we were putting them out.  We did our thing and they did theirs and sometimes we did stuff together.   We took over the basement and were very comfortable.
To continue with the "things not going right moments", the car that we were planning on driving back to Atlanta had the check engine light on.  What else could possible go bad?!
That night we all went to dinner with our Ferguson friends (Mayor Knowles and his wife and baby) and caught up on all that commotion.
That pretty much did it for that day.