We made it safely back from a wonderful family vacation! Thank you, Lord, for watching over us and helping us get along during all that enforced togetherness. We did have a great time, and details of our terrific trip will follow...eventually. That's the good news!
The bad news is, our luggage was (hopefully temporarily) lost. All four bags. We saw them actually go on to the plane in Newark, but they didn't make it to Grand Rapids. How that's possible, I don't know, but please hope and pray with us that our bags will be found and returned to us quickly - including eight days' worth of clothing for all of us, shoes, all of our souvenirs, some of the childrens' toys, etc.
There's more bad news...I booted up my desktop this evening and my hard drive was working fine for about five minutes. My computer froze up and when I rebooted - nothing. Jim, my own personal computer hero, is pretty sure it's the hard drive and is working to restore the poor guy and its data. Fortunately, I learned from past mistakes and I'm pretty certain I have ALL of my pictures backed up on a separate drive, and may have lost only a week's worth of documents - not much. Even my Outlook files were backed up completely just before we left on vacation - I had eighteen emails that I might have lost, but I think I have most of them on my phone. So if you emailed me between July 10 and July 16 and I don't get back to you in the next couple of days, please contact me again.