Getting Ready to Move

We have been here at Valle del Oro in Mesa since the first week of October. Next Monday we will move on, headed toward the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas where we will volunteer as tram drivers and interpreters at the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. On the way there, we plan to spend five days at Big Bend National Park.

We love seeing birds, but we have a lot to learn about bird watching. Santa Ana is at the confluence of two major bird flyways, the Central and the Mississippi. We are excited to see all the birds and butterflies there and share the joys of that with others on the tram tours. They sent us a 17-page tram narrative to study--and we have been doing that. We will have two weeks of training when we arrive, before we begin giving tours on February 1.

Our focus yesterday was to put away a lot of the items that only come out when we are parked in the same place for weeks or months--like the grill and sun screens and tire covers and our "home" stained glass window. In addition to that, we had Christmas decorations to put away. It may have only been the second day of Christmas, but the decorations had been up more than a month. So we stored them till next year.

We will go on one more hike this week and today we went to a movie. That is quite an event for us. Usually, we watch old movies we can record on TV. We had both read all three books by the late Stieg Larsson and when we read that the movie version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" was coming out this week, we decided to see it before we leave Mesa. If you have read the book, the movie is a way to re-experience this story. If you haven't read the book, we don't think the movie is really all that good. (Appreciate this movie review. This is only the second film we have seen in a theater this year and probably also only the second one in five or six years.)

Wimps!

I guess we have been in Arizona for too long. We have turned into wimps. We think it is way too cold. The low this morning was 29 degrees. The high here today was 45. Even though I kept reminding myself it was 40 degrees or more colder back in Colorado, where we come from, it didn't help. I was still cold. We didn't like it.

On a more positive note, yesterday we went to a movie in a theater for the first time in years. We gave one of the staff here our old lawn chairs. Since her husband works at the Harkins Theater in Casa Grande, she gave us 2 free passes and 2 free popcorn vouchers as a thank you. Since they were showing The King's Speech, and we had seen a story about it on TV, we decided to go. Admittedly, it is the only current movie we knew anything about. But from the first, it had sounded like it would be something we would enjoy.

And we did! We highly recommend it. It is very moving.