happy halloween – meet dracula

About 20 years ago, give or take a few, we decided to turn our son into Dracula for Halloween. Here’s the result of our efforts:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pretty good, don’t you think?

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

uncle royce

My Uncle Royce, my mom’s brother, died on September 28 after a wonderful life of helping people, throwing the best barbeques, having the greatest Halloween parties and just being an all-around good guy. He will be missed.

RIP Uncle Royce

san francisco

This past Tuesday and Wednesday we took a quick trip to San Francisco to have dinner with our son, The Intrepid Traveler, and his wife, The Jersey Girl (also a world traveler). They’re both heading to Thailand for working vacations so we wanted to visit with them before they left.

The dinner, at Bobo’s, was also a combined belated birthday dinner for myself and Mr WS and, as always, it was wonderful. Bagels for breakfast the next morning completed our visit. The kids took off for work and we wandered over to the Ferry Building to see if anything was open at 8 in the morning. A farmer’s market full of produce from local farmers was open and I ended up buying heirloom tomatoes, red pears and a jar of capers, all of which are organic. Outside the building we came upon a (seemingly) friendly seagull. I got within a foot of him, but didn’t press my luck and try to pet him even though I really wanted to. An hour later we were on our way back to the hotel to pack up and head home.

The trip home was the usual six hour drive through orchards, cotton fields, a very pungent cattle ranch and lots of barren hills.  A stop for pea soup for lunch was in order, followed by another stop where we fired up the GPS and discovered there was a geocache across the parking lot, so we grabbed it – #297 for us. A couple more stops for leg-stretching and… voila!… we’re back home. It’s always nice to be home.

The Intrepid Traveler left very early this morning for two weeks at Muay Thai training camp and The Jersey Girl leaves Thursday for a week working with rescued elephants. After their separate vacations they’ll spend a week enjoying the lush beauty of Thailand together. All the while Mr WS and I will be waiting for photos and updates about their trip. It’s great to live vicariously through our kids.

And now for some photos of our trip up Interstate 5 to San Francisco.

go karts

There’s always something interesting going on in our valley. Yesterday, it was go karts. They were practicing for a go kart grand prix-style race at a downtown event this weekend and I managed to get a couple of shots of them as they practiced.

palm trees

Just about everywhere you look in Southern California there are palm trees of all shapes and sizes. To me, California (at least So Cal) wouldn’t be California without palm trees and over the years I’ve taken lots of photos of them, so I decided post a few here.

acton and a geocache

Mr WS and I took a little ride to Acton to check on our On The Road To Shambala cache and to drop off a new travel bug, Komodo Dragon. The recent Station Fire had come close enough to cause evacuation of Shambala, so we wanted to see what the area looked like and see if the fire had gotten near our cache. Not even close. Everything was fine.

This is the cache site. Shhhh, don’t tell anyone!

There’s a cache in there somewhere…

And here’s the cache with Komodo Dragon ready to start his travels from cache to cache. Happy journey, KD!

Now for a few photos of the more rural part of Acton…

travel bug down?

It’s happened again. A second travel bug may have been lost to a fire. We won’t know for a while, but it’s not sounding very good. Merv (the Griffin) had been placed in the Balcom Canyon Digs cache on September 9 and the fire started on the 23rd. The cache’s owner, Skych1ck, sent an email to let us know that her cache was hit by that fire and Merv was in the cache:

“On September 23, over 300 acres of dry brush burned between Grimes Canyon in Fillmore and Balcom Canyon in Santa Paula.
I just returned from vacation, and found my wooden construction which housed the ammo can completely gone. It appears that much soot and dirt have covered the area.

I will endeavor to dig for the ammo can in order to save Merv the Griffin TB. I hope that he was spared.”

We do, too. Fires are such horrible things. Until we had travel bugs we weren’t personally touched by them, just ringed by them each year. Since Merv’s in an ammo can his chances for survival are better, but he’s plastic. Not so good. We can only hope the fire moved quickly over the ammo can and it didn’t heat up very much. I know, it’s a long shot, but we can hope.

Thanks, Skych1ck, for letting us know.

cooking

I’m enjoying my new-found passion for cooking. My mom was a great cook, her mom was a great cook, all the women in her family were great cooks. My dad’s mom was a great cook, too. By all rights, I should have gotten plenty of cooking genes! I used to cook, but somewhere along the way decided I didn’t like cooking and quit almost entirely. I still made spaghetti, tacos, stuffed bell peppers and swiss steak, but most everything else fell by the wayside. When we wanted something special we went out. But with us being so close to retirement and starting to practice living on less money, cooking at home was a no-brainer for saving money. At first, Mr WS wasn’t completely on board for eating at home (I’m sure he was skeptical that I could cook anything really great), but now he can’t wait to see what I cook next. The money we save by eating at home? It’s going into a special savings account so we can wander as much as we want to when we retire. Life is good.

This whole cooking thing started when I found a blog about a family living in an old stone cottage in England (Mutterings from the Moor… the link is on the right-hand side) and after enjoying that site, I checked out her links to other blogs. That’s where I found Forest Street Kitchen (also over on the right) and it’s just about the best thing I’ve found in ages. One of her posts concerned making an elegant finger sandwich lunch for many people and needing recipes that would suit so many folks. She said she went to allrecipes.com and got just what she needed. She noted that she looked for recipes with the most stars and the highest number of reviews.

So… I just hopped on over to allrecipes.com and started browsing. Boy! I hit a goldmine for great recipes. In the past week I’ve made two dishes from the site and  BOTH are winners. Today we had Awesome Baked Sea Scallops (pictured here). I’ll be making them many many times in the future. Another recipe I used with great success was Chicken Fried Chicken. It’s just as good warmed up the next day… and the next. I’m 2 for 2.

After running out about 60 recipes from allrecipes.com I decided I had to stop for a while until I tried some of the recipes I’d already collected.  That idea lasted about an hour and I was back at the computer looking up old favorites to see if there was a recipe for whatever came to mind. Almost everything I wanted was there!  Then I started searching by single food items… chicken, tuna, green beans, cream. Now my recipe folder is bulging even more. And the searching continues. Speaking of which… gotta go!

travel bug rescue

Geocachers in general are wonderful people… and one went above and beyond wonderful recently.

Last month, when the Station Fire was as its wildest, one of our travel bugs, Plane Fun, was rescued by a fellow geocacher, saving it from almost certain destruction. Here’s the log entry for Plane Fun:

“Location: California, United States
joetrain1 retrieved Plane Fun (Travel Bug Dog Tag) from Up On Sister Elsie’s Antenna Farm at 8/30/2009
Log Date: 8/30/2009
Work brought me up to the top of Mt. Lukens this afternoon to check on the radio towers. We left the top around 12:30pm and the cache was safe and not touched. I grabbed the TB, just in case and placed the cache back in its home, a little deeper than I found it. The firemen with me later confirmed that the mountain top did burn later in the day. I will be returning in the morning so I will check on it again. Well I hope that I will be able to return depending upon what the Station fire does overnight.”

After I wrote to joetrain1 to thank him for rescuing our travel bug, this is what he wrote back:

“I was fortunate that I was able to reach the top on Mt. Lukens and knew where the cache was hidden having found it in the past. The TB was clipped to the outside of the container and I knew it would not survive the heat. I often check on this cache when work requires me to go up the hill, mainly to see if there are any TB’s that may be stranded. Not too many people make it up the hill and sometimes a TB can stay up there for months before the next person finds the cache.”

Thank you again, Joe, for rescuing our travel bug.

a heck of a week

August 29, 2009 – This week started out with the death of one of our cats, Nova (previous post), and went downhill from there. Thursday, the 27th, was the 7th anniversary of my mom’s death and on that day my mom’s favorite cat (actually, the only cat she ever liked if I remember right), Prowler, died at the ripe old age of 17. Prowler was one of our first two cats, the other being her sister Shiloh. Mom was Prowler’s favorite human… she loved the perfume my mom wore and would practically attack her as soon as she walked in the door. Mom loved it. Prowler would lick mom’s neck and if mom moved, she was right there going for the neck again. It was always funny.

Powler will be missed. Mom is missed. I think I’ll skip August from now on.