2017 Holiday Greetings

December 2017
Greetings from somewhere in the American Southwest. If you live in the northwest, the rule for many is that the minute you retire you buy a motorhome and start “snowbirding” to Arizona. Fred retired in April (I beat him by a couple of years).
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Before the obligatory southern migration, we did some major projects around the property, particularly pulling stumps, clearing land and installing drainage. We finished the house two years ago November, and while the inside is pretty cozy, visitors will tell you to bring mud boots in the wet season and something to keep the dust out of your eyes in the dry season. There’s a bit more landscaping, if you’d call it that, to do.
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We also joined another couple of C-Dory owners to make a long-promised three-week excursion into the inner islands at the north end of Vancouver Island.

And, we upgraded from a travel trailer to a little motorhome so it’d be easier to get around down in the tricky streets of Phoenix and Tombstone.

It’s funny. When you retire, if you’re me, you feel like you’re really not doing much. The other day someone asked me how I spend my time and I said, “cleaning.” Fred pointed out that there are a number of other activities, such as those above (which do, by the way, entail a fair amount of cleaning), and he’s right.

We visit with friends a lot more, relax a lot more, read a lot more. I’ve always been obsessed with gathering rocks, so it was a natural progression to start painting on them now that it’s a craze here. (See Facebook site WhidbeyIslandRocks.) We’d probably watch more TV, but we’re too “frugal” to put in Dish and there’s no cable service here. Our internet service is a micro-tower in a tree down the street, so our screen time is spent on wobbly streaming and pixelated off-channel over the air TV. Channel 5-2, for example, is the Justice Network. (Although we do get a couple major channels in full HD when the wind isn’t blowing and the EA-18 Growlers aren’t flying.)  

Speaking of the jets. Not to miss out on the mass harasser scandals in larger venues from Hollywood to DC, we had our own sex scandal here in Oak Harbor and the Okanogan highlands where our pilots practice. This Washington Post explanation of the probable motivation for their ill-advised skywriting makes the most sense to me: “For some reason, when you get into a situation where you need to draw something, it’s always a penis.”

​Funny, it would never have occurred to me....​