We were lucky enough to have the house full for a few weeks this Spring as Aunt Sue and Tony had an extended visit in April, while Emma and the Boys visited in May. We loved having everyone in town and just wished we had more time to spend with everyone.

Aunt Sue and Tony landed while Dad was in Minnesota for meetings and luckily they escaped their visit without getting the plague initially started by Sam and Alex (Dad also came back with a bad case of allergies as Minnesota is a few weeks behind for Spring). We did have a nice Easter dinner together and the following week Gung Gung and Tony took a long drive to Kentucky for a Revolutionary War re-enactment. In-between we found time for a few dinners together and a couple of trips shopping.

Emma, Seby and Ollie came a few weeks later and we had a nice visit to the Museum of Natural History where they got to see some scientists working on the new exhibit with the dueling Dinosaurs (https://duelingdinosaurs.org). The boys got to visit a couple of the parks in the area and we had a couple of nice dinners together.

Hopefully, everyone had as much fun as we did hosting them. Maybe next year, we will make a visit across the pond to visit them.

Well, we completely missed the holiday update as it seemed like the holidays just flew by last year. We did get to spend Thanksgiving with Gung Gung, but he left in early December to go visit everyone in England/France. Christmas and New Years were pretty quiet overall, but we did have a nice time just relaxing and recovering, as we seemed to be passing a cold around the house the whole holiday season. On top of trying to stay healthy, Alex and Sam were both working full-time hours, while Dad was putting in about 65 hours a week trying to keep the new store he was transferred to running, but in the end, we all survived.

After watching the KC Chiefs lose the Super Bowl, we started off Spring cleaning early and in February and March we started working on some small projects around the house. We painted David’s room, upgraded the front hallway with new paint, wallpaper and molding, re-organized Nana/Gung Gung’s storage shed, started work on the yard and gardens and for the mother of all projects – we cleaned Alex’s room. As we move into summer, we still have a few house projects to tackle, including a new Grill Patio that we just recently started…. we had to get HOA approval first of course. We also hope to get away to the beach soon to get some much needed R&R.

Today, we joined the millions of other Americans that voted early. Mom, Dad, Sam and Nana all closed in all the correct circles on the ballot. Alex, as usual stayed at home. 🥲 We were a little worried that it would take long because the parking lot had been full everytime we drove past the last few days, but we were lucky as the lot was only half full and the whole process only took about 20 minutes.

A couple of weeks ago, Mom and Dad got a chance to go down to Greenville, NC and see the Vice-President give a speech at East Carolina University (ECU Minges Coliseum). It was standing room only and they were some of the last ones that were allowed in to the event. This whole election is like watching a Kansas City Chiefs football game… you have no idea who is going to win and you know it is going to come down to the last few plays. 😆

Well, the birthday season is over as Alex and Mom had birthdays in August and Nana had her birthday in September. Each birthday boy/girl got to pick their own dinner that day and each received a couple of small gift bags. Other than the birthdays, not a lot of New News to report. The hurricanes all missed us, but we did got quite a bit of rain… oddly enough, we haven’t seen much rain since then. The flowers, except for the Cannas, are starting to wind down and soon it will be time to trim back the elephant ears and banana trees which both exceeded our expectations this year. This weekend we will probably go ahead and put out the Halloween inflatables too.

Dad had to fly up to Minnesota a couple of weeks ago for merchandising meetings. Only 64 people were selected from the stores to attend (2 from each Marketplace). It was a long, but short trip. Dad got up at 3am on Wednesday to get to the 6am flight and was in Minneapolis for 29 hours (12 hours of meetings) and then got back home at 1am on Friday morning. Luckily he didn’t get stuck in the Crowdstrike debacle, because the other guy in the marketplace didn’t actually get home until 10pm Friday night – spending most of the day on Friday in the airport waiting for a flight. Anyway, Dad and the other guy now have to teach back what they learned to the Marketplace AVP (Associate Vice President) and all the Marketplace Directors… of course they didn’t tell him this before he left. 😀 The only free time he had, he went over to the Mall of America to get dinner. The highlight of the trip was that he bumped into a friend from KC. His friend lived a block away and they went to school together from 1st grade through high school, but hadn’t seen each other since HS graduation.

Sam and Mom have been working tirelessly out in the yard and the dividends are really starting to pay off. The lawn is looking much better, the flowers are in bloom and we have lots of friends dropping by to say Hi. 😀

We also added some new outdoor seating to the venue…

And speaking of new friends… our next door neighbors have put their house on the market and we noticed the other day that it is already pending on Zillow. We didn’t go to the Open House, but we did look on Zillow and when we did we found a drone image of their house and ours. We saved the photo and cropped it a little so you can see our new cottage/shed and the new walking path (the grass is a lot greener in real life 😀).

Just a quick post to bring everyone up-to-date with life in Clayton. First off, Dad had Father’s Day off this year, but unfortunately Alex and Sam had to work. So we had a nice, low-key Father’s Day dinner on the following Wednesday (ribs, beef strips and farmer’s market potatoes and tomatoes). Meanwhile, we finished a couple of more projects around the house as Nana painted the front door and made some new curtains for the downstairs living & dining area. Mom and Sam have also been working diligently in the garden and are now starting to see some of their hard work over the last 2 years starting to pay off, so we decided to show some before and after photos of the yard.

After getting back from Virginia on Tuesday, we had the day off on Wednesday (sort of…), but Thursday we hit the road again for Sam’s Megalodon tooth dive off the coast of Southport, NC. Sam went on this dive in August of 2021 and he had a great time. He even came back with about a 6″ Megalodon tooth and some other bones, see post: https://the-payne-chronicles.com/2021/09/18/megladon-hunting/. Since then, he has been trying to go again, but due to weather issues and a mix-up on scheduling he hasn’t been able to make the trip. So when we looked at the weather forecast on Wednesday, we were excited because there was no rain in sight and sunny weather for both Thursday and Friday. Unfortunately, Thursday proved to be quite windy with 15-20 mph sustained wind that made for some big waves on the beach and the feeling of being sand blasted if you were sitting on the beach. Then around 5pm, we got the text saying that the dive on Friday morning was cancelled – turns out there was a pretty big Low pressure system off the coast and a small craft advisory was issued. So we will try to reschedule this dive for the 4th time, sometime in late August or early September. More than likely, we may have to put this off until next year because they are usually booked out pretty far and August/September have the most weather issues. We did end up staying Thursday night as we had already checked into the hotel. Friday morning, we went back to the beach for a few hours and it was a beautiful day with a low tide, which also meant a lot of shells on the beach. Mom and Sam must have decided that we were running low on seashells in the house because they brought back several more bags of shells. 😂

Saturday and Sunday, we finished placing the stepping stones to the shed and planting some grass seed around the yard. Our first round of planting grass seed didn’t go well, so we tried a different brand and hopefully we will get a much better result. Meanwhile, Sam has been nurturing his elephant ear/hosta bed all spring and his hard work has paid off as he found his largest elephant ear leaf so far – measuring 29″ in length! The hostas are coming along well too, but they are hard to see underneath all the elephant ears.

Since it’s Father’s Day, we thought we would leave you with a couple of Dad jokes… What’s Blue and not very heavy? Light blue. Why was the Hulk so good at gardening? He has a green thumb. Why can’t you hear a pterodactyl going to the bathroom? The ‘P’ is silent. 😊

Since Dad has the week off, Mom and Dad decided to take a short trip up to DC as part of his Father’s Day present, so he could visit some of the museums. The National Air & Space museum and the National Gallery of Art are 2 of his favorite museums and he wanted to spend some time there and also visit the American Indian museum (the British Museum is still his favorite but that seemed a bit much 😊). Anyway, the trip started off fine as we had good luck with traffic as it was fairly light most of the way up to DC and we arrived pretty much right on time (4 hours from Clayton, NC). Unfortunately, the good luck stopped there… Unbeknownst to us, the Air & Space museum is under going a multi-year renovation and was limited to only guests with timed tickets. Of course, the tickets are free, but all were already given out for the day so we couldn’t even get into the museum. Part of the problem was that the front entryway is getting completely remodeled, so all the doors were closed, forcing everyone to use the back entrance. We are assuming this is probably a safety issue so they have to limit the number of people that visit. (https://airandspace.si.edu/newsroom/press-releases/national-air-and-space-museum-provides-update-renovation-project, https://airandspace.si.edu/about-transformation).

The next stop was the National Gallery of Art, specifically the Impressionist wing with some amazing Monet paintings. Unfortunately we ran into problems here too, as the museum found some mold in this wing of the building and had to shut down the entire section. They temporarily moved a couple of Monet’s smaller pieces downstairs but it was very limited and a little disappointing to say the least. There was a nice portrait on display from Da Vinci that was new and pretty interesting, but portraits aren’t really the most exciting works of art (https://www.nga.gov/visit/renovation-information.html). The last stop on the itinerary was the American Indian museum, but alas it too had most of the main exhibits closed. So overall the trip was a bust, but if nothing else, we did get our exercise for the day as we walked about 11 miles by the time we were done.

The good news was that since we were leaving much earlier than anticipated, we didn’t hit very much rush hour traffic and got back to the hotel by 5pm. We had a nice dinner at Olive Garden and made it over to Ikea and the outlet mall (which hasn’t been updated since we lived there!). The next day we took a slight detour and made it over to Harrisonburg, VA to visit a Lavender Farm that was very nice and had some friendly farm animals. We then drove over to Waynesboro to visit with Aunt Becky and Aunt Courtney (Nana was there too!) as they are making the final preparations for the move to Maryland in a couple of weeks.

Well the time has finally come to close the doors on Camp Waynesboro as Aunt Becky and Aunt Courtney will be moving to Maryland in a couple of weeks to be closer to Uncle Deke and the grandkids/cousins. It was nice that we had a chance to stop by this week for a quick lunch and a short visit during all the chaos of packing and to see everyone and take one last spin around Waynesboro. Mom even managed to sneak one last visit into Sharp Shopper and managed to do quite some damage ($83 worth 😂, perhaps the highlight of the trip). Anyway, we thought we would take a look back at some of the fun times we had over the years.