My Hometown:

Look at this amazing photo that was taken by a new connection from Vermilion, Ohio, my hometown. Scott Dommin has started posting photos on a Facebook page about Vermilion. and I've been enjoying a tour of the local sights.

The lighthouse isn't functional, but is a replica of an 1877 one that stood in the Vermilion Harbor long ago. It sits right next to the little Inland Seas Maritime Museum. Immediately to the right, just past the bushes is the sometimes sandy and sometimes rocky shore of Lake Erie.

This picture reminds me of the awesome summer storms that I could see from my 2nd story bedroom window. They would roll in off Lake Erie filling the skies with this spectacular lightening show. It was mostly exciting, but sometimes a bit frightening when the thunder and lightening got a little too close for comfort.

We used to swim in the lake until the last possible moment before the storm came in, then we'd go swimming again after the storms. We would always be guaranteed great waves at those times, which made things quite interesting. I remember one time being convinced that I would never make it back to the pier because the waves kept washing me farther and farther away. But God was watching over me and I did make it back safe and sound.

Just another reminder of God's constant protective hand on us. What an awesome God we serve! He's big enough to create the storms, but personally involved enough to carry us thru them!

Thanks Scott, for sharing this picture.

Simple Summer Pleasures...
I don't know if you like food as much as I do, but there are certain kinds of food that have etched indelible memories in my mind.

I have always loved summer and the promise of fresh fruits and vegetables! Growing up in Ohio and having a grandmother that sold produce at her roadside stand for a living, made me appreciate it even more. We often had fresh picked melons, tomatoes, beans, and more straight from the garden. Have you ever bit into a Beefsteak tomato that's bigger and deeper red than an apple and let the juice just drip down your chin? There's really nothing that compares to it.

And to this day, some of my favorite meals were the summer corn roasts that we used to have at our neighborhood HOA clubhouse overlooking Lake Erie.

My dad would build a grill about 6 feet long and 4 feet wide from cinder blocks and metal grates and he and the other neighborhood dads would roast corn (in the husks) until everyone had their fill. That aroma was so amazing and the taste of sweet corn picked that morning, swimming in butter was to die for! Did you know that the longer the corn is off the stalk, the less sweet it is? So the sooner you can cook it after you pick it, the better it will be.

At those corn roasts, the women would all bring their best picnic dishes, potato salad, watermelon, hot dogs, baked beans, apple pies, chocolate cakes and the works. The kids just enjoyed the feast on extra long picnic tables topped with red checked cloths. We'd skip down to the beach every few hours to take a dip, cool off and work up an appetite, then come back up the hill for more scrumptious food! What a day it was! Summer and corn season always reminds me of those special days.

Anyway, I digress...down memory lane.

Today I'm talking about a few other simple treats. I've been trying to take more healthy food to work for lunch lately and have been buying more celery. I really like celery. It's nearly the perfect snack, after all. My problem is that if I don't cut it up all at once I'm too lazy to do it in the morning when I'm putting together my lunch. So, I cut up these stalks yesterday and just LOVED the way they looked in the container. You know that if you store them in water they stay crisp and fresh and you can just grab a few whenever the urge strikes.

I also bought this little pot full of fresh Basil from our local Sprouts store. I love having these around to pinch off a few leaves for salads, sandwiches or other recipes. I'm hoping to be able to start my own little herb garden soon, so I have access to other herbs all the time. Once you've had fresh herbs, you never want to go back to the dry kind.

The Desert Botanical Garden here in town has a class on Herb Gardening that I'd love to take the next time it's offered. Would anyone like to take it with me?

Random Thoughts:

Wow! It's been almost 2 weeks since my last post. Where did the time go? So I just have a bunch of random stuff to post today.

First: Obadiah Parker made it to the 3rd round. Yay! Now they only have 5 more days of voting to get into the final 5 and they really need your help. Here's a note from Mat. "They've chosen the top 20 bands for the Austin City Limits Concert possibilities and have six days to get as many votes as we can to get in the top five. If we do this we will automatically go to Austin to participate in the final round. This is a really cool opportunity for us and we're relying solely on our fans to make this happen for us. You can vote everyday for every email address that you have. You can also spread the word anyway you can!"

Here the link. Click here to vote please!

Next: I came across this photo that Julie Thrush took of Terry & me when we were in Greer. I don't remember if I posted it before, but I really like it, so here it is again.

I got together with my mom on Friday night and got started gathering some family history. I sat with my laptop and just asked her questions about her and my dad and typed the answers. I'm hoping to continue doing this when we get together, because there's so much that we don't have documented about their lives and those of our family, and she rarely took pictures. I think it made her feel good that someone is interested in her life and I love getting the info down in writing. Since I've been blogging and taking more photos, and since Amy's been scanning the old Hann family photos, I realize just how precious all that information will be in a generation or two. I would love to find details about my grandparents and great grandparents, but there isn't much around. Someday, hopefully someone will really enjoy all this info. Even if they don't, I'm enjoying gathering it.

She also showed me some pics that my brother, Pat sent to her. This is the little house that he's living in now in Vermilion, Ohio. He really likes the fact that it's so quiet. It's also just a few blocks to Lake Erie and just steps to the post office, a little cafe, stores, etc. He seems to be much happier there. He's quite a loner and very sensitive to outside noises, so a detached home is the perfect option for him.

Next random thought...Terry and I watched Rain Man last night. I LOVE that movie! I'm not usually much for rating my absolute favorites of anything, because I have a hard time being that black and white, but Rain Man has got to be in my top picks for best movies ever. Dustin Hoffman is fantastic in this role and the story is just so sweet!!

I'm trying to go through my photos and determine which ones will go on the wall in our hallway. We have a decent amount of space for a little family gallery, but with the big families that we both have, it's hard to decide what to put up. I have an 8 x 10 of my dad at 24 and my mom at 13 that are great! They will definitely be in the mix. I'm trying to post them here, but I keep getting an error. I'll keep trying because they're worth seeing.

Maybe I'll choose a couple of the old Hann photos for the wall too. I'm looking forward to getting them from Amy when she's done scanning all the old slides. She's been sending some great ones...like this of the Hann boys in Tombstone AZ! (Terry is the cute one on the right.) And don't miss Tom behind the bar.

Here are a few more favorite pics and a link to all my pictures from my trip to Vermilion.

Unfortunately, they're not in any kind of order and there are quite a few, but if you look at them in a slideshow you can set the speed so it goes pretty fast. Some have captions and some don't. I got tired of doing them and wanted to get these out before the end of the year. Some will probably seem kind of random...doorknobs and such, but these are little pieces of my aunt's cottage that are great memories for me. I hope you enjoy some of them!

There are some very cute ones of my niece and nephew (Sharon's grandkids). Kids are always so adorable!

I look forward to hearing from you too.

Left to right (youngest to oldest) me, Sharon, Pat, Diane.

Things I love about the Cottage:

The cottage is one of my favorite places. There's so much to know about it and so much to see that I'll have to do it in several installments. When we were back in Vermilion this time we made some new discoveries.

This watercolor below was painted by a neighbor in 1961 (when I was 3 years old). It depicts my grandmother's fruit and vegetable stand that was just down the road from the cottage. That's how their family made a living and probably why she had so many kids. She was an amazing gardener with a huge farm full of everything delicious...acres and acres of fresh sweet corn, watermelon, turnips, apples, peppers and dozens of other healthy treats. I used to stay with her and my cousin, Karen on the farm for a few weeks every summer. It was heaven! Even though this painting is far from professional, it brings back wonderful memories of her place.


But I digress...this is supposed to be about the cottage.

Here are just a few of the things that I love about the place:

LURES: My uncle has a boat and loves to fish on the lake. He used to take us out when we were kids. You can see that he has all of his lures hanging on the wall at the top of the stairs for anyone who comes to visit and wants to use them.

DOORKNOBS: The house is filled with working vintage doorknobs! This one is their front door. I have more pics of the knobs, but won't bore you with those. Once I get all my pics online, I'll link so you can see everything.

CHERRIES: My aunt & uncle's last name is Cherry, so the kitchen is filled with bunches of vintage cherry decor. This tray is just one example.


LOVE NOTES FROM OUR HOSTS: Over the years as my aunt & uncle having lovingly cared for and shared the cottage, they've discovered all the important do's and don'ts that keep it the special place that it's become. This bulletin board is a sampling of the loving notes from our hosts that ensure that we all have a grand time and keep the cottage in one piece.

LUCKY STONES: I showed you some of the beach glass collection in my last post and now you need to learn about lucky stones. The stones in the shot glass are called "Lucky Stones". They're not actually stones at all. (Click the link to find out more.) If you click on the photo you can see the "L" on each one. We spent many hours in our youth looking for these on the beach. The cottage guests have collected them over the years and we saw several cups full around the house. My aunt says that when you give them to someone else they are a gift of love and become "Lucky Love Stones". My sweet cousin, Elaine gave me a pair of earrings and a necklace that she made from these. Wow, did I feel loved!

Well, that's all for now...more to come.

Home again, home again jiggety jig...

Last night I arrived home after about 4 days in Ohio visiting my brother, Pat, with my two sisters. We realized that our last trip with our mom happened about the same time last year, so we're thinking that this needs to become an annual affair in early June. My mom didn't come along this time because this trip was kind of short notice and she wouldn't have had time to prepare. We'll plan another one with her in the coming months.

I'll post a few of my favorite pics tonight, then do more later. Look closer at the one with the "Gone to the Beach" sign. The lamp base is filled with beach glass! You can't really tell the size from the picture, but the globe is about the size of a basketball.

We stayed at my Aunt Eleanor's cottage just about 100 steps from Lake Erie and I took bunches of pics of the place trying to capture a bit of the feeling that I get when I'm there. Time seems to stand still in that little corner of the world and we all look forward to that. We enjoyed every minute including drives around town, thunderstorms every day, walks on the beach, finding shells and beach glass, visits from cousins and aunts, delicious strawberry shortcake, fresh Lake Erie Perch dinners, amazing beefsteak tomatoes sliced and eaten with just a little salt & pepper, running into old friends from high school, and helping our brother find a new place to live.

If you look closely at the picture of the beach stones that I took after one of the storms, you'll see dozens of tiny shells, a bit of beach glass, some sandstone (orange) and the black shale that we often used as natural blackboards for writing and drawing while lounging on the beach.

We also visited my nephew, Jason and his two adorable children Jaret & Justine.

On the road again...

So I can't believe it's been so long since I've posted. I guess I've been pre-occupied with various family happenings, some good and some very challenging. I don't have time to write about everything now, but I'll write more, hopefully next week.

I'll be leaving on Saturday to fly back to my hometown, Vermilion, Ohio for just a few days to try to help my brother find a new place to live...very long story. My sisters, Sharon and Diane are going too. I'm not expecting a really "fun" trip, (again - long story) but we'll make the best of it.

I am excited about the fact that we get to stay at our aunt and uncle's cottage in Mitiwanga. I'll post pics when I get back. It's an amazying old 2-story cottage with wood floors and a screened in front porch just a hundred yards or so from the beach at Lake Erie. I have wonderful memories of Easter egg hunts and summer days spent eating watermelon, playing and connecting with our huge extended family there.

And we'll have to be sure and have some Lake Erie Perch, breaded and deep fried...mmmm good!

This is a cool link that I just came across with some old postcards from around Vermilion. The photo above is from that site. It's the Vermilion-on-the-Lake Clubhouse right down the street from where I lived, where I learned to swim, and took ballet lessons, had holiday parties, and accepted Christ.

I'll post more when I can. Thanks for checking in on me once in a while. I know I've been very sporadic lately.

Lake Erie in the Winter:

This is a pic of a beach on the shores of Lake Erie very close to where I grew up in Vermilion, Ohio. We used to call this Tiki Beach. I have no idea why. My long-time friend, Scott took this recently when he went home to visit his dad. Scott grew up in a home overlooking the lake. How cool is that!

It's so bizarre to think that folks back there are getting snowstorms when we hit 99 degrees this week in Phoenix! I've been wearing my summery capris and sandals all weekend and we actually turned on the air conditioner yesterday.

I often miss the seasons and yes, even the winter. I remember as a kid walking out on the frozen lake. It was awesome! Of course, I probably wouldn't do much of that now, but would certainly enjoy looking out at it from beside a warm fireplace.