Our updates for all of you

 Yes, I am now retired! 5-months ago. It was weird at first; seemed like I was just off work for a few days.  I had to drive to southern California for most of the month of April, which added to that 'on vacation' feel.  The first long trip in over two years. It was something; gas was very expensive but even more so in California!  I was glad to take our Rav4. I had been planning to take our truck. However, just a week before, we'd taken it in to get checked out, which was a major expense and a wait for the parts, so I took the Toyota. It saved a lot of money, although I planned to take the truck and the small trailer for a room instead of moteling it.  With the high cost of ..... everything!, would it have saved as much as I'd hoped? Probably not in reality, but it worked as it did. As the Rav4 is a hybrid, I was able to get an average of 37 mpg, and that was keeping the adaptive cruise control set about 66 to 69 miles per hour which is plenty fast, even with m...

 Well, since the last post, fall went into winter, and here we are now in February 2022.  This winter has been unlike the previous three winters in this pacific northwest region.  We've actually HAD a winter for a change! Not a lot of snow, as in the 'olden days' but almost two feet of snow overall at our 2,300-foot elevation, and cold enough that the snow/ice is still around almost a month later. With the snow and ice, getting around can be a challenge!! Above: A MUST have  item for here in the North, are things like these "YaxTraxs" I'm wearing to be able to walk on the solid ice, like our driveway below. Snow is usually traction, ice is NOT!! We've been using them for years now and they are well worth the money to keep from being really hurt from slipping on ice. The week or so from Christmas into the new year, it became very cold, like it used to, with a few mornings of below zero temps with highs into the teens.  The night of the 6th of January, we g...

 So, Selby Sharp, Stacy's father died on November 7th around 10:00 am.  He was 99 years old and just 4-months short of his most recent life goal of making it to 100 years old. It is a combination of sadness and relief for Stacy. Sadness because he's always been there! Relief because at 99-years old his life the last few months was not the poster for "those golden years." For years Stacy and I kept hearing about his concerns of dying relatively young like his father had, in his 50s. Then it was "just make it to 80," then 90, then 95, then on his 99th last year he pondered just going for it and 100.  He dodged Covid, being in Europe during World War 2, the Battle of the Bulge, his unit was on hand for the liberation of a concentration camp. He found that living that long and outliving all of his friends and colleagues from his career as a teacher at Riverside City College as well as friends he'd made over the years also wasn't all it was cracked up to...

 Yes, it was one long HOT summer!  In addition to the record-breaking heat along the coastal ranges in Oregon, Washington, and into Canada, we saw temperatures in this Northern Idaho area I NEVER thought we would see again after moving away from the high desert of Southern California in 2006! The hottest temp was an afternoon high of 112 degrees (44.44 C) on June 30th. But, hot, hot days, too warm evenings, no rain so dusty and dry.  Record heat, the hottest weather ever recorded in Idaho, and, according to the stories, only the beginning of the heat that will probably be the "new normal" from this point on. Seems that the same "high-pressure bubble" that causes the cold and snow of winter weather to almost completely bypass our region of the pacific northwest in winter causes record heat in our same region of the pacific northwest in the summer! Since my last post, mainly, we have just been living and trying to avoid getting Covid. Stacy and I got our vaccinations...

  It is also true that the only constant in life is change! I say these things because I had an unplanned trip to some of my old home areas in Southern California from the first of May to the thirteenth. And man, have things changed! I have a friend that lives in the town I spent many years living in, Yucaipa, California. Yucaipa used to be a small, mostly retirement community, about 70 or so miles east of Los Angeles if you're on your way to Palm Springs or directions east out off Interstate 10. When my family moved there in 1973 from Redlands, another no longer small town about 10 miles west, it was full of orange groves, egg farms, a turkey ranch, and many mobile home parks for the decidedly retirement-aged residents of the era. The freeway through the area was 3-lanes, not the current 5-lanes, and the population then was, as I recall, around ten-thousandish. Back then, there were many vacant lands, and due to its rural area, many homes had septic tanks and not city sewer connec...