Hi from Ohio

Visiting my mom in Ohio this week. Mike and I drove here with Nicky (the only kid who was free from work) and it took 11 hours!
Tonight we had dinner with my 2 sisters and brother. I think it has to be more than 10 years since we were last together. We're pretty spread around the map--Georgia, New York, Michigan and Ohio.
Everyone loves the baby blanket--which is finished! I have no means to put a photo on it here because I'm using my mother's desktop. Alas, she does not have wi-fi so my laptop is good only for games. I'll post a photo after I get back to New York.
All-in-all, a nice family trip. Tomorrow is the big Family Reunion with cousins and other relatives. I think my mother (87) and my aunt (89) will be the oldest people there.
Hope everyone has a nice weekend!

I'm in Ohio

My two older kids, Michael and Katherine, are with me visiting their grandma (my mom) in Ohio. We flew in on Saturday. The ride was a little bit bumpy due to rain, but not bad at all. We took Southwest. It's cheap and flies out of a local airport--much nicer than one of the NYC airports! The only thing I don't like about Southwest is that there are no assigned seats. You have to call 24 hours in advance to get your boarding pass, then they let you go on by category--A, B or C. I was mad because I called 23 hours in advance and ended up with B passes. But...they subdivide now (I don't think they used to do that), so we were at the front of the Bs. We got window seats from Long Island to Baltimore and then from Baltimore to Columbus. So it wasn't bad at all.

Do you know, it was 50 dollars cheaper per person to fly on Saturday as opposed to Friday or Sunday? What a difference a day makes!

I saw the weirdest phenomenon in the air, one I may never see again. Dang, if only I'd had a memory card in my camera! It was a circular rainbow! Somehow, the angle of the sun against the airplane made a reflection on the clouds. It started as a bright, white disk with a weird shape in the middle. As the plane went up, the disk grew and became surrounded with rainbow colors. And that weird shape turned out to be the shadow of the plane! So, there on the clouds was a beautiful, round rainbow with a perfect silhouette of the plane in the middle. It was so cool!

So we're here until Wednesday getting fat on Mom's cooking. We had baked macaroni on Saturday. There is homemade vegetable soup, and last night we had beef stroganoff. Michael loves stroganoff, and he helped grandma cook--and got some good pointers! I was armed with the camera then--I'd bought a memory card at CVS. (Ha, ha, frugal to the last--there was a five dollar ECB with it. I gave it to my mom, because I used her card.)

Mom made an angel's food cake to celebrate the kids' birthdays. I wish I could make cake like that. It was always a tradition to have angel's food cake on birthdays when I was growing up, and I'm glad Michael and Katherine had the fun of sharing that.

Today we are going to a cool restaurant called Der Dutchmann. Good food and a killer boutique--I save up to have fun there! Not sure what I'll get, but I know I'll come home with a few neat goodies. Oh! And down the block is an awesome Amish grocery store, where I will buy some spices to bring home. It has a little consignment shop next door that I'll browse. The prices are so reasonable (as compared to New York) that I'm sure I'll find something to bring home.

This is too long and I don't know if anyone actually reads this much text, but if you got this far...hi, hope all is well, wish you were here to have some of my mom's amazing food.