A Big Week and Weekend for the Raffs

We are having a most wonderful week filled with many simchas (Jewish for blessings!)

We celebrated my 59th birthday this week, our 32nd wedding anniversary, our dog Willow's one year birthday and we'll soon be celebrating our BIG wedding coming up this Memorial Day weekend.

The first photo shows Laura's wonderful family from Boston and Texas who arrived midweek to help assemble hotel guest welcome baskets and help with transporting flowers, vases, table decorations, etc. to and from our house here in Milford to the Ann Arbor venue for the wedding events.

The second photo shows us after our "one" of our celebration dinners this week. We had just taken everyone out to dinner to Cinco Lagos (Five Lakes) restaurant and had come back home to relax and visit with our most recent wedding guest arrivals -- Genie (our stem cell donor) and Meryl (our Israeli family) arrive most recently.

We have to quiz Meryl every time she comes to visit us. How many grandchildren? How "old" is the youngest one you still have at home? (20 grandchildren from her five married children and age 15 is the youngest of her "still at home" children.)

I will be updating this blog very soon because we will have wedding pictures to share.

Until then....

Haiku:

Time to be present

Many simchas and blessings

Take time to savor each one.

A Trip to Washington, DC

The top photo is a giant moth or butterfly in the butterfly exhibit at the Museum of Natural History in DC where you could walk into an enclosed space and let the butterflies land on you and walk on you then fly on to the next fower. Those with bright colors on -- like Gil in his pink salmon shirr -- got bombarded by flapping wings.

Gil and I were in Washington, DC earlier in the month for a Nuclear Medicine conference he was speaking to. We were also lucky enough to have dinner one of the two nights we were there with his old boyhood friends from Brooklyn. Storied were regaled. Embarrassing moments were shared. "Well, we were a lot younger then." was heard all around.

Gil is sitting next to Smithsonian Institution's Castle in a little "pocket park" that I insist we visit each time we are in DC. It is called the Mary Livingston Ripley Garden and I like that so much of it is at waist level so there's not so much bending down and squinting to see the names of the plants.

Our wedding is coming up in 11 days and the plans are coming together. My next blog entry will give the details and capture in photos the "work parties" to make everything ready for the big weekend. I think the rain is going to stop and let us have a beautiful sunny weekend for the event.

Haiku

Love interests hang

on the most fragile of threads

Barely within reach.