Retire In Style Blog Too

Oregon Summer just a short walk away! Our home has stood empty for six month...mostly. A grandson, wife and small baby did stayed for three weeks in January. It was nice to share with them. Since that nothing has happened to make our home feel loved. No plants on the kitchen window sill, no flowers on the dinning table. Dust collected and that about all that could be measured. We have been back since last Wednesday. We have been busy as you can imagine. Snowbird lifestyle does involve two things...the leaving and the returning. The return is nothing I have ever mentioned. Coming home, and it will always be home no matter where we nest in the winter, is wonderfully exciting. It is like seeing our life with new eyes. So I thought you might like to know the steps to breathing life back into an empty abandoned house after six month of dark and cold. Open all the curtains, blinds and windows. Reconnect TV, internet and turn the water back on. (We leave electricity/gas on for refrigerator an...

My husband and I flew home for our 6 months in Oregon this last week. We fly Southwest because they allow us 2 pieces of checked luggage each...free. We have figured out how to get everything we want for the next 6 months into those suitcases. In fact, I think we might be able to travel with less if we needed to do it. Our life is good. But, as Gilda Radner would have said, "It's always something!" and it was. I am sure you know that a Southwest flight had an engine explode recently. As a result, every plane in the business is taking care of their engines, canceling flights and keeping us safe...and safe we were.  View from our Oregon home front door. Our flight was canceled in Tucson Wednesday morning, we were put on a different flight and routed through Los Angeles, Oakland and then on to Portland. It was not bad at all. Really! I just did not care. But in all of this shuffling, I became aware that not one time did the airline tell us when we would arrive at our destina...

May in Oregon Summer Vacation begins with Mother's Day  Great Granddaughter Embrey at less than one year. Mother's Day 4th of July parade with family. ...the people all over the United States that live in a place that attracts winter visitors can reclaim their world. For us all, snow birds and warm climate livers, life is good. Whitewater rafting in July. The golf courses are empty and snowbird hangouts can go back to their real life. One man asked my husband when we are leaving. Next Wednesday is our departure date. A party is scheduled for the following Sunday. They will celebrate when we go home and we will celebrate when we get there. Trip to Santa Fe in November Arizona Townhouse remodel Sept. to April  Great Granddaughter born in January in San Diego Arizona Garden in April...we return to Oregon next week to begin it all over again! I love our rhythm of life. Luck will have us repeating this cycle many more times...fingers crossed. bz=

Remember back when your children were small and you would change the subject quickly when they demanded something or you would point at the mountain instead of the ice cream shop? My parents tried it on me but I never did bite and did make them turn around and take me back to the Dairy Queen because I was REALLY hungry. The misdirect did not work. I guess not all that much has changed around here. I can see through a misdirect in a nanosecond. That is why I posted a small poster on Facebook the other day. It looked like this. Will I never learn that for every opinion there is someone out there that reads some evil intent into the thought? Probably not. But, in this case I totally see what the person that commented was thinking. She said, " I guess using gas to kill your citizens is okay." I was appalled to think of what I had implied.  No, it isn't ok to use gas to kill citizen, in particular small children. That is wrong on so many levels I cannot even comprehend it.  I ...

I first published this article back in 2011. The baby I talked about just turned 10. But, in the matter of sleep, not much has changed. I received a request for a backlink to some current information so I thought I would repost the article. Best quote ever: "Put sleep in the background of your life. Don't monitor it, don't evaluate it." My son and daughter-in-law spent the week retraining their 1 year old to sleep through the night. They have spent on year nurturing this little person because of health issues at birth. After a year, it became apparent that the baby had played his "no sleep card" one too many times. After a week of training he slept through the night... like a baby! This is the one thing that babies have in common with seniors...both age groups are delicate sleeper. Now I read that we can retrain ourselves to get a better nights sleep, even as we get older. Yesterday I talked about the Memory Foam Mattress and how the mattress we are sleepin...

I am struggling with finding the truth. I don't like any news media either liberal or conservative to try to shape my opinion. I want those people to read me the news without providing any opinions or coloring the story in some way. The news media is not putting out "fake news" but they are injecting a lot of hints as to where they stand. I don't care! I woke up this morning thinking back to the "good old days" when avoiding slander and libel were part of our ethical culture. People actually believed that something could be done if they were, for example, attacked in print unfairly. In fact, back before President Reagan administration vetoed a law that would have made "equal time" a law and not a public policy, the person that was attacked politically could demand equal time in the media. Wow! Remember when? The doctrine, instituted by the Federal Communications Commission as public policy in 1949, requires the nation's radio and television st...

It seems that I cannot post a reply to my comments on blogger. It is driving me nuts because, well, I have stuff to say and no one can see what I have to say. My life is not perfect in anyway. Yes that is my golf ball and, yes that is the blue flag you see through the tree. My golf game is not perfect either. Darn! :) b+