October 2025

While Titus and I were in Charlotte, the rest of the kids went to Game Night at Lyon's and Chris got a night alone at home (sort of an early B-Day gift).

Amber and I caught a great moon shot on our way to the barn; it looked like an African moon on the Serengeti.

After the ECD dance, the gang met up for treats at Cook-Out.

Titus got his drone this month and he is a natural.  He plans to get his commerical drone pilot license so he can take real estate photos and become CAP drone pilot for Search and Rescue missions.

Jared got Chris hooked back on LEGOs, he says its helping fight off dementia.  

As Frank was a little immobile, so we brought birthday cake over to them so they could still celebrate Chris' birthday.  I'm so blessed to have such an incredible man as my best friend to go through life.

Though the geese felt a little left out, they wanted cake too.

We did a bit of dual birthday celebration this year where Chris took the day off and came to the Aloha Safari zoo with Amber and her FIAR friends.  Chris and I enjoyed walking about a bit alone while the paperwork for Amber to "adopt" her friends little sister was being written up.

Kimberly of course spent the weekend for Amber's birthday and they got to experiment together with Ambers new digital art tools.  Following tradition, we also went on a hike, this year at Bass Lake.

Big bro couldn't decide what color to get so he just got them all.

Birthday celebrations ended with a yummy birthday dinner made to order with a second dose of fun.  It's amazing that she's actually 14, not sure where the time went.  She's such an incredibly beautiful young lady and accomplished horsewoman, can't wait to see what she does with the coming year.

Believe it or not Lance went to his very first State Fair.  As he does not do rides, he was the official purse holder for all his friends.  A co-worker heard his laugh came up behind and scared the girls till Lance started laughing.  At the end of the night he was a gentleman and made sure all the girls got back safely to their cars (though he was parked right next to them as he had to replace a tire for one before the fair).

We went to a new corn maze this year where we got to meet many of the boy's friends for the first time.  It was a lot of fun, we played some disc golf and corn hole too.  Though the highlight was watching the kids go through the mini-corn maze blindfolded directed by their "friends".

Titus and I had an impromptu date, we went to north Raleigh to get his tennis racquet restrung so he could finish the JTT season strong.  As the guy works from his home, we needed to occupy ourselves somewhere near by while he worked.  He suggested an Irish Pub and we couldn't have been more delighted.  

Month finished out with a square dance, the boys dressed up as the Pontipees from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.  It was a bit of drive so they drove three of their friends.  Titus was tasked with making a Halloween playlist for the drive.

Earlier in the month Jared was given another raise and he had another private dance calling event.  This side gig is starting to be quite profitable.

STEM Part2

As soon as we arrived from Hilton head, I had to go and find us a hotel to stay in Charlotte that night as Titus got a shower and all his civil air patrol stuff together. We grabbed a bite to eat. We were back on the road, Charlotte is about a 3 Hour Dr. from our house and we got there around 8 PM.  We stopped at a Panera on our way in for a late dinner.

The hotel was clean and safe and that's how we really cared about and it was eight minutes from the aviation Institute of maintenance where he had eight hours of classes starting at 8 AM the next morning thankfully the hotel provided breakfast so after eating I dropped him off and managed a late checkout so I could just chill in the room for most of the day, the rest of the day I went to a bass pro shop nearby, wandering the store and all the RVs on display outside.  

Titus said the much more entertaining day. The first class was on propulsion and his second class was on materials as his group finished their propulsion exercise first they actually got to stand in front of a propeller model and get blown away by the wind. In his materials class, they learned how to mend metal and how to apply fiberglass to model airplanes, which would be the same process for doing it on real planes or as Titus put it fixing big red.

Now Titus has completed all the classes necessary for his stem badge at Civil Air Patrol when he gets home, he just has to write a dossier turn it in to complete badge.

HH Fall 2025

This trip started out a little different than all our other trips because we were short one member as Lance was still in Myrtle as we began our drive down. Also, because Lance was in the championship games on Sunday as we drove down, we spent the five hour trip listening to the radio broadcast of his games instead of music. This resulted in Amber sleeping two hours until we arrived at Buc-ees for the first time, Buc-ees was a bit chaotic but interesting. Amber and her inmate both managed to get some sleep on the second half, too. 

The final game was getting very exciting as we approach the island and Lance's team won about a mile from us reaching our destination; resulting in an extremely jubilant arrival at the island.

The weather people had forecasted a rather rainy week, but we didn't care. We just needed to get away - all of us. We figured worst case scenario if it rained enough, we'd get our money back since we had a weather promise on the rental, but thankfully as it turned out, there wasn't really any bad weather while we were there just some strong winds.  

We had a first during our first walk on the beach, we found a real message in a bottle. We contacted the person inside.  It turned out it was a last request and we fulfilled their family desire with Daniel taking it to Disney next.

The weather was iffy on Monday so we did our window shopping that day.  We got all new spices and teas from our favorite spice store. Then enjoyed a wonderful lunch at Its Greek to Me; our favorite place to eat.

Tuesday we played Putt-Putt golf, got Aloha smoothies on our way and ate leftovers from Sunday and Monday

Wednesday and Thursday were just rinse, lather, repeat of beach time like we've done every other day, bocce ball, walking and eating Greek food; basically a perfect vacation. The only small disappointment was the waves were way too strong because the two hurricanes off the coast to actually do much fishing. 

We did manage to find a live sand dollar in one of our walks and rescue a duck that apparently been washed to shore, probably from one of the hurricanes; those were highlights of our walk.

For Amber, the highlight was the night the skies cleared up and she could give us all a wonderful lesson in astronomy that she's been learning in school.  She was able to find all the summer stars she's been studying.  As a bonus we spotted ghost crabs.

There were a lot of shenanigans throughout the week; videos of the boys (including Chris) running down the beach like Jack Sparrow, Jared did a "Watermelon" video (They made a mound of sand...but I got watermelon in my hand), Titus got in some skim boarding and some great castles were built and destroyed.

We're hoping to go back in May instead of waiting till September next year we're starting to realize the fishing was much better and the wind is a little calmer. d.v.

On the ride home, Jared drove with Lance,  Having two cars certainly made the packing a lot easier in the morning. Our car chose to keep the music off on the ride home, which let Amber and Titus both get in a good nap.  Napping was necessary as Titus and I had to turn around as soon as we got home, but more of that in our next post.