Backwards Livin'

Livin' in the desert can seem sort of backwards at times.   I was raised in California, then spent 10 years in Ohio.  Winter in Ohio can be cold, windy and snowy four months or so when it comes to weather.  I remember feeling as if I were hibernating during the winter.  Granted, if the sun was shining, I loved to trek out over the new fallen snow.  But the reality of working and living in a snowy state can be a pain.  All those accessories:  hat, gloves, shoes, ice scrapers.  Getting up in the dark, scraping snow off the car, shivering while the car warms up, never knowing if the roads to work would be open or closed.  Some days you had to get creative on your drive to work if the snow plows hadn't been out yet!   

Here in the desert, our "winter" is summertime.  Extreme heat and dry conditions can be just as draining as the cold and wet winters of the midwest.  It's also when we get our rains for the year. Monsoon season is just around the corner.

Weekends in the summer heat tend to be spent hibernating.  Long afternoon naps because there's only so much you can do when its hot!  And anything over 80 degrees makes it difficult for Sadie to breathe, so we don't get outdoors very much.  By 7am today, I had already taken Sadie for her morning walk, washed the car and washed the bed linens.  That leaves quite a lot of daytime left to do .... what?   I need to think up a project to keep me occupied, or it's going to be a very long boring and worse, unproductive!, summer.   

I'm thinking working over the scrapbooks and photo albums.  With my history of blended families, there are some photos in the albums that probably aren't labeled, and future generations will wonder "Who's that?"  I had that same issue with my grandmother's photo albums.  So maybe a note of the who, what, and when about a photo.... maybe even a little story telling, just to make it interesting! 

This was about 1990.  Grandma Greer came from Oregon to California for an extended stay.  Obviously Christmas time!  Tanya and Brian are my kids.  In the background is the upright piano that my parents bought from an old school sale in Los Gatos.  They brought it home, disassembled it, stripping all the old paint off it.  It had been green, pink and beige in the past!  They stained it, and put it back together.  It was moved into my bedroom where I learned to play and took lessons back in the 1960s.  When the family room was added on, it finally moved out there!   

Another little note:  most of the ornaments on my mother's tree were hand made.