"As I See It"

JD has just published his first book! JD is a talented photographer who began showing his work at art fairs around the south about a year and a half ago. Most of the images were taken within a ten mile radius of our house here in Blount County. I'm telling you about this not so much to sell the book (although that's always nice) but to say how great is self publishing? I'm sure everyone has heard about the online publishing companies by now and let me tell you the service was great and the finished book quality could not be any better. It's a book of photos and the color was spot on. He used Blurb because he had heard their color was good. If you've got a book in you, I'd highly recommend having it printed so you can hold it in your hands, and share it with friends and family. You can order one, or hundreds; the price per book stays the same. Very reasonable. Think of the possibilities!

The Long Road Home

I'm going to borrow a line from my daughter over at Who Knows What and say let's just pretend I haven't been absent for over a month. I don't know what happened. But here's what happened last week. Remember last weekend? The weekend it was so very very cold, everywhere? We picked that weekend to visit my daughter in North Carolina. We were going to leave her house Sunday morning, before the snow and cold weather came in, but guess what - we got up Sunday morning and there had been freezing rain Saturday night. And then snow on top of that. The road to their house is a narrow one lane road hanging on the side of the mountain which makes a couple of hairpin turns then goes almost straight up. Sunday it looked like a ski jump. So we weren't able to get out until Thursday afternoon when the temperature got above freezing. And we had put down 80 pounds of de-icer.

Once we accepted the fact that we weren't leaving for a few days, we had a wonderful time. We're from Alabama and snow is a big deal to us. We haven't even seen snow since Winter Storm '93 when Birmingham got an unheard of 16 inches. It's one of my fondest memories even though we had no power for seven days.

The woods and frozen streams and waterfalls in the mountains were beautiful and we walked and walked. We had plenty of groceries and satellite TV, what more could you ask for? I also got to spend extra time with my beautiful one year old grandson. So all in all I could not have planned a better winter vacation. Thank you so much Rob and Melanie for having us. I give your B&B five stars.