Tonight I am up in Ojai. The wind has been blowing very hard all day. We had old friends come up and visit today. They are moving to Washington State and are on their way up the coast to their new home there. They are very good friends who we haven’t seen because of Covid…

I am quite a conversationalist with myself. I have full-blown discussions, which are characterized by two distinctly different thought processes. One is the “I don’t know what I’m doing” part of my brain and the other is the part that says, “It’s okay. You don’t always have to have everything together.” I guess we could…

Today, our family met at Sarah’s for haircuts, food, and visiting. We came early and stayed late and had lots of fun just hanging out together. All three of my daughters and Nico received haircuts from a hairdresser named Jennifer who came to the house. They met with her on the patio for their haircuts….

I am sitting on a Friday night in my living room. It is 9:47 and I am very ready to head upstairs to bed. However, I still need to write my blog for today to honor the commitment I made to myself to write daily. I am now lamenting the fact that I waited until…

I have all of my life been someone who is open. I am open to people, ideas, plans, you name it. If you want someone to be enthusiastic about doing pretty much anything that is fun, interesting, challenging, etc. then just call on me. I’ll be right there to encourage you, cheer you on, and…

Liz and Ron have added a lot of features to our orange grove since they moved here but these four additions are the biggest improvement of all. Introducing: Finn, Jimmy Jet, Leroy and Buttercup. They are all young male alpacas who have come to live at our orange grove and be neighbors with the chickens…

Here in the orange grove in Ojai, we spotted a baby opossum outside our gate. Well, let me rephrase, our dogs saw this little ball of fur that we finally figured out was the baby of the mother possum we had seen just a few minutes before. The little possum hid inside the wheel well…

We are having a bona fide rain shower up here in Ojai this evening with real lightning and thunder! What an unexpected treat. The rain is drumming a steady rhythm on the roof of the Airstream and every once in a while, there’s a flash of lightning and a peal of thunder. This is accompanied…

Spoiler alert. Do not read if you hope to watch this movie without knowing prior information on what happens. I am in rest and recovery mode from my illness so I watched The Many Saints of Newark this afternoon, the prequel to The Sopranos. Being someone who came very late to The Sopranos party –…

The woman in the center of the photo is Maureen. She and the young man in the aisle behind her run the dining car on the Southwest Chief, the train traveling from LA to Chicago and back weekly. Maureen told us that she’s worked for Amtrak for eleven years and that when she gets off…