October 27, 2009

Randy’s been off of work for a few days, and I find that the days are running together. Randy's cooking again – delicious things like apple and cream cheese pastries, pumpkin bread pudding with caramel sauce, pulled pork - wonderful!!! We are sharing it with the neighbors; otherwise I’d sit down and eat it all! And I can't do that because we are working on improving our health. We’ve exercising more - mostly bicycling and walks - and I went to a beginner’s line dancing class today. Well, they called it a beginner’s class, but only me and one other lady were beginners – everyone else had taken the same class last year! So I have a lot to learn…

We're also working on modifying our menus. To help change the way we eat, we’re checking out some local stores to see what they offer, such as Food City, which has a lot of Mexican products that we want to learn how to use. We also drove into Phoenix to try a Fresh & New grocery, but we're not sure we’d do that again.

Last Saturday we went out to dinner at Eva’s, a local Mexican restaurant, with two other couples from the RV Park. Randy and I shared an order of beef nachos that was really good – I would definitely go back there.

Our neighbors in the park are really nice. They offered to let our dogs out if we want to take an all-day sight-seeing trip, so we are in the process of socializing Sugarbaby and Julienne to accept them. They got used to our neighbors at the St. Louis park, so I know they can accept other people – it just takes time. I think if Julienne accepts someone, Sugarbaby will, too. He is so protective of her that if she starts barking, he’s instantly on the offensive.

We recently went to Camping World to get another set of de-flappers; that’s a funny name, but it’s pretty descriptive. It’s a clamp that is supposed to stop the RV awning from flapping in the breeze, which can cause the awning to tear off. We already had one set, but two sets are better than one. We had them on until yesterday, when some neighbors said that the wind was going to really pick up. They started pulling their awnings down, and since they were here last year and had experience with this, we took ours down too, even though the wind was still light. This morning the weather was just the same and we were wondering what happened to the wind storm we were supposed to get. This afternoon, it arrived! The wind did pick up a lot, enough to hurt the awnings if they had been up, but the remarkable thing was the dust. We were driving into town when the wind picked up and it was like we were driving in the dust bowl of the olden days! Everyone on the road had to turn on their lights, and it was like driving in a fog. Somehow it un-nerved me – I don’t think I would have lasted very long as a pioneer, unable to get away from the blowing wind and heavy, blinding dust.

When we got back to the RV Park we noticed that one camper wasn't able to bring their awnings in, so Randy loaned them our 2 sets of flappers. Hopefully that will be enough to save their awning, but we won't know until the storm passes.