Yesterday was a real eye opener.  A single lady in the park has her home up for sale.  Two men came to look at it and one asked to use the bathroom while the other wanted to go outside and discuss the roof.  Yup, you guessed it.  She later discovered that her jewelry was gone.  The outcome certainly could have been far worse then that.  In later comments, she said she now realizes she should have had a neighbor or friend with her while they were there. 

This kind and gentle lady, as most of us do, wanted to believe that people in general are good and honest.  Unfortunately, we don’t know which ones are and which ones aren’t.  Living so close to the major city of Phoenix, we have heard far too many stories of what happens to those who show their houses, and a lot of it isn’t good.  Now the thieves have invaded our RV/home complex, forcing us to be much more vigilant.

On the lighter side, February seems to be a visiting month for RVers.  I love it when friends come into the campground with all their own facilities and bop over to sit on my back deck or enjoy the sun room.  JJ and Peggy Williams from Idaho filled me in on their activities and destinations for the rest of the winter but we had only one day to do it.  That’s not nearly enough, guys.

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Recently, Affinity RV from Prescott and Dewey, brought two Class A Winnebagos, a small one and a large one, a new one and a used one, to North Ranch for most of a Saturday.  They do this every year and it is a nice way for us to go through the models and see all the new changes or additions. I drooled!  If the prospect of perusing RVs didn’t bring people out from their homes and the campground, the food did.  As they always do, they fed us hotdogs. 

Neighbors chatted with neighbors, RV details were cussed and discussed and wild adventure stories abounded.  The two pleasant gentleman who brought the RVs answered questions, made sales…or not, and hopefully the trip was worth their time.

            Anything can happen as you walk the aisles of Wal-Mart superstores.  I parked my cart in position to go around a poorly positioned bin sticking out at the end of an otherwise empty aisle, to grab something and suddenly everybody in the store was trying to go through where there was room for only one cart.  I quickly hurried over to rectify my error and move the cart.  A woman walked up and said, “You are a bad shopper!”  She was right.  I shouldn’t have parked it where I did but I resented her making a big deal about it.  I had already shopped for an hour and made allowances for people who were blocking the aisle, nearly running over me on corners, or any of a dozen other instances where a smile and a little patience was more in order than a confrontation.  It was really annoying that she took it upon herself to be the “goddess of carts.”  Oh well, I got over it.  No wonder countries fight with each other when we can’t even get through a box store without arching our backs.

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With Phoenix being the 5^th largest city in the U.S., there are many famous people who have claimed Arizona as their home.  One of my favorites is Author Zane Grey.  At one time you could visit the one-room cabin he built on three acres up on the Mogollon Rim near Payson.  He eventually abandoned it and it deteriorated.  It was later restored and in 1972, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  It was not destined to live as it was totally destroyed by the “Dude” forest fire in 1990.  However, you cannot keep a good man’s cabin down.  In 2003, a replica of the cabin was built lakeside on the Rim Country Museum grounds in Payson.

Strangely enough, he didn’t originally come here to write; he came to fish.  I’m not sure how much fishing he did but he wrote many novels (I read 56 in one account and 90 in another – it was a lot!), at least a third of them taking place in Arizona.  Riders of the Purple Sage, supposedly his most famous novel, was written in 1912.  In 1939, he died after a massive heart attack in California.  He is buried in Lackawaxen, PA.  His life story is a busy one and most interesting.  He was also one of the first authors who self-published (Of course he wasn’t famous yet).

I once stayed with my oldest brother and his wife in Cumberland, Maryland for several weeks.  As an early teenager, there wasn’t a whole lot to do beyond going to the neighborhood pool to swim and flirt with the lifeguard but my sister-in-law’s mother lived just up the street.  She had the most amazing collection of the Old West Adventure Zane Grey books.  They were even more exciting than the cute lifeguard.  Late into the night, I snuggled under the covers using a flashlight to read every detail of those stories.

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In February’s RV Life, I wrote about Arizona and its centennial year but due to space constraints, there are always things you have to cut.  Although I only rafted a mile of the lower and milder part of the Grand Canyon with a group of my Girl Scout Seniors many years ago, I have always been fascinated by the big GC.  One of the things on my Bucket List is a real two-week rafting trip through the rapids.  I have only done it via the Imax Theatre.  Wanna go?

It boggles my mind that John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran, led the first documented exploration of the Grand Canyon in 1869 with nine men and four wooden boats.  That is a whole story in itself.

Arizona has everything, Hope, Surprise, Nowhere, Somewhere, and Timbuktu.  In 1856, they also had “Ali Haiji and the Camels.”  This was not a contemporary rock group, but an experiment with 74 camels brought into this arid country to use as pack animals in building the 1857 wagon road across Arizona.  Ali, a Syrian camel driver, came with them.  After the project cancellation in 1864, Hi Jolly, as the soldiers nicknamed him, bought camels and started his own freighting business.  The fame of this enterprising fellow is registered for all time on a windblown pyramid tomb that declares it is “The last camp of Hi Jolly.” He was born “somewhere in Syria about 1828.”  He came to this country in February of 1856 and over the next 30 years, was “a faithful aid to the U.S. government.”  He died at Quartzsite December 16, 1902.

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            It has become a habit on the once-a-month hour-long trips I make to Surprise for supplies, that I pull into McDonald’s drive through at the east edge of Wickenburg, for a cup of coffee to keep me alert.  I handed the smiling clerk a dollar and she informed me that a small coffee was free all that week.  It was a nice start to my day although generally 76 cents doesn’t stretch my budget too far.

            Anyone who knows me personally or who has read my stuff over the last 20+ years, would know that cooking is not my forte.  Walking through Wal-Mart, a puzzled looking young man stopped me with this, “You look like you are a good cook so you would probably know where to find the Liquid Smoke.”  I’m not sure how he surmised I looked like a good cook.  Maybe he figured if I had survived to this age, I surely had to know how to cook.  At any rate, my guess was that it might be in the barbecuing section.  A couple of aisles of running into each other later, he raised up the bottle of Liquid Smoke in triumph.  

            My MI sis-in-law Nora, who is in AZ for the winter (Can you blame her?), went to the Home and Garden Show at the AZ State Fairgrounds with me.  After wandering what seemed like forever, we sat at a picnic table with four strangers.  The fellow next to me was gnawing (literally) on a huge turkey leg, one of the show’s specialties.  It wasn’t long before we were all teasing him and he gave back in full measure.  We were soon swapping stories and telling whoppers.  He was a real Arizona native, a rare find these days.  We soon discovered that the other three people, along with Nora and I, were from various parts of Michigan.  A small world after all.

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I was trapped!  The colonoscopy loomed.  No food the day before “the procedure” but drink lots of fluids.  At 3 pm, take four pooping pills.  From five p.m. on drink a glass of a Gatorade mixed with powdered pooping stuff every fifteen minutes until it is gone unless you become nauseated which I did.  I lost ¼ of what I had drunk and since it gave me a migraine headache, I took a Tryptophan and a sip of water and gave up.

            After the migraine pill did its job and the other stuff did its job, I finally went into a deep sleep around 4 a.m. and suddenly realized from my daze that something was buzzing.  The alarm buzzed for ½ hour before it awakened me.  Since I was only allowed to shower, no food or drink, no makeup, no lotion, no anything, it didn’t take long and I was ready for my driver.  I don’t know what I would do without my NR Friend Walter as we build equity with each other for times just like this when we are required to have a driver for the two-hour round trip to Surprise.

            The extremely efficient nursing staff waits until your rights are signed away, the doctor pokes his head in the door to say “Hi” and you barely remember the kid who examined you months before, get you stripped and dressed in a backless wonder, start a drip, tie you up with pulse and blood pressure devices, wheel you in to be strapped with more devices you are afraid to ask how they are going to use, then they ask, “How are you today?”  Hmmm.

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After graduating high school, I stayed in touch with many fellow students and occasionally a teacher but I had a real surprise this week.  An e-mail came from a classmate informing me that our high school chorus teacher had passed away.  She was 103 years old.  Thinking of her brought back many happy memories.  Miss Ash was a very disciplined person and had no problem keeping a huge group of us in order as well.   I wish her spirit would come and visit our church choir!

This week I blitzed my office and in the process threw out a very old and huge computer monitor.  I gave some thought to pinning a sign up sheet in the campground office so people could come to my house and for a $50 ticket, they could take a sledgehammer to it and work out their electronics frustrations.  It would be less costly than using the sledgehammer on an actual computer which I am often tempted to do!

            Hey, aren’t we lucky!  Another election year is upon us.  By the time we actually vote for the person who will lead our country, be he a Democrat or a Republican, our children and grandchildren will have learned many lessons about badmouthing and bullying.  Politicians don’t adhere to the policy of, “If you can’t stay something nice about someone, don’t say anything.”  Hmmm.  Maybe there isn’t anything – now there’s a thought.

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Wow!  We made it!  I wrote earlier about not putting up one string of Christmas lights (There are about 30 inside and out) or arranging even one out of about 35 village pieces and no outside nativity.  “They” always say there is an upside to everything and I found out what that was on New Year’s Day.  I didn’t have to gingerly take it all down, wrap it up, and put it away!  All that work will not, however, keep me from doing it next year if I’m able.  And right now when I’m feeling so vigorous (that should last about five minutes!), I think I’ll have a party!

            Did you go out and have a wild time on New Year’s Eve?  I certainly did.  I called a North Ranch friend who was as excited about New Years Eve as I was and we went down to Wickenburg for a “To Die For” hamburger (never frozen) and seasoned fries (always share, it is a huge order) at Screamers Drive In.  I don’t think they actually serve at the car window as in “olden times,” but you do have the choice of sitting outside.  We did a fair amount of swilling in that two hours, root beer on the rocks.  It was so wild that I was back home again by 7:30 p.m.  I retired such that I missed the New Year by only two hours.  I’m not sure if that was pitiful or wise.

            New Years Sunday started with church, then after lunch, I spent most of the afternoon lounging comfortably in my huge tilt back chair, sleeping and watching…are you ready for this…football.  Monday I didn’t hurt myself either.  I watched the parade and finished reading a book.

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Although I have threatened all my friends with dire consequences if they send me “forwards,” and I have seen this one before, it is funny and I thought you might enjoy reading it.

            Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman, that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment. The woman apologized and explained, “We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days.  The clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."

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Normally by this time I would be gushing about the excitement of Christmas, stringing foot after foot of outside lights along the house and office roofline and in and around the tree limbs and very carefully around the cactus.  Laid low with a miserable chest cold since Thanksgiving, my celebratory activities were cut short.  I finally gave up trying to sing in the Christmas Cantata, missed the choir party, and I wasn’t very energetic for digging out and arranging all the inside village decorations either.  I hope to do better next year.

            The 2011 Christmas montage/letter has been approved by my offspring (Since they are in it as much as I am) so now I can send it on its way.  A lot of people don’t like getting a Christmas letter but most of mine go to friends and family I see rarely, if ever anymore.  Limiting it to ¾ of a page (plus photo montage at the top), I give them mostly good news about what everybody is doing.  I didn’t put in it that sadly I had four extremely close friends leave this earthly plain this year or any other discouraging words and I didn’t include any of my thoughts on politics or the “button-pushing” things I’m working on eliminating from my life. 

            Since I didn’t have a recent photograph, I sure had fun trying to get one by raising the camera in my right hand and taking a shot into the bathroom mirror.  It worked pretty well, especially after I did a little Photoshop trimming.  If these letter/photos aren’t appreciated, the recipients have the option of going straight to the bottom for the signature. 

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