If I did not have my calendar to look at I would feel as if Spring was in the air. The sun is up before 7 AM, birds are singing outside of my window, leaves are on the tree, the sky is a beautiful blue and the temperature seems to be mild. I should state that the only way I know what the temperature is comes after a brief encounter with the great outdoors this morning while feeding the dogs.

Our camera club group of Wednesday picture takers will head out to our Japanese gardens where the leaves hopefully will be a brilliant red. I am not counting on it. I am going to get out of the house and then to pick up Samantha for a lovely lunch before taking her to the University for her lab and to meet up with her husband. If I get a decent picture out of this outing, I will consider it a blessing.

I am still waking up with an Eastern Time zone body mind set. I hope that by this weekend, I will go back to being my old lazy self and stay in bed past 6:30.

Ok, I have now been on Xanga 3 times this week. What is up with that? Happy Wednesday.

while we were on vacation in Ohio. For the past 4 years, I have romanticized what it would be like to live in Ohio. I envied the people who had beautiful trees in their yards and the beautiful fall colors of the leaves. I thought what a great deal of fun it must be to have leaf raking "parties" one or two weekends and spend time hanging out with the neighbors for an extended period of time.

Now that idea is so out of my head. We raked Rebecca's leaves, or should I say that Lewis raked most of them, and it was not fun past the first 30 minutes when Little Mam was enjoying our efforts and doing a great job of helping. There were no neighbors helping us or even really gathering their own leaves. The neighbors to the north do not have trees in their yards because Rebecca and her south side neighbors in that park type of backyard environment have all of the trees so the northsider's do not need to plant any for shade purposes. The Northsider's do not bother to rake as they know that the north wind will just blow the leaves back to the tree owners yard.

I did see more fall color than I have ever seen. We enjoyed the Hocking state park in southern Ohio just a few days past the peak of the season. When landing in Columbus, the trees were multi-colored and in great abundance. The reds were brilliant and I was in love. I can not say that this entire leaf falling thing was awful. I just ached from the raking :)

We did have a wonderful time with our daughter and her family. We also visited the zoo, drove to Cincinnati to see the Newport Aquarium in Kentucky, celebrated Little Mam's 3rd birthday, and Little Sir's first Halloween experience. I took over 1000 pictures but Xanga won't let me post any of them. I will try to put some on flickr. I was able to enjoy eating Graeter's ice cream twice with Little Mam and witnessed her first tasting of peanut butter. completed reading one book while flying from Columbus to Phoenix on the first leg of our flight home, read the Southwest Airlines November issue of the magazine from cover to cover and skipped the snacks offered on both flights.

I gained 2 pounds since I was eating like a pig and I made many treasured memories along the way.

If you want to see 2 more balloon pics, they are in the photolog. I still can not get them to my blog entry.