Jim: It was a pretty lazy and laid-back day around our place today. Barbara got up early and worked on journal entries for the past couple of days. I was whipped from the long day on Friday and managed to sleep in longer than usual.
About 9:00 I finished my coffee and walked out to the highway to check the mail…the roundtrip is about a mile, so I was feeling pretty self righteous about the exercise, even though I knew I should have just walked on into town and back.
The rest of the day was spent just piddling around the place…taking care of a few chores and doing some minor housecleaning.
When we were returning from Lubbock yesterday, Barbara’s sister Carol called to say that her son Gary was going to be visiting this weekend from Shreveport, Louisiana. The family had planned a big get-together for tonight, and they wanted to know if we could come up to visit and have a cookout. Of course we said yes. We had tried to call Gary a couple of times when we passed through Shreveport on our trips, so we were glad to finally be able to connect with him.
About 4:30 we went over to Mother’s house so I could iron a couple of shirts and visit a bit with her. From there, we drove on up to Roswell – stopped at Albertson’s to buy a few things, and then went to Carol and Cal’s house.
Barbara: Since Jim and I both have relatively small families, it’s always an experience to go to Carol’s when her tribe is all home…haven’t been there when all of them gather together. This night there were 30 of us assembled to celebrate Gary’s homecoming visit. I hadn’t seen Gary since Mom died 5 years ago! That’s way too long to go without seeing friends, much less family!
I have to chuckle when I remember Carol’s delight in the fact that I brought the camera. I think she’s the only person on the face of the earth that isn’t tired of seeing me with it! By gathering family groups together for a photo, I was able to visit with each group individually, at least for a while. Of course, rounding them up was a feat in itself…I’d get two or three together and then lose one while hunting the others…it was really funny.
Once the family shots were taken, Cameron (who is Missy Jo’s oldest…she
died 3 ½ years ago) showed an interest in taking photos; so I helped him go around and take individual shots of people. He has quite an eye for the camera view as shown with this photo of his Aunt Lynette and Aunt Connie. As with all little ones, interest waned and after a while he was ready to go play chase with his sister and cousins; but not before he got his sister, Allie (left) and cousin Madison to pose for him. (These two were his best shots…not bad 
for a 6 year old)Carol and I finally got to visit a little while we were eating. (Connie Sue took over the chores of coordinating everything while Carol and I ate together…thanks, Connie!
Of course, there wasn’t time to really visit long; but it was great to be with her and her family for the evening. We had intended to leave by at least 7:30 so we could be home before dark, but that didn’t quite work out…it’s too hard to leave when you’re enjoying yourself…so we didn’t get back to Artesia until 9ish. Roswell’s only about 45 minutes away so we didn’t have much dark driving time.
Left corner: Connie, Jenny, and Ed (her other children were not there)Right corner: Top row…Justin, Ashley’s friend, Gary, Callie; bottom row…Ashley (baby’s due July 31), Kyle and Cheyene (Gary’s wife and youngest daughter were at home in Shreveport, LA.
Left side: Lynette, often called Nettie, and Madison with the boys Marcus, Daniel, and Dominic (husband Michael was in Phoenix)
Center: Sister Carol and husband Cal
Right side: Missy Jo’s two children, Cameron and Allie
Bottom left: Carol and I
Bottom Right: Connie’s oldest daughter Kim (middle) with boyfriend Josh and his sister arrived just as we were leaving.
Missing this night was Teresa, who works as a police officer in Tularosa,
and her children.I typed the names of Carol and Cal’s kids in bold for easier identification. Quite a good looking group! And, my, how great they get along…it’s heartwarming to watch them interact.
Jim: Wow…It’s hard to believe, but it has been one year since we started this new journey called retirement. While the first “official” day of retirement was July 1, 2006, it was about 3:00 pm on Friday, June 30, after working my last day at Liberal High School, that we headed out of Liberal on the way to our new “home” in Artesia, New Mexico.
We’ve written about it in previous journals, but the condensed version for our choice of Artesia is that we both graduated from Artesia High School in 1962, my mother moved back there about 3 ½ years ago, as did my youngest brother and his wife; also, our “adopted/extended” family, the Terpenings, invited us to come live on their property west of town. Just 35 miles north of Artesia is Roswell, where Barbara’s sister, Carol, and her husband, and my brother, Jerry, and his wife live. It just seemed to be the perfect place for a home base while we decided what we wanted to do with our first year or so of retirement.
What we decided we wanted to do more than anything was to travel, and travel we did. In the last twelve months we have journeyed from coast to coast through 26 states in Big V (our motor home), the Vibe (our car) and/or the Voyager (our motorcycle), racking up 29,149 miles (13,511 in Big V, 12,338 in the Vibe, and 3,300 on the Voyager). A look at the calendar shows that we spent one-third of our time in Artesia and two-third’s on the road.
While the traveling was certainly for fun, it provided a host of other benefits, some planned; others very serendipitous. We visited children, grandchildren, and other family members, made new friends and reconnected with old ones, saw new sights (and places we’ve been before, but now with new eyes), saw places where our textbook versions of American history occurred, and experienced new (for us) foods (Thai, Vietnamese, and Cajun, Brazilian, and French, just for starters).
And, somewhere along the way came the idea for the journal. As we stated in our first volume (July 1 – December 31, 2006), we started out with a simple email message to some friends to let them know we were headed to Virginia. That email was the basis for what was to become a consuming passion…to record and preserve a historical document for our children and grandchildren. Somewhere along the way, thanks to our good friend Charlene Plett in Liberal, it turned into a weekly (sometimes daily) report of our journeys or of our activities here in Artesia that we send to about a hundred family members and friends (except when some kind of glitch or keystroke takes someone out of the address book and we don’t find out about it until they ask why we aren’t sending them anything.). Thanks to our good friend Steve Kinney in Redondo Beach, California, we even entered the internet technology world with a blog site in April, something that allowed us to post more pictures than we could do with the journal.
And so, we come to the end of the first year of retirement feeling so very blessed not only for the opportunities we have had to expand our horizons, but also for the opportunity to share in the journey with so many friends who we consider to be a part of our family. Your suggestions and encouragement have been so very important to us, and we hope you have enjoyed the ride.
Thanks to all for your friendship and love, and for all that you mean to us.
From our home in Artesia, New Mexico,
Jim and Barbara
We were browsing through some assorted quotes the other day and found this one…thought it was particularly relevant at this time.
“Bear in mind that the wonderful things you learn in your schools are the work of many generations. All this is put in your hands as your inheritance in order that you may receive it, honor it, add to it, and one day faithfully hand it on to your children.”...Albert Einstein
