Back to Blogging Monday Meandering 8 - 12 - 2019

What can I say, I fell off the blog-wagon for a month!  Yikes. The first week or so of being off was due to kidney stone. UGH.  Never want that to happen again.  The pain was intense but luckily I was able to have it removed pretty quickly.  But, there was a lot of concern about our vacation that was scheduled to start one week after the procedure.  

Luckily, I was feeling ok and was able to enjoy our trip to California.  The impetus was to attend the wedding reception for the daughter of a friend of ours.  She lives in New Zealand  so we weren't able to attend the wedding but definitely wanted to come to the reception.  

Our trip was wonderful.  First up Southern California.  We lived in various locations in SoCal for many years before we decided to move east.  (Sometimes I wonder what we were thinking!) So the So Cal time was spent revisiting old haunts and some new places. 

Our hotel was in El Segundo right next to the Mattel headquarters.  The shared  parking deck was festooned with banners commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Barbie doll. 

The reception was held in an automobile
museum with an In and Out Burger food truck.  What fun!  We've missed those burgers and really enjoyed having some on vacation.  Here are two of the cars: the Model A (left) and Model T, commercial version.  The Model A sold for $455 in 1931. My great grandmother had one in 50's. I'm not sure whether it was an A or a T.   I doubt if I ever saw it but it has stayed in my memory for years. 

We spent a couple of days driving the beach areas and going back to the area where we lived when we first were married.  Everything seems so much more crowded.  

It was a beautiful day in Redondo Beach although the picture shows some lingering early morning fog in the distance. 

I visited the high school I graduated from after attending one year. Yep, we moved my senior year from Virginia to Palos Verdes, Ca.  It was pretty "shocking" to me coming from a one building hs to this new one.  The buildings were separated and had no indoor hallways.  There was no indoor cafeteria -- something I had never seen before.  And, all I remember about the set up is it rained constantly that spring and we got soaked between classes.  Can you say 40 days of rain?  Not my idea of fun.  

We also drove by our old apartment.  Still looked nice. We had a hard time finding the public library that my dad was instrumental in expanding.  There has been an explosion of building in the main part of town and we couldn't figure out how to get to the road the library was on.  

We also visited our college -- Univ. of Southern Calif.  It too has expanded and looks different than when we went there.  The LA Coliseum is being renovated and should be done for the fall football season.  Exposition Park, next to USC and the Coliseum, has changed a lot too.  It all was so different.  Continuing our trip down memory lane we drove past my grandparent's house that was close to USC.  They'd moved in sometime in the 30's (I think.) Yikes. The neighborhood looked great -- definitely California bungalows.    But their house was so overgrown you could only see plants.  The picture I sent to my brother and cousins certainly surprised all of us. 

We left Southern California to visit the Monterey Aquarium.  Here are some pictures from the night before the aquarium visit. 

Long before you could see the seals you could hear them barking.  This fellow was enjoying being king of the rock, so to speak.  We had dinner at a restaurant on the commercial wharf and then took a walk down to the end. 

At the end we could see the seals basking on a jetty.  It was too far away to get decent pictures.  We also could hear seals barking from under the wharf but couldn't really see them. (I didn't want to go swimming with them accidentally!) 

One seal decided to sit where we could get some great closeups.  He was there for at least a half an hour and was willing to pose.  There were seals swimming around but those pictures didn't turn out very well either.  It was early evening and the sky was overcast.  Probably the only less than perfect weather day of the whole trip. (If you click on any picture it should enlarge.)

I'll share more pictures over the coming days/weeks.  As you might have guessed not much has been happening on the quilting front.  Yesterday I started loading a charity quilt.  I hope to get several of them done before I go on my next retreat where I'll see some gals who can take the quilts back to the FCQ guild for me.  

Because I have another medical thing happening next week I've decided to forgo doing a weekly goal list for a while.  My motivation is low except for the quilting above and getting some kits cut for the October retreat.   

I'm linking up with my favorite Monday posts: Monday Making*, Main Crush Monday, and Moving It Forward. * This one is delayed so I'll check back tomorrow to see if it is posted.  I haven't done much blog browsing recently so hope to do so soon. 

Happy Quilting All! Bonnie