Dinner with Friends, a movie and a lot of Shopping

Last night we were invited over to Richard and Terri's site for a lovely Barbeque dinner. We've been trying to connect with these two for ages but Terri has been struggling with what she believes to be allergies. Severe congestion has kept her out of sorts for the last month or so.

Finally feeling better they tracked us down and invited us to dinner. Even Robbie was invited which is always nice. Their baby Della is a beautiful German Shepherd and she is 8 years old, just like Robbie. They are not sure if they like each other yet but hopefully next season we will be able to socialize them a bit more and that will change.

Della is sooo cute, she refuses to leave the golf cart and sits out there all day/evening likely waiting for her next ride....

Really enjoyed the steak and sweet potatoe supper and the conversation with them. Before we knew it we realized it was 3 minutes until the resort movie night started. Tempting as it was to forego the movie, we did have other friends who were expecting us there so we dragged ourselves away. Thank you both for the wonderful dinner.

This week's movie was The Shape of Water. Not quite sure what to expect from this movie having heard it was about a woman who falls in love with a fish.... not quite. It won best picture this year apparently and everyone was praising it... We quite enjoyed it. Didn't think we would, but... for what it was, it was pretty damn good. Not our usual kind of movie but we had considered going to see it in Temecula just last week but I didn't want to pay to see it, so when we heard it was playing here for free.... why the hell not?!

Today we decided to drive out to Palm Desert. On the way there we heard an alarm going off. Realizing that is wasn't stopping and had to be us we were very careful but decided to continue on to our destination, especially since we had no cell service to 'google' the problem.

Once we reached Palm Desert and cell service, I found a couple of forums where I discovered that others had experienced this odd alarm. Turns out it seems tied to the turn signal which we had noted when we were driving. When we turned the signal on to pull over the alarm stopped. So we drove along and every 80 seconds or so when the alarm went off we had to hit the turn signal on and off again which shut it up. After replacing the bulb at Wally World, it never happened again. Weird.

We wandered through waaaaaayyyyy too many shops (Brad and Robbie included) looking for some 'California summer' gifts to take home with us for the Grandkids. I am not a 'shopper', I'm a get in, get what you need and get out kind of shopper so gifts are very difficult for me. Never did find anything... well, actually Brad picked up a pair of white lounging pants... that won't last 5 minutes I guarantee. Between the coffee spills and not changing to do work around the house..... 5 minutes is probably a stretch. We shall see.

Deciding to stop for dinner out tonight, we went to Temecula for Vietnamese, one of our favourites. The drive to Temecula from Palm Springs/Desert area is reaaaaallllllyyyy far. About 1.5 hours (in a car).... a try to stay awake kind of drive. But the winds in Palm Springs beside the bazillion wind towers is crazy windy. Quite the wind tunnel you have to drive through - perfect spot for a wind farm for sure. The passenger window was actually bulging outwards and I was having to hang on to it for fear it would break in the winds... It is only held on to the window frame with velcro so I was quite afraid it would not hold, but it did - easily. 

Our little 4 cylinder was having trouble holding 50mph but we didn't feel so bad since the rest of the traffic wasn't doing much better with the head wind as strong as it was.

Anyway, we finally made it home after a long day of shopping adventures. Next week we're going to go to Oceanside, we saw a lot of stores there that had nice gifts for the Grandkids.

9 days to go before heading north.