Saltcedar, Tamarix ramosissima
                                                                          

I had to look real hard this time in this rather ugly desert that's surrounding us but I found it .....SPRING has sprung....again!



          Velvet Mesquite (Prosopis velutina)

 ?

 

Quite a lot of the 'snowbirds' are starting to leave us, slowly moving back to their summer places, mostly somewhere in Canada.          
                  

So instead of a full-on potluck we decided to go for a cocktail hour with appetizers this month since there's only such a small crowd  of us.

 

      

'Only some appetizers', ....yeah.... right.... there was still plenty of course!

Puh, I don't know what you're talking about....

We had some famous visitors from blog-land staying a couple of days at the campground this week. I don't know if you ever read the blog but this is the Scholl Bus of the Scholl family.
I never met anybody before that I've read the blog of, it was so cool to say hello and tell them that I'd been following theirs! Sometimes I feel a little lonely out there! (It doesn't help that mine is private, I know)
But maybe I've seen or met more people who blog but just don't follow, or recognize, them?
Their bus is hard to miss of course.

One of our guests had a little bit of a too good of a time at the Spirit Mountain casino and drove into the wall at the campgrounds entrance!
It was quite a crash but fortunately he was unhurt himself. His car fared a little less good and the wall got the worst of it as you can see.
It was quite the 'talk of the town' for a while. Nothing ever happens here.....

 

 

 

Having Iced coffee at Sharron and Merv's site

 

Wow, did it get hot this week! Temperatures of 92F(31C) to 95F(33C) !

…de mussen vallen van het dak! This Dutch saying literally translates to it’s so hot, the sparrows are falling off the roof.

I had to look this up (of course) and found out that this saying has actually nothing to do with sparrows falling off a roof but dates back to times when lots of the farm roofs, for insulation purposes, where covered with moss (mos). During very hot and dry weather the moss would crack and parts of it would fall down.
When the moss wasn't used anymore, the saying became misunderstood and the 'mossen' changed into 'mussen' meaning 'sparrows', somehow making more sense to fall of the roof when it would be hot enough. Not that it would ever be that hot in Holland!

Merlin found a cool(er) spot in the basement

 

It got warm enough to turn on the air conditioning (my limit inside is 86F), mainly for the dog (right), who has a thing lately that she only seems to want to be inside the RV for some odd reason?
I sure like to be able to cool down the bedroom for the night too tough and I'm also happy our electricity is free!!

My tomatoes are much happier these days and are coloring quickly now. They taste so much better than the ones from the store!

 

 

Since James has been promoted to greens superintendent he now has his own office :

                                                                 And a big workshop....

                                                              

So know we have free golfing at the Los Lagos golf course which is a step up from the Lake Dessert one. The grass, aka, the greens, are definitely much greener over here and the warmer weather has brought out the flowers (African daisies)!

We're golfing in the late afternoon again, around 5pm, when it starts to cool down a bit and are just making it through 9 holes before it gets to dark to see where you're going.
It reminds us of Lake Arrowhead where we used to do the same thing almost every day when we were members of the Country Club up there.
You usually have the course to yourselves and the evenings are so beautiful and quiet.
  
I've started a new knitting project for which I'm using the very first yarn I ever spun. I just liked to have it hanging around as a colourful 'hank' and proudly looked at it as my first spinning achievement but I finally decided to make something useful of it.





So guess what I'm knitting in this heat? Gloves! Off course, why not?
And yes, that's pretty crazy, I guess, but at least they're fingerless ones :)!

The warm weather has brought the farmer out on the fields again. Who knows what he's doing, just plowing away...

 


He has help from this little yellow airplane that makes long passes over the fields. I can't SEE that he's spraying but I'm pretty sure he is.

 

  

 

I don't think I want to know what it is.................

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The weather is finally and quite suddenly warming up, yesterday we had a high of 88!
As always when the heat hits so unexpectedly nobody is prepared for it and everybody is complaining but it sure beats the 50s (or less) we had for the longest time!
The cotton fields of last October have all been plowed and since last week they are being irrigated too. I wonder if they rotate their crops, I don't have a clue what they have sowed, in fact I haven't even seen them doing anything yet.
It's going to be a surprise!


We're probably not going to see much of it anyways, come to think of it, since we're leaving in another month and a half or so.
After a lot of searching and talking and teleconferencing we found a job at the West Yellowstone KOA in Montana. Yeah! We're so excited!
It's a full time paid maintenance job for James, just what we wanted, and I'll have the summer off! Well, I've offered to lend housekeeping a hand in case of emergencies but they didn't think that would happen very often since they have a large crew. (Fine with me!)
They want us there at around the 7th of May and we're going to take a week or 2 to slowly make our way up. That means we're probably leaving here around the 21st of April.
I'm so ready for it, my hitch-itch is crawling all over me!





Because of the beautiful evening we celebrated with a BBQ! Very nice double-cheese hamburgers, as in blue cheese inside and Swiss on top, yumm!






Oh and look, Merlin has a girlfriend! Isn't she cute? She thinks he's great but he is sort of half afraid of her! Hilarious. She tries to invite him to play, stalks him and makes these fake-attack moves and he just thinks she's out to get him!

 

 

It's a beautiful cat, she just showed up one day and we have no idea who she belongs to, certainly not to anybody here at the campground. She's skittish but looks well fed. She reminds me somewhat of Pumpkin, our little girl who passed away in 2009.

Pumpkin

 

Sadie is not doing so great lately. She is losing the strength in her rear right leg and went from stumbling a lot to barely being able to hold herself up on that side and falling down on her butt a lot.
I've started to walk her with a sling under her belly. It's not that I have to hold her up all the time but it's more to keep her in balance so she doesn't fall over.
Poor girl! She still wants to run, silly dog, it must be so frustrating!

And here's proof that the dutch celebrate 12.5 year anniversaries and that I was not (as some have said) just out to get a party going.
My sister celebrated her 12.5 years on the job last Friday, she got a nice present, dinner and they decorated her office desk!

 

Congratulations sister!