This is the day that the Lord has made.

After too many years of not really wanting to go to church, I am finally in the part of my life where I look forward to it. I think it has to do with our new church home as much as anything else. We drive down to the little town of LeRoy, Michigan every week to attend, even though there are two churches within walking distance right here in Bristol.

By the way, I don't know if you can really call Bristol a town. There are two churches, a store, and the town hall/township hall within about half a mile of each other. I think the smallest parcel of land belongs to the town hall. There are a couple more that are maybe an acre, and everyone else has ten acres or more. Most have a lot more.

But anyhow, we got to church late. We blame daylight savings time, of course. We got there in time for the message, though. It was all about Joy (not happiness, which tends to be temporary). One of the greatest things about being a Christian is knowing that any trial that you face is nothing but a temporary growth experience.

After the service, we had lunch with the choir and served up a birthday cake for Gabe. He turns five today. Hey, it's not just anyone that gets "Happy Birthday" sung to them by the choir.

I have been out of the singing business for more than a decade. That doesn't mean that I never sing to the kids, or just sing with some of my favorite CDs. I haven't actually done the practice thing where you have to deal with the stop-and-go singing while the director tries to get everyone correct note. We're under the gun, too. There are only two more practices, and we are having trouble with this stuff. I'm going to have to plink the notes out on one of the kids' musical toys just to make sure that I get it right.

But it's about time I got back into it. My entire family of origin is musical, so I'm really turning my back on some of my heritage if I don't come back to the music. This seems to be the part of my life where I need to be going back.

Mary picked me up late, so I had time to play with the piano a bit and learn some of the music. I had been getting some of the notes wrong.

After that, it was time to roll on home. We decided to take a run through the National Forest instead of going straight home. That was easy enough -- we just went half a mile past the road that we live on, took a right, and was in the national forest after half a mile of dirt road.

We really should have taken the big Jeep for this one. There was still snow on some of the road, and plenty of mud at the edges where the snow is melting.

After the long winter, it was wonderful to see everything coming back to life. There were vernal ponds in a lot of the low-lying places. That isn't surprising, considering the fact that we have been hearing the spring peepers (frogs) at night for the past few days. They must have a fast life cycle, considering that they have to mate and lay eggs in time for the polliwogs to grow up and turn into frogs.

We spotted a number of low, marshy areas that may have cranberries later. Also, it looks like there are some blueberry patches for us to visit this summer.

Now, I'm goofing around on the computer. I figured out how to move some photos to my web space so that I can link to them from the blog. That means that I won't have to worry about going over any limit that blogspot may place on my freebie account. I still haven't figured out how all of this stuff works, anyhow.

I have lots of work to do, like adding links, maybe separating my drivel into several blogs, editing the template, and making a custom header. All in good time... Getting the ability to put the pictures on my own space is enough for today. Later, I'll write a program that will format my HTML for me and publish it. Maybe.

So, in honor of the fact that I'm now storing the images on my own site, I'm going to provide two gratuitous photos of the day.

Fluffy stuff... I have no idea what it is.

Hyassins from a few years ago