Our House In…

November 23, 2015 and counting:  Our goal was Blessing, Texas by Thanksgiving to spend the holiday with Laura’s mom.  Laura’s family moved to Blessing in the mid-80s and Laura graduated from the local high school.

We made it ahead of schedule and will be here for a while as we wrap up details before moving across the border.

Contrary to the name, the first part of the visit was no blessing.  About 20 miles short of town we stopped for groceries.  Blessing has multiple convenience stores and a combination barber shop / liquor store, but not much in the way of groceries.  Heading out of the parking lot, our van’s AC decided to evacuate all of its Freon in an impressive display of sight and sound.  Happily it didn’t disable the vehicle, so we continued our journey.

We arrived at Bobby’s house (Laura’s mom).  Not long after, we discovered the kitchen sink was leaking.  This was not promising for our upcoming Thanksgiving, so we proceeded to “take a look” at the problem.  This resulted in the sink no longer leaking . . . if you consider draining directly into a bucket something different than a leak.

From this point, Blessing did a better job of living up to its name.  Bobby’s friend George was willing, able, and, importantly, equipped to come over and fix the sink.  George is a local history buff, and we were treated to stories about Blessing’s prominent founding family, as well as an old gunslinger George met in his youth who allegedly did “work” for that prominent family.

We were then able to have a mellow Thanksgiving with Bobby and our friend Cody, one of Laura’s high school classmates and honorary brother.  The next night we added two more classmates to the mix  (Lisa and Beverly) and caught up on all the local gossip.

Over the course of our stay we caught up with some of Laura’s former teachers (and Bobby’s former colleagues), her first real boss from the days of waitressing at the American Legion, and had a surprise visit from Cody’s dad.  No visit is complete without stopping in to say hello to Helen at The Hotel Coffee Shop at the Blessing Hotel.

 

We have been more or less stationary for a week, and we’ve had some time to do some evaluating and repacking, and finish some projects that didn’t get done before we left, like wiring in the new Surge Guard surge/voltage protector:

We also got the Freon recharged.  Not sure whether it’s good or bad that the mechanic couldn’t figure out why the over pressure pop-off blew.  It’s working fine now, but we don’t know whether it’ll happen again.

The weather over the last couple of weeks, mostly cool and overcast, has been pretty poor for photography, but it has been good for walking.  And that’s a nice way to  get the lay of the land and meet some of the local characters.

Being in Blessing for a longer-than-usual stay has been a nice opportunity to catch up with friends and family, but soon it will be time to head South.

But first, we’re going North . . .