Thirty Three and Counting

Jo spent several days this week on the road as part of the Forbes Women's tour giving talks in North Carolina, Hartford, CT, and Cincinnati, OH.  The goal is to help empower women and she is having a great time meeting a wide range of people both outside and inside the Northwestern Mutual community.  She traveled and presented with Moira Forbes (daughter of Steven Forbes) and Ingrid Vanderveldt (a well known tech entrepreneur) and it was great chance for her to get to know two exceptional women.  During this she has to survive professional make-up sessions along with media interviews.  The fun thing with Jo is she disliked the make-up sessions more than the interviewing.  You can catch what Business Week online had to say at the following link.

We celebrated our 33rd anniversary on Friday.  We decided to enjoy dinner at the Lake Park Bistro with its view of Lake Michigan - which unfortunately was less than spectacular due to fog rolling in over the still very cold lake.  It was a lovely dinner with a bit too much champagne as we reminisced about the things we have done over all the years and marveled at how fast it all seemed to have happened.  We both decided to sign on for another 30 years and then stop and see how it is going.

Saturday morning dawned to another cloudy, foggy, and slightly raining day and after our morning exercising we packed up the car and headed to the Chicago area.  First stop was a visit with Jo's brother, Bill, who lives in St. Charles.  It was our first time to visit his house and it had been a long time since either of us had seen St. Charles.  We had a great visit catching up on his plans for an upcoming retirement and a fun lunch at the local Blue Goose Market.  Unfortunately we didn't get a chance to see our nephew, Kurt, as he was sleeping the entire time we were there - oh to be young again and to be able to sleep into the wee hours of the afternoon!

After our visit we headed to Elmhurst for the high school graduation party of Jenna, John and Linda's youngest.  We talked about her too-soon-for-her-parents departure for college and it was fun listening to all her plans and her excitement for heading off to one of our favorite schools in the nation - hint, it has the best pizza on the planet, a big, refurbished Alma Mater statue, and Jo and I are rather fond of it.  The party was copiously supplied with lots of tasty treats which we obviously enjoyed since as our full stomachs constantly reminded us on the drive home later that evening.  We also had a few moments to catch up on the latest doings with John and Linda as they prepare to enter their empty nest years

Sunday was reserved for strawberry picking and jam making.  We started first thing in the morning to be sure to get to the local berry patch before it was all picked out - a real risk this year with our cool, raining weather we have been having in June.  Then it was home to begin making four batches of fresh strawberry jam.  There is nothing better than warm jam fresh out of the pot on bread.  We then enjoyed peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches for lunch.  The afternoon consisted of a four mile hike down to the lake to see the airshow.  Unfortunately, the fog ruled again and the airshow was cancelled so we just had a nice walk.  Then it was home for a dinner of  grilled tuna steak with roasted vegetables and catching up on our backlog of newspapers.