How did Monday get here already?  It seems like I just left for retreat!

This will probably be short and sweet because I am still worn out from my weekend!  I drug my sleepy body of out bed this morning to get ready for work, but I sure did not want to.  Mondays are tough anyway, but especially the kind of Mondays that come after a wonderful weekend away with a bunch of ladies where you stay up and play Five Crowns till 1:00 A.M.!

I used to love to play cards when I was a kid.  The card game we most played, because we weren’t aloud to play with “real” cards, was Rook.  It was a really fun game and I remember that we could play it for hours.  I had a little friend that I would play with and we would sometimes make up our own rules for the game whenever we got tired of playing by the Rook rules! 

I had never heard of Five Crowns and on Friday night, a group of ladies gathered around the coffee table to play and I told them I’d watch and learn.  They said that would never do….you have to PLAY in order to learn, so they handed me some cards and it was an easy game to learn.  I loved it.  And whether or not there is such a thing….I had some beginners luck.  I won a few rounds and came in second by the end of the ten rounds.  It was quite an addictive game.  Some ladies went up stairs to their rooms to go to sleep, but a few of us hung out and played again.  I loved it!  So imagine how tickled I was when the ladies gave me a birthday bag on Saturday night of the retreat that contained a sweet card signed by everyone and a brand new deck of Five Crowns!!!

Another cool thing this weekend was to stop by and see Anna Ruby Falls.  I’ve never hiked up to see any Falls before.  One of the girls suggested it wasn’t too far from where we were and we could stop by and see it before we headed home.  The day was a perfect day.  We drove up the side of the mountain and it was gorgeous.  We found a parking space and hit the trail that said it was a 4/10 of a mile hike up to the falls. The weather was just cool enough to keep you from being too hot.  And the sight of those Falls was well worth the effort to get to see it.  Of course I didn’t have my camera with me (I can never remember to take it), but trust me, the view was breath taking!  On the way down, we crossed a part of the path where the water was coming down a little creek and all you had to do was to step on a few rocks and you could get a taste of that cool, clear, mountain water.  So I did just that!  I stuck my hand in that cool, icey water and had a few sips of yummy creek water.  Of course my friend told me she hoped I didn’t get any parasites from drinking that water….gee, thanks!  Oh well, I was baptized in creek water just like that about 35 years ago and I know I swallowed some then, so I guess a little creek water can’t be too bad!