All the news that's fit to print....

I missed the whole month of October!  Did you notice?  Probably not.  I'm sure your life doesn't revolve around reading my sparse bloggishness.  Apparently neither does mine.  :)

Ah well.  I did some stuff in October.  The biggest and bestest of all was the Bunko Babes' 25th Anniversary Trip (never mind that our 26th anniversary happened in September!).  Our own dear Rosemary and her hubby just happen to own a lovely second home in Fort Myers, Florida, so after much debate about where and when to take our trip and a few false starts back in the spring, we finally made our way there on Columbus Day weekend.  We were fortunate that nine of us could actually arrange to go on the trip, but we so missed those that were left behind.  As you'll see in the following picture, we brought them along in effigy (kind of our own version of Flat Stanley). 

That's Marsha, Donna and Carol, enjoying themselves on the beach on Sanibel Island.  We threatened to bury them in the sand, but we were too full from lunch at the Mucky Duck to do all that digging.

                                      

This is my favorite shot from the beach, looking out over the Gulf of Mexico.  Sand, shells, colorful umbrella, a neat wave and sparkling sun just about to set behind those gorgeous clouds.  That's Gail standing in the wave and Sally out a little farther, with several other Babes way out there in the water.  I was shooting with my cell phone camera at this point, to send a shot to my daughter Jen.  Right after that shot, this happened....

Now for the sake of maintaining my friendship with the other Babes, I won't show you any more of my blackmail shots from the beach, but here's where we ended the night....

Thanks to a very nice waitress at the Beach Cafe on Fort Myers Beach, you get to see us all in one shot with a very big chair...left to right we have Krisha, Rosemary, Jana, Cindy, Beth, Sally, me, Kathy and Gail.  

The rest of our weekend was filled with lots of eating - mostly at great restaurants, a modicum of drinking, a visit to the Thomas Edison and Henry Ford winter estates, a pirate cruise and, oh yeah....another big chair!

Many thanks to Rosemary for sharing her house with us, to her mother-in-law for the use of her car and to her father-in-law for picking some of us up at the airport!  And thanks to all the Babes for hanging in there for so many years of great fun, friendship and support.  I hope we can spend our next 25 years together!  And I can't wait for our trip to PK later this month!

And what about the rest of October?  Besides some jewelry-making fun, my parents celebrated their 61st wedding anniversary, one of my brothers had a birthday, I had fun reading to my 4th grade friends and the Texas Brahmas got their season started.  It was a pretty good month!