Back to Dancing

We haven't danced since last Wednesday, so we were a bit uncertain how well we would do at Darryl's workshop this afternoon. We were generally pleased with how well it went, despite some wandering... Gabe and Martha are back in the Valley, and we got to dance with them twice. They're doing remarkably well for their first time back. Bob Boyink danced with Jean Hayden (Curt was off visiting family in Colorado). Bob said that Pat has rescheduled her chemo so that she'll feel good enough to come to the New Year's Eve dance. Everyone missed Hardy and Judy.

When we came back to the park after the dance, it was around 4:30 p.m. and overcast, so we decided to take our walk. It was very smoky outside. Ken commented that it smelled like a giant bonfire. We're not sure where the smoke was coming from, but it didn't make breathing easy. We walked over to the park and spied a few birds. Actually, we saw flocks of thousands of boat tailed grackles earlier, when we were driving by the fields along Inspiration Highway. They darkened the fields and the skies. Wikipedia says that such large groups of these birds are commonly referred to a a plague of grackles, and it's not hard to see why. They might easily have been the inspiration for Hitchcock's film, The Birds.

We decided that we needed to withdraw some money from our retirement accounts before the end of the year. I called Toni Panovec, with Smith Barney in the Cleveland area. My mom and brother had accounts there, and when Mom passed on in 2007, I was one of the beneficiaries of her IRA. Closing that account today marked a kind of break with the past and reminded me of the sadness of losing Mom and my brother Bob.