A Great Dinner and Billings

We had a wonderful dinner with our granddaughter last night—she is home on leave from Italy, stationed with the USAF.  It was great to see her and give her a big hug—she has been gone a year. 

There is a gravel road from McLeod over the mountains to Livingston passing by Lonn and LoraLee’s house.  We took that road last night hoping to see some fall colors but it got dark too quickly.  Instead we were treated to a spectacular sunset.

Today we headed to Billings leaving Emmi with Nat.  I had a haircut appointment and we both had a long list of errands.

It was return things to Costco day.  Remember the new vacuum cleaner I bought in July—a Hoover—kaput all ready!  When in the upright position the beater bars were supposed to stop—that feature stopped working so if I took the vacuum outside to clean out the vehicles and sat it on gravel, guess what—yep, I sucked up lots of gravel!!  The hose for the tools was so short I would get a backache from bending over to use it.  JUNK!

Remember the blogging about mattresses and memory foam toppers???  We purchased a memory foam topper from Costco that also had gel pellets inside it.  Well, at first it was great then it began to just envelope us like little packages—made us both too warm and we both woke with back aches.  Back to Costco it went!

Purchased a Dyson vacuum cleaner today—we will see if all the hype about those is correct.  Costco makes it easy to return things—very accommodating!

My friend Jeane has a Toyota Prius and it has been in the hospital in Billings for about a week.  We picked it up for her today—when I got the key from the service guy I asked him to kind of tell me how to start the car which he did.  But when I got out there to insert the key fob into the slot and get it into “drive” I was defeated by the smart aleck thing!  Back inside to ask one of the service guys to please come outside and help me which he very graciously did.  It was kind of fun to drive once I got the dang thing started!

You run into the strangest people in Costco—ran into Michael’s good friend Sarge—we stood around in the parking lot and discussed all our winter plans. 

Our good friends Peg and John added a new member to their family today.  John and Peg had schnauzers and in the past couple of years lost both of them to severe illnesses.  They wanted to try a different breed of dog and settled on a cockapoo—Miss Charlee flew into Billings today—John and Peg are beside themselves.

Huge herd of elk in the pasture above Lonn and LoraLee’s house—it was really too dark for photos.