Mosaic

Ever since I moved here, I've been wanting to try out the singles group at my church.  It's called Mosaic.  But since I was kind of thinking maybe I wasn't going to be single forever, I had been putting it off.  I had someone in my field of vision and didn't think I needed to take a swim in a new dating pool.  But, it seemed like the right place to be last night.  So, I got cuted up, even putting on a little makeup and my fabulous new aqua and orange mules, and headed out!  Dreading it if you want to know the truth.

I walked in the door of the gymnasium where the group meets, and took a quick look around.  Lots of gray hair.  Lots of wrinkles.  THIS is MY demographic?  I shuddered to myself.  And in my heart, I thought, THIS is going to be an ordeal.  Then I learned that it was potluck night.  M-Z was supposed to have brought a main dish.  I, last letter N, had dinner before I came.  Anyhow, I picked a chair at a table that looked like it had all the people in my actual demographic sitting at it already.  Which means I sat alone.  I wondered who would be drawn to sit at the table with me.  A few moments after sitting down, a lady sitting at the table adjacent to mine asked me if I'd ever been there before.  "No, it's my first time."  It was her first time as well, and she had brought a friend for whom it was also the first time.  These two ladies were probably in their late forties or early fifties.  Both of them recently widowed and feeling even more out of place than I.  Very nice ladies, both of them.  Then Randy joined us.  Randy was a slightly embittered separated gentleman, probably also in his late forties, early fifties.  He knew these two ladies as the three of them had been in the same grief support group.

Dinner starts.  And David and Tony join us at the table.  These two gentleman were absolutely delightful.  If I had to guess I'd say they were in their late sixties, mayabe early seventies.  David looked a bit like a leprechaun up to no good, and Tony looked like one of those men who gets to go on cruises for free just for dancing with the ladies.  We chatted and laughed and made friends. 

And on my first night at my new singles group and I walked out with not one, but two proposals of marriage!  But David and Tony, though extremely charming, weren't exactly my type!  They did flatter me, and call me beautiful, and told me how pretty my hair was, and told me how smart and funny I was, and it's nice to hear that from a man of any age, especially when you are feeling particularly unlovely.  And they wanted to show me around town, and they wanted to take me dancing.  So, thanks for the lift, guys.

I was told that the turnout was really low last night.  That there's usually twice as many people there.  Perhaps my actual demographic (late thirties, early forties, single, never married, no kids) was out doing something else last night.  Last night I thought that maybe I'd give it another try next week.  But, after dissecting my true intention for going (to meet a man) I decided I'd best stay away.

Or I run the risk of taking a David or a Tony up on their offer!

What Do You Do?

I suppose that this is a problem that everyone faces when a relationship ends.  What do you do with "the box of stuff"?  The box looks different and has different things in it, but inside it's basically the same for everyone, isn't it?  Mine is white and green, and says Weyerhaeuser on it.  In big hand printed letters it also says "CDs & Clock", so I guess it was a moving box in its first life.

Ticket stubs, letters, notes, pictures…

I didn't know him very long, unless you count knowing him since childhood.  I was a child and he was nearly a man when I knew him "the first time".  I watched him from afar, admiring his blond hair, his light eyes, and his quick smile.  At ten years old, the idea that this almost-man would ever have anything to do with me was preposterous.

Thirty years later he shows up in my life again, and it wasn't such a preposterous notion anymore.  Nobody comes into a relationship without baggage of some type.  But one of the crazy things about this relationship was that my feelings for him predated my feelings for just about every boy for whom I ever had feelings (except for Frank Real, my kindergarten crush!).  I was ten, what did I know?  I know that he pulled my heart strings then, and I know I was nearly heartbroken when his family moved away all those years ago. 

And here I am, 41 years old, and heartbroken again.  Same guy, only slightly different story.  The first moving away involved a change of address, this one involved a change of heart.  There was a chasm between us that merely crossing the miles couldn't close.

So, what do I do with the cobalt blue water bottle, all those printouts of our hours-long IM sessions, the rocks I picked up along the railroad tracks in the Royal Gorge, the letters I wrote and never sent, his notes and his cards?  What do I do with the huge file with his name on it that I downloaded off my computer?  What do I do with the scavenger hunt mementos?  I don't think he's keeping ANY of "our stuff".  But I cannot bear to throw a single bit of it away.  So, what do I do with it?

Last night I went through it, read some things, touched things that he had touched.  But it served no purpose except to make me cry.  I don't think I can keep the box, but I can't get rid of it either.  Not yet.

But when?

A Russian Saying

There's an old Russian saying…

Okay, I don't know if it's old, I don't know if it's Russian, but since I am saying it, it surely is a saying!  I'm a little rusty when it comes to the Cyrillic languages, so my translation might be a little bit off, but it goes something like this:

"You can never really finish remodeling.  You can only make it stop."

I've had my fun trying the DIY route, and I think I now have a pretty good understanding of what I want to do, what I don't mind doing, what I don't want to do, and what I don't mind paying someone else to do.

After seeing what a great job the guy I hired to do Diane's place over is doing, I have decided I need to get this guy into my house and make the remodeling stop.  I used to say "why do yourself what you can pay somebody else to do for you."  While I am more apt to try some of the small things myself than I was before, I still think maybe my first tack was the best tack.

Can't wait for Dave to start work on my place…

 

I’ve Created a Monster!!

Since I started my blog, I have been encouraging (probably more like nagging, if I'm totally honest here) my sister, Diane, to start her own blog.  She did, and now she is constantly dinking around with it.  I'd say I never see her anymore, but since she's living with me for awhile, I always see her on the other couch with her laptop on her lap.

But, as a blog addict, that's like the pot calling the kettle black, now isn't it?…since I'm on the OTHER-other couch with MY laptop, dinking around with my own blog…

Church – The Easy Way!

When I lived down in Orange County, I attended a church I loved.  When I moved to Torrance in early 1990, I continued to attend there despite the long drive it required.  After some time, I tired of the drive, and because I was working two jobs, my free time was so limited I didn't want to spend any more of it in a car than I absolutely had to.  So I tried to find a church I liked in the Torrance area.  Long story short, I never did, not after living there for sixteen years.  I went here and went there but never found a church that I considered my home. 

When I moved to Colorado Springs, I thought that finding a church was going to be a struggle.  I wasn't looking forward to the prospect of trying on a bunch of new places.  The second church I tried because my cousin Julie really wanted me to go with her to her church.  Her church was a megachurch (a church with a really big congregation), and I don't really like megachurches, but I went.  And I loved it and have been attending ever since.  It's called Woodmen Valley Chapel and the Senior Pastor is Matt Heard.  My first visit to the church coincided with his return after a long sabbatical.  He is an amazing teacher.  I have purchased and sent out copies of sermons on CDs to friends and family and wished there was an easier and cheaper way to share certain messages.  Yesterday in church they announced that they now do podcasting, but I really don't know anyone who does the ipod thing.

Last night I was poking around the WVC website looking for information on the upcoming singles' retreat, and I came across "listen online". 

http://www.woodmenvalley.org/index.cfm/pageid/218/index.html

There are some great messages available on there.  I have added a permanent link to "listen online".  Look over there to the right under Blog Roll and you'll see it!  This weekend's message was a wrap-up of a series that's he's been preaching.  It was pretty powerful.  Because he'll start a series, then interrupt it and do another, this series of eight messages has been going on for months.  I have missed a number of them due to being out of town and am looking forward to getting all caught up. 

If you like a good sermon, check out WVC Listen Online.

 

“Sell a work of art” – List of 50

On top of being other frustrated things (photographer, writer, etc.), I am a frustrated artist. 

When I was in the second grade, one of the upper grade teachers, Mrs. Jamieson, came to my classroom and saw a picture I had painted.  It was a picture of an airplane, painted on that huge blue paper with those awful tempura paints, but something about it made her think I had some sort of aptitude for art.  Mrs. Jamieson was the resident artist at Center Street School and taught sixth grade.  And she arranged it with my teacher, Mrs. Wilkerson, to have me come to her class weekly to make art with her kids.  And she arranged that to happen for the next four years until I was in her class as a sixth grader.  She was an amazing teacher.  I have been trying to find her so that I can thank her for being the teacher who most profoundly affected my life.  She was a strong believer in “divergent thinking”.  (More on sixth grade and divergent thinking in a later posting.)

I continued to take the occasional artsy sort of classes.  Jewelry making in junior high, color theory in high school.  But never really did anything after high school in the art arena.  After taking a few years off from higher education, in 1987 I returned to school attending Saddleback College in Orange County.  I took all sorts of classes there that tickled my fancy…like Spanish, and Japanese, and Music Appreciation.  I also decided I’d take a beginning drawing class.  On the first day we had to draw a simple still life.  I picked an old tea pot and a pump sprayer.  And we drew in pencil.  Something about that drawing made the professor think I had some sort of aptitude for art and told me “no matter what it is you are studying here, you need to change your focus to art.”  I told him I was studying to be a nurse and hoped to someday take my nursing skills to third world countries.  Looking rather crestfallen, he told me that this aspiration of mine was much more important than art, but encouraged me to continue to persue it as a hobby if nothing else.

One of our art projects in the class was to create something using the pointillism technique.  That is where the entire work is done using dots.  Our assignment was to do something in simple black and white.  I found a picture of a handsome older gentleman in an ad for Dewar’s (is that whiskey?) and turned it into this:

And it sat, with all of my other projects from that class in a black cardboard portfolio for years.  In the mid 1990′s I was working for a center that performed joint replacement surgery.  We had an annual fund raising event which included a silent auction.  I was asked to donate something for one of these auctions and I decided that it might just be the right time to see if I could fulfill one of things on the List of 50 and sell a work of art.  So I entered “Dewar’s” into the auction and it sold, for (I think) about $475.  Probably purchased by someone who thought it looked like their grandpa, but that didn’t matter.  I did it!

The last work of art I ever completed was in that class, back in 1987.  It was my final project, which when I turned it in, again made my professor sigh and wish that I’d take up art as a career.  My project was a picture of my friend Kevin building a truss in the Philippines:

 

Lately I have been thinking how much I’d like to return to my artsy roots and start creating again.  I have a project in mind.  For Connie and Phil’s wedding present they requested that I create something for them.  I never did.  For months I have been thinking of creating something in Connie’s memory for Phil.  And interestingly enough, on my last visit to California while out to dinner with my brother, he reminded me that I still “owed” him that wedding present and that he is going to hold me to it, even though Connie is gone.

Spellchecker

WordPress has added another very useful new feature to their site!  Spellchecker.  I'm a pretty good speller, but I thought I'd run a few of my drafts through the spellchecker, just to try it out.

Guess what word kept showing up as being misspelled….

'Blog'.

How's that for irony?

And when I ran this entry through the spellchecker, 'Wordpress' as well as 'blog' came up as being misspelled.

And I thought it was funny that the AOL automatic spellchecker shows 'internet' as being misspelled…!

Saturday

Today my cousin Julie, her twins (Schuyler and Jordan), my sister Diane, and I all went up to Julie's property to retrieve a trampoline and to get firewood.  The property is outside of Buena Vista.  We who are from California pronounce this city the spanish way, "bway-na vees-tah".  The people who live in the area and Coloradans in general pronounce it "byu-nah viss-tah".  We who are from California (and that would be all of those previously mentioned here) are on a mission to retrain those who aren't from California in the correct pronunciation.  Or at least to not follow their suit in that horrible mispronunciation. 

The drive out on Highway 24 was truly spectacular.  I have pictures, but they are all 35mm prints, so if you want to see them, you'll have to come here to visit me.  About halfway there, you round a corner and go through what is called the Wilkerson Pass, and in a fraction of a moment, the most amazingly beautiful range of mountains comes into view.  Part of the Rockies, these mountains cover about 130 degrees of your field of vision at this point.  The farther you drive, even more mountains come in to view.

We trudged through the snow to reach the trampoline.  Julie called this afternoon after she left her house and was well on her way to my place.  She didn't bring any tools and didn't know how the thing was put together.  FORTUNATELY, the guy who is redoing Diane's condo, and who is a sort of neighbor of Julie's, was familiar with this exact trampoline as it used to belong to a friend of his and he had put it together some time in the past.  So, she popped over there and found out that all we needed was a hammer and an indelible marker (to mark which part attached to which part).  We banged it apart easily, loaded the pieces in Julie's SUV, and proceeded to load up the back of Diane's SUV with nice, dry, well-seasoned wood. 

On the way home we stopped at Sonic for dinner.  Sorry all of you who don't have Sonics.

All in all it was a beautiful day, except for the fact that I am on the verge of tears constantly.  I feel like I have been crying, or on the verge of crying, or trying not to cry now for 9 months.  This, too, shall pass.

Mitchell learned how to whistle today.  That's a very good thing.

Where Were We?

Thanks, Shawn, for reminding me that I hadn’t answered ”Where Are We?”. 

The picture of the biohazard needle container was taken in the women’s restroom at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix.  Does its presence mean that they had a problem with people just mindlessly and thoughtlessly throwing their used needles on the floor???  What’s UP with that?  And what is next?  I totally understand and agree with the placement of AEDs (automated external defibrillators) in airports and have taken care of patients who were defibrillated by bystanders at LAX before paramedics arrived.  But needle containers??

You’d probably think that the container was placed there because diabetics were throwing their needles in the garbage.  But all the diabetics I know reuse their needles.  They aren’t thoughtless with their medical waste.  So it does make me wonder just what happened at THAT aiport!  Any diabetics reading?  Tell us what YOU do with your used needles when YOU are traveling…

 

Shouldn’t I Be Crying?

Today should have been a really bad day.  But it wasn’t.  Eight months ago I had my very worst day, and all other days are compared to that one and, fortunately, come up way short when it comes to the question “Which is worse, today, or THAT day?”.  The answer is always THAT day.  And yet, I am surprised at my significant lack of emotion at the moment.  In fact, what I feel is more emptiness than anything else.  Should I weep?  Should I scream?  Should I rent my clothes and ask God “why?”  Should I walk around in sack cloth and ashes?  Maybe when the significance of what happened today sinks in I will.  Or maybe if I tell somebody what happened the tears will come.  But for the moment, I am bereft of emotion.  And I am keeping it to myself.  I don’t want to talk about it.  What will talking solve?  What will crying over it solve?  Matthew 6:34 tells me “Do not be over-anxious, therefore, about to-morrow, for to-morrow will bring its own cares.  Enough for each day are its own troubles.”  (Weymouth New Testament Version)

Today the best romance I ever had ended after many months of pain and frustration.  Through the pain and frustration I remained hopeful that we’d find our way out of this particular dark time and back into the light and lovliness that was in the beginning.  Today I got the answer that I dreaded:  an end to the relationship in all its iterations.  Our romance was one that I never dreamed could happen to me.  This man brought me a happiness and a joy that made me think that maybe marriage was something that my future held afterall.  A thought that I hadn’t had in a decade.  He changed me.  He softened me.  He made me want to truly *need* to have a particular person in my life.  He was my friend, and I dreamed of him, and I let myself imagine a life with him, and I woke up thinking of him, and I went to sleep smiling and content and with him on my mind.  And this at a time when things were the darkest for me.  And at a time when his life was filled with the darkness of loss as well.  I thought that God had said “Here my children, a gift of unimagineable worth for you.”.  Did I hear wrong??  Was there always a part of me that has been crying out to have that but because of past hurts I had subjugated it to other interests and desires?  Did that part of me jump too soon into something I had no business jumping into?  And why did it go so wrong?  A bomb went off, and not only could we not remove the shrapnel from each other’s hearts, we couldn’t even find the shrapnel in the first place.  We kept trying to tell each other where it was and what it looked like, but after enjoying a time of amazing communication in the beginning, our words were confounded and we were no longer even remotely understanding each other.  I have endured the loss of love before.  The last time I was devestated by losing someone (nearly twenty years ago now) I wrote a poem which sadly, comes to mind tonight.  It has no title.

Unseen forces fold the waters back

Revealing

Delicate, hidden things

A fragile intricate world

Left unprotected by her gates of green.

There are those who trample carelessly over

The hidden parts

Not caring

On what they tread.

There are those who remove

Treasures now exposed

And put them on display

For all to see.

There are those who

Look

And gently touch

Experiencing the beauty

Becoming a part of it.

The waves in all their majesty

Must eventually be stripped back.

They cannot hide forever

The crystal pools.

She cannot keep the world

Away from her shores

Nor from picking over the delicate things.

She can only hope

For the one who will look inside and

See the gentleness there

Understanding

It is as much a part of the sea

As the waves

And that when the waves return

To obscure

The gentler things, that

They still lie beneath the green gates,

And need to be, for a time

Locked in.

Protected.

He showed up in my life in the most amazing of ways and my heart was open and unprotected and welcoming when he did.  His touch was a gentle one, but after the bomb, the waters started to seep back in.  I tried to hold them back for him, but now tonight, the waves have crashed back in over my heart.  Good Bye, Scruffy J.

 

Shower Leak, An Update

The interesting thing about this blogging stuff is that the most mundane things in life are actually interesting enough to deserve being written about.  Like my shower leak.  When I called the plumber, the woman who answered the phone told me not to fret too much, it was likely something as simple as cracks in my calking which caused the deluge into my living room.  I have to admit that I didn’t exactly believe that this was the case, but crossed my fingers anyway.

Leo the plumber showed up at about 11:15 yesterday and went to work.  He filled the tub.  No leaking.  And he ran the shower.  Again, no leaking.  He evaluated my tiles and calking and noted multiple hairline cracks which he said was probably the source of the problem.  He said I’d be surprised at how much water can seep into those and that I had probably reached critical mass (he didn’t say critical mass, but that’s what he meant) with how much water the dry wall could absorb, and it simply had to find a way out.  “Get some silicone calking and fill those cracks and you should be fine.”  He said if it was a pipes issue, it would have flooded again.  Ten minutes later he was handing me the bill and telling me to call should I have any problems.

Ten minutes for seventy bucks.  That makes, what, $420 an hour?  I should have become a plumber.

I calked, I showered, I didn’t leak.  (At least not this time.  Keeping those fingers crossed!)

 

Welcome to the Blogosphere!

I hadn’t planned on posting three times in one day, but there are simply some things that are so incredibly blogworthy that they must be heralded immediately!

My sister, Diane, has joined the smaller WordPress family and the greater family of bloggers!  Yeah!!!!!  (Finally!  She’s the computer geek in the family, so this big step deserves an “it’s about time”!)

www.dnorris.wordpress.com

A permanent link to her blog is located under my Blog Roll. 

May you all enjoy her blog and may she enjoy blogging as much as I do!  And may she have completed her first posting by the time you click the above link…she’s been working on it for quite some time now, and so far, nothing…

 

Unpaid product endorsement for the day – TJ’s White Cheddar Popcorn

I am not generally a purveyor of flavored popcorns, however, I would give all of you a taste of this stuff if I could.  I don't even LIKE cheese flavored popcorn, but I tried this stuff one day, and it's like crack, or methamphetamine.  One hit and your hooked!  If you are lucky enough to have a Trader Joe's within a hundred miles of where you live, you might want to pick up a bag or two. 

  

I know I stopped in a Trader Joe's when I was in LA last week and picked some up!  (I wonder if my mother would think it frivolous if I asked her to send me a bag or two every now and again.  I imagine if I paid her, she wouldn't care HOW frivolous a request it was!)

Team Number Three, and Counting!

When I got home and was going through my mail I was so excited to see my first real packet of information had arrived from Teen Missions in my absence.  When I opened the packet, I found that they had 'apparently' made an error and all my paperwork reflected a different Zambia team than the one I had been assigned!  I e-mailed TMI to see what the deal was and the reply was "Didn't anyone notify you that there was an assignment change?  Sorry about that."  And Betty assured me that I "will love" this team!  And I thought the cooking thing was going to be a stretch!  God in His infinite wisdom, and with His curious sense of humor, has now put me on a team where there are severe restrictions on the amount of personal belongings you can bring AND it's a team where we'll be moving around alot, so there will probably be a few breaking downs and setting up of camps!  And that is the hardest part of camping, right?  I just sort of laughed and thought "this is going to be a FUN summer!" 

On the three teams that I went on as a "kid", I was the girl who sweet talked all the boys into carrying something of mine so that I could still take all my stuff and stay under the 32 pound weight limit.  The boys always had an extra pound or two or three to play with, so I'd see how many of those pounds I could get allocated with MY stuff!  I don't know how these weight restrictions will work as a leader.  I have a laundry list as long as my arm of "extras" I'd like to bring so that I can make team life easier if I can, but with these restrictions I don't know if that will be possible!  And since this is only March and I'm on my third assignment, chances are I could have more assignment changes before I actually get on the field.  I had a leader on my first team to Haiti who was totally awesome, and he was transferred to another team a week into Boot Camp, so no guarantees.

It's an adventure from the very beginning, it is!  Indeed!

Where Are We???

A test of sorts for you….where do you think this picture was taken?

(Just in case you don’t know what it is, it is a safety container for used needles.  The kind that injections are given with.)  Hint:  We’re NOT in a hospital!

 

Two Condos…

one shower, and no ranges!

So typical of a situation that I and Diane would find ourselves in!  We have two condos.  Hers has no flooring except for subflooring and is in the process of being completely redone (paint is dry though).  Basically uninhabitable.  Every room is pretty much torn apart.  The only room in HER condo that is actually IN working order, is the upstairs bathroom.  The shower in my condo is leaking, so we can’t use it.  (Plumber expected sometime today).  Her kitchen has no appliances, and my oven/stove is currently BACK in my dining room.  So, on Di’s first morning in Colorado Springs, and my first day back home, morning found us traipsing from my condo over to hers with towels, clothes, toiletries, etc. to take a shower!  As for cooking, I DO have a microwave and a toaster oven.  But, as Diane’s best friend Brenda says, if we can’t figure out what to make using those, we can always make reservations! 

Off for round two of the trudge through the snow to take a shower!

The difference between an adventure and an ordeal is attitude!  WE are having an adventure!

 

Not all who wander…

Yesterday on our visit to the Grand Canyon, we caught the bus that takes you on a tour out to Hermit’s Nest, making a number of stops at scenic points (like every point isn’t scenic, huh?) along the way.  Its terminus was a place called the Hermit’s Nest where you could enjoy a humonstrous fire, get a cup of coffee, and maybe drop a dime on some useless canyon paraphernalia.  There was a book there called “Who Pooped In The Canyon”, which was pretty amusing and showed you all the animials and what their excrement looked like.  It wasn’t really a contender for purchase, but deserved a mention.  As many of you who know me well could have guessed, I headed straight for the T-shirt section.  I found a long sleeved olive colored T with a slogan on it that hit me right where I live.  I was going to buy it for a guy I know who doesn’t exactly “get” my sense of spirit and adventure, but in my heart I knew I’d keep it for myself!  Here’s what it says:

 

Isn’t that great???  And it even has boots on it, so I’m thinking it will go with me this summer.

Now, onto the snow.  Initially the snow that was falling was the classic snow flake variety.  The snow where you can see each beautiful and not to be repeated crystalline structure.  At some point, something weird started to fall.  Large clumps of snow, but not the big wet blobby snow I’ve seen before.  This stuff was conical in shape (shaped sort of like a NASA reentry module,

 

These ‘snow modules’ were upwards of a quarter of an inch long.  Really weird stuff.

And at first glance, on the ground, it looked like hail, but it was really light and you could pick it apart, so it wasn’t that.  We ran into a British family, and they thought it looked like “polystyrene falling from the sky”, that’s styrofoam to us Yanks.  Now here is where I will bore you to death.  I was determined to discover what this oddity was.  This is what I have learned!  This snow is called ‘conical graupel’.  Graupel is a word of german derviation meaning ’kernal’.  These pellets of snow sort of look do look like kernals of corn.  They look more like re-entry modules, but there probably wasn’t a German word for that when it came to having to find a cool name for this snow.  It is thought to be a transititional state between snow and hail, but they really don’t know much about it.  But how totally cool that we got to see it!

The quality of this picture is awful, but that could be explained by the fact that I found it on google images, cut and pasted it in Irfanview, saved it in PhotoSuite changing it from a .bmp file to a .jpg file, and uploaded it here.  I suppose it would be easier to do a fancy schmancy link to the picture, but even though a kind reader recently sent me detailed instructions on just how to DO that…I haven’t mastered it.  So, you’ll have to deal with the fuzzy photo.  All I really wanted you to see was the lunar module nature of the pellet dead center in the picture.  If you are interested in boring yourselves further with a very brief scientific explanation of how these weird snow flakes are formed, and to see the picture above as intended, you can use this old fashioned kind of link:  http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/as3/scrns/precip/Note09.html.

Okay, so now that we have the technical and the boring and the T-shirt out of the way, just one more picture relating to the Grand Canyon: 

Here’s Rocky!

He just stood there on the precipice of the canyon and posed like he knew exactly what I was doing!

 

Doozy?

The Grand Canyon was spectacular, as the GC is expected to be.  It was COLD, and overcast, and snowy at times.  We were surprised at just how many people were there in the middle of winter!  And at how many of them were dressed to freeze!  We purchased an annual pass for the National Parks as there are a number of them that we hope to visit soon.  A pretty good deal!  Fifty bucks for a 12 month pass.  Gets you into all the parks for no additional costs.  It normally costs twenty dollars per vehicle to enter a park, so go to three and you’ve already saved money.  I’m thinking of investing in the lifetime pass.  Why, I’ve never even been to Yellowstone!  We will be planning a trip back to the Grand Canyon as we were only able to spend four hours there and there was still much to see and do.  And my cousin Julie has never been, so she’ll need to go!  Maybe when it’s warmer.  I’m thinking riding the mules down might be fun, in a heart stopping acrophobic way…

We were anxious to get to Colorado Springs, but kept hearing reports of dire weather on the roads ahead of us.  The Springs was supposed to be having a “doozy” of a storm starting in the early evening as reported by one local weatherman.  But weather.com had predicted only 10-20 percent chances of snow on I-25 between Albuquerque and Colorado Springs.  We decided to gut it out and power through.  Not far out of Albuquerque, we hit our first snow.  For twenty minutes or so we weren’t sure if going on was the best thing to do, but then, all of the sudden, it cleared.  And we didn’t hit any more snow!  We made it without further weather incident.  Perhaps the “doozy” of a storm is still brewing out there and we’ll wake up in a winter wonderland.  That would be nice.

I bought a cool shirt to show you, and I have more to tell on the GC, but it’s going on 2 a.m. and I am thinking I need to get to sleep. 

 

Traffic

Not a movie review, but an observation on TMC…too many cars.

As Diane and I were working our way out of town on the 91 freeway, this is what we were in:

This is at noon, on a Saturday!  We hit much more of the same farther down the road on the 15!  Actually were at a standstill at many points in the journey out of town!  Oy…  A reminder of one of the reasons it’s good to leave Los Angeles!

We are currently encamped in a Holiday Inn Express a couple of miles outside of the entrance to the Grand Canyon.  On the drive on the road out here to the GC, we both saw a shooting star that streaked far across the extremely dark sky.  I’m not superstitious, but that has to be good luck, right??  Hoping that the weather in the morning will be clear enough to enjoy some excellent views!  My cousin Julie called a few hours ago and said that it will be snowing heavily in Colorado Springs by tomorrow night.  I guess we’ll just have to play our progress by ear depending on what weather we hit and where and at what time.  I suppose prudence would say “while the weather is still good power through so you beat the storm!”.  But we put duct tape over Prudence’s mouth and decided that you can’t just drive right past the Grand Canyon if you’ve never seen it, despite potentially awful future weather conditions! 

Have you ever seen this at a hotel?

If you’re not certain what it is you are looking at, it is a bed that has been made without a top sheet!  I don’t know about you, but EWWWW, why would a maid DO that??  When I called down to the desk, Paul, the guy who answered the phone, apologized and told me that he’d “been getting a bunch of those calls tonight”.  I see a pink slip in someone’s future!

 

On The Road

After a very nice breakfast with our Mom, our sister Whitney, our niece Avalon, and our nephew Mitchell, I am taking a brief moment to drop a post.

We (Diane and I) drove past Diane’s former house to say one last good-bye, and it already doesn’t feel like hers anymore.  Strange how you can spend so much time in a place, create so many wonderful memories there, and then, the day after it isn’t “family” anymore, it feels like it almost never was.

So, we’re finishing putting things in the car at the hotel where we’ve been saying, and will be on the road in about fifteen minutes.

Can’t believe Diane’s moving day is here already!