After Thanksgiving Greetings

The clouds you see below greeted me when I arrived tired, but happy, in Palm Springs the week before Thanksgiving. This was taken at the airport while I waited for Mom to pick me up.

More clouds.

While waiting for Thanksgiving, Mom and I went to see The Irishman. It was way too long at three and a half hours. It was great to see DeNiro, Pesci, and Pacino in a movie together, but... after a while there were too many executions and I didn't really care about the characters. We saw the movie at the Mary Pickford Theatre and next door was the balloon festival and food truck fair. They had painted a balloon on the wall of the theatre for photo ops. (The balloon was right near the fountain of the spitting turtles.)

Did I mention that those clouds provided buckets of rain? It seemed to rain for days, sometimes with very heavy rain overnight. In fact our neighbor's giant bouganvilla that normally sits on his roof is down on the ground. On Mom's patio (outside her bedroom), the bouganvilla has been beaten off the wall. We hope the gardeners can put it back tomorrow.

Needess to say, the picture below was taken before the rains although only some of the blossoms came off; it wasn't really damaged.

Our friend, Elaine, brought the most wonderful lemon tarts and butter tarts to our Thanksgiving dinner. She picked the lemons from her own tree! I have often wanted to try a Canadian butter tart because I listen to Brittlestar from Canada on Friday mornings and he's always talking about them. They are delicious and I wanted to devour them, but restrained myself to one bite. They are almost like little pecan pies with no pecans. Maple flavored.

Above is Mom and Elaine before dinner.  I'm really happy that we had cocktails at 4 p.m. and dinner at 5 p.m. I didn't have to get up early to put the turkey in! I had cooked most of the sides the day before (whipped potatoes, squash, stuffing to go in the bird, homemade cranberry sauce, homemade cocktail sauce for the shrimp). Deb and Paul brought green bean casserole and Paul made cornbread-sausage stuffing. So everything was very relaxed on Thanksgiving Day!

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Mom's early Christmas present was a set of Mexican Train Dominoes. We had invited Elaine over last week (or the week before??) and we had fun playing it. It's a really easy game and it goes fast. We had a lot of laughs because you never know who is going to win until right at the end.

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Today is Sunday, December 1 and the day is nice and sunny and warm -- it's 69 F. They are predicting cooler weather and more rain. There is more snow on San Jacinto and El Gorgonio mountains than we have ever seen and the new rain will add more snow. At the Palm Springs Tram summit, there is at least two and a half feet of snow. It's interesting that it's listed as 2596 meters high. You'll have to google it yourself to see what that is in feet.

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Today we're going to hear Handel's Messiah at the 7th Day Adventist Church. We went last year and I was blown away by the musicianship. It was a very nice program. Their organist only has one arm, which is a major feat playing classical music and most of the musicians are volunteers with other careers.

The music was fabulous again this year. I really enjoyed it. I liked the tenor best but Mom liked the baritone. The collatura wasn't bad and the soprano had the best enunciation.

Today, Big Bear got four feet of snow! It's the most snow they have had in 50 years on December 1. We're hearing about all kinds of awful weather and car crashes on the TV news tonight. I hope you all have safe travels -- or better yet -- you stayed home safe.

Cheers!