Riding and Reading

I'm back at the resort (still under construction) in Rancho Santa Fe.  Last time I came out on a private jet, this time I had to settle for FC on Continental Airlines.
Life is tough when you're retired.

When I arrived Steph picked me up and we went to the stables where Al had taken the kids for their weekly lessons ......
Videos are downloading to YouTube and when they are completed I will post them.  In the meantime Evelyn would like to say something to you.....Here is Evie:

i  want to watch Cinderella......(she typed it)
Me now......Oh, OK , Cinderella it is then.


More later....You Tube is taking ages to upload...

Air Filter Change. Easy, right?

Two weeks ago I went to get the oil changed in my Honda.  We are religious about oil changes; a good friend who owned VDS Racing in Midland told us how important it is.
I took it to a shop I have trusted for 4 years in Houston.  Mechanics are tuff to trust and it's nice to feel you have a good trustworthy shop.

About an hour after I dropped it off, I got a call from them saying I needed this and that along with the oil change.  Trusting them I was OK with it until the guy said, " and your tires are showing some wear and need to be rotated"

I blew!  I have brand new tires not two weeks old........they obviously don't need rotating yet.

I told him to forget the air filter, forget the passenger cabin filter and forget the tires and just put new oil and oil filter in.

I told the manager how disappointed I was and he apologized but had no rationale as to why that happened.

So after I dropped off the cruisers today I stopped at O'Reilly's Car Parts and bought an air filter.
Well, what used to be a simple wing nut project is far different today.  There were four screws that I needed to back out holding the air filter cover in place.  That done I tried to remove the cover.......
No way.  Despite mucho force´ bruta I couldn't move it enough to slide out the old filter.  I had to release
two spring clips and a large screw clip before I could pull up the cover off.
Anyway it took a while and I saved 10 whole dollars.

On another subject I took the cruisers to Galveston and while I wanted a still picture, my camera was in movie mode so this is what you get.





As I said, I thought I was doing stills but this 'prolonged' snapshot is good too.

A Two Day Concert

I had taken a few vids of Col and Anna outside on the patio.  Later I thought I'd inadvertently erased them in error.  I lost 'em somehow and was ticked off about my ineptness and Colin said, " Never mind G'Dad we can do them again tomorrow"

Well we did take them again the next day and when I eventually got round to downloading them this morning I 'found' the 'lost' ones!  So here are both versions of the songs.

Lego Madness....and swimming

Anna and Colin Oliver are visiting us.  We enjoy our time with them and they are so appreciative of our meals.

They were brave enough to go swimming in March!






And Col got a Lego today

90 Years but who's Counting?

We went to a Waco Italian restaurant for lunch.  The food was terrific.
Dulce enjoyed her hours in the spotlight.
Jill, Tom, Beverly, Eric, Cinda and Joe were there.  Dulce said she would remember who was present when sending gifts next Christmas.
Here's a video of us all having fun.

The highlight perhaps was when Dulce Maria opened her cards after the meal and learned she was going on a cruise.
 

Leslie Stahl from 60 Minutes made an appearance ....

And Rita Hayworth guarded the door with her sexy pose....

And a video of the candle blowout and Happy Birthday song  

Me Spacey? Nah...

This is the Earth as it looked from Voyager 1 twenty years ago.  Carl Sagan said:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselvese    Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

Billy Elliot and Airplane Browsing

Tom and Jill came to town and we all went to see the Houston opening of Billy Elliot. We had a good dinner and breezed downtown easily for the 'less than spectacular' show.

On a different note, here's what I was looking at on the flight returning from RSF last week.