Lincoln Birthday Pictures

Lincoln's 200th Birthday

I made it to the Lincoln Memorial on his 200th birthday to place a dozen red roses with a ribbon labeled "The Lincoln Society of Athens, Ohio." I will try to post some pictures.

Yes, We Can!

Somehow or other I have hope that we will manage a reunion this year. I would be happy to help host in Athens at the guesthouse at Mom and Dad's. We have no big travel plans for the next few months, other than a trip to Chicago for our niece's wedding on April 25. Our bank acount still needs to rebound from our fall adventure in Australia.

M.E.

A monkey wrench in the spring plans

To any and all...... and update to M.E. and Nanell,

We're trying to plan a spring get-together, likely in Athens, but open to other ideas. We were thinking May or June. Everyone else check your calendars for May and June and post good and bad times. However, I've encountered a possible snag and won't know for a few weeks for sure.

Add pilonidal cysts to the list of things you don't want to have. Rachel is in the middle of having one treated and it's painful, extremely gross, humiliating and a tad barbaric... No one knows how they form (exactly anyway) and she has absolutely none of the risk factors except she's under 30 (but barely). They don't really have a good way to treat them either!!!! So much for modern medicine.

I'm not explaining what it is here (you can look online for yourself), but it takes about 6 weeks to heal (she's in week 1 and it is healing fine); then they recommend surgery hopefully before it occurs again (which is likely). She's also thinking ahead to May and wants me to come for a week. Since she's hardly ever asked me to do anything like this, and since I missed both of her emergency ovarian surgeries, I think I must do it.

I still want to plan to get together -- When we figure out the timing, I will keep you informed. she sees the doctor next week for follow up and is going to see if they can tentatively schedule the surgery. He may want her to do it sooner, in which case my only issue will be a lot of time away from work (which is currently low on my list of priorities). I'll be out for at least 2 weeks in late jan/early Feb for my bunion surgery, and then a week for Rachel and whatever time we plan. Good thing I have 400 hours of paid time off saved up.......... even with 2 weeks in alaska this year and a lot of time off for the holidays, I seem to accrue it as fast as I use it up.

Time to catch up

After talking to Anne and Mary Ellen in a three-way phone conversation this morning, we thought it might be a good idea to try to revive the Ideal Women's Club blog so we could more easily keep track of each other. I don't know about you guys, but I avoid the telephone like the plague. I'm not high-tech enough for a Blackberry, but I find the Internet useful in lots of ways and spend some time here every day, so it's easy to check a blog once you bookmark it.

Some "how-to" advice: If you want to write your own entry, then sign in and click on "Create Post." As far as signing in, the first time you may have to set up a Google blogger account, which, if you do, you just click on and enter your e-mail address and a password. After that, you should just be able to click on "Sign In" at the top right corner.

If you want to comment on someone else's blog entry, go to the bottom of the entry, and you'll see a small "COMMENT" that you can click on. Sometimes it will show that there are other comments, and you can just click on them and read the comments that are already there. But you can add your own too.

If you want to add photographs, you can use any that you have on your computer or go to a photo-sharing site like www.flickr.com or Google Images and snag a photo to illustrate (like I did, above). But you don't need pictures unless you want to post photos of grandkids, etc., which we would all love to see. When you are composing your entry, on the top toolbar there is a photo icon between the ABC checkmark icon and the filmstrip icon. You just click on that and then you can browse your photo collection and upload any to your blog entry.

It would be great if we could all stay in touch more frequently, because it gets overwhelming to try to figure out where to start when we try to catch up.

I've redesigned the blog to make it more colorful and hope some of you will participate.

If you have questions, just e-mail them to me at nwhalen@frontiernet.net.

IDEAL WOMEN

What a wonderful idea and how amazing to view these photos on the web! I am looking forward to keeping in touch with everyone via this blog……ie, as soon as our company leaves on Tuesday night. Thank you so much Nanell for thinking of this and bringing us all together -
Love, Nanell CC I

Ideal women

Photo of Patti, Anne, Nan, Mary and Suz taken in Florida in 1997 -- the sign says it all

Having been considered less than, shall we say, "ideal" in high school but having matured into total babes, we took this picture to mark our 50th year when we were visiting Patti in Florida.

My hope for this blog is that we can rejoice in the fact that Athens High School is long ago and far away, but the close bonds of friendship we forged through our long-suffering are very much alive. More ideal women shown below.

In these pages, may we celebrate, comfort, share and gripe to our hearts' content, and most of all, may we remember that there are no friends like old friends.