Pictures! Pictures! and More Pictures from my phone!

I did a photo dump and here they are:

I recovered our dining room chairs. I started the project by myself but before it was over, Mark helped me which made the project go much faster. I used a very neutral fabric so that we won't be tied to a certain color for artwork and rugs. We still have to buy those. I've recovered these chairs a lot of times.

We've been having lots of folks on Tuesday night. The last two weeks, we had 18 of them plus the two of us.

We've been to see granddaughter #1 cheer on her team.

As I was leaving for work one morning, I was stopped by the duck brigade.

For 13 years, we've been hosting the young adults on Tuesday nights and I've always used paper plates and disposable cups. Our new dishwasher will hold a LOT of dishes so we ordered plates and cups that can be washed and reused.

The cups are made of wheat straw! Plates and cups were purchased from Amazon.

For the women's retreat, I spray painted a whole bunch of picture frames. Most of the frames were from Amazon and I bought this amazing paint nozzle to go on top of the can. I read about it on someone's blog recently. It is a game changer.

Speaking of Women's Retreat, it was amazing. On Friday night, we watched Barbie outside on the giant blow up screen. The movie was much deeper than I anticipated.

Our theme this year was Portraits. We heard stories from three different women about their lives and how God has worked in and through them. We studied women of the Bible and we studied women who have shaped the Christian faith. We opened the retreat with a funny skit. This is us behind the black curtain. We are a part of a AI art exhibit. I was the Mona Lisa (of course!). We all started talking to each other and about each other while the "docent" was trying to tell the audience about the photos. One of my friends writes the skits and she has done a great job. I'm on the far right.

This is what the art exhibit looked like from the front. At a certain point in the skit, we removed the mouths from the paintings and inserted our lips.

This is my friend, Laura R. who received the call to ministry while we were in Israel in 2020 - right before the world shut down. She just finished seminary earlier this year and is one of our associate pastors. We were roommates.

Emily gave the first talk and her talk was a great beginning for the retreat. The real retreat is from 10 a.m. Saturday until 10:00 a.m. Sunday. We have found that most women can slip away for 24 hours. We also have some ladies who come just for the day and don't spend the night. We've tried to be flexible so that all who want to do so, can attend.

Kim was our Saturday afternoon speaker.

This is my other friend, Laura E. She is the writer of the skit and she is one of the fun people in my life. I love having friends of multiple generations.

This was the view from our room on Sunday morning. It was lovely!

This was the set up for the last talk -- I don't have a picture. After the talk, we had communion and each person took a flower from the arrangements and laid them at the foot of the cross.

I think I told y'all that I was making/baking 600 cheese straws. We packaged them like this and they were left in everyone's rooms.

I don't know if you can read this or not, but this is beautiful. It is about all of the women that we have been, are, and will be.

As each person arrived, the first stop was an "appointment" with two young women who are members of our church and who are professional photographers. They took photos (portraits) of every single woman who attended and then they made a montage that we watched on Saturday night. The slide show was set to Image of God by We Are Messengers (great song!!) - we were all created in the image of God. I see all of the wrinkles and very little make up BUT I was created in the image of God!!

Mark went and picked up our golf cart. It has been in our son's basement since the fire. I know our granddaughter is going to miss it!!

We went on a quick ride after work. The moon was spectacular but I didn't do a good job of snapping a photo.

We started decorating for Halloween - it is a big deal in our neighborhood . . .and I love it!