Thursday, April 12, 2007

Merry Chris....No, wait, it's Easter!

Well, the Easter Bunny had a little fun with us this year! We had almost 2 feet of snow in Chardon starting on Saturday and extending all day through Sunday. Here I was thinking we’d see daffodils, maybe get to do a little pre-season work in the garden! Even for Northeast Ohio, this was unusual. As a consequence, the Chardon Maple Festival – traditionally held the weekend after Easter – was postponed a week. And these are people who are used to dealing with a lot of snow! Here’s a shot of the Sunday morning scene as we were digging our way out.

Despite the unseasonable weather, we did have a nice Easter. Phyllis and Tadd came by on their way home to Michigan to see the house and make some recommendations on the renovation plans. Michael took the Greyhound bus from Pittsburgh on Friday and spent the weekend. We celebrated the holiday a day early, as we had to be back in CT for both Don’s and my work on Monday. Serendipitously, Nancy and Lucy Blum were visiting Louise in Hudson, and we enticed them all to come up for Easter dinner on Saturday. Together with VMF regulars Jan Oakley, Jean Krizman and Jim Blum and the Lewis-Kovac’s we had 15 for dinner. We had a big fire in the living room and even though it was more like Christmas than Easter outside, we had a nice time. Here's Don doing the traditional Valentine family 'bunny ears' behind Jan, with Jean adding some needed maturity to the scene!

House plans continue apace. Don and I spent some time with the architect and builder and designer while we were out there, and we now have a pretty good handle on what we’d like to do, and now we just have to see what it will cost! As an old friend of ours told Don once, “You don’t have to be handy with power tools if you’re handy with money!”. Our architect has a very cool program that lets him enter all the dimensions and details and then you get a 3D view which you can look at from all different angles. It helped enormously to get an accurate sense of what it will look like when its done, and its so quick to make changes that you can explore a lot of different ideas fast. I’ll post a picture later on when we get closer to a ‘final’ drawing.