Skip to main content

Ten Things of Thankful: Road Trip Edition

Photo: A Minnie Mouse made of giant pumpkins smiles over the entrance to Disneyland
Youngest daughter and I went on vacation last week, leaving behind chores and projects to spend some time together. John stayed home and so while we were off having fun, he saw to it that home projects got completed. 

1. I'm thankful the wild, hilly part of our backyard now has sprinklers! Now that regular watering is possible, I can start planning where to put lilacs, raspberries, and other plants. The area is huge and the project will be ever-evolving, but I love gardening projects!

 2. I'm thankful for some rain. I think the sprinkler installers were, too, because it made it easier to dig. Our soil is more rocks than dirt, and the installers quickly realized that trying to dig the trenches by hand would take forever. They left and returned with a trench-digger, and I think the recent rainfall made it at least a tiny bit easier.

 3. I'm thankful for a mom-daughter vacation with youngest daughter. We spent last week together at Disneyland, and had a fabulous time.
Photo: Daughter and I stand on either side of R2D2

 4. I'm thankful for friends. As frequently happens when we are at Disneyland, we met friends there. It's nice to catch up.
Photo: Our friends and us in Oga's Cantina in the new Star Wars Land. Fortunately, there were plenty of non-alcoholic options for all of us teetotalers!

 5. I'm thankful we could also visit another daughter and her family:

  • (6) I'm thankful that youngest granddaughter has decided I'm not scary enough to warrant tears anymore. 
Photo: Youngest granddaughter sits on my lap, while I smile at the camera and she doesn't cry
  • (7) I'm thankful that my visit elicited a very excited, "GRANDMA!" from another granddaughter.
  • (8) I'm thankful I had a chance to read Where the Wild Things Are, help construct a Lego airplane, and play Zingo with the grandchildren.
9. I'm thankful for a message from a friend of mine. She teaches nursing, and while she was at the hospital with her students this week, she ran into my son, who is on rotations at the same hospital. Receiving her message almost made me feel like I had just seen him, too. 

10. As always, I'm thankful for John, who had the unenviable task of supervising the installation of the sprinklers, working, and basically holding down the fort while I played. (Thank you, honey!)As much as I enjoyed the week in California, it is so nice to be together at home again. 

What are you thankful for this week? Comment below, and feel free to link up your own TToT post!

 Joining me this week:
The Prolific Pulse
MessyMimi's Meanderings
A Season and a Time
The Wakefield Doctrine
You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!
Click here to enter

Comments

  1. messymimiSeptember 15, 2019 at 3:55 PM

    Awww, i can imagine how much fun you had, and i'm so happy for you that you got to go!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lisa TomeySeptember 15, 2019 at 4:12 PM

    How fun! I am glad to had the opportunity to go with your daughter and have some quality time! And yay and grandchildren being happy, happy, happy for granny!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. KristiSeptember 18, 2019 at 10:03 AM

      Yes, it is nice when the reaction is one of joy (or at least of no tears, in the case of the youngest.) :-)

      Delete
  3. Pat BSeptember 15, 2019 at 11:40 PM

    What a cute seasonal entrance to Disneyland!

    Your mention of using a backhoe to make the trenches for the sprinkling system sounds like a much easier way of tackling you rocky soil. I saw a bunch of landscapers using what looked like jackhammers the other day to make holes for planting shrubs. This was on a day when the ground was quite hard and dry. . .before the deluge of rain came.

    Love the "no tears" photo.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. KristiSeptember 18, 2019 at 10:04 AM

      Improving the soil here will be a long, on-going project. At this point I think it is more rocks than dirt.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Conversations are so much nicer when more than one person does the talking. :-) Please leave a comment and let me know your thoughts; I'd love to hear from you!

Popular posts from this blog

Ten Things of Thankful: Live from Oregon, part 2

stock photo of old computer monitor When I was 10 or 11, I remember sitting next to my dad in our living room and reading computer code to him as he entered it into an Apple computer. We would finish the exercise and he would hit enter (or was it "run"?) and wait expectantly for the green type to appear on the screen. If we were lucky, the whole conversation would occur. Most often, there would be an error either in my dictation of the code, or in the typing of the code. We would then go painstakingly back through the lines, character by character, to find and correct the error. After what seemed like hours (and might have been), we would succeed and the computer would finally run the entire program. It was magical! My dad designed and built an earth-sheltered, passive solar home decades before solar panels were commonplace. He also was on a 9-month waiting list for a Prius, when hybrids were not seen on every street.  While my dad is definitely on the cutting edge of technol...
5 comments
Read more

Monday Mentions: Equate Crutches

Have you ever needed crutches? I hadn't, until a week ago.  I'm pretty sure I strained a muscle while running a half-marathon.  (That sounds kind of cool, doesn't it? I'm not actually that cool; the last time I strained a muscle it was from carrying too many shopping bags at once.) In any case, I found myself in need of some crutches. I sent my husband to the store to get some. Photo: A pair of crutches leans against a wall  Not that crutches are all that complex, but because I hadn't used any before, I wondered if I could figure out how to adjust them to fit me properly. I shouldn't have worried. John came home from Walmart with their generic store brand of crutches, complete with instructions. First, I needed to take out a long bolt that went through the hand grip. Then I needed to find my height range, push down two metal pieces, and slide the crutches until the little metal pieces came up in the hole near my height range. (Having two people for this...
4 comments
Read more

What a Wonderful World! (An #AtoZChallenge Post): Z is for Zion National Park

  Visitor Center sign in Zion National Park My husband recently re-retired, and we are front-loading travel. My #AtoZChallenge posts this year will explore our adventures--some pre-retirement, some post. Today's location: Zion National Park in Utah.  Zion is a bit of a shibboleth. People from outside of Utah (or those who are not members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) tend to pronounce Zion as "ZIE-on." Locals (or tourists who are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) use more of a schwa sound, pronouncing Zion to rhyme with lion. However you choose to pronounce it, it is an amazing, beautiful national park and has some amazing hikes. The last time my husband and I visited Zion National Park, we entered from the east, and traveled through the mile-long Zion-Mt. Carmel tunnel. It is an engineering marvel, completed in the 1920s. Before we passed through the tunnel, though, we spotted a group of bighorn sheep, including some babies...
8 comments
Read more