Category Archives: Friends

Thanksgiving awaits

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The Harris Hawks are feeling right at home in our yard. This was the second day of them hanging out. I wrote about hawks on Wednesday, HERE. This guy is looking mighty plump.

Next week is Thanksgiving. I have mixed emotions about the holiday. I do like getting together with family or friends. I enjoy cooking the meal and having a bounty of leftovers. I enjoy the compliments my Thanksgiving meal gets. It’s satisfying.

But the dark side of Thanksgiving awaits.

Thanksgiving 2021 our dear friend passed away.

Decades earlier: When I was unmarried, living in Seattle, a recent college graduate, this friend (who also lived in Seattle) introduced me to my husband. My husband was visiting for Seafair, which is a summer festival highlighted by hydro races and a Blue Angels show.

As they say, the rest is history.

Eventually our friend left Seattle, sold all his property (real estate was his business) and moved to Arizona. He turned his Seattle real estate into an even greater empire in the Scottsdale/Phoenix area. Prices were way more affordable. Taxes were much better and the business environment was exciting to him.

We would visit our friend in Scottsdale a mile or two from where we now live. We would drive for the weekend from Palm Springs and stay in his casita. My husband was convinced that when he retired, Arizona was the place to be. We’d say good-bye to the high cost of living and taxes of California and embrace Arizona life.

COVID hit and my husband worked remotely. Home prices were skyrocketing in Palm Springs because people wanted out of apartments in San Francisco and LA. They wanted space, a yard, pool and our prices were much lower. We had a new next door neighbor who moved in from SF with his mom sight unseen and called the home his “COVID” home. He was worried about his elderly mom’s health.

My husband decided that it was time to make our move. Especially since he was working from home. I wasn’t sold on it, but told our kids that I was going to ask for a ridiculous price for our home that nobody would consider. That was my secret plan to stay in my dream home. Our house of almost 30 years sold in four hours with offers above asking. So much for that.

So we moved to Arizona close to our friend. He was our first and only friend in the state. We had been friends for close to 40 years. He loved to grill steaks for us. We had him over to our house for dinner. We watched football together and went out to great sushi restaurants. My husband would help him with his properties on weekends, schlepping refrigerators into apartments, or other DIY stuff. Like I said, that was his business. He appreciated my husband’s help.

He introduced us to his entourage, his brother and wife who also moved from Seattle to Arizona. Then another couple who will be retiring from Seattle to Scottsdale in a few years.

A few weeks before Thanksgiving 2021, he was hospitalized. He had a cough and was having trouble breathing. He was put on a ventilator after a week. He’d call my husband to bring him things from his home, like his razor and a pillow. The hospital tested him eight times for COVID — all negative.

Thanksgiving night, 2021 we had our friends who moved from Palm Springs over for dinner. My husband told them that he was worried about our friend, who was finally diagnosed with Valley Fever. Thinking it was COVID, the hospital had treated him the entire time with antibiotics, which is the wrong thing to do to a fungus like Valley Fever. Antibiotics allowed the fungus to grow unchecked.

The harsh words from our dinner guest, who retired from running the ER in Palm Springs said, “He’s not going to make it.”

He died a few hours later.

What holiday that is supposed to be joyous has dark undertones for you?

What’s cooking?

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Instructor Jan D’Artri helped us by cutting up the White Chocolate English Toffee I made with my neighbor during a cooking class at Sweet Basil Culinary Center.

Are you a spur of the moment person?

I’m not. I plan out my weeks and I like to follow a schedule. I make to do lists and enjoy crossing off items with a red pen.

My neighbor texted me and invited me to an Ina Garten cooking class. She said her friend couldn’t make it and would I like to take her place. I hesitated. It wasn’t on my schedule. It wasn’t on my list.

Then I said yes.

I had to look up who Ina Garten was. She had a show on the Food Network called the Barefoot Contessa. I watched her show occasionally, but I didn’t know her real name.

It was a hands on cooking class called Cooking Ina Garten Favorites (no she wasn’t there in person). Then we got to pick what we wanted to prepare out of the following recipes:

Spinach & Artichoke Dip with Garlic Bread
Truffled Mac & Cheese
Crispy Chicken Parmesan with English Roasted Potatoes
Ina’s Chicken Pot Pie Soup with Puff Pastry Croutons
White Chocolate English Toffee
Beatty’s Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Buttercream
Paloma Cocktail

FYI, you can google any of these recipes and they show up from Ina Garten.

Crispy Chicken Parmesan with English Roasted Potatoes. Delicious.

Chicken Pot Pie Soup with Puff Pastry Croutons. This was my favorite and I’ll try it at home. Here’s a LINK to Ina’s recipe.

One of my neighbor’s friends making the Paloma cocktails.

A photo of the cooking area. We were assigned to stations with our ingredients, pots and pans, burners, ovens and recipes.

My neighbor and I chose White Chocolate English Toffee because it looked super easy. However, we couldn’t get our white chocolate morsels to melt. The instructor added vegetable oil and whipped it into shape. Here’s a LINK to Ina Garten’s recipe.

When we were done cooking, we sat down to a delicious meal. Everything was so good!

Sweet Basil’s is also a kitchen store with all sorts of fun gadgets, beautiful dishes, serving platters, knives and everything under the sun for cooking.

Have you tried any of Ina Garten’s recipes before? If so what ones?

From my list of recipes from the cooking class, which would you most likely want to prepare and eat?

Are you a spur of the moment person or a planner?

Odds and Ends

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It was windy and beginning to rain when I went outside to bring in a towel out by the pool. I didn’t want the towel to end up in the pool, or get wet from rain.

I pulled the towel off the recliner and a bobcat jumped out of the fireplace! We both were surprised. She ran to the fence and crawled through to the wash behind our house. I ran into the house. A few minutes later, she returned to the fireplace. I grabbed my camera with the telephoto lens and took a few pictures from inside our bedroom.

Olive the cat noticed her first bobcat. She got low into stalking mode — but stayed far away from the window as she watched. If it’s a bird, she’s right up against the window whacking at the bird through the glass.

The fireplace makes a cozy cat cave.

House Guests

The last house guest stayed with us for several days to scout a local lake. He’s entering a freshwater spearfishing competition. He arrived at our house with his boat and spent the next three days free diving in the lake from dawn to dusk.

He also brought us some treats from a recent fishing trip to Alaska. The freezer in the casita is filled with salmon, rock cod and black cod. There’s also lobster from his free diving off the coast of Southern California. What a treat! He’s welcome back anytime.

This is Black Cod that I cooked in foil on the barbecue. It’s my favorite fish which I used to get in Seattle’s Chinatown while I was in college. Incredibly delicious!

Things are not going swimmingly!

The past two weeks, I got back into the pool at the YMCA for lap swimming. I had stopped swimming during our wet, cold winter months ago. Then summer came and the weather was hot, which means I don’t like being out in the sun.

I was proud of myself and wanted to be consistent with swimming. Then on my swim day, the weather dropped overnight by 50 degrees! It was windy and rainy. I cancelled swimming. It warms up a bit this week, so I’ll get back to the pool.

One day while driving home from the pool, I heard INTELLIGENCE FOR YOUR LIFE MINUTES by John Tesh on the radio. It was about a Harvard study on ending your daily shower with 30-seconds of cold water.

In the study, people who ended their daily shower with 30-seconds of cold water had less sick days than those who took hot showers. I’ve heard of a trend of cold plunge lately by a number of celebrities. My college roommate’s husband said he takes a cold plunge in an icy stream at their home in Sun Valley, Idaho.

I found this information from UCLA:

What is cold therapy?

Cold therapy, also called cryotherapy, uses exposure to cold temperatures to cool the body’s tissues for therapeutic reasons. There are several ways to apply cold therapy, including:

  • Cold showers, which involve lowering the water temperature below 60 degrees for two to three minutes at a time
  • Cold spray, used to numb a small area
  • Cold water immersion or ice baths, or submerging everything but your head and neck in cold water
  • Localized ice application to treat injuries or specific muscle groups
  • Whole-body cryotherapy, which exposes the body to very cold vapors

Why cold showers could be good for you

Cold showers are not the primary treatment for any conditions, and conclusive research about cold therapy is still limited. But a quick blast of cold water can be beneficial when used for symptom relief.

Taking cold showers may:

1. Bolster your immunity to common colds

2. Combat symptoms of depression

3. Improve circulation

4. Increase metabolism

5. Reduce inflammation and prevent muscle soreness

6. Relieve localized pain

Our daughter used to take ice baths at swim meets in our hotel room between prelims and finals. The purpose was to flush out inflammation and increase blood flow to her legs.

Our pool isn’t heated and I could use it as a cold plunge pool this winter. Or, try the 30 second shower method. I’ll tell you how it goes.

What are your thoughts about cold showers or ice baths? Would you give it a try?

Have you tried Black Cod otherwise known as Sablefish?

My super busy week

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A cactus in bloom last May.
A cactus in bloom last spring.

Ever have one of those weeks? Where everything seems to be happening at once? I’m having one and I’m thankful it’s Friday.

My week started with one thing on the schedule each day. That’s unusual for me. I usually have more down days than days with things planned. I had appointments, my lunch bunch went to a fun new restaurant, I had a board meeting for my women’s group that supports sex trafficked women. We invited a neighbor over for dinner Thursday because his wife is out of town. I had my zoom call where we discuss all the things you’re not supposed to in polite company — current events, politics and yes, religion!

I even made it to the YMCA and started lap swimming again! Yay for me! It feels wonderful to be back in the water and helps my toes that have started to hurt again during my walks. I will credit swimming to keeping me calm during my super, busy week.

I got a phone call while out to lunch with my friends. A swim mom friend from Palm Springs called. We usually talk for an hour. I didn’t answer because like I said, I was out to lunch. I forgot about the call and then I saw they texted me several times. I realized I had missed a few calls from her earlier in the week, too.

This mom was one of my best friends on the swim team. I went to my first swim meet when our son was in second grade. I was overwhelmed. It’s like landing on another planet. I didn’t know what was going on. Our son was scared. We couldn’t figure out how we were supposed to know when he was supposed to line up at the blocks.

The first person to greet me with a big smile and welcome was this woman, who would become one of my best friends.

Our two kids swam with her daughter, who went to the Beijing Olympics at age 16 and London at 20. Their daughter is so humble that once our daughter said to her, “Wow. I get to train with an Olympian.”

She looked around and answered, “Really? Who? Where’s the Olympian?”

Our son and her daughter would do homework together at the pool before practice when they were in high school.

Wednesday night I called and my friend asked if they could stay with us for three or four days starting the next day. Her husband is in a spear fishing tournament at a lake by us. He wants to scout out the lake before the big event. Of course I said yes.

They are arriving Thursday, while we’re having our neighbor over for dinner.

Thursday morning, I moved Olive and all her cat stuff from the casita into our master bathroom. I moved my files, books and laptop, too. We had guests a little over a week ago, and I prepped and readied the casita for them. Gradually, my stuff and Olive’s found it’s way back in there.

Sheets are washed, bed is made and grocery shopping is done to stock their fridge with a few goodies. I’m good to go. I did let her know that I had two meetings on Friday and would be gone most of the day.

She said she’s not expecting me to entertain her. So all is good! But I was a bit overwhelmed….

Do you like busy weeks, or quiet alone ones? Or a mix of the two?

A few visitors

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While we had visitors from Washington, we had this kitten stop by for a few hours. The bottle in front of the kitten is bug spray for the “no see ums.”

Our Washington visitors were brand new friends in 2021. We were introduced to them by the friend who brought us out to Arizona. He introduced us to the other couple before he died of Valley Fever Thanksgiving 2021. He also introduced me to my husband 40 years ago in Seattle.

The couple who stayed with us the past few days, still live in the Seattle area but bought a home here that they will retire to. It’s now a rental home for them.

While my mom was alive and in assisted living, I’d get together with this new friend, who lived a few miles from where my mom was. I feel like our friendship with this couple deepened throughout the few days they stayed with us this week. We shared our childhoods, stories about our kids, parents and found more connections.

While they were here, we had visitors of a wilder kind:

I wonder where the momma cat is? This is the youngest kitten I’ve seen alone. Does he have siblings?

Eventually, the kitten curled into a ball and fell asleep

First time I’ve had a cardinal visit in a couple months.

What is this Gilded Flicker doing? It looks like he’s trying to remove a screw with his beak.

What visitors have you had lately?

Getting Ready for Guests

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A picture my son colored in second grade. Wait until you read the story he wrote about it below!

Funny how it takes guests staying with us for me to get motivated to clean closets. I successfully emptied the casita closet. It had turned into storage space for all sorts of stuff including blankets, air mattresses, slippers, Sorel snow boots, hiking boots and even a box full of canvases and paints. Now it holds an appropriate number of sheets and towels.

That felt so good. I continued my cleaning spree in my own closet.

My efforts filled a car with blankets, books, comforters, and more that made it to Kiwanis Thrift Store. It’s amazing how things can accumulate after three short years of being in our new home. To be honest, a lot of stuff that I stored in closets moved with us.

Next, I went through my bathroom drawers and threw out ancient makeup, cough drops, unnecessary ointments and mini lotions and shampoos from years of hotel stays.

I have a guest bedroom closet left to tackle and I’ll be done! But it has all the personal things like photo albums, boxes of photos from my mom including her notebooks and diaries. I have generations of things to go through. Like the photo above, I saved things my kids created, report cards, school awards and swim medals. I have my daughter’s set of Madame Alexander dolls from the Wizard of Oz. I think it was easier to clear out the big stuff — especially because there’s no emotional attachment.

Here’s the story that goes with the photo:

What are your thoughts about the story? FYI, “derend” is a unique spelling of turned.

How do you do to prepare for guests?

The Holy Moly Home Tour

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Here’s a view from a Saturday afternoon luxury home tour. This is outside the living room on the patio overlooking an infinity pool.

We watched Michigan vs. USC football at our friends’ house, a mile up the hill from us Saturday. It was interesting because the other couple went to Michigan and my husband is a devout USC fan.

I was afraid it would be awkward, but it was a good game and Michigan won by three points.

At halftime, our friends suggested we go on a luxury home tour in their neighborhood. Every Saturday afternoon you can tour amazing homes in their massive development that has everything from condos to mansions on seven golf courses. We visited three homes. The first was all white, with white shiny counters, white walls and all white everything else. It’s was boring and I’m not wasting your time with photos.

The second was amazing. Fully furnished with the most unique art, fixtures, countertops, stone, etc. For a cool $6.5 million fully furnished. I didn’t take any photos, but here’s a LINK so you can see for yourself. The photos don’t do it justice. In fact, it looks crazy busy but in person it was really unique, fun and not overwhelming.

The third was high on the mountain with the most spectacular views. Here’s a LINK to the sales info. It was 9,411 square feet and $5.9 million, unfurnished.

View from a bedroom of the third house we toured.

Bathtub in the Master Bath.

Of course we’re never going to buy a home like this. Nor do we want to live in a country club community. But, it’s fun to take a look and wonder about the people who are selling these homes. Where are they moving to? Why are they selling?

Would you rather watch football or look at crazy luxury homes?