An Unexpected Trip to Cabo San Lucas!

 the Walkers at Cabo

I never planned to go on a cruise and truthfully, never cared about doing so. Our vacations usually consist of grueling activities like sightseeing all day every day hardly eating or drinking or sleeping, or, hiking and other outdoor ventures all day every day hardly eating or drinking or sleeping, or, visiting family and doing all of the above too. So much we want to see and do, and so little time.

We were recently invited on a cruise with all of Craig’s siblings and their spouses, and who wouldn’t want to join up with that! A four-day cruise, it would dock for a day at Catalina Island and a day at Ensenada, Mexico. We boarded the Carnival Paradise at Long Beach on January 18, just as reports of severe major storms were coming in. Because of the weather it was announced that our itinerary would change to sail directly south to Cabo San Lucas (40 hours) where the weather would be better. There was an audible cheer from the passengers. We stood on deck as the ship left the harbor accompanied by a pilot boat, and before long we were out on the sea. I loved showing up for a nice dinner that night without lifting a finger.

The ship rolled quite a bit on the way to Cabo but some miles from there a straight line in the sky marked the end of the clouds and storm, and the beginning of sun and sparkling seas. We watched whales spouting and arcing. On shore we hired a guide/ driver to take us on a tour of the area, and part of that included a short boat trip out to the arches area. I enjoyed seeing Cabo’s bountiful tropical vegetation and azure seas and lovely, classy residential areas.

On the trip back the ship was tossed more severely than before, even diving into troughs in the waves. I got sick on the last night for about 6 hours. As we disembarked back in Long Beach a crew member told us that some of the engines had quit during the storm and we came close to needing a rescue.

Other than the sea-sickness I enjoyed the company, the scenery, the entertainment (Craig singing karaoke), and having three meals a day without effort. Would I do it again? Yes, if the price was rock-bottom as this one was. You can’t arrange the weather but you can enjoy a cruise in spite of what nature throws at you.

An Early Sign of My Future Senility

From 1977-1978 our family lived on the military base in China Lake, California, where Craig worked at the Naval Weapons Center. He helped design Sidewinder Missile (I guess it can be mentioned now, even though it was top secret then).

Every week I made a trip to the public library to check out fat novels and return the stack from the previous week. I had this habit of setting the books on top of the car while buckling my baby into his car seat. Then I would grab the books and set them on the front seat. Except for this one time, when I forgot they were up there.

I happily cruised away from the library down Ridgecrest Blvd., the town’s main street, at the 25 mph speed limit. What a grand sight I must have been that sunny day, with the breeze ruffling my hair, and my elbow resting on the fully-open driver's window, looking like I had the world by the tail. Except there was a stack of library books on top of my car.

I turned left into the base and stopped at the guard shack where a handsome young uniform checked my ID. He stared at me intently (was I not the foxiest chick he’d seen all day?) but he never said a word, then waved me into the base. At home in the driveway I got out to unbuckle the baby and my eye caught something on top of the car. For cryin' out loud! I had left the books on top of the car and every one of them was still there just like I had left them! And that guard had said nothing! He hadn't thought I was foxy, just a major idiot. He must have had a jovial time over a beer at the mess hall that night, telling the story of that wacky mom who cruised Ridgecrest with a stack of books on top of her car.

Ups & Downs of Bunion Surgery

My Mom had her first bunion surgery when I was in about the 6th grade (1966). She had been in misery foot-wise for decades. I remember her struggle with those old-fashioned wooden crutches and the hideousness of her feet with their new set of personal railroad tracks. My strongest memory though is the way she guarded her feet like they were Fort Knox. Whether she was walking or sitting we kids could only get so close before she shooed us away. Apparently the pain was so extreme that she couldn't tolerate the thought of her feet being stepped on by her little darlins, even after a few months had passed. 

So, I swore I'd never do bunion surgery, never go under the knife for the sake of painful bunions. Over the years mine enlarged and I discovered new ways to lesson the misery of being on my feet. Sensible nannie shoes, when I could find them, were a lifesaver. Until that didn't work anymore. When my bunions progressed I started stretching the nannie shoes to fit, and then when they got bigger I put layers of cushioned bandaids and moleskin and even foam padding over the bunions.  When that was no longer enough, I looked into the very surgery I once resolved never to have.

And here I am 8 weeks post-radical bunion surgery. It's been a slow, sometimes tough recovery, marked by milestones of relief. After two weeks the pain went from all-consuming to very manageable. On Christmas Eve, the most special gift was taking my first shower in five weeks. Sitting in a camp chair while the hot water ran over me was heavenly.

At the almost seven-week point I hit bottom. My foot was swelling badly from edema so walking without crutches was not even on the radar. Finally the doc recommended physical therapy and I broke down in the PT's office. Then I came home and promptly tumbled down the stairs. Thinking I had broken my healing foot, I laid at the bottom wailing in my own personal pity party. 

Diligently employing physical therapy has been the greatest thing though. To know I have the power to help my foot helps me see the end of the road. The PT gave me a pressure sock that fits tightly on my foot and it feels wonderful while holding down the swelling. I have labored diligently in PT even though some of the exercises give me the willies (like massaging the scar tissue--hard). On Thursday I experienced the most wonderful thing--she showed me how to make my right foot take walking steps again. And now I can put weight on that foot and even stand without crutches for a while. My foot looks more normal instead of like an inflated balloon, and on Thursday I was able to put a shoe on it for the first time in two months.

But you know the biggest plus of all?  That ugly knobby painful bunion is gone forever!

Book Harvest 2009

 Most of the books I read this year were recommended by someone else--either Bridget, Craig, The Oregonian, or Book Group.  There were only a few disappointments.  The lineup of fiction and non-fiction was 10 fiction to 16 non-fiction, which is more fiction than the usual for me. 

The bin Ladens (Coll)--NF; delves into ObL's extended family and points out that ObL is an outcast in certain parts of his own family; a newer book called Growing Up bin Laden is on my list for this year

Lone Survivor (Luttrell)--NF; you couldn't make up a thrilling yet tragic book like this but be warned about language

Found--F; strange tale of a plane full of babies; intriguing but weird at the same time

Red Sky in Mourning (Ashcraft)--almost pointless NF story about a man lost at sea in a storm, written by his surviving wife; it should have been shorter; don't confuse w/ an excellent coming of age story called Red Sky at Morning

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society (Shaffer)--F; loved it and wish there was a sequel

The Hunger Games (Collins)--F; imaginative, suspenseful and well-written work about a society that annually sends two of its teenagers to a gladiator-style exhibition; stand alone first-in-a-series

Mornings on Horseback (McCullough)--NF; who knew Teddy Roosevelt became the accomplished person he did against such great odds?

A Long Way From Home (Brokaw)--NF; Tom Brokaw's youth; I say he was meant to achieve great things

Follow Me Down (Foote)--F; Civil War historian Shelby Foote's novel about nothing; I didn't care for it much

Shiloh (Foote)--F; Foote is in his element here when he describes a scene of dead and wounded as barrels of God's creation mistakes dumped out onto the battlefield [he says it more eloquently]

Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times (Brands)--NF; re: T. Roosevelt above; who knew a man with a lousy life could take care of our national business?

A. Lincoln (White)--NF; what doesn't he say about honest Abe?  Didn't know he abhorred slavery from childhood

Ablaze (Read)--NF; as bad as Chernobyl was, we're lucky it wasn't worse; can thank some who gave their lives to get the plant under control

In Plain Sight (Smart)--NF; Elizabeth Smart story thoroughly covered by her uncle

Firelover (Wambaugh)--NF; fire department arson specialist who creates his own job security, if you get my drift

Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Walker)--NF; no agenda or whitewashing here; it's the real deal

The Dark is Rising (Cooper)--F; this was on a list of must-reads so I obeyed and read it; in the light of some of the good juvenile literature we've seen the past decade it pales because it's too far-fetched and hard to follow

The Shack (Young)--F; popular fiction that's too weird for my tastes

The Worst Hard Time (Egan)--NF; Depression dust bowl 101; itwas shocking to me to read how much that area suffered--I just didn't know

A Matter of Chastity (Yocom)--NF; chronicle of a young woman who committed murder to avenge her rape over 100 years ago

Sarah's Key (DeRosnay)--F; ok fast read involving the Holocaust in France, but too manipulative and contrived

Three Weeks in October (Moose)--NF; Charles Moose, former PDX police chief writes about the Washington DC sniper he dealt with as Montgomery County MD police chief

Sudden Sea (Rossi)--NF; 1938 New England hurricane which made landfall without warning as a category 5; people peacefully eating lunch on their sunny terrace were drowned in 25 feet of water a few hours later

The Princess Academy (Hale)--F; great YA story about a young woman who wanted 'more' than to be a princess

Skeletons on the Zahara (King)--NF; amazing story of survival by sailors shipwrecked on the African coast

Catching Fire (Collins)--F; sequel to The Hunger Games . . . leaves you hanging and the third book doesn't come out until August!

35 Years

Taken at our wedding reception December 21, 1974, on a nice December 80-degree day  (Craig looks so young I appear to be marrying Steven . . .)

December 19 was our 35th wedding anniversary! Wow, that sounds like a lot of years. I remember when my parents celebrated their 25th and how old they seemed to me at the time. They made it to their 40th before my Mom died and here we are, only a few years away from that. We celebrated by going for an early dinner at the Reedville Cafe. It's a local place, one-of-a-kind that serves delicious meals far superior to the factory-food-popular chains that proliferate our area. We splurged by ordering an appetizer of their delicious homemade onion rings. I don't remember ever ordering an appetizer before at a restaurant. It's not worth the expense and most restaurant meals are enough food for me anyhow. But it was our anniversary . . .

December 19th seems like an odd day to get married. It is close enough to Christmas that most people would avoid it. We had a challenge scheduling our marriage. Because we are Mormons who were being married in the temple, we didn't have the choice of a totally open calendar. Temples were not open over Christmas and New Year break except for one day between the two holidays.

We were BYU students living in Provo and that week before Christmas was finals week, which ended Friday December 20, so getting married before that was not convenient. The last day that temples were open was Saturday the 21st. We wanted to have our reception in Southern California that day, but the drive from Provo was going to be close to 12 hours so we couldn't get married and get to our reception all on the same day. We didn't want to use that one day in between the holidays because we wanted to have our quasi-honeymoon over before Christmas so we could head back to Provo on the 26th.

We decided to get married at 7 PM on the 19th in the Provo Temple, then drive to California on the 20th, have the reception the 21st, go on a two-to-three-day honeymoon, come back Christmas Eve, leave for Provo the 26th. It worked out OK because I moved my final exams to be done on the 18th. Craig had two finals on the 19th. He took the first one, then when he showed up to the second one the teacher excused him because he had earned an A no matter how he did on the final. So he went home and took a nap.

Now that we passed that milestone, we have five years till the next significant one. My dream celebration would be to camp at Cape Kiwanda for a week, if I will still be able to get into a sleeping bag on a pad on the ground in a tent under the stars in my old age!

Genuine Romance

An advice columnist recently featured a letter from a 20-something gal whose live-in boyfriend never sent her flowers. She went on and on about how she begged him to be romantic by sending her flowers. She hinted repeatedly, and when that didn't work eventually worked her way up to saying that if he really loved her he would send her flowers. Gag. I wonder if her next step was to hold a gun to his head. Would she have been happy then? The advice person said, "if you want flowers, buy them yourself." Amen. And she went on to say that everyone has their own way of showing love or being romantic, but it might be not be a Hallmark ad.

So I thought I would write a few paragraphs here about what passes for romance in our household. Someone else might think how dull or boring or unimaginative we are, or that we should be doing this stuff anyway. But every time I hear boasts from friends that their husbands often bring them multiple giant bunches of flowers or pricey jewelry or that they dine at the Stephanie Inn ($$$$) regularly or whatever, I just smile and think how dull, boring and unimaginative that would be in my book.  \Sure it's nice and has its place, but there are endless ways to show feelings, and putting forth a healthy outlay of cash is not required.

My husband fixes my computer. On demand. Sometimes not on demand. I use it a lot for research and have a low tolerance for clunk. If I even so much as hint that there's a problem, he drops everything to wave his magic wand. Voila!  It is fixed.

He also writes programs just for me to do what I need done.

Recently the door to our deep freeze got left open and you know how that goes. You can't shut it again until you defrost it, and I had to go to work over in Troutdale for the day. I quickly unloaded it and set a pan of boiling water inside and left. I knew when I came home that I'd be scrubbing and chipping before re-loading it. But surprise, it was completely defrosted AND completely scrubbed out. Now that's romantic.

Occasional drives through the countryside are something I really enjoy and guess what: he does all the driving while I do all the looking. And we both are happy.

I've never had to mow a lawn, never had to clean the rain gutters (and believe me, that's a gooky job here in the PAC NW). If he's passing Winco he might call to see if we need any groceries. He makes the trips to the bread outlet for bargains. He takes Daniel on errands so I can have a few quiet minutes. Recently we had been discussing adding insulation to our attic by doing it ourselves; a month ago my husband declared the day had arrived, made the arrangements for materials and machinery, and we worked together that evening to get it done. We could have been sitting in a nice restaurant instead, or he could have brought me flowers, then sat down to watch sports on TV. But instead we had this fun time working together that won't be forgotten. Installing insulation can be romantic? I vote yes.

Perhaps I'll dine at the Stephanie Inn before I die. But being romantic revolves less around impressing the other person than from an attitude of "what can I do to make [the other person] happy?" I think at least one person in this household knows the answer to that question.

Childhood Used to Be Dangerous (But More Fun)

On Bridget's blog is a video of Magda going down a slide. She scooted her little self forward on the dull plastic ramp until she was able to glide a few feet to the bottom. At that point the slide levels out so that she didn't go flying off into oblivion. Perfect for a 15-month-old.

Unfortunately, slides and other equipment made for kids now days is across-the-board dull. Slides that don't slide, monkey bars too close to the ground, and I rarely see teeter-totters (see-saws) or merry-go-rounds anymore. Kids are safer but they sure miss out on fun.

Teeter-totters were the best. It was a balancing act to get onto them--someone had to hold your seat in mid-air when you climbed on but once you had a roughly equal weight on the other end, how fun it was to push up to the sky, then feel your stomach flop as you hit the ground. On the negative side, a careless or hateful partner on the other end could leap off unexpectedly, slamming you to the ground with enough force to knock your breath out. But that rare misery was worth it for the excitement.

Slides were great. They were made of metal and could be sky-high. Metal slides zoomed you down at top speed and sent you flying off the end onto the asphalt or dirt. On a burning summer day you could increase the thrill of the ride by using a sheet of Mom's wax paper to polish the slide. Then you hurtled down at freeway speed  and shot off the edge, getting scorched by hot metal all the way down. 

A favorite childhood experience was when a neighborhood mom took a group of kids over to a nearby empty hill, with cardboard boxes, and let us hop in and slide down willy-nilly. I guess sometimes we got overturned and ended up with a mouthful of dirt.

I don't doubt that kids got hurt on toys before safety measures were in place. My brother slashed his chest on a rideable fire engine with sharp metal edges. A friend broke her arm when she fell off a skate board in the day when the wheels were inadequately small.  Probably worse than that happened  to kids. But we survived the fun, eventually healed and learned to be tough.