Well, it has been a month since my last post, and it is still cold. Right now the thermometer is saying 34 degrees. Booooo! Oh well, at least the sun has been shining. So, you may be asking yourselves, what have the old folks been up to lately? One of Opa's projects was sausage making. I bought a pork shoulder at Krogers. Opa ground it with my old hand-crank, clamp-it-to-the-table meat grinder. Then he seasoned it with salt and pepper. He had Papaw's old sausage stuffer, and some casings he got from the Troy meat market. If Kasandra gets to read this post, the casings, which are the tubes you stuff the sausage into, are made from the pig's intestines. They are all cleaned and scraped. You place one end of the casing over the tube that comes out of the bottom of the sausage stuffer. Then you push the entire length of the casing onto the tube. The sausage is placed inside the stuffer, and a metal plate is placed at the end of the long screw you can see over the top of the stuffer. As you turn the handle, the screw forces the plate downwards, so that the sausage squishes out the tube and into the casing. It was my job to turn the handle, slowly and steadily. Opa slowly drew the casing out as the sausage filled it, until we had a tube of sausage several feet long coiled up in the pan at his feet. We cut the sausage up into links about 4 inches long, and then we put them in ziplock bags in the freezer. We put water in the bag around the links, because we have found over the years that the sausage stays fresher tasting that way. When we fried up some of the sausage, it was delicious! On March 10, little Eryn was one year old. We went to Cincinnati for her birthday. She had a lot of fun playing with the other little children who came. She also enjoyed the delicious cupcakes that Anna made. She was very neat while she was eating them, and didn't get frosting all over her at all.

Last Saturday we went to Granville for Jared Honeycutt's wedding. It hardly seems possible that it has been almost 12 years since he and Anna graduated from high school. While Jared was studying in Oxford, England, he met Wendy, who is now his wife. (I got to meet her when we visited Oxford in 2007. She laughs a lot, and has a great sense of humor.)Her family is originally from Malaysia, and now lives in Melbourne, Australia. It was a very international wedding, with people there from Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, South Africa, England, and the U.S.

The wedding reception featured an English high tea, a remembrance of their meeting in Oxford. They also had "bangers and mash" (sausages and mashed potatoes) and fish and chips. I was disappointed though - there were no mushy peas, an English delicacy that goes with fish and chips in some pubs. But the food was very good.

Below is a picture of their wedding cake. The two little creatures on top are little English hedgehogs, which are very shy little creatures. Jared and Wendy were very shy and slow in becoming a couple, just like the hedgehogs.

This is Jared and Wendy cutting the cake.

Anna, Jim and Eryn were at the wedding, too. Eryn was very good during the ceremony, quietly dropping pew cards on the floor for us to pick up. The maitre 'd at the reception brought Eryn her own special plate of fruit and yummy macaroni and cheese. She'll have high tea another day.

Jared and Wendy had a specially coreographed dance for their wedding. A friend who does ballroom dancing taught it to them. They had a lot of fun, but I think Jared should go ahead and keep studying for his doctorate. Dancing with the Stars probably won't call this week.

Notice how Jared doesn't look any older than he did as a high school student? If he and Wendy have children who smile as much as they do, they will have a very sun-shiny home indeed.

It was good to see Jo and Clyde, and Jocelyn and her husband Mike. Jocelyn is expecting a little girl July 2. She said they are going to name her Aubrey Nichole, but I don't know if that is how they are going to spell it, so stay tuned. Seth and Emily were there, too. Emily is working on a masters in theology at Wake Forest University.

That about covers all the news for now. We're looking forward to a trip to Atlanta the first week of May for Micah's graduation from Georgia Tech. The week before that I am going out to D.C. for an "Oma deployment." It's going to be a busy spring!