RV Travels With Huggy

This being the last day of January it seems appropriate to welcome the month of February. Welcome! In our area we have set a record for the warmest January on record and those records go back into the late 1800s, so this is a pretty long standing thing. Our weather guessers are saying they expect February to be warmer and dryer than January was, but it normally is so I'm not sure if it will be quite a bit better than usual or what. I have noticed more hours of daylight and that I like. It will also do well for our home heating bills, although I guess what is good for us here is not so good for others in different parts of the country. Last year we had a very cold, snowy winter while the East Coast was enjoying balmy weather. This year it seems to have flip-flopped. I don't know what next year will bring but I'll vote for another El Nino year like this one, although it didn't get started until about the end of November.

February is also a month with some important birthdays for our family. It starts out with Pat's younger brother on the 4th, then Pat's on the 22nd and my brother's on the 24th. Pat and T have a fun thing of trying to outdo each other with wacky birthday cards but Pat is a little behind since if she goes too far overboard it will catch up as T's BD is first and he has almost three weeks to find an appropriate card. The 22nd also used to be the birthday of George Washington, our country's first President. Pat told her school mates the reason they got a holiday on the 22nd was to celebrate her birthday. We also used to get Abraham Lincoln's birthday off on the 12th. I guess Congress decided it was too much to allow the People to have two holidays in one month. Or there was a lot of pressure from government employees who wanted three day weekends but thought they couldn't get two of them in a month, so they canceled both birthdays and we now just celebrate an office workers holiday on the 3rd Monday. We haven't canceled or moved Pat's birthday- it will still happen on the 22nd.

I've had a few questions about how Huggy is doing. She is fine although we are still having cat wars between our three cats. Huggy and Peewee, the youngest one, have almost made it a game. Molly is still the queen of the house and she tries to just ignore both of the others although they sometimes do get her involved. There are times when they will all three be in the same room and just quietly ignore each other. That is about the best we seem to be able to have happen.

Labels: Birthdays, Holidays, Huggy, Our cats, Weather

Friday night we attended a play at our local River Belle Dinner Theater here in Mount Vernon. It was billed as a musical melodrama and titled, "He Ain't Done Right By Nell." It will just be there two weekends and then followed by another for two weekends called, "Curse You, Jack Dalton" that I think we would like to also go see. These are summer fare and not full dinner productions so the cost is much less- $14 each plus tax for adults. It was a lot of fun and of course I took some photos, over 150 all together but I've selected a dozen to post here. It was very hard to cut them down to only a dozen but I really feel that is almost too many for a blog post so have limited it to them. I did take a CD with all the photos to the play director yesterday so they will have them. By the way, a blogger friend from Whidbey Island, who produces plays for their local theater down there, is in need of a piano player for a production they are about open. If you or anyone you know might be interested, please click on the link here on my site labeled, Life After NEXCOM and talk with Mary Lou.

Here is what their flier says about the play:
"A gay nineties musical comedy. When Hilton Hays learns that Nell is a foundling and has no right to the Perkins name, he threatens to tell because Nell will not respond to his advances. Nell is too honest to marry the manly hero, Jack Logan, under the circumstances, so she dons her cape and prepares to roam the cruel world seeking a refuge for her broken heart. But wealthy Burkett Carleton has Hays arrested for stealing, and he discovers Nell is his long lost granddaughter."

That is a short summary of the play. There were seven characters and I know one of them quite well through church. I had never been to a Melodrama but it was done as in the past, with cue cards for the audience to cheer, boo, clap, etc. at appropriate times. I guess we could have thrown popcorn, which apparently was done in past years, but I think any popcorn that was sold there was eaten rather than thrown. Anyway, here are some photos, in the order they were taken.


Granny, coming down the step, is the one who found baby Nell in a basket outside the barn when Nell was a very small baby. The lady in the background is a friend of Granny's who is also searching for a Man (for her.)


The Villain, Hilton Hays, makes his first appearance. He is the manager of the local mill that is owned by the absentee Mr. Carleton. Hays is a perfect villain and shows his many despicable characteristics.


Hilton Hays along with the young lady he claims is his girl friend but in reality he is just using her as he does everyone. He does bum $50 from her as he apparently has no cash.


Granny's deceased husband had designed some invention that supposedly will be worth a lot of money. Granny plans to give the drawings of it to Nell as a wedding present but Hilton has become aware of it and tries to bribe Granny to give it to him to check out as he plans to marry Nell. So he says. He goes so far as to offer her cash (that he got from his "girl friend") and Granny is wise enough to take his money but not give him the drawings.


Nell, who has been out walking her blood hounds, makes her appearance and makes it clear that she has no intention of every marrying Hilton Hays. The love of her life is Jack Logan.


Here is Nell and Jack.


This looks a lot like the last one but it is actually a bit later in the play. The two have pretty much agreed that they want to marry.


Hilton Hays overheard a conversation between Granny & her lady friend where Granny admits that Nell was found in a basket outside their barn. Hays, being unable to get Nell to agree to marry him (he wants control of that invention) tells Nell that she is a foundling and has no right to the Perkins name. Apparently in the 1890s this was important as Nell decides that she cannot marry Jack and will just go off on her own. Hays looks around the Perkins home until he finds the drawings, which he then takes.


Nell, dressed in her cape ready to leave, tells Jack that she cannot marry him but he tells her that makes no difference to him and he still wants her for his wife.


Hilton Hays is exposed by his "girl friend" and Jack, normally a pretty calm person, threatens to hit Hilton. Hilton brings out his only true friend, a rubber chicken, which really seems appropriate. While they scuffle, the missing invention plans fall out of his pocket and he is exposed as a thief.


The "girl friend" has contacted her father who turns out to be Burkett Carleton, the owner of the mill that Hilton manages. He and his accountants have found many irregularities with money that Hilton has taken for his own use and have brought the Sherri f to arrest Hilton. While there, Mr. Carleton (my friend from church) notices the locket that Nell wears and asks to look at it. Due to a bunch of problems, one of Mr. Carleton's daughters married, gave birth and then died. Her husband gave away the baby and then disappeared leaving no trace of where the baby went. This locket was Mr. Carleton's daughters and it contains a photo of his daughter. Thus it is determined that Nell is his long lost granddaughter. She not only really has a last name but she is from a rich family!


Here's a photo with the full ensemble onstage singing (remember, this is a musical) at the end of the play.

We enjoyed it and definitely plan to return. They theater returns to their regular dinner theater programs in the fall and the first production will start the day after my birthday in September. That would be a neat gift! Are you listening, Honey?

Labels: Birthdays, Entertainment, Photos

Last Sunday Pat and I drove south to Auburn to attend a birthday party to celebrate the 12th birthday of my oldest granddaughter, K. I can't believe that she is almost a teenager already. She was born while my older son was on his first deployment in his Navy career so she was about three and a half months old when he first was able to hold her. The Navy lets those sailors who's wives have delivered babies while they were deployed be the first off the ship, and B was about the second of the bunch of a dozen or so.

K is now 12 and I guess that makes her kind of still a kid but not yet quite a teenager (I know teenagers all think they are adults but we know better.) I have no idea what a girl of that age wants in the way of birthday presents so I took the easy way out and got her a gift certificate for a store where I know she likes to shop. She did get quite a few gifts and I think mine was the only gift certificate, but much of the rest of the family lives closer so were able to know more about what she would want. I did take a few photos-


Here's the birthday girl looking through a bag with a number of gifts inside. Yep, she is still enjoying this opening gifts thing.


This is the card from Pat and I. It is a funny one. She is still young enough that funny birthday cards work, but she is young enough that they are not "aren't you getting old" themed. It was fun picking it out.


She sat across the table from Pat and I for awhile and I got what I think is a pretty cute photo of her snuggled against the shoulder of her other Grandpa. When she was a small baby until when Annie & I moved to Mount Vernon, K would spend most Saturday nights with us and go to sleep on my lap in my recliner chair. She was so cute and sweet then. She is still cute and sweet, but not small enough to go to sleep sitting on Grandpa's lap in a recliner. One more year and she will be a teenager.

I guess wonderful memories like that is a part of the fun side of growing older.

Labels: Birthdays, Family, Grandkids, Photos, Reminiscing

We usually don't have much snow at all over a winter here in north west Washington State, but the last few days have been very unusual. Yesterday we started out from home about 11am to drive south to my grand daughter's 11th birthday party. It was raining when we left home but as we started up the hill on the freeway south of town we started into mixed snow & rain. A few miles farther, about at the Skagit/Snohomish County line for those familiar with the area, the snow really started sticking on the road as well as alongside the road. A mile or so farther we spotted the first car that had slid off the road. As we approached the Camano Island exit there was close to 4 inches of snow and it was coming down hard. The speed of the traffic was down to about 30mph and it looked like it was getting worse, so we got off the freeway there and turned back. Later we learned that there had been something like 6" of snowfall down at Smokey Point & Marysville that was about 12 miles ahead. I talked with K, my grand daughter, in the evening and we will go take her to lunch the week after next when she is on spring vacation from school.

Back home it was still just raining which actually quit later in the day although it never did warm up very much. When we got up this morning, this is what we had outside our windows:

This is our front yard with the new Thundering Plum tree and the forsythia, both in full bloom, although both with snow on them. You can see the snowflakes falling in the photo. The roads were just slushy but not any problem to drive, although I'll bet that farther south as you get into the so called convergent zone there was a lot more snow (like yesterday.)


This is a telephoto view of the condos on the hill just east of us. This is very unusual weather, especially for "spring."


A photo from the sunroom showing the little fireplace at work, trying to make it warm for the cats. The "flames" are visible here and the heat comes from the bottom of the fireplace. They love it out here but are not fond of cold weather, so we are spending electricity to heat the room. Also notice the hummingbird in the upper part of the window. More about these next.


A closer view of one of the other windows, with a hummingbird in it. Notice all the ice and snow on the pampas grass plant outside the window, and you can still see the snowflakes falling.


A closeup view of the hummingbird in the previous photo. Yes, it did stay there and wait for me to take a closer photo. That is because they are not real birds. Pat found some in a catalog that are split in half. Each half has a magnet attached so that you can put one on each side of a single pane window and they look pretty real. They say they won't work on a double pane insulated window and we haven't tried them on any of those but they work fine on the sunroom windows.


This is a different bird that is on one of the south facing windows. You can see the melted snow drops here as the weather system is coming out of the southwest, but you can also see how the birds are split in half. I used the flash unit to light the bird but it didn't penetrate the tinted window so the outside part is just in silhouette against the brighter sky. These things are fun and if anyone is interested in them I can post where Pat found them.

Our weather is supposed to change for the better after today. I am really getting tired of having winter in springtime. The temperature yesterday never got out of the 30s. This afternoon is supposed to have sunshine but the weather forecasts we get usually come from Seattle, 80 miles south, and it can be different up here in the frigid north. But, we are ready for better weather. Soon, please.

Labels: Birthdays, Grandkids, Griping, Photos, Sunroom, Weather

Last weekend I ordered a Tokina 12-24mm F/4.0 AF DX extreme wide angle zoom lens to use on my Nikon D200 Digital SLR camera. It came yesterday from the store in New York and I couldn't wait to test it, so took it outside for a few photos, then a few inside photos including the one here from the sunroom. I didn't have a lot of time to play with it as yesterday was also Pat's birthday and we did have some activities planned.

I love this lens! I didn't realize how much difference I would see between the other lens I have that goes to a wide angle view at 18mm focal length and this one. It doesn't sound like a lot, just 6mm less, but it is a big jump when you look at it from the point of view of percentage change. Anyway, here are three test photos from that short experimental shooting session:


For this photo I was only about two feet from the back of the VW Bug. The view shows from all the way on the left side of the house clear over to the right edge and has most of the Bug in the photo, too. And the vertical lines at the sides are pretty straight up and down. I could have bought a lens that is 2mm wider but it is a Fisheye lens and the verticals at the edges curve. By the time you crop it to fit into a standard view you do not have much more of a wide angle than I have here but you have given up a fair percentage of the pixels in the original image, thus limiting how large you can go with that photo. So, I thought this lens would work better for me and the way I like to take photos. My friend, G, in Fort Bragg, CA has the other lens and I've seen some exciting and different photos he has taken with it. I wonder if I need them both.....


This view shows another corner of the sunroom but it also shows the full length of the house from the back corner of the sunroom all the way to the front, plus the street in front! And it is all sharply in focus, from the nearest thing in the photo, the corner of the sunroom that was about four feet in front of the camera, to the clouds and trees on the hills behind our town. This is another thing that wide angle lenses do, give a vast amount of depth of field where everything is sharp.


This view inside the sunroom is somewhat similar to others I have posted earlier, taken from the door into the house, but this shows the full left side, all the way across the back and almost up to the sliding glass door on the right side. Notice how much of the ceiling is included. This also shows how a wide angle lens exaggerates perspective, making things look farther apart than they really are. It is only 12 feet to the back of the sunroom from where I took the photo, the same distance that it is across the back of the room, but notice how the wall to the left side looks so much longer than the one across the back. They are the same length.

I think I am going to have a lot of fun with this lens and hopefully get the chance to go out and use it soon. Our weather has been great here for the last week and I hope we have turned the corner to where winter is behind and spring is actually here. But there are things still going on that demand time so I can't just go shooting with the camera. Tomorrow the electrician is coming and I hope we can get the wiring finished in the sunroom. About Monday I can put the final coat of three of Danish oil on the stained wood parts, and then we can setup to have the finished floor put in. We also will go shopping for lights when we look for the flooring. This project may actually be finished within the next two weeks or so!

I did do something else this past week and the thing I ordered should be here Tuesday. That is the same day the guy from Comcast cable TV is coming by to run the cable out to the sunroom. We will soon have HD TV on a much larger screen than the 19" unit I have for the sunroom! More on that later.

Labels: Birthdays, House, Photos, Sunroom

My youngest grand daughter, K, celebrated her 7th birthday just three days after my XXth birthday this month. Since all the kids are now back in school, her party was held on a Saturday at their house. Pat and I attended along with her other grand parents, many aunts and uncles (her mom is child number 14 in a family of 16 children) and many of her friends and neighbors. Since the party started at 1:30 in the afternoon, they started with pizza for anyone who wanted a little more lunch. Then it was time to move on to the cake for desert.


Here is the table with the cake and many of the kids plus a few of the adults gathered around, including Mom & Dad. The birthday girl is on the right side of the photo, wearing the hat.


This one looks like she is saying blowing out seven candles is no problem. She did it fine.


Now it is time to start opening the gifts. This bag was from Pat & I and contained about half a dozen gifts. No, I wouldn't spoil my Grand Daughter!


This gift is one of those from us that was inside the big bag that she was holding in the previous photo. It is a notebook with a photo of K on the cover. The photo was taken in 2004, of K wearing one of Grandma Ann's Red Hatter hats.


I think all kids like money. Someone gave her a stack of seven dollar bills and they were a big hit with K, as you can tell from her expression.


Grandma Annie was real good at picking gifts for the grandkids. She would buy them when she found them, sometimes saving them for months before the event they were needed for occurred. Sometimes they were forgotten at the time they should have been given. These sticker books were a couple of things that Annie had picked out for one of our two grand daughters, before her death in 2005 and they were safely put away. I found them this spring while cleaning out the house to get it ready to sell. So, these sticker books and a couple of small books about Kochina dolls that were with them are some of the last gifts for K from her Grandma Ann.

The birthday party was fun. It doesn't seem possible to me this little girl is already seven years old. She was born just four months after the death of my Mother and K's Grandma Ann died while K was four years old, a month & a half before her fifth birthday. In many ways it doesn't seem possible that it has been over two years since we lost Annie, either. I know I sure am a lot happier this year than I was last year. I have Pat to thank for that.

Labels: Annie, Birthdays, Family, Grandkids, Pat and I, Photos

The birthdays of my older son, myself and my youngest grand daughter all fall within a week of each other in September. For quite a few years I've celebrated them by doing coffee hour at church on the nearest weekend to my birthday. This year was no exception except that this year I had Pat to help grand daughter K and I. Son B is out at sea on his ship so wasn't able to be there. K's Dad is working today but her Mom brought her up and that gave Mom a chance to go do some birthday shopping without K being along.

When you need a cake for 50 to 60 or more, I think the best place to look around here is at Costco. Plus their cakes are very good and at a good price. My favorite is carrot cake and since it was my birthday and I placed the order, that was what I got.

Here is the cake before we started to cut it. It is one half of a full sheet cake and at our store sold for $18 which seems like a pretty fair price to me. And it sure was good, although I only was allowed one small piece as I am still trying to loose more weight.


Pat is starting to cut the cake while K is asking what do we need to do next. We are almost ready and people will be coming in soon as the church service is nearly over. Annie taught me that we always bring fruit as some people can't or don't eat cake. And there are cookies and punch for the kids but I've been amazed at how many big kids also eat them. I know- I used to.


Pat is finishing up cutting the cake. We managed to have it all eaten so that I didn't have to bring any home to tempt me. I LOVE carrot cake! We finally did get the chance to eat a (small) piece along with some fruit and a cup of coffee. Then it was time to start loading the dish washer and clean things up. We got away just after noon and brought our extra car home as we had driven there from different locations.

Pat then took me out to Cascade Pizza for one of my favorite lunches. We even have enough left for lunch tomorrow! There is a nice steak house here in town called Max Dale's Steak and Chop House. They sent me a coupon for my birthday to get a dinner free so we are going there tonight. It will be steak time. Then tomorrow son M has the day off and we are invited to dinner with he, his wife J and the other birthday person, K. It sounds like a couple of nice eating days to me and a good way to celebrate the 29th anniversary of my 35th birthday.

Labels: Birthdays, Family, Grandkids, Pat and I, Photos

It has been a busy few days since I last put up a post. I doubt that I will do any photos until I get home, about the end of next week. Things are too busy here at the conference to have time to set up the desktop PC & work over the photos and when I leave here I will beat feet for home, trying to make miles each day. I will be able to do text posts and will as I progress northward.

This has been the first Life on Wheels conference in 2006 and the first ever in the state of Arizona. There were 237 registered to attend and close to 150 were turned down due to lack of space. We have been told the conference will return here next year and more space to park RVs will be made available, so there should be more in attendance in 2007. While the session at the University of Idaho in Moscow is a full week long, the four satellite conferences are only two & a half days worth of classes. But that gives an opportunity for the attendees to select one of nine or so different classes that are offered each class period for a total of ten periods. In Moscow there are eight more sessions available.

There are commercial sponsors who help support this program so that all the costs do not have to be covered by the tuition paid by attendees. Tuesday evening, after the Introduction session, all were invited to Beaudry RV for a nice catered lasangne dinner, followed by cheese cake for desert next door at Camping World, which stayed open late to give us an opportunity to shop after dinner.

There were four class periods yesterday, four today and there will be two tomorrow, followed by a wrap up session. I have talked with many here who are intending to go to another conference. With nine or more classes offered at once, it can take a few return trips to attend all of them you want to. This is my fifth session and there are still some I haven't managed to fit in, plus there are new ones all the time, too. You also get to know many people who attend and those who work to make the conference happen, so it is a fun social event as well as a great learning experience.

I hadn't had a mocha since Monday night, until this morning. My friend D, who I worked with for years at Metro Transit in Seattle, celebrated his 56th birthday yesterday. We both needed to buy a few things at a couple of different stores, so we "cut class" second period today and started at the Seattle's Best Coffee cafe at the Border's book store where I bought him a mocha for his birthday, & me one too. I will hit the road for home tomorrow afternoon or for sure Sat morning & my mocha stops then might not happen daily. When I get home I may need to have more than one a day to make up for the shortfall!

Labels: Birthdays, Events, Friends, RVing

My Blogger Dashboard tells me this is my 80th post, but that is not really accurate since the first photos I posted were by using the "Blog This" option from Flickr and that makes a separate post for each photo. If I put up six photos in one day it counted as six posts. I have since learned how to move the HTML code that brings the photo from Flickr to Blogger and lets you put many of them in one post.

Yesterday I again met northwest friends, K & C K, for lunch. This time we went to Rob's Grill. Rob is from the NW but has relocated to Yuma & lives here fulltime. After lunch we spent some time at the Zodiak Internet Cafe for mochas and some browsing on the web. I came home for the rest of the evening and to finish my Mexican chef salad for dinner. I really need to learn how to cook something else!

Today I spent some time with the computers. I got into my author list and found that of the six Robert B Parker Spenser novels I bought on Wed. I already had half of them! I took them back this afternoon but she only had one other one that I didn't have so I got a couple of Sue Grafton novels that I don't think I have. My mocha today was from The Grocery Store and I did a little shopping there, too. Dinner tonight was from Stouffer's frozen selections. The microwave does a pretty good job on them. I plan to try to call my brother, L, in Spokane, WA and wish him a happy 60th birthday tonight. Today is his birthday.

Tomorrow there is a special event here in town that I think I will go to. I am not going to commit since cousin J says I will have to get there early if I want to go. When I worked I started at 05:00 but since retiring I have changed to stay up later at night and sleep in later in the morning. I will see how I do at "early."

Labels: Birthdays, Family, Friends, Internet