Really, I am here......

I meant to blog after dd's birthday and my time got away from me. Kim got her ears pierced a week after her birthday. We did end up at Claire's Accessories and they were great about the piercings. It was quick and almost pain free. Kim said it hurt for just a bit, then went away. They were clean and courteous about the whole experience. They gave us explicit instructions to follow and Kim has been religious about following them. She has found that some places we went into over the past couple of weeks have really freaked her out. Places that she has felt like weren't clean enough for her to enter their doors and she would get infected ears just by being there. It is good for a quiet chuckle to ourselves, but I think I understand where she is coming from.



We went on a quick trip to the high desert of southern California and I have a ton of pictures to share. Between Kim and myself, we took over 200 pictures, and I went through and labeled all of them today. There were some pictures that I didn't get that I later wished I had taken. Oh well. I'll tell you what they were later.




We see these trees in the Spring when we drive to California, they are absolutely beautiful and I asked Robert to stop. I would love to know what they are. The bees love them, they were all over them when we stopped, but they don't seem to smell a lot. They look a little bit like lilac flowers when you get close to them, but not quite. They are just this beautiful shade of purpley-pink. We have seem them before on our drive down, usually just in the mountains above Lake Shasta. This time we actually saw them around Sacramento as well. In some spots they kind of looked invasive.














We left last Wednesday and drove to Corning, CA, getting there around 6:00 pm. We like to stop in Corning because they have olives there. I didn't get any pictures of the olive trees, but this is the place we really like to stop at and stock up on olives. Her prices are more reasonable than the touristy place up the road. They process their olives without using lye. Most of the olives in the industry go through a lye bath. These are processed in a brine instead. We really like the flavor a lot better, and they Tehama style keeps things like almonds and garlic crisp once they have been canned. We actually stopped there twice, once on the way down to get two jars, one for us to eat and one to leave at our destination, then on our way back to really stock up. There are signs as you come to Corning about it being the Olive City.

When we left Corning the next morning, we ended up behind this!!! It literally went 35 mph for about 10 miles before taking an overpass to let traffic by. I can only imagine how far back the traffic was, in the rear-view windows it looked like it went for miles. As we passed it, there were signs on it about live animals. It wobbled back and forth as they went down the road.

Driving across California is a unique experience. We crossed mountains, farmland with stinky feedlots, fields of crops and orchards, and more mountains like these. I love these wind farms. I think they are so cool to look at and marvel at how much energy they produce. I don't know how much it is, but it just seems like it would be a lot.

To end this post, these were taken by Kim about 3 hours before we reached our destination. She said the colors really looked like this, especially the egg-yolk yellow. I wasn't looking.

More later, I have laundry to do, and we really need groceries, especially 1/2&1/2 for our coffee. :)