Ann was riding high. Not only does she get to return for free if she kept her tickets, but when the electricity went out she was stranded at the height of the ride. The backup generators supplied enough power to return her to earth.

Once during the year as many as possibly can do the Lagoon thing. During the month of May, I work for 11 days to earn free passes, one per day plus ten extra for working each day, all day. So here we are this year minus those from Utah County as Wendy was having a baby and Brady and Stephanie had three of their family in Florida. It was a fun day! The electricity went out for a couple of hours all over the park so if you saved the tickets, you get to come back for free. What a bargain!

If you want more pictures, contact this family as the Gregory family sent home over 500 pictures of the New York saga.

One of the final things mom did before I left was something she did as we departed from our mission. She even did a little trimming from Chancho!! " Have you cleaned up the hair yet, Joanna?"

The wonderful wives of three lucky men who were the backbone of the whole saga.

President Hinckley said that when a father gets old or becomes a widow, he is blessed indeed if he has daughters to take care of him. Well, I am blessed to have three daughters and the two you see here together I do not usually have the opportunity to put my arm around at the same time; nor do these two daughters often have the opportunity to bond as they did for ten days.

Mom and dad were a little lazy when it was our time to cook. Joanna had mentioned some delicious pizza from Wegmans. So, she ordered a normal pizza for the children and two exotic pizzas for the adults. I cannot remember what the two adult pizzas contained but the word "delicious" does not describe the taste. Soon the kids were begging for the adult pizza. These two huge pizzas, cut into 24 nice squares were less than thirty dollars. This was our after Niagara Falls dinner. If I were still in New York, I would rush right down to Wegman's and buy another exotic pizza right now.

Here is "one of these things is not like the other" quizzes for you. There were 18 people in the Gregory household during vacation time. Chris had to work this day so 17 of us went to Niagara Falls. Of the 17, four did not descend to the Cave of the Wind. So, my question is, which person below is not a Gregory or a Chapman or a Nixon and which four did not descend? As a funny note, on the way home from Niagara I was trying to entertain the children so I asked if they could tell me a word that rhymed with Niagara. In less than a tenth of a second one of the older twins said, "Viagara!"

It does not take much of an imagination to know what title of a hymn from the LDS songbook would be an appropriate title for this picture. Actually, this is one of the activities you can do at the Falls!

Fixing meals was a major part of the vacation. Here we are at Niagara Falls. I was helping prepare the sandwiches but was "fired" because I only put peanut butter on one side of the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and not both sides. Since I was in no mood to argue, I grabbed the camera and got out of the way of these lunch ladies.

I do not know if a sink bath was a first for them, but they sure enjoyed it! I was careful to take a modest picture so when they are teenagers, Liseanne or Jeff can show this picture to the twin's friends!

Given a chance, this kid will find a way to catch the attention of the camera.

One of the meals included "fried chicken." We had purchased three large containers of legs and had to borrow another electric fry pan to cook them all. We thought there would be tons left over but the Gregory children had never eaten fried chicken legs and many of them were in line for seconds before some of the adults had had firsts. Joanna could not believe how well her kids ate the fried legs.

These "salted potatoes" have french fries beat all to heck. They are just small potatoes that are boiled with a cup of salt in the water and then have some butter drizzled on them. They are very popular in upstate New York and Joanna makes them even better at home with an additional step or two!

One of the twelve children in the group was starting her own style of footwear

but luckily, no one else was "booted!"

The Hill Cumorah Pageant was one of the highlights for the 18 people in our group; some of whom have seen it many times and 9 of whom were about to watch it for the first time. The crowds were the largest they have ever been we were told in church as we attended on Sunday.

And while the tomatoes were not yet ready to eat, they were growing profusely.

There were also tons of lovely, fresh, garden vegetables to adorn each meal.

The Gregory yard was visual eye candy of beautiful things to admire...

While mom was doing other things around this vacated house, I was outside watering the corn. I asked our resident LDS farm man how far the church corn was behind this year and he told me three weeks to a month. So, Jeff, you may have corn, but it won't be until about the middle of September if the warm weather comes again. You can see that Heavenly Father was helping me with the irrigation by allowing rain to moisten the land also. Anyway, what lovely ground to work with. Just tons and tons of sand! My hoe loved the workout.

"HI! Is Liseanne there? Liseanne, we were at your house and realized that your sprinkling timer was not working. We need to talk to Jeff so see the settings so we can reset it.....and other things were discussed. I am guessing it( the other things) could not have waited until we landed on Tuesday! However, the important thing is that we reset the sprinkling system and also Heavenly Father has helped out this past week with some timely showers.

P.S. What mom did not tell Jeff and Liseanne was that Max misses them!

Time for a drink at the local bar!

"Oh, bury me not, on the lone prairie"

Gunsmoke is alive and well!

Today, July 9th, we went to the Ogden Farmers Market. What an adventure! Besides hundreds of vendors, along with some fresh produce and other eclectic items for viewing we were able to witness a wild west gun fight. It was fun to see and quite realistic. The following pictures are the sequence of action

Brady and Stephanie introduced us to this restaurant two or three weeks ago. On Friday, in the late afternoon, following the procedure listed earlier, Annice had a great appetite. So, we hopped on the train at 4 P.M. in the afternoon and traveled all the to SLC and then jumped on Trax and went to the end of the line. We then walked ten minutes to this restaurant and had another delicious dinner of salad, soups, breads to die for, fruit, pasta, and some ice cream on top of a chocolate muffin(actually, mom had the chocolate muffin and ice cream) and then returned home the same way. We got home about 9:30 P.M. What a fun date. Would you believe that on the way down on the train we sat with a lady( crowded train) who found out we had a preschool in West Point. The lady in the seat behind us sat listening to our conversation and when we reached the train station in Salt Lake she(the lady who was listening) approached us and introduced herself as ..................................... ! You will have to e-mail us to find out who it was. Please do not call. We never would have believed it!

What a dumb picture to have on a blog! However, it is about the only thing we could post but the purple bandage was full of good news. When you reach our age, you are supposed to have certain medical procedures every five or ten years. The nice thing is that they are free or at a greatly reduced price. This procedure was free and the reduced price would have been $100.00 total. When the procedure was finished, the doctor came in and said, "No cancerous tumors, no polyps, no diverticulitis, a clean intestine, a negative procedure. So, they took out the IV needle and sent a very groggy mother home so her extremely thoughtful husband could pamper her the rest of the day.

Well, I finally did it. I joined the 21st century with this new hearing device. Talk about radical changes. Sound was amplified with the old models but with these new ones, I can really hear much better; no, not much better but a whole lot better. One of the nice features is that I can hold a phone to my ear and there is no squealing or feedback. Only a person who wears aids would appreciate this upgrade.

Does it appear to you that Sheldon and his father-in-law are in an argument?!

July 4th always means a parade down our street. It is as typical of a hometown parade as it comes. The entries are always the same but the breakfast is nice and the family association is great. There is also mucho candy for the grandchildren. Everyone has copies of the pictures that I took and the only reason I included this one was because it had most all of the grandchildren who were present included in the picture. Of the 17 grandchildren who were there, can you tell the three who were not in the picture?

The Joseph Smith Memorial Building recently celebrated its one hundredth birthday so we went to check out the displays in the lobby and other rooms of the old Hotel Utah. It was fascinating. While we were there, we climbed to the ninth floor where they have two restaurants and an observation window. We had never been on that floor before but heard the view of the Temple was quite spectacular. Needless to say, it was!

We went to an expo at the South Towne exposition center a couple of weeks ago. It was an exposition that dealt with far east countries. There were all kinds of food available and some rather interesting displays. This one was the most fascinating. You can see the watermelon, cantaloupe and honey dew melon, along with some vegetables. It was fascinating to watch.

Patch Work charm

Annice has been having dermatology problems so when we got her new insurance which was required at age 65 she decided to have some tests performed. This is the result of the first day at the office. The second day, they read some of the patches and the third day they gave her the verdict. Basically she has to stay away from things with fragrance when it comes to items for her make-up, lotions and the such. There were about 100 patches on her back. The whole process was close to $2,000. We thought the results would be more conclusive but that is what we got.