Christmas is Coming!

No matter how large or how small your house, people all over this country like to put up outdoor decorations for the Christmas season. We see a lot of blow-up Christmas scenes here in Arizona. I wanted to share some of them with you.



We dropped in to coffee and donuts Monday morning and saw how the ballroom in Canyon Vistas is decorated for the holidays.



The Guest Services area has a tree decorated in the same theme.




This is one of the cutest decorated cactus I have seen.

What A Mess!

Why does our living room look like this?

We spent a good share of yesterday afternoon sitting in the middle of the room with all this mess around us. And this is what the bedroom looked like.

Why? you ask. Our house has lots of windows and the sun is very bright here. We have had our blinds closed most of the time. In addition, there are windows high up on the wall that let in a lot of light in the afternoon. We finally put cardboard there to keep the sun from shining on the TV screen.

We noticed that a number of our neighbors had tinted film on their windows, reflecting the sun. The protective film also provides privacy. We can see out, but during the day others can't see inside our house. One of the neighbors recommended Made in the Shade, who had done their windows. Yesterday they installed the film on our windows.

By the end of the afternoon, the job was complete and we were able to put all the furniture back in place. Finally, we can have the blinds open so we can see out. Others can't see in and the sun's rays aren't nearly as harsh.

By the way, as I got ready to post this blog entry, I realized it is the 1,000th entry in the blog. I really can't believe I have written that much!

Things Are Happening

It has been a month and a half since we bought our house in Arizona.  We have been busy buying everything we need to furnish it, while waiting for the contractors to prepare the rest of the site and pour the concrete for our driveway and RV pad.  Finally, there is activity in our front yard.

Other workers arrived and began removing the rocks along the edge of the house. They put them in a wheel barrow and arranged them on the other side of the house.

These fellows doing the work have gotten a kick out of me taking pictures and at times have hammed it up for the camera.

I have never watched anything built like this, so it has been very interesting. A workshop will be built next to the house in the spring. They are digging trenches for the footings now, so that concrete can be laid at the same time they pave the driveway. It is a lot of hard, physical labor. They even use a small jack hammer at times.

The tractor grades the site. Before the driver began that, he used a site like surveyors use. You can see that in one of the photos above where they were showing off for me.

When they left for the night, we had a big pile of dirt in the front yard.

On Thursday, Dan the plumber arrived. He had to dig a trench for the sewer and water lines that provide full hookups for our RV.

Dan has been very friendly and more than willing to explain what he is doing. Here he is putting a red sleeve on the blue water pipe, protecting the pipe from the dirt.

Here is the completed trench and the pipes waiting to be connected to the utilities underneath the house.

We're not the only ones interested in what is going on. This morning I looked out and saw these four men, neighbors I guess, who stopped by and asked Dan about the project.

Late this morning, Randy, who is construction supervisor here for our builder Cal-Am Construction, came to see that everything was going well.  Woking with him, we made a couple of changes in the plans.  Randy has been great to work with, friendly, helpful and prompt to respond to any questions we have.

One thing he had to do today was mark out an area of concrete that has to be cut out next week. It is interesting to see what has to be done to connect the utilities from the house to the addition.

Lunch and Good Conversation

Dave and Alice have been spending their winters in Arizona for 11 years or more. Since we bought our house in Superstition Views, we are only about 2 or 3 miles from their winter home. I thought they didn't come down till after Christmas. However, when they received our Christmas letter last week and realized we were in Arizona, they called and asked when we could get together. They have been here since Halloween. Dave and John have been friends since childhood and it was so good to see them.

We showed they our new home, then walked over to the Cactus Grill and brought our lunch back to the house. A good three hours later, we were still talking. We hadn't seen them since a hike last spring so we had a lot to catch up on. We look forward to seeing them again, soon.

A Favorite Haunt

Two or three times a week, there is a room here at Canyon Vistas where you can be sure to find us.

Thats right, we do our best to work out in the Exercise Room several times a week. First, a little bit of history.

When I started college at the age of 18, I started smoking. I didn't kick that habit until I was 38 years old. I tried to quit smoking several times a year over probably a 10-year period. Finally I did it--by giving myself permission to eat whenever I felt the urge to smoke. You can probably imagine what that meant. It didn't take me any time at all to gain 25 pounds. And I kept eating until September of 2002, when I weighed 175 pounds. That month, I received a letter from my health insurance saying they recommended that women not take hormone replacement therapy for long periods of time. I had been on them for 7 years and now I had to stop.

My issue with that was that the hormones helped to keep my bones strong. Since my mother had osteoporosis, I knew I had to do something to protect myself. After some research, I took a deep breath and signed up for a weight training class at the Goodson Recreation Center near our home in Colorado. I expected to be in a class with lots of young, strong men. To my delight, the other class members were all seniors, both men and women. Not only was I comfortable in the class, I soon really enjoyed the workouts. John had done weight training off and on since his teens. By January 2003, he, too, joined the class. And the really good news was that I lost 28 pounds by that April!

Since then, we have continued our weight training. A personal trainer designed routines for us, using free weights, for use when we traveled in our RV. In January 2009, we became full-time RVers and continued with that same routine for the past nearly 6 years. We knew it was important to change the weight training programs to keep muscles in shape, but never took the effort to make new routines. The good news is, I weigh the same today as I did in April 2003. The bad news is, that weight is 15 or so more than my lowest weight in the past 11 years. I would like to loose weight, but I try to appreciate the 28-pound loss I have maintained. If only I was still as tall as I was then!

For the past 6 winters, we have had access to circuit machines, but never bothered to use them until this year. It feels good to do something new. When it is cool to cold in the mornings, John runs on the treadmill and I use an elliptical trainer.

As you can see from the photos below, there are machines to work just about every muscle in our body. And there are lots of people here in the resort who like to keep fit by working out here.

What's next?

If it's Thanksgiving, what comes next? Christmas, of course. And that means it is time to put up the Christmas decorations. We had already moved the Christmas decoration boxes to the house, so it didn't take long to get started.

We may want a bigger tree in the future, but the 3-foot one we have used in the RV works just fine for now.

We enjoyed arranging my collection of nativity sets on the bedroom chest of drawers. The pottery stable and creche set is something I made 2 years ago.

It is really good to see all these Santas. They have been in storage since we went on the road full-time 6 years ago.

It was especially fun to use these. My mother made them probably 35 to 40 years ago. They represent John and me and our 2 sons.

Thanksgiving

Yes, we really did celebrate Thanksgiving. I am just behind on the blog. The past few years, we have described our Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations as getting together with 800 to 1,000 of our closest friends. That is the number of people who came to the holiday potluck dinners at Valle del Oro. We have moved to Superstition Views at Canyon Vistas, so we attended the Thanksgiving dinner here. Since this resort doesn't have a large kitchen, the meal was served on Wednesday. We paid for the meal and didn't have to bring anything, In years past, the resort provided meat and gravy and resort residents brought the rest of the food.

Canyon Vistas is about half the size of Valle del Oro, so we marked the day with several hundred less of our closest friends. I think there was somewhere over 300 people attending.

There were lots of people ready to serve our meal of turkey, mashed potatoes, dressing, gravy, broccoli and rolls. There was also pumpkin pie.

We enjoyed meeting two new couples.

The next day, I cooked a turkey, dressing and mashed potatoes. We have been eating the leftovers ever since. Turkey sandwiches are a must!

We hope you, too, had a good Thanksgiving.