Today we are proud to announce the healthy birth of our fourth granddaughter, Eleanor Kate Levvis. She weighed in at 7 pounds, 13 ounces and measures 20.25 inches.
Her proud parents, Kiri and Justin are thrilled with the arrival. Older sister, Gracie, can’t wait to help out and teach her all the tricks.
Here is Katie’s first photo – being held by Grandma Nola.
We love y’all.
Rick’s spending his birthday waiting for more 3-D shows on TV.
We’re unable to attend the birthday party that is being thrown, in the Dallas area, to celebrate our granddaughter Maddi’s 4th birthday.
The crowd is arriving at Marc’s house as we write this post. I’m sure that all will have a good time. Maddi understands that this is her day and will certainly get her share of the cake.
2008 was a great year and we wanted to thank the nearly 150,000 visitors to our blog.Our server logged visitors from 87 countries, since we got a dedicated server for this from blog.servermania.com/what-is-a-dedicated-server/. This may not be all of them, but of those recorded, 87.4 % were from the United States followed by 4.55% from Mexico and 2.37% from Canada. You can click on the list to enlarge the chart. How did they find us in Botwana, Liechtenstein, or the Faroe Islands? Oh well, we’re glad they did.
We’ve enjoyed sharing our travels with you and look forward to a great 2009.
Well, except for the economy, 2008 was good to us. We even ended the year with both of us weighing 15% less than when the year started.
We returned to the States from Mexico in late March and wandered around Arizona and New Mexico prior to heading back to Texas in late May. Our plans were to spend a lot of time on the Texas Coast and work our way up one side of the Mississippi River and down the other. Unfortunately, the flooding in the Midwest and the fuel prices had us rethinking our plans. The end result was that we spent the rest of the year exploring the Texas Coast and the Rio Grande Valley.
We spent the majority of the summer and fall in the Corpus Christi area and since December 1st we’ve been in South Texas near Weslaco and McAllen, Texas.
At year’s end, our travel map showed the addition of several Mexican states. This represents the 675 days since the onset of retirement.
Our current plans for 2009 will be to move back to the Corpus Christi area sometime in mid-March. In June and July we hope to complete our earlier plans to tour the central US. We will again work our way to South Texas for the remainder of the year with the exception of a period in October to attend Rick’s 45th high school reunion in Rockford, Illinois.
Our intent is to, once again, spend some portion of next winter in Mexico. This time we will head from South Texas to the Pacific Coast rather than the long trek through Tucson. It is undecided whether we will haul the 5th wheel on this trip or just drive the Jeep and find a bungalow to rent.
In any event, by the end of 2009 we hope our map will look like this. The YELLOW areas are the proposed new travel.
