Our updates for all of you

 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...

 It was a Thursday, this date way back in 1977. I was 19-years old, my family operated the Redlands Fox Theater, and I worked there too, most often as a Projectionist.  About this time of the day, around 4:00pm (pacific time), I was on my way driving west on the I-10 freeway in my 1973 Dodge Challenger (I still wish I had that car!), making the almost two-hour drive on my way to Grauman's Chinese Movie Theater in Hollywood to see, in 70mm widescreen (the high definition of that era), this new movie that had just premiered the day before, (movies premiered on Wednesdays back then) this new movie was called, "Star Wars."  Years before it became Episode IV, it was just, 'Star Wars'. I was drawn to the special effects and commercials I had seen about the movie on TV and in magazines for several months. There weren't the hour's long waiting lines........yet, those really started that first weekend and news stories were all over it about the lines after the week...

  I had started this post on April 15th, now it's the 23rd so this is now history! Warmer temps, for a few days anyway. After the last few weeks of more like winter than spring temps, it is pushing 70-degrees (21.1 C) today! It's been clear, not windy like the last three days, and generally nice weather. We can only hope it will continue to be good weather with it not too dry for the late summer since it has been a dry winter and spring so far. The last time it was particularly dry it was a very bad summer for Hornets. Most places in the region have many of those yellow and greenish hanging hornet traps set all over the place. We do too!  Time to get the traps out, cleaned, and set out for the season. You have to get the traps baited and up soon as with the warm weather the hibernating queens come to and start looking for places to set up new nests. That one year though, hornets were everywhere! The forest was alive with the buzzing of thousands (millions?) of hornets. Dozens ...

   Winter? What Winter? To say this region's winter has been "mild" is almost an understatement for the 2020-2021 winter season.  The weather pattern that affected our area's weather is the same basic pattern that has been developing for the last few years. No longer are most of our storms coming from the Northwest and Alaska directions as they used to. Yes, a few storms still make it but most of the storms have shifted and are warmer and wetter as they blow from the Southwest and blow over from the Northern California and Oregon coasts.   Yes, there has been some snowfall too, the most at one time this year was about 8 or 9-inches and as with all the snowfall, within a few days of any snow the weather warms and the rains come washing the snow away. Or, as also happened, the weather would become pretty cold, we had a week of near and a couple of days of just a bit below zero temps but mostly lows in the 20s and low 30s at night and mid to upper 30s in the daytim...