News from Greener Pastures

First of all, a big old THANKYOU to Daddy for loaning us his laptop.
Well, the bad news is, it's sorta rainy. The good news is, that makes everything all the greener. I thought as we descended from the clouds that we must have made a mistake and ended up in Ireland; ever since the first glimpse, our winter-weary eyes have been feasting on the luscious green! And then, a second later, I thought, no, this isn't Ireland - it's heaven! It was as if we had heard all our lives that there was this beautiful color- green- and yet, never really seen it before. All our lives, we had to just believe that there was such beauty..and suddenly, faith gave way to sight. The hills, the trees, the color - it all feeds a hole in my soul and a part of me that had been stifled can breathe again. That's what I think heaven will be like - a beauty that we have only dreamed of emerges out of dark clouds...
On to more ordinary things. The trip out went very well...for me. Poor Brad suffered from airsickness during the flight but fortunately didn't throw up. We had a couple layovers- one in Denver...Colorado is such a weird state. It's like a bunch of flat, cement-like looking squares all different shades of brown and then suddenly - BANG! The meringue peaks of the Rockies. I was dazzled by the Rockies. The other times I've flown over them, it was either at night or too high to see much detail but, since we took off from Denver, we were low enough to really see them. I CANNOT fathom how the pioneers made it over them. They seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see north and south, and just kept on rolling out under us to the west. I think I would have been one of the pioneers who gave up and died along the way.
As happened on our trip out here last year, the rental car place caused us some hassles...but it was tedious enough to experience, much less to retell and inflict on you. BUT the up-side was, WE GOT UPGRADED to a fantastic vehicle. The Buick Rendezvous. I LOVE saying rendezvous phonetically. So Much Fun. It's the SUV-ish type thing that Tiger Woods advertises. We are riding in style with the Tigermobile and we love it. Now we can transport Grandpa and several large goats, if we want.
You know you are in California when you're in a sub shop and everybody else in the place is speaking Spanish except for you. Huh.
We were pretty zonked from getting up around 3:20 a.m. and so we went to bed before 7:00 last night! Of course, our Eastern Standard Time bodies felt like it was 10:00...
So we haven't done a whole lot yet. I realized that I didn't really pack appropriately - no jacket- it is kind of chilly, unfort.-( I am wearing aprox four layers of clothing right now to keep warm - and I'm INSIDE) so we went out shopping today to get me a new fleece or something equivalent but failed to find anything that Brad and I could agree on. ( He loathed a jacket I picked out so we are back to square one.) We had lunch at QUIZNO'S and Brad is now converted. And we went to the library and got more books...and we drove around in this absolutely fantastic housing development, where it looked like another slice of heaven, or at least where they keep all the houses that appear in magazines like Better Homes and Gardens, Architectural Digest, and House Beautiful. It almost made me want to cry for joy - the houses and landscaping were unutterably gorgeous. We nearly got lost in the development and had to live there forever because it was so winding and confusing.
There's a middle school across the creek in back of the house and every once in a while, you'll suddenly hear this woman's voice over a PA, as clear as a bell, announcing something. It's a bit unnerving and yet, kind of funny.
Oh, yes- and we took Grandpa to get his hair cut this morning because he was looking a little wooly and he said he had tried cutting his own hair but botched it up rather badly; one side was sticking up, with a distinctly DIY-ish look. So now he looks like a freshly shorn lamb.
Further bulletins as events warrant!