My father sent me to pick up my mother from work. When I arrived, I had to wait for her to finish her shift as a waitress, so she had me sit at the counter and sent the new girl over to wait on me. She brought me a large piece on NY style cheesecake. We talked for a while and decided to be bold and ask her out. A year later, I had joined the Navy, 6 months after that I brought her to my first duty station and we eloped. That was almost 35 years ago. I served in the Navy for 20 years and retired.

The obvious answers would be our wedding or the birth of our 3 children, but the times I returned from deployments were the best. Coming home to them has no words. The last time allowed us to save enough to buy our first home in 2004. 20 years later, after 5 years of construction and multiple spinal surgeries, being 100% disabled from my military service, our new Log Home in the mountains is complete. We laid every log and did almost all of the work ourselves (some friends helped of course).

Now we have entered our third act. The kids have grown up and moved away and we have started a new business, making furniture and décor from Wine and Bourbon barrels. Unfortunately, this takes up the entire garage. So we would use the money to build a new shop on the property to build our products and we would finally be able to get our cars in the garage. Being 100% disabled from my Military service, working from new shop at home would be ideal.