02/20/15 2:00 pm

Good Afternoon:

Today 63 years ago I had been told by my dad that we had a very good snow storm. He drove my mom and I to the Little Falls hospital being in labor for my birth. After delivering us to the hospital he returned home to tend to the cattle as the coming blizzard would stop all transportation. He got home OK, I got born OK, three days later he was able to return to see us. He always joked that the blizzard so delayed him that I might have hair and teeth before he returned, I did have hair. In this time of googling everything, I found the weather data on my day of birth and yes we did have 9 inches of snow, quite different from this year.

Today I am 63, below is the birthday drawing I got from Iza this morning, she stayed at our house last night. Jon worked till 10 last night and Anna is in Hungary. Her mom had some extensive surgery and she will be there for two weeks to help her. At first Anna was not able to see her mom in the hospital because of a flu quarantine. Over there they literally stop the public from entering the hospital, Jon told me that to bypass you just bribe the nurse. I guess their health system must be getting better because they refused Anna's bribe, by now the quarantine was lifted and she got in.

The word quarantine comes from the Italian (seventeenth-century Venetian) quaranta, meaning forty, which is the number of days ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague epidemic. A little trivia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine .

I thought it was really nice that Iza has me as 36. I told Jon that I hope she doesn't have dyslexia.

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Thank you to all who came to our Valentine's Party, it was a very nice evening.

Thank you again from all of us Iza, Anna, Mary, Holly, Jon and myself.

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I think it is time to give away a bottle of wine. I recently was watching a wine movie on netflix and heard two words that sound very much alike but are different. The two words are viticulture and viniculture. The word viticulture is the study of growing grapes. Another neat word is Enology, sometimes spelled Oenology, this is the study of wine and making wine. Without googling finish the sentence, Viniculture is the study of .........

Send your answer to donmillner@gmail.com with the subject line, "I'd like a free bottle of wine."