We bought a new house right here in the south

O M goodness, lost almost another week, how did that happen again?  We have some very exciting news, we heard about a house here in the complex that was newly for sale last night, Monday night.  So off we toodled, saw it, came home and decided it was for us, it was the first day it had been for sale.

So we marched right back and made a full price offer which they accepted gleefully, so as it now stands, we have 2 houses, we made the down payment today, and took a few photos.

The sellers are hot to go, they have an offer on another bigger house somewhere else in Desert Hot Springs, so we will be able to put some of our clothing in the new house before we leave.  Here it is below:

As you can see, it has a lovely private back enclosed area, and we should be able to sit outside back there most of the time we are down here.  Now I'll show you the back part, it even has a cook top outside.

You can kind of see that there is one part that is covered with a canopy, and another part that is open.  There is also an electrically driven sun screen that drops down at the side of the covered part, in case it's windy, or too sunny. 

So we should get a lot of use out of our new place.  The trailer is about 8 years younger than our current one, which we may either sell or rent.

The outside of the new trailer is wood, not aluminum, so that is a bit nicer than our current one, though it takes a bit more upkeep, caulking and painting it about every 5 years or so.

Now here's the cooktop part: behind the deck chair are cupboards, on the left side there is a cooktop that is covered, so you just lift the top and voila, you can cook outside.  The house has propane heat, and a swamp cooler which we know very little about, but it cools much more cheaply than air conditioning.  We may not even use it, due to the time of year that we are normally down here.  We'll see.

So you can imagine we are very, very excited.  We will be able to put our clothes and personal stuff inside it just before we leave for home, so that is very, very neat and exciting.

It is one road over from our current street, so the middle street, and a bit nearer the clubhouse and the pool, so that is great.  In the above photo the dart board is on the back (inside) of the large shed door, when the shed door is closed, you can leave out the entry door to the front of the house.  Our street address will be the same, just the lot number will be different.  New lot number is 104.

The stairway that you see on the extreme left leads into the bedroom, out front is the door access to the living room/ dining room/ kitchen combination front room.

I haven't got a good photo of the living room, the one I took was too dark.  I'll retake it and post it later.

Back to our week, on Thursday after coffee and our weekly business meeting the Entertainment Committee cleaned out all the kitchen cupboards in the clubhouse, which was a big job, but we were about 1/2 dozen folks, so it went pretty quickly.

In the afternoon I helped with poker, there were 35 players, I think.

The next day I attended a very interesting day long conference called a Call to Care, put on by the Catholic Church, but held at an Episcopalian church on Hwy 74, in Palm Desert, on the road that eventually goes up to Idyllwild.  It was fascinating, the first main speaker was Father Bill Faiella, who basically talked about how to live using your heart, how to forgive yourself and live in the NOW, not worrying about the past, nor fearing the future.  All very positive information. with very interesting references cited for further reading.  It was kind of addressed to caregivers, but all were welcome.

Then our flute teacher Annie was the other speaker, and of course she spoke about playing music as a healing modality, about playing from the heart, playing your own songs, and using music to heal, unite people, and bring joy and peace.

She played her flute withher friend Adolph for a kind of opening prayer, then she fluted with our friend Chip, it was just lovely.  During Father Bill's talk he asked her to play "discord" and up she got, and did that.  Then he asked her to play another emotion, a strong one, and she responded marvellously to that request, too.

The two speakers complemented each other very well, and smoothly, too.

In the afternoon we did a bit of drawing, chatted a bit about what we had drawn using the theme of peace, and then we had a drum circle, with every one of the forty or so attendees joining in with drum tops, cymbals, rattles, chimes, it was lovely energy and a nice finish to a very interesting and informative day.

The best part of it was there was no pressure, it was kind of peaceful and uplifting, and it was completely free, with both breakfast and lunch provided.

Saturday we went out to lunch at the Jackalope Restaurant on Hwy 111, Lary and myself, Chip and Annie.  Kind of a wrap up for our season together, the restaurant is lovely at this time of the year, they have beautiful gardens where you can sit outside in the warm sunshine, and eat your meal.  We had a relaxed time together, sat around after lunch just chatting, and it was lovely and warm in the sunshine.  In fact we were seated under a sun shade umbrella.  Temps likely in the high 70s or low 80s, the desert is warming up steadily now.

This is a picture of a lovely sculpture in the garden of the restaurant where we ate lunch with Annie and Chip, it's so sweet.  The theme of children is often repeated in civic art down here in the Coachella Valley, it's wonderful to see.

After lunch we went to La Quinta Art under the Umbrellas art show, and it was the last hour of that show, we met Dave and Wendy and chatted for a while, and about an hour later joined them for Jazz in the Gardens at El Paseo, the swanky area of shops over in Palm Desert.  The Gardens also has bronze sculptures of children playing, they are just wonderful, I adore them all.

The parking lot for The Gardens shopping center was very full, it's Fashion Week and all the fashionistas were nearby in tents, attending the rollout of the latest and greatest in the world of high fashion.  Not us.

For the first time ever we attended a Jazz music event that we didn't enjoy, in fact about 1/2 the audience left part way through the musicians show, it was 2 men playing guitars, another on a synthesizer, and the fourth playing the drums.  I'm not sure who they were but the audience showed extreme displeasure with the music.

We had a couple of glasses of wine and appies, and we stayed for the whole hour, but it was kind of painful.  They were loud and got louder, it wasn't typical for the type of entertainment that is normally featured on Saturday evenings Jazz, outdoors on the lawn of the Gardens.  Oh well, it cost us $12 each, and we got drink, food and yucky music not to our taste.  Win some, lose some.

Sunday Lary went down to College of the Desert street fair and bought a dark pair of sunglasses, bifocals for reading.  Then he carved on his blue jay, he is trying valiantly to get it finished, but it's a big project, he just bought a wonderful new carving 'how to do it' book, with both very detailed carving and painting instructions, so that is very helpful to him. 

He found it online at Abe Books, and it took 4 days to arrive, and was 1/2 the cover price.  It's a large hardback book, very helpful indeed.  It arrived by US Postal Service, wow, we are pretty impressed by the speed of the service, and they even deliver here on Saturdays.

Not sure what else we did but that leads us to Monday and the late afternoon when we first saw the house we then went back to, and bought, leading to more activity for the last 2 weeks of our stay here.  Lots of sorting out and packing up to be done now, though we only have to go 1 block or so with our possessions to move them, and we have the offer of a neighbour's golf cart in addition to ours, so that might be very handy indeed.

Today we got all sorts of congratulations on our new purchase, news travels like brushfire around here, we only paid the deposit on the house this morning when we went over to talk with the vendors.  They are very nice indeed.  They are from Washington State.

More soon, we are expecting to be in a flurry of activity from now on til our departure.  Thanks for reading.