The nice thing about "living" in the desert is that the weather is nice and warm during the daytime and cool at night. There was a time in my life when I would have found being cool at night to be an uncomfortable way to sleep but now thanks to menopause I welcome it. According to some of our neighbours, it even gets cold enough overnight that in the mornings there will be a skiff of ice on the pond. Brrrr! The good news is that at least it doesn't stay, the days warm up nicely and there's no snow to shovel.

Today, Jennifer and I went on the hunt for the post office and then for a pet store that carries the type of cat food that Sam eats. The post office, (though easy to get to once a person knows where it is), required several attempts of getting directions from an assortment of confused folks but eventually we found it after an hour of driving around in circles. Then we hunted for the elusive pet store! Understand, I have a GPS system that gives me video and audio, step-by-step directions but today the two places I programmed into it, had recently moved. Again, we seemed to go around in circles but this time we had a phone number to call instead of relying on passers-by to give us wrong directions. What should have been a quick trip to town became an all day event.

Rick stayed at the park to help with some landscaping and then he took a "pickle-ball" lesson up at the clubhouse. Pickle-ball is a cross between ping pong and tennis, played on a court about half the size of a tennis court with rackets resembling large ping pong paddles and a hard hollow plastic ball with holes in it. It is very popular and taken quite seriously in these parts, and can be a lot of fun. Rick, who achieved his official "pickle pin" today, tells me it may even be possible for me to learn ( I am notoriously uncoordinated). So who knows, perhaps we will both become pickle-ball experts by the time we leave here!