Dear Family, Friends, and Diary,
I feel we need a record, but there's not much to note since the diary three weeks ago. I suppose that's a message all by itself.
Spring weather has started arriving after a long winter of rain and mountain snow. Flowers are coming out and, with all the irrigation water, our neighborhood should have color all year. Nice. It's also Mourning Dove season again, with a new pair nesting on our back porch.
The first Saturday in April is also the time for the Cambridge Avenue yard sale and this year we had our own "store". I don't think we offered anything of great note or value, but we managed to unload a couple hundred dollars of stuff. Some day, we will need to sell a houseful of wonderful things, but that's for some later year when we do that senior thing: down-sizing. Not yet.
While Marianne stays busy with painting, I kill more time with puzzles and reading. My last book was "Secret Harvests" by David "Mas" Masumoto, a local organic farmer and writer. It is the real story of a family dealing with Fresno farm labor struggles, prejudice, internment, disability, and changes within the Japanese-American community. Key to the story are lessons learned from "discovering" a long-lost aunt who had been institutionalized in the days just before family imprisonment due to a meningitis-caused disability. In 2012, Mas received a phone call connecting him and the family with his mother's sister, now a 90-year-old survivor of seventy years of institutional care. A sobering and thoughtful book.
Books require one type of thought, puzzles a different one.
Our big home development has been replacement of our heating and cooling system. Our 90+ year old home will never be energy efficient, but now we should be able to count on the basement system to warm us now and cool us in the summer. All we will have to do is pay the electric and gas bill.
Socially, not much has been happening. Marianne visits with Zumba and art friends and I stay connected to our neighbors. Yesterday I dropped by Vern's house while he was preparing his play list for a three-hour radio show today. In days past he was a (part-time) jazz singer and now he hosts a Wednesday program on the Fresno State radio station, sharing his music and memories. He likes to say he is the world's oldest jazz disk-jockey.
And that's it. Coming up we will have more interesting reports, I hope.
We do have a month-long drive planned for a couple weeks from now, so stay tuned.
John and Marianne