March is certainly not going out like a lamb here in southeastern Arizona. The winds, they are a blowin’! We are under a wind advisory this afternoon and tonight, with gust up to 50 mph forecasted. It seems like the wind blows a lot here. It makes for good drying weather, if you can keep the clothes pinned to the clothes line. And that leads to my big news for March: I finally have a washing machine! After months of looking, comparing models and trying to decide whether to buy a really cheapie one in the belief that we’ll just leave it here whenever we move again or buy a really good model with all the bells and whistles and plan to take it with us wherever we move, whenever we move, we finally decided to compromise. So, we spent more money than we would have liked, but much less than we could have spent, and I now have a washing machine. No more trips to the Laundromat! Hurray!! I can now wash a load a day, hang it out on the line, where it dries in about an hour, and thus have my Saturday’s totally free. That might mean some longer day trips on Saturdays in the coming weeks.

March has been a tough month for me emotionally. Munchkin’s birthday was March 7th and this is the first year since her birth that I have not been able to celebrate her birthday with her. She turned four! Can you believe it? Here’s a picture of her with me just a few minutes after her birth:

And here are a couple pictures from her “princess” birthday party:

Munchkin is on the right and her friend is on the left.

So, the beginning March was difficult, but as the month went on, something seemed to ease within me. Maybe it’s just that enough time has passed since we left Tallahassee (six months now) that I am finally becoming more adjusted to this major life change of not having any of the children around. Or maybe it’s just that Munchkin’s birthday passed, I survived, I know she’s doing well, and life goes on. Or maybe it is just that the weather is warmer, the sun is shining more and I those two things always make me happier. Whatever it is, I am definitely coping better, not tearing up every time I think about how far away the kids and Munchkin are or think about how long it has been since I saw them.

I am looking forward to April. I have many items on April’s “to do” list, so many that I am really uncertain where to begin or in what order to begin. Maybe I need a dart board to help sort it all out!

Goodness, has it really been a month and a half since my last post? I certainly didn’t intend that. I seem to do things all or nothing and February was my month for catching up on the financial records and getting taxes filed, which I accomplished! It is such a nice feeling, having them done early and knowing, for the good or bad, what the results were. Thankfully this year it was good results, with a nice refund, which I sort of was hoping for what with our moving expenses, job search expenses, and college expenses. Next year might be a different story!

Other than that, I think I’ve been hibernating, waiting for the weather to warm up! December, January, February, even the first half of March have been cold, a lot of cloudy days, and a lot of wind. Tucson reported their fourth wettest January/February period in over 100 years. Wouldn’t you know it? It seems like we always move somewhere when they are having a non-normal year. But today is sunny and gorgeous, if still a bit chilly from the wind. The temperature may reach 70, but that wind blowing down from the snow-capped mountain is still cold!

My main project these last few days has been hanging pictures in the living room. I have so many digital pictures filed here and there on my computer, but so few actual prints. So I’ve been ordering some prints, buying some frames, and getting some memories off the computer and onto the walls! I decided the living room would be full of my pictures, only pictures that I had taken, other than the one picture that my Grammy painted that I hung when we first moved in. So far I have the west wall completely done.

I know you can’t see what the pictures are, but I wanted to show the full effect between the two windows the edge that wall.

The center picture was taken at Fort Lauderdale.

Two of the four pictures surrounding that are Arizona pictures from one of our exploration drives last November.

One other is St. George Island in Florida.

The last is Sanibel Island Beach in Florida.

And the outside two were taken at Watkins Glen State Park in New York.

I am quite pleased with how the arrangement turned out and want to give a special “thank you” to my mom for her long-distance assistance!

Yesterday was my mother-in-law’s and my father-in-law’s birthdays. What are the odds of marrying someone who has the same birthday as you? They are both deceased; Ken (my father-in-law) died in 1989 and Doris (my mother-in-law) in 2000. Here is a picture of them taken February 1985, the same month that Kat was born.

Doris & Ken Gibson, 1985

Doris was a wonderful person who taught me a lot about how to live life and I have missed her dearly since her death.  But I find that lately, since we moved to Arizona, I have been thinking about her much more frequently.  Mostly I have been wondering if she ever forgave us for moving her grandchildren so very far away.  Our children were such an integral part of her everyday life and suddenly they were 1000 miles away and she saw them very infrequently.  I know we considered how our lives would be affected by moving, but I don’t think we fully understood the impact that our move would have on those left behind.  Now that I am in that situation, being so far from our own granddaughter, I feel a lot of guilt about taking Doris’s grandchildren so far away from her.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t have moved, or that, if we had to do it over again, that we would have done differently.  But I do think that, knowing what I do now, that I would have made more of an effort to keep Doris and her grandchildren in touch with each other.  They were young, they were busy, they didn’t like to talk much on the telephone; it is really too bad that the technology we can use now to keep in touch wasn’t available back then.  She would have so enjoyed continuing to be a part of the children’s everyday lives through Skype.

Doris & Grandchildren, Thanksgiving 1994

Doris with her five grandchildren, Thanksgiving 1994.  Our three are the youngest; Bill’s brother’s two children are the others in the picture.

I think this is the very last picture of all five of her grandchildren together.  They are all grown up now and live in four different states.  Charles was four and a half in that picture!  In two months he will be twenty.  How the years do fly by!