Trip to Illinois

I'm still on the road -- will be back tomorrow night (Monday). It's been a long and tiring trip but I'm glad we made it. I'm glad Jennifer could come in from California, because as I said in one of m previous posts, it is probably the last time my family will be together. She got to meet a lot of people that she has only heard about and some that I haven't seen in a long time. One of my sister-in-laws is originally from England. She and my brother have been married for almost 40 years. Two of her brothers and one of her sisters came over for the wedding. One of her brothers was here 38 years ago when I was just 14 -- mind you he was only 18 at the time! I met her other brother at some point when he came visiting and I had never met her sister. So, it was certainly a special time for all of us. The wedding was great -- real laid back but everyone had fun. I'll post a few photos when I get back.

it will be nice to get back to a routine. Alan leaves to go back to San Francisco on Wednesday and then life will be a little more "normal". After jennifer and Alan move back in july it will be full steam ahead for their wedding.

It was an emotional week for me. Hard to deal with some things, hard to let go of some things. I've become much more emotional though in the last few years so it doesn't take much!!!! I lost my necklace that a dear friend gave me about ten years ago. I never took that necklace off -- i loved it so much. I had always admired other women who had something from their husbands like a necklace that they never took off. My husband never gave me anything like that. One year for my birthday a very dear friend from Illinois sent me a necklace that had a small pendant on it. It was oblong and had the word love on one side, and then the word love was spelled in Chinese on the reverse. It was very simple but beautiful and i fell in love with it when I saw it. I knew that once I put it on I wouldn't take it off. i got so many compliments on it. Then, the chain broke when I was in Peoria this week and I lost the pendant. I have no idea when or where it broke but it did and I was so sad to have that gone. It really meant a lot to me. I got very emotional over that. I know that sounds silly, but it wasn't just the necklace, it was the thought that my friend would have taken time to buy it for me - he has such good taste and he knows how much I have worn that. I'm going to hate to have to tell him.

Enough about that. I'm using Alan's keyboard and I don't like it, hence the capitalization errors in this post. I'll try to clean it up later.

More when I get home.