Once in awhile-now and again-this is us

We didn’t know much about foreign lands, so they never beckoned us. Our dear friend and neighbor, Lorita, was beckoned and did travel to just about every country in the world. She took the most incredible slides with her Leica camera. and we got to see all of them at slide shows in her living room. So in a way we have seen foreign lands with great photos, interesting, informative, and personable narratives, all in the comforts of her home, eating popcorn.

Frank and Linda now keep us captivated with their iPhone pictures and tales of their interesting travels abroad when they return home. In return for cat sitting we see the world again.

Kara had been encouraging me to write an autobiography of our travels someday. She loved to write, and boy did she write, as I found out cleaning out her house. I have written down some stuff for myself, and decided to share part of it on the blog. The short and condensed version.

There were two places I wanted to see, for sure, when we started our travels. The Statue of Liberty and Mt. Rushmore. Well, I got to see them not only once, but four times. And each time was as special as the first.
I got an inexpensive Kodak digital camera for our first travels. And moved up in price as we traveled more.

A shout out to Martha and Ray, enjoy your trip to Virginia to see Karl and Sandy and their new home tomorrow. Enjoy Washington DC and all the history there. And enjoy that gift of first class plane tickets.WOW! Have fun and send pictures.

Lots more later,

stay tuned,

💗jilly

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We love our neighborhood and our neighbors that live here. It’s a nice bunch of people. but it is changing. In the last 3 years, 4 houses have sold and are occupied, one is going on sale and Kara’s just sold for $900,000.00. It wasn’t sold ‘as is’ as planned. They used a realtor who decided to do some work and stage it. That helped increase the asking price.

so it went from this: (an old photo, it had gotten much worse when we started)

to this:

to this:

The dynamics of the neighborhood are also changing. We haven’t had a lot of children on our block for quite awhile. We’ve got two cute girls next door, 7&8 who have been here since birth. Now, they have three new darling 3 year old girls, and a seven year old boy to play with. And there’s a baby girl on the way. We haven’t met the new occupants of Jessie’s house yet but they have kids too. Kara’s house will have two girls 10&? It’s going to be a lot nosier during summers now. But kids add something good to a neighborhood. Laughter for one.

Tracy and Tony, who were 7and 10 when we moved here in 1974, grew up with lots of kids their age on the block. They could safely walk themselves to and from school, what a blessing that was. When we moved here we were some of the youngest people, now we’re the oldest 😮 what happened? It’s been a good life here.

Staying home more allows me time to do more puzzles among other things.

🔽And this one

The one below is of the Mission Inn we went to last year. It was delightfully difficult.

You can see there were some same shape pieces that would fit almost exactly in the same place. When I started the puzzle I put one of the pieces on the wrong side. It perplexed me to no end why the other piece wouldn’t fit anywhere. That happened other places too, but I found the mistake quickly. This time I didn’t catch on until that wrong piece was the last one. So I had to look everywhere where it could fit.

I’ve also had time to embroider some bibs for Melody. So much fun. In my younger years it seems like I made pillowcases for everyone. I even stamped the design on fabric and sewed them together. You could buy the patterns. Good old Simplicity. I found these undone at a, where else, thrift store.

Melody looks so much like Hannah. We hope to meet her in June.

We bought the coach in 1992. We took a lot of short vacations in it while Jerry was working. We loved it. And when Jerry retired at 62, we wanted to take long trips, but that gets expensive. Reverse mortgages were just starting to get popular and it sounded like a plan to get the equity in the house then, and fund our desires to travel the USA. We had to wait 3years until I was 62 and then we did it. And we did it big, and we have no regrets. That money afforded us to travel in style. No adventure was out of reach.

But I guess we are semi retiring from those long, long, cross country trips. We’ve seen our bucket lists and then some. So home feels good now. I think Midas likes us home too.

Stay tuned

💗jilly

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