Saturday, February 5, 2011

Yes, we are still alive and in the land of the living. I find it very hard to write something when we aren’t doing anything exciting; when traveling it is easy to write about where we are and what we are doing, but now we are like anyone else living in the same place and carrying on a normal life.

We took part in the parks Garage Sale two weeks ago, and hooray, we managed to get rid of everything. We were out just before 8 a.m. and it was quite chilly until about 10, people were arriving wearing gloves it was so cool but it did warm up nicely. Sharon & Bob, across the street from us, had put an ad in the paper re the garage sale as they had a lot of stuff they hoped to get rid of and their ad sure brought in a lot of people from outside the park which helped us. We sold our lazy boy chair and towards the end we still had two bar stools left, plus some odds and ends when a gal came along and bought the bar stools. She had a friend with her who gave us a brochure for Helping Hands and she said if we wanted she would take away anything that was left over. The gal who bought the stools came back about 45 minutes later to pick them up and her friend took the few things we had left, so we were real happy to see everything gone & not having to deal with the leftovers.

We had a few good laughs out of people, John had two saw horses out for $1 each and a fellow came along and looked at them, thought his friend in Washington might like them and tried to call him to find out if he would like them, but couldn’t remember his phone number. Anyways, after much dithering about he decided to buy them – all of this for $2! Another lady was looking at the humidifier we had out, it is one that sits on the kitchen counter and the fellow we bought the house from needed it as he got nose bleeds from the dryness. Anyways, it was towards the end so John told the woman $0.25 for it and she still couldn’t make up her mind and ended up walking away. A couple of minutes later her husband came back to get it and asked me how much so I said $1, he said he though it was $0.25 but I said my price was $1 and he paid it, sometimes it doesn’t pay to procrastinate about things!! Another lady spent five minutes asking questions and dithering about a ceiling light, another item that was at that point going for $0.25, but she did buy it with our assurances that it worked and the only reason we were selling it was because we had replaced it with a track light. People like this made the morning fun!

Last week our friends Jim & Linda came over from Desert Hot Springs, California for a couple of days and we had a great visit with them. On Wednesday we went out to Lake Martinez to show them the lake and look around. There are some absolutely gorgeous homes out there and then there are some pretty tired looking places, a little bit of everything. We had lunch at a restaurant/bar there, Jim & Linda treated us to an awesome burger, an absolutely huge burger that serves 4 and was it ever good – thanks again guys.





We will have to go again sometime with another couple who would like to split a burger! After lunch we drove farther out from the lake to the National Wildlife Preserve and went through the visitor’s centre, then came back through the Dome Valley where it is all farmland, not something you expect to find in the desert.

We had a real cold snap here this week and the pool was even closed for 3 days. On Wednesday night/Thursday morning it went down to 28F and a lot of people had their plants killed by the frost and it looks like the trees got frostbite also. Wednesday and Thursday the temperature didn’t get much past the mid 50’sF during the day but it is now warming up again. I really won’t complain though as they had a rough weather week back home so our little cold snap wasn’t all that bad. On Wednesday afternoon we went downtown planning on seeing The King’s Speech at the theatre but when we got there the lineup was huge and it was cold and windy so we decided to wait and go another day, that day still hasn’t come but we will go soon.

This morning a fellow came from the insurance company to take pictures of the house and he was telling John that his brother lives in Tucson and because of the cold weather they have run out of natural gas, now that would not be nice! I was just checking the Tucson News and it seems like there were about 15,000 homes that lost their gas supply and now Southwest Gas must turn off all the meters in the service area, then repressurize its system before turning all those meters on again. Workers have to enter each home to turn customers’ meters back on and can only do that when someone is home and they expect they won’t get them all back on until Tuesday, wow, what a mess that is.

Yesterday when John was out for his bike ride he saw a Giant bike for sale in the area he calls Little Mexico, so when he came back he took the truck over to check it out and came back with a new, to him, bike for $25. It is in good shape but sure needs to be cleaned up so I know how he will be spending his time for the next while. He loves doing stuff like that so is in his glory and will end up having a nice bike when he’s done.

Time to get some lunch then head out to fight the crowds at the grocery store.

And so ends more great gifts of days and we look forward to more good days to come.