Jill's boys

Meet Charlie and Bruce, Jill's two boys that share her abode. Charlie is a Siamese who is in the neighborhood of 13 years old, he was born in Burns, Oregon. Charlie is allowing Ansel to share his bed and nap with him.

Boy number two is Bruce who could be an angora sweater - his hair is sooooo long and thick. He is relatively young and joined Jill and Charlie when she was living in Ontario, OR in the last year.

Happy B-Day Cyndy @ Excalibur

For my birthday we went to the "Tournament of Kings" dinner show at Excalibur. It's set in King Arthur's Roundtable days.

It's pretty darn neat. They use horses, stunt men, pyrotechnics and gymnasts to to deliver a mini dramatization of Knight's of the Round Table. The seating sections represent Kingdoms, and each has a respective Knight/King on horseback whom each section cheers and shouts and bangs their tables in support of. We ended up sitting in the Dragon section which was reigned by the evil king, he rode a pretty fancy black Andalusian and his horsemanship was superb. Our dinner is soup served in a bowl, and a dinner of a whole Cornish hen, broccoli, and taters with no eating utensils except the ones we were born with, our fingers. The only luxury is a large wet nap to wash our hands with after eating with our fingers.

There's plenty of action, eventually a jousting competition, dancing maids, and an incredible gymnast. An appearance or two by Merlin the Wizard, and from start to finish we are kept in stitches by a height challenged Court Jester. There are some pretty scary scenes when the "Evil One" sneers and jeers and makes that evil laugh makes your hair stand on end and some pretty scary fireworks go off.

At the beginning when they are doing their announcements and instructions for engaging the crowd. They put the spot light on a young man military man who had just returned from IRAQ and introduced him and welcomed him home safely. Jill and I started the standing ovation for him which was very moving. (Thank you Lord for our men and women who have and who are still serving and fighting for our freedom)

Then they went around and mentioned Happy Birthdays and Happy Anniversaries of those who were celebrating in their respective Countries (sections) and gee, they even knew it was my birthday... ???? imagine that???

Hoover Dam on the Colorado River

Sunday afternoon we took a drive down to check out Hoover Dam. This picture is of Lake Mead at 65mph out the car window.

Monument to the "Scalers" who built the dam

The lake and the Colorado River divides Arizona and Nevada, we joked as we drove across that Jill and Ansel were in AZ, and I was in NV. AZ is in their own timezone. Part of the year they are in mountain time zone, and the other they are Pacific.

Jill and Ansel

She's so cute.

There really weren't many places you could pull over to look at things. The parking lot near the dam was $7.00 just to find out we didn't want to pay $30.00 ea for a tour of the dam, or $10.00 ea to see the Visitors Centor . Would have thought there would have been a free Visitors Center to tell you the history of it. I wonder how many more miss out on the history, because the prices. I can see the price they charge for the tour, but for our parking fee, they should give us a little history for that.

Sunday morning

Sunday morning thanks to our nifty little GPS Navigator or perhaps a little divine intervention... we went to a really neat spirit filled church right close to Jill's house. It was very down to earth and everyone was super friendly and warm. Jill thinks it just might be her new church home. Calvary Chapel Green Valley, turns out their Pastor is from Boston, MA. He had a couple of anecdotes from there that really made a connection.

And after filling our souls, then we needed to fill our bellies. Jill took us to her new fav breakfast place where they treat you like family, "The Griddle" on S. Eastern Ave. in Henderson.

Proprietor Femamzadeh and her brother Baja" make you feel special with their care and the decor, flavored with Italian accents is very warm and comfortable.

Jill and our server "Baja", Mr. Personality himself ;0) In addition to feeling like family, and the great service and attention, the food was excellent !!

Vegas Baby

New road trip for Ansel and I... We flew into Vegas to spend a few days helping friend Jill Villeggiante unpack and set up her new digs in Henderson, NV. Jill is a flight attendant for Southwest and is based out of in LAS. It's taken her a long time to come to terms with moving her home from Oregon down to Vegas. She has a really really awesome place. It's almost like a resort.

Jill was living in Ontario, Oregon with her two cats Charlie and Bruce. Instead of flying them to their new digs, she drove my car down and Ansel and I flew down from PDX (again with passes from Jill) and then will drive the car back after taking a circuitous route via San Diego.


Here's the view from her place.

Upon arriving, I had a catastrophe when I turned my puter on... it was dead/crashed/nobody home!! I thought I was going to die, started to have DT's and major anxiety attacks. After an evening of giving it CPR, we were finally able to breath life back into it. WHEW........

Then I spent several hours backing everything up again. My pics I suppose are my biggest concern. I had spent a lot of time this summer doing back ups, but hadn't since then. I felt I needed to spend the time on the back ups, since I didn't know if my puter fix would be lasting.