St. Louis Visitors

Brad and I enjoyed having Anne and Dave Warfield visit us from St. Louis for two days last week. On their first morning we had breakfast at one of our favorite places, the Starling Diner.

Anne and I walked to the top of Signal Hill. The sky wasn't as clear as it would get later in the week, but the view from up there is still spectacular.

The warmer weather allowed Anne, Dave, and I to take a harbor tour and, as you can see, the view of downtown Long Beach from the water is quite nice.

This is what I'm talking about.

Afterwards we drove over to San Pedro so they could see more of the port, and I did my best impression of the tour guide also known as Brad Harrison. My Brad Harrison imitation must be pretty good because I even found a ship viewing site that the real Brad Harrison has never found. We got to see a few ships drive into the port of Los Angeles, which is a sight to see.

Anne worked hard to get a selfie of her and Allie. This was her favorite one.

But this one is my favorite!

Last Week: From the Air

I'm finally getting around to blogging about my trip to St. Louis last week, and rather than do a gigantic post I'm going to break it into pieces. The first: my pictures from takeoff. I love taking off from LAX in clear weather because most of the time we take off over the ocean and take a left down the coast, which means we fly over our house. Let me walk you through what I mean. Above is the picture shortly after we turned left after takeoff. That fat peninsula is Palos Verdes.

Now we're heading down the coast and what you see are the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Together they are the ninth largest container port complex in the world. About a third of what comes into the country (and about three-fourths of what comes in through the west coast) comes in through these two ports. (Not counting what Santa brings in!)

Now the Port of Los Angeles is behind us and what's in this picture is just the Port of Long Beach.  The long waterfront to the right of the port is the Long Beach coastline.

And this is where we live! See the pier on the middle of the coastline in the picture? That's the Belmont Pier. See the island in the water? That's just off the coast from our house. So if you draw a line from the island to the coast, and go inland one block, that's where we live!

The Rest of Last Week

Brad and I went on a port tour on Friday evening, compliments of our neighborhood association. As always, it was beautiful and interesting.

The harbor, the port, and the city look different from this vantage point. For example, this is the Greenpeace ship that we toured the weekend before last, as seen from the water.

The Queen Mary is undergoing a big multiyear renovation. They're repainting the smoke stacks and it looks like two of them are done and one is being worked on.

In the middle of the port, this is some of the machinery that lifts the containers up and off the ships. (Don't ask me to get any more technical than that.)

Long Beach at sunset.

Meanwhile in Morocco, I think you can tell from this Snapchat that Peter is enjoying living on a golf course. He and Jessa had to report back to work last week for four days, and now they're off all this week for national holidays. On Monday the kids start returning to school.

And as you can also see, Peaches continues to make herself right at home in Morocco and ..... she seems happy to have Peter and Jessa home again.

Asleep at the Wheel?

So you're probably wondering, what's the matter with Sue? Has she retired from blogging? It's been, what, a whole WEEK since Flashback Friday and she's blogged nothing since?! (Good grief, what is up with her?) Well folks, settle down. I know you're not really thinking that. It's just me being overly dramatic for the sake of having something to say. But seriously, I do have things from this week but they're only coming together just now. So here we go, it's a long one. The above photo is from last week. I had lunch with a friend in Huntington Beach and what a pretty view we had from our lunch seats. It's hard to beat this view!

Flash forward two days later and Brad and I were in Los Angeles for the Environmental Media Association Gala. We got to get dressed up and spend the evening in the backyard of a beautiful home.

My pictures of the backyard aren't great but it was so very pretty. There were different floral arrangement on each table, with blue and white table settings. It was just gorgeous. This was our table.

Jane Fonda got an award, and Lily Tomlin introduced her. So it was a treat to see these two in person. My pictures aren't great, but my memories are.

They sat this close to us. (They're at the far table in photo.)

The next treat of the evening was the entertainment: Snoop Dogg. I don't know what was better: getting to dance to his performance, or getting to send photos of it to our kids. (I give it a tie.)

Everybody got up and danced and got out their phones. It was so much fun, and we were right up front. This was with a zoom, but barely.

As you can see, we were close, and I was having fun.

The next day, Brad and I drove down to Seal Beach for brunch. Afterwards we walked out to the pier. It was a gorgeous day.

We watched the surfers from the pier.

Then we went to a Farmer's Market in Long Beach.

We had never visited this one before, and I don't know why. It was great and we'll be back for sure.

There was so much good stuff!

On Monday I drove down to visit my mom (and Simba).

I stayed the night and we had a short but nice visit.

My mom has a purse that matches her neighbor's red truck!

Oh, and did I mention that Simba was there too?!

The night I got home we took a twilight walk. It was beautiful. The End.

Another Harbor Tour, and Thensome

Last week I spent a couple of days in Temecula. Steve was there too, to pick up my dad's truck. We went out to lunch at one of Mom's favorite places, BJ's.

I came home bright and early Saturday morning for our second harbor tour in as many weekends. This one was sponsored by our neighborhood association and I'm so glad I didn't miss it! Not only was it a picture perfect day, but the tour was led by employees of the Port of Long Beach, so it was nonstop interesting information the whole way.

Lucky for you I can't remember ALL the facts and figures we learned, but this one sticks with me: Long Beach and Los Angeles each have separate ports, which are right next to each other; the two of them combined account for half of all goods shipped into the country.

I was surprised to hear about the green initiatives being made by the Port of Long Beach. For starters, the ships are getting larger so as to require fewer trips (the current largest can carry nine thousand 40-foot containers). Also, the Port has built a railroad that allows the containers to go straight from the ship onto a train (reducing individual trucking trips to the railways, and the emissions that goes along with those trips) AND the Port has also installed a power supply that the ships can connect to so they don't have to idle while they're being unloaded.

Speaking of unloading, we got to watch this ship being unloaded. The automation reminded me of something you might see at Disneyland—with these 40-foot containers being made to look like toys.

We really nerded out on all the interesting things we learned, but we also enjoyed a super comfortable ride and perfect weather on the water. This cruise isn't one you can buy a ticket for, but I got the scoop on how to try to get back on board this boat on the few times each month it goes tours like this one, so visitors cross your fingers that your dates coincide with these tours (only in summer months) because you don't want to miss this!

I'll end this post with a picture of a great big cat and a teeny tiny dog. Today we had a video call with Peter and Jessa, and Allie (inset, on Brad's lap) got to meet Peaches. I think neither had any idea what was going on, but the humans all had a good laugh.

Ikea to the Rescue

When our kids were growing up, there were three sure ways to torture them. The first was to take them to a real estate Open House. The second was to take them to our favorite nursery/home store in Racine, called Milaeger's. And the third way was to take them to Ikea. (Of course now that they're grown, they take themselves to Ikea and it isn't torture at all.) But when we lived in Poland and discovered Ikea, they felt so abused every time we went that I'm sure they would have called Child Services on us if they could have. Anyway, after many years of not having shopped at Ikea, we made a return trip last weekend to rescue our living room from dark and overbearing curtains. We didn't want to spend a lot on curtains for a rental, but the room is so pretty we wanted something to do it justice. I found the perfect solution online at Ikea and we visited our local store to buy them in person. Above you can see the before (on the right, though it's a bad photo and they looked much worse in person) and after (on the left).

The curtains were all too long so it was a group effort to sew them to size. Brad was in charge of measuring and cutting. 

My job was ironing . . . . .

. . . . . and sewing.

By the end of the day we'd finished them all.

And we're quite pleased with how they turned out.

They make the room light and airy. We could have spent much more and not have been half as pleased. Ikea, you really came through for us.

But wait a minute, I can't do a blog post just about curtains! So I'll add a picture of Mary and Andy from a wedding they were at over the weekend. Much as I like our new curtains, these two are much cuter, in my completely biased opinion.