It's Christmas time on the desert

Okay, okay, okay! I know it’s been a long time since my last post but, as the gist of that post implied, we’re really not doing much here in the Desert Southwest other than enjoying the mostly marvelous weather.

Last weekend a marvelous, refreshing, nourishing rain fell on the area. It rained almost continuously for about 23 hours resulting in a total of nearly 2.4”. The intense day of wind that followed caused us to “hunker in our bunker” for another 24 hours. When the gusty winds blow we do a bit of rocking and rolling in the motorhome. It’s nothing alarming but, like the boat, you get rocked to sleep at night. Beautiful sunsets over Mt. San Jacinto are a wonderful benefit of enduring the storm’s passage.

That event, although significant, was the first time the weather had forced us indoors since our arrival back at the beginning of November.

We’ve had another very pleasant week with temps in the mid 70’s but now expect another weather event for this weekend with the possibility of more rain and wind. It’s a pretty good schedule because I do enjoy watching the football games on TV. We are heartbroken over the deadly weather in the Northwest and hope and pray all of our friends and acquaintances there were not badly impacted by the storms.

We’ve been decorating for the holidays. We erected and decorated our Christmas Tree last week. It’s a new tree this year and we decided to be “green” and purchased a string of the new LED lights. We pondered whether to buy the “clear” or “colored” variety and finally settled on “colored”. If you’re considering such a purchase and are as uninformed as we were, do some research. If nothing else, look for a lighted display. The colors of these new lights are so intense that it’s more like carnival lighting than holiday. The blue color especially overwhelms the other colors. We have a neon-looking Christmas Tree. Forest, our Alaska stuffed bear, graces the display garbed in his Santa Claus House tee shirt from North Pole Alaska, and a Santa hat originally purchased for a Pug dog who probably refused to wear it or just looked too stupid.

A stop at a Jack-in-the-Box netted a new antenna ball that came with a suction cup attachment and it is stuck in the center of our kitchen wall clock. Christmas music on the XM Satellite radio rounds out the holiday scene. It’s not Currier and Ives but it proves we’re in the spirit and ready for celebrating to begin.

In my last posting I talked about all of the things to do in the area, but neglected to mention one that is not to be missed. The weekly flea-market at the College of the Desert in Cathedral City, is an event that draws us

there at least twice a winter. It’s a upscale flea market where one can purchase stuff ranging from the common tee shirt vendors wares to tuxedos, or evening wear and diamond jewelry to Croc shoes. Heck, you can even buy a very pricey “water feature” for your patio or garden.

“People watching” here is right up near the top of the scale as you mix with the gentry who arrived in their Rolls Royce or Bentley’s and the college student in a 70’s VW bug.

There are no "starving artist" deals from this fine art dealer at the Flea Market.

An interesting sight was the bagged dates on the palms that line the streets at the College of the Desert. They bag the young dates to keep the birds from stealing all of the fruit before they can harvest it.

It’s a fascinating experience that occasionally produces some little gem we can’t resist buying.

Today was also our turn to attend “The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies,” and the name says it all. It was fabulous, though a bit on the long side at 3.5 hours but fabulous never-the-less. The Guiness Book of World Records includes the “Oldest active performing Showgirl in the World” who trips the light fantastic at 84 years old and has the body of someone about 20. All of the showgirls have shapes that rival hers. The vaudeville-type comedians were funny and Kaye Ballard (the guest headliner) did a great job at more than 70 years old. Their patriotic tribute last number was very nice and recognized all of our services including the U.S. Coast Guard and the Merchant Marine Service. Ron’s friend Ken Blue would have really appreciated the latter.

We went to the show in the company of our friends, Bob and Cheryl, Rvers from Illinois that we’ve known since our Mexico sojourn. They too enjoyed the show.

We bought a new GPS unit and have done our first GeoCaching. In case you’re unfamiliar with the activity it’s a new-age, hi-tech, treasure or scavenger hunt. There are hundreds of thousands of little treasures hidden around the world (maybe millions if the number in our immediate area are indicative of other places) and with the help of a GPS unit you too can find them. The fun here is mostly in the finding rather than the treasure in the cache though there are items there for the taking. When a cache is discovered you look at the stuff

(called “SWAG” in the hobby), take some if you wish, and always record your visit in the log book provided by the person who hid the cache. If you take an item you should also leave an item. Some of the Swag is sort of official and known as “Travel Bugs”. These articles have a metal tag attached to them and are meant to be sent on in another cache as soon as possible. They take a journey like “go around the world” and return to the originator when the journey is complete. They may come with instructions such as “move further east” requiring a person who takes such a bug to do as instructed. I’m holding a cache in the photo.


Lists of the caches can be found online at http://www.geocache.com/ and then the coordinates can be transferred into your GPS for later searching.

It’s an interesting experience with the main benefit of getting you out of the house and going to places you probably would never have gone before.

We leave the motorhome in storage and drive home on December 17. We’re looking forward to getting home so Judy can spend four hectic days decorating for the holidays, wrapping gifts, baking cookies, and shopping for all of the food we’ll need for the two weeks were home with our anxiously anticipated houseguests, Laurie and Dani, who arrive on December 23. I think this will be our first Christmas together since we all traveled to Boise to be with her some years ago and will be Laurie’s first visit with her two nephews. It should be lots of fun.

We hope your Christmas is blessed, happy, and filled with family, friends, good food, and joy. We wish you all a very happy New Year with hopes for good health, prosperity, and happiness for all of you.

Here’s another Geocache after removal of the rocks that covered it. It contained a log book and some little plastic creatures.