Posts Tagged friends

Pics from Alison’s first birthday in America :)

We had a lovely dinner at BJ’s restaurant in Jarvisburg. Mom bought us dinner and had made arrnagements to have the table decorsted with flowers and gifts and we were joined for dinner by Tracey, Megan and Grace and Phil and his wife Kathy. afterwards it was a stop by tracey’s house where she and the kids had made a cake and more flowers and presents. Just a wonderful evening we had. Happy Birthday Mrs G! I love you! xxx

Alison’s Birthday

This past Saturday evening all the girls took Alison out for a night on the town as a leaving party. Alison will likely do a post or write something about it so I will just present a small slide show of some of the pictures

too bad we dont have any video from the karaoke sessions though, I have a feeling quite a few of the girls were feeling pretty good about that time of the evening ;)

I was reading my friend Mike’s blog, The Top of Texas Gazette, the other day and he had found this very cool widget from Feedjit. Its a live traffic feed widget to add to your website, and though its not giving you as much information as a full fledged tracking tool such as Google Analytics, its really a great tool to see quickly where your traffic is coming from and it works very close to real time, well with each page refresh. Mike’s always having some really clever finds posted to his blog as well as a lot of humour, good music, great photo blog posts and even the serious posts as well, a little something for everyone there in the panhandle of Texas, so have a look sometime. ;) Tell him G sent you

The widget is easily customised to incorporate it into your own site or blog. Its a handy tool to see at a quick glance where your traffic is coming from. As he mentioned in his post, he knows where his friends live so he can see at a glance who has dropped by and the same with me, If I see a hit from Lemesos, Cyprus, and I know fairly well thats my baby or one of her friends, and of course Amarillo, Texas is likely Mike. But generally the cities that show are I am guessing where the local traffic from the surrounding areas is routed to. For instance I know he doesnt live in Amarillo, just its the closest relay to him. (I dont know if relay is the correct term but I’m using it ;)! ) Its pretty neat and pretty accurate too. The only thing I can see is it only will show where you came from if you actually select a direct link form some site, just typing in the address wont show up, neither will it show where you left off to unless its a link on the site you are on. . Well its still a great tool I think and I was going to add it to our site on blogger, but my baby beat me to it! Oh she’s getting good now with this sort of thing :) Well I like to think I am teaching her some things , but I think she picks up things a lot better than she lets on ;) It doesnt seem to add much time to loading a page either which is nice, as I already probably have just a few too many things there in the right column as it is increasing the load times and the overall consensus is already saying WordPress is a bit slow to begin with.

I mentioned above about it not showing actually the city you are living in but where the connection is made to the internet. In my case I live very near t the coast of northeastern North Carolina in a town called Grandy. the first time I saw the feed on Mike’s site it has me in Raleigh, NC and yesterday it was showing me in Kenly, NC and today its saying Lillington, NC. Well I have never even heard of either Kenly or Lillington!Well I had to look them up then to see where they were.

This pin on the far left is Lillington, the next one to it is Kenly and the one in the upper right is where I actually live so you can see its really not so accurate but only to a good size area. Not that it makes a difference really as you know generally when its someone you already know pretty well.  (I love this map feature in Live Writer by the way)

The biggest advantage it has is you can see at a glance when you have had some hits from say a search engine or another blog and what people are actually reading on your site.

Say a prayer for the family and friends of Susie Pratt a longtime friend who lost a hard tough fight to cancer this last weekend. She and Gretchen were best friends. close as sisters.

Cynthia Susanne Pratt  Susie

December 5, 1949 (?)  – May 2, 2008

Cynthia Susanne Pratt WILLIAMSBURG – Cynthia Susanne Pratt, 59, a loving wife, mother and grandmother passed away late in the afternoon May 2, 2008, after a long and valiant battle with cancer. Always a generous soul who loved sharing with those less fortunate, she will be greatly missed by her family, friends and the community. A native of Chesapeake, she was born in Norfolk to Ernest Cola and Grace Thomas Harding. She is survived by her husband of 40 years, Jim; son and daughter, Jaime and Casey; granddaughters, Alexa and Ramsey; sisters, Sharon Palmasano of Ortanna, Pa., and Ann Goodwin of Elizabeth City, N.C.; and brother, Phillip Harding of Chesapeake. A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Friday in Twiford’s Funeral Home on Battlefield Boulevard, Chesapeake. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that any donation be made in her memory to Autism Speaks at www.autismspeaks.org.

Published in The Virginian Pilot on 5/6/2008.

An online guest book has been set up online if you wish to post a message to the family. Thanks for the contributions to maintain the guest book permanently.

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He shall direct your paths.” (Proverbs 3:5-6)

X X X X X I love you Alison <3

Well this post is going to be a bit different in a way from most on here…  Alison and I have spent the last two years faithfully writing each other each morning and night and in between too. Only the rare occasion when one of us has been on a plane to see the other have we ever missed a mail to each other! It just feels strange to not be writing one tonight so I came up with this brilliant idea to not only send my Angel a kiss,but also tell her what I am up to this evening (and in the process I have another post on my site! ;)  Well i could still send her an email but she may not get it until she is home as she’s in Protaras this weekend with JM and her longtime friend Anne, who is visiting her for a couple of weeks. They are staying at the Sunrise Beach Hotel. JM has his laptop and I can of course send a mail to his account, but I’m sure he’s not really so excited to be the middle man for mushy love mails! LOL Well i will mail the link to this post instead. I know they only may have just a few minutes online as the hotel there is charging for Internet access… unless JM can find an open WiFi connection that is! ;) Its a shame really considering the prices of hotel rooms, especially these bigger ones, that internet service is not provided in each room free to guests. I know here there are a lot of them now offering it as part of the amenities. As are a lot of coffee shops and the like. Considering now how so many other devices besides PC’s are suing the internet and are Wifi enabled, cell phones (mobiles), game consoles, mp3 players, PDA’s.. oh the list is increasing all the time, it really should be something that becomes quite common now.  Oh l’m rambling here too in the post, just as I do in the mails! See Alison, its not just you I ramble on with! lol

(more…)

Well looking at the dates of the last posts one would think we had forgot about the site! Well we are still here and doing better than ever! :) We do seem to spend much more time now, since this last holiday together especially, trying every chance we can to get together for a chat, or to speak on Skype, and then there is still the mails we write each day. Oh the mails we have written!! It amazes me sometimes just to realize that every single day since April 5 of 2006 we have had at least one mail every day, and many times as much as a dozen a day! They say its hard work to maintain a long distance realtionship… well maybe… yes it is hard to be that far a apart, but never once have I thought of it as work! I hate work, ask my employer! lol But seriously it has been nothing but love and desire to be ever closer to my soulmate that I have opened every new mail with a smile on my face and in my heart just to tell her I love her. And its even harder now to spend one more day aprt now that we have shared our times together and seen face to face that we are meant for each other just as we knew. That was proably one of the hardest saddest days of my life to get back on that plane in Cyrpus to come back the US, and you know we have both seen some bad days. But still our love endures and it always will! Oh I’m getting a bit sugary here arent I?! lol well you should read our chats then if you think thats sugary! OH maybe not! ;) lol

WellI admit I am totally lost (and found) in love with this Beautiful Brit, and strange as it may sound to some, I alwasy have been. From the very first time we spoke I felt I had known her all my life and she will say the same. You all know our stories, and I will always believe it was a match made in heaven by God and our angels. Some things just dont happen, I dont care what anyone says. The things we have seen and felt.. incredible… I cant reason it, or begin to explain it, but know this, God has a plan for us all! Even if we don’t believe it ourselves. Take it for what it’s worth. :)

I have to laugh sometimes when I think back to the early days after we met and how some people seemed to act so surprised that we met online, and some were even shocked! Well in truth there were more positve response than any negative ones. But it surprised me when people would ask one of us , how do you know they are who they say they are? Ok I can understand it to a degree as there are so many stories you hear of weirdos and worse online, but think about it… Even in a face to face meeting, how can you be sure the other is who they say they are either? you can’t! And God knows all you have to do is turn on the TV and see the crazy folks in the world who are described by friends and family as alwasy seeming nice and being known by them all their life, and then turning out they go on a shooting spree or some other mad horrible thing. You can still get the sense and feel of a person just as much from writing them as you can from meeting them. Maybe even more so as you are focused on their words more and listen to each other.. and it doesnt take long to see who is truthful and who isnt, Well I dont know the point I am getting to, just some things I wanted to say. Well everyone who knows me has seen the happiness in me now and the love too. And they are ALL happy fo me, for us! Most of all I am happy for us! :) ecstatically happy!! And looking forward to a future I know is going to be even more incrdeible that anything I could ever imagine. :) Oh that picture above is from a photo of us here in May that I worked on and tried to create a painting from. It is one of my favourite pictures. I look at it and it just seems to exude love and passion and a love beyond measure in that embrace and kiss. My every waking moment is spent in that sort of dreamy feel of a happiness beyond compare too. Well we all have days that things dont go right, or something happens, but you know what? Nothing can take the smile from my heart that Alison Michelle has put there, it gets me through everything! Love is all you need.. every thing else is just… fluff! I love you baby xxxx I do!

To Maureen and Jack for the wonderful engagement present! Alison’s mam and dad gave us a nice holiday within a holiday! We spent Monday through Wednesday in the Alexander the Great Hotel in Paphos. It was such a wonderful time and we both appreciate it so very much! Can’t wait to thank you in person, it’s a memory that wil last a lifetime! :)

Thanks also to Agneta and George for a wonderful lunch in Vouni, to Allyson & Marios and Thereza & Andros for making me feel welcome, to Dee and Philip for their hospitality, to Frosso for a lovely evening of chat and company, to Julie and the people at Mom’s bar on the base I met and had chance to speak to, to all of Alison’s coworkers at 3D for the welcome I received and a special thanks to JM for making me feel welcome and for getting the grill going!! lol :), can’t forget Benji either! What a wonderful time I had there and can;t wait to go back! Love and best wishes to all