The good was Connie’s birthday…she turned mumble mumble mumble years old so after she worked for awhile She got dressed up and we headed out to Joe’s Crab Shack for dinner. Joe’s is about 8 miles from here and we got there before dark. The bar is elevated a bit and we had a very nice view out of the windows looking at the boats in the marina, the bridge, and the water traffic going by. No sunset photos though…we could only see to the North and East from where we were sitting.

Happy hour prices for beer was 3 bucks and appetizers were half off so we had a couple of Yuengling drafts and some crab stuffed mushrooms. Neil was still thirsty so had a Happy Hour Margarita for 3 bucks…can’t complain about that. The only problem was that it was a really big glass (like a draft beer glass) and they only put 1 drinks worth of tequila in it…this makes for a relatively weak drink overall. Oh well, guess that’s the way it goes.

After that we had a couple more beers and a couple of their special steamer dinners…Crab, Mussels, and Scallops for Connie and Grilled Crab and Shrimp for Neil. Both came with cute little crab bibs, red skin potatoes, and corn on the cob along with a whole roll of paper towels to wipe the mess off with. All of the food tasted great and Neil got a shot of Connie sitting at the bar and then one of her making like a chicken when the staff came around to sing Happy Birthday to her.  We passed on dessert and birthday shots though…didn’t need the calories of dessert and we had to drive home and figured that birthday shots were not too smart of an idea. Three beers each over a couple of hours with dinner is one thing but once you start doing shots ya tend to have more than one and neither of us looks good in DWI pinstripes so we stayed smart.

We headed home shortly after this…you can see she’s laughing behind her chicken beak cups. Grabbed a couple of shots of our Christmas lights on the way in from the car.

The bad news came when we got up this morning. Connie got an email from her sister Cindy that her older brother Jerry had passed away yesterday evening. Gerry was 20 years older than Connie and has been ill with aplastic anemia for the past 4 or 5 years and had no immunity left. He came down with pneumonia last week and went into the hospital…and was transferred to hospice for palliative care only. He passed away last evening with his wife Carol by his side. The funeral arrangements are in process but it is scheduled for Saturday…we’ll be heading up to the Atlanta area for the services later on in the week

That came as a downer on what otherwise would have been a happy day for her. Neil is taking good care of her though…and it wasn’t a sudden thing so to some extent we all knew it was coming albeit just not exactly when.

Cyas.