We were so very fortunate to have both Lily and Tim home for Christmas in Montana. Tim had a short turnaround time because his team is in season right now. He unfortunately got to Denver and had to spend the night there last night before picking up a different flight today back to San Diego. That was really the only hiccup with his visit other than we didn’t have any snow until the day he left. That did not stop us from cooking good food and snacks…and playing lots of games. Tim is our puzzle kid….always has been. He decided we needed a challenge and therefore ordered the puzzle and had it sent to the house ahead of him. It was NOT EASY! I have a photo of it here:

We worked on the puzzle everyday Tim was here, but we also played a lot of board and card games as well. I think our average bedtime was somewhere between 1 and 2 a.m. each night. Lily was crushing all of us in dirty rummy every night. This did not make her big brother very happy.

Lily arrived on December 15th and will be staying until January 25th – so a nice, long break. We have enjoyed cooking together while jamming to the Wicked Soundtrack. We also took a drive to a nearby pottery place called Montana Earth Pottery. We each walked away with a beautiful mug and I got a couple of big bowls that I have already used at our holiday open house the weekend before Christmas. The owner, Judy, was so nice. I felt like we were being welcomed into a friend’s home. I will definitely be back!

We were pretty busy over the holidays at the fire department. I finally told Joe that 5 calls in 24 hours over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day was getting a bit too much and to knock it off for a bit. We like to think that Joe is trying to get our attention when we are on calls and letting us know in his way that he is with us. He was with us a lot while Tim was in town. Luckily Tim and Lily were old enough to press “pause” on opening Christmas gifts so we could go on a medical call. Here are some photos of Tim and Lily….

You’ll have to wait until I process my good camera for family photos with the four of us. Maybe in a couple of days.

We have had a few Christmas cards trickling in this year. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a couple of special gifts we received from friends related to remembering our Joe. I have a friend from our time in Norway, who is not religious at all, visiting Europe. She lit a candle for our Joe in one of churches she was in and sent me a picture. It meant so very much. Then I had another friend from our time in Bellevue, Nebraska, who had a beautiful candle made with our Joe’s photo on it. It is currently on my desk and I look at it every day. Then our dear friends from our time at Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota years and years ago…okay DECADES ago, sent us a postcard telling us that a wreath was laid on a veteran’s grave in memory of our SSG Joseph Messina. We are not only honoring Joe, but also honoring the gravesite of another fallen soldier. I can’t think of anything more fitting. We are so blessed to have people who still remember that Christmas may not exactly be “Merry” for us. There are a lot of memories…really good ones associated with Christmas. Knowing that we have future memories with Tim and Lily bring us hope. Knowing all our Christmas memories with Joe are in the past, is heartbreaking. So many of our friends are now having grandchildren and that is something that was also taken from us when Joe died. We are so very happy for them and their new roles as grandparents, but there is always that twinge of envy there. I think I would have loved being a grandma. I also would have loved Rich as a grandpa. I had a dentist appointment today and even though it was just a cleaning, the dentist did all the work. He mentioned to me that he had lost his dad this year, and what a good dad he was. He knows I have stage IV cancer and I told him about our Joe leaving before me…that my diagnosis allows me the freedom to tell people how I feel about them, even though that is not how I was raised. I told him that having this diagnosis was actually a big blessing, especially since we lost our Joe. I took out my letter I wrote to him for when I die and I realized I had said everything I wanted to him. That was a huge blessing. I told my dentist that I wished everyone could heed that advice. I found a poem today in my facebook feed that I wanted to share:

Don’t wait til I’m gone

And then stand up to speak

About all the things

That you loved about me

Don’t sing all my praises

Through all of your tears

When I am no longer

Beside you to hear

Don’t leave all that love

Like a secret unsaid

But tell me tomorrow

Or right now instead

And I’ll tell you too

Of the things I admire

About who you are

And how much you inspire

I’ll speak from my heart

Whilst you’re still here to know

“You are” not “you were”

Or “it used to be so”

I’ll speak of your light

Whilst you’ll still hear the words

And not leave that love

In the darkness, unheard

So tell me tomorrow

Or right now – don’t wait

Because we don’t know

When it might be too late

Because we don’t know

When our time might be up

And we need to hear – while we are here –

How we’re loved…..

***By Becky Hemsley***

We have the tree up and the house decorated. There is snow on the ground and we even have outside lights up this year. That is a first as I don’t think we put lights up at all when we lived in Omaha. The Christmas cards are in the mail and the packages of gifts to family are also on their way. I had an hour to take a breath before the next project and decided to take some photos of my sidekick, Tallinn. He loves to wear his green satin bowtie (no, seriously, he loves it) and be the object of some Christmas photos. Enjoy!

We have been volunteering with Bad Rock Volunteer Fire Department and QRU for well over a year now. We have made some really good friends, and we have served our rural community by their sides. We started this whole thing wanting to honor our Joe, which we do every time we go on a call or help our fire hall in some way. I thought we’d be washing trucks and making cookies. Well, we certainly do that, but we didn’t realize that they would want us to join their ranks. I have been so blessed they did. I wanted to share a few photos taken of Rich and me recently.

We have a good-sized herd of deer that live in our rural area. They spend time in our yard almost every day. We also have a gaggle of about 3 DOZEN turkey that make their presence known as well. Each Halloween since we have moved here, I buy a few pumpkins on Halloween, when they are marked way down. I keep them on the front porch for fall decoration until about Thanksgiving, and then I take them out in the back yard at the edge of the woods and break them up into lots of pieces. The deer love them. Here are a few photos of a buck who came back to eat our pumpkins.

Okay…finally getting all caught up with all the travel we did this last year! We were traveling so much! This trip was only a couple of weeks, but we had four flights as we crammed a lot into the time we were gone.

We started by flying to Kansas City for Zac and Megan’s wedding. Zac has been our Joe’s best friend since the 7th grade. It was so wonderful to see a big group of Joe’s friends and to celebrate with Zac and Megan. They had photos of Joe on the table of those missing from the event, which caused a few tears…especially when I saw his leather radio strap that Joe’s and Michelle gave to Zac to wear. After Zac had a dance with his mom, he had a special dance with me, to honor Joe. It was to the song, “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables”. The two of us cried through the whole thing. Michelle, Joe’s widow, was in the wedding, so it was good to see her and Lily came with us as she has had Zac as a big brother figure in her life since she was 2. We absolutely love Zac, his sister, and parents. We are so happy we get to see them when we are visiting Lily and Michelle! We stayed with Lily at her place, which was fun. Here are some photos of that couple of days in Kansas City:

We then flew to Florida for our Cruise Planners Annual Convention in Fort Lauderdale. We were there for a couple of days when Hurricane Milton started barreling towards Florida. Rich’s parents and sister live about 4 hours away near the Tampa area and so Rich left me at the convention and he grabbed some groceries, water, and gas, and took a rental car into the storm to be with his family. Thankfully, there wasn’t as much damage as they predicted, and he just got to spend some quality time with his family. I continued on at the convention and trade fair and then went on a 3-day cruise on the Sun Princess. It was the inaugural cruise for that ship out of the U.S.. It was short and sweet, but I tried a lot of things on the ship….took Spanish lessons, Salsa dancing lessons, did some name that tune contests, and learn to play spoons at the Irish pub on board. We only had one stop and that was in Bermuda. It was my 51st country. I chose to go swimming with seals at that stop. It was pretty cool. The entire ship was only travel advisors, press, or social media travel folks. Only one of us could go, and Rich let me go. It meant I was rooming with a total stranger, which was odd. We ended up having a nice time though! They had a pretty spectacular drone light show before we left Ft. Lauderdale. Here are a few photos from Florida time on this trip:

Rich and I then flew to Houston to spend some time with my parents, brother (and his family), and Rich’s uncle and his wife. Rich and my brother and our nephew went to the Formula 1 race in Austin. My dad’s siblings were all in town to visit my dad at his memory care facility. He has been living there for almost 2 years now and he doesn’t know he is married, has children, or siblings. It is hard to deal with, but he is still in good spirits a majority of the time. We were able to spend some time with our nephew, Alex, and our niece and Goddaughter, Emily Jo. We also went to a Houston Rockets game vs. the San Antonio Spurs with my brother, Craig. That was a lot of fun as well.

While I am blowing you away with the beautiful place where we live, I thought I would add a few more photos of our area. Rich’s brother and his wife came to visit us a couple of weeks ago. We showed them around the area….went down to Big Fork and showed them the Flathead Lake. We then went to Glacier National Park and spent time on the west side and the east side. We saw a black bear and a beaver…several deer and some American bald eagles. The water and the mountains were the stars of the show though. Here are a few of the photos from their trip here:

I am forever playing catch up with my photos. I went to an EMS symposium on October 31, November 1st and 2nd. It is one of the larger EMS symposiums in the state of Montana. Billings is about 7 hours away by car. I stopped a few times and took some photos along the way there and on the way back. I learned a lot while I was there, met some wonderful people from across the state, and saw some fabulous views on the way there and back. Here are some of the photos I took across our state.

Thanksgiving is a bit of a hard day for me. Three years ago we all got together for Thanksgiving at my parents’ house in Houston. It was the last time the 6 of us were together as a family. I took a ton of family photos during that trip and I cherish each and every one of them now. We attempted to have a family Thanksgiving the year Joe died and it was just too hard. We decided that we would go to wherever Tim’s basketball team was playing a tournament. Last year, they were at home so we all flew to San Diego. We spent Thanksgiving at the San Diego Zoo and ate at Denny’s. It worked out pretty well. This year, Tim’s team was playing out of town and only for one day, so it didn’t make sense to head out to California for one day. Rich and I few down to Denver last week and spent 4 days in the Colorado Springs and Denver area. Tim’s team was in the area playing the Air Force Academy and then Denver University. We were able to watch Tim do his thing with his team and even got a few hours here and there to spend some time with him. We have so many friends who have retired in that area and we were able to get together with several of them, which was wonderful.

Lily flew up to Montana from Kansas City late on Tuesday night. She’ll be here until Monday morning. We went to our neighbor’s house today for Thanksgiving dinner. It was a small but wonderful gathering and the Lions even won, although they tried their best to lose in the last few minutes of the game (old habits die hard).

I did meet with the Mayo Clinic sarcoma team this week. They agreed that I continue to be stable. The biggest news is that I may not be able to continue to do the telemedicine meetings via zoom anymore. They are tightening up the regulations on telemedicine starting January 2025. My Mayo doctor has to have a license to practice in Montana and he does not. Therefore, I will have to travel to Rochester, MN every 6 months for my appointments. Not incredibly convenient, but it is do-able. I had a treatment last week and here is my photo from that day:

Here are a couple of photos from today. One of Lily and then one of her “meat flowers” she made at our neighbor’s house today to make a charcuterie board look festive.

Here are some photos from our time in Colorado. So photos of Tim doing his thing and some hikes we went on in Colorado Springs and Denver and in-between. Both games went into overtime, so they were great games, but Tim’s team didn’t pull out the W on either game. That makes 3 out of 4 live games we have seen going into overtime. We’ll be seeing them play another game on the road in January.

Wishing you all a very happy Thanksgiving. I hope you all have had a wonderful time with family and friends. Take the photos….play the games….eat the pie.