In our former life, we always enjoyed having large gatherings for dinner or a BBQ in celebration of just about any holiday or non-event.  Groundhog Day has always been my personal favorite but most of our friends just couldn’t seem to adapt to the wild rangy taste of rodent.   I believe my bride took special delight in this Easter as it gave her the opportunity to display her hostess skills and spend some time with the younger generation...

   Back Home Again                                                            April 25, 2006

Or the kids may simply have provided her some cover to get back on the monkey bars.   And now, in that long held tradition of saving the best for last, I would like to share the news that our daughter, Kassie, and her husband will be presenting us with another grandchild in December.  In fact, her delivery date is December 13th, which just happens to be my birthday!!  Pretty neat, huh!! Hugs and smooches ‘til next time. Chuck and Zook

Either he’ll have to take some singing lessons or change the name of that boat.  Our border crossing was pretty much uneventful this time with my bride’s poinsettia being the only victim of federal confiscation.   We spent several days in Tucson where we caught up with our Alaska travel pals, Mike and Flo, and had our motorhome serviced at Beaudry RV.   We are now camped out in the parking lot of the Canoga Park Elks Lodge while engaging in a marathon of doctor visitations.   In brief, Kalyn’s breast surgeon gave her a clean bill of health and renewed her travel permit for another 6 months.   She also informed us that she will be getting married some time soon to a fellow 7 years her junior…we figure she has discovered some loophole in California law that is allowing her to marry a 12 year old.  Go get ‘em Doc!!!  Our family doc set us up for heart stress tests and coronary calcium CT scans, renewed our hundreds of prescriptions, sold us some baklava and sent us on our way; our dentist checked our choppers, was duly impressed by my navigator’s conspicuous consumption of dental floss, and, being from South Africa, he railed at me for several minutes in Swahili about my continuing lack of care for my 3 remaining teeth…I only wish I could understand him.   We also paid a visit to our gastroenterologist (hey, give me a break, even Spellchecker can’t get this one right) for what is becoming our annual colonoscopys.   I have some great photos of the procedure but haven’t yet found a way to sneak them past my on board censor.  Easter provided us the opportunity to vicariously re-live our child rearing days by providing baskets for 2 little friends of our daughter, Kassie, and having Easter dinner for a “group” in our RV...

In reality, I actually caught both fish but piscatorial etiquette and a sense of fair play dictated that I let Bob pose with one of my fish for the picture . . . well, that and the mental image of a 65-year old man crying in the background if he was left out of the photo.  And, after all, it was his boat and tackle I used to land these behemoths.  Our day on the water with Mike and Peggy and their new acquisition provided us with a great ocean-side view of the San Carlos area and was only slightly marred by Mike’s endless serenade of Frank Sinatra songs...

“Hey, it’s good to be back home again!” to quote the line from one of my favorite John Denver songs.  Our winter’s sojourn to Mexico has come to an end and we are, once more, back on US soil…well, almost…we are actually in Los Angeles.  I don’t really feel at home until I’m roaming the back roads in the Rocky Mountains of Montana and Wyoming or rock crawling the canyon country of Utah in our Jeep.  Now THAT is home!!  And we will soon be heading in that direction.  Our final days in Mexico consisted of some fishing and a daytrip on our friends’ new “yacht.”  The fishing turned out to be pretty exciting as we actually caught a couple of yellowtail tuna…