SUNday, Jan 29th

What a difference a day makes.  The day started out sunny and just got warmer.  By noon we were out, so could not change, but it was definitely shorts weather.  This will definitely be a welcome change and I am back to celebrating life in the Valley of the Sun.  I think we were in the mid-70's today.
  I went to the church service this morning and we had a good sized group there.  We also had some special music and it made for a nice service.  Pastor Don weaves some interesting analogies into his sermon, today was one of those.  It built on last week a bit and the analogy was very down to earth.  His perspective is generally thought provoking.  If your day it going just a little bit better, you can thank me, it may be that I put in a good word for you.  LOL
  When I returned, my charming wife had made a monkey bread or pull-apart bun pan.  These are sure good and I am glad she has picked it up as her new "thing" for mornings.  Kind of funny, she was expecting one of her pals to come for some, but she didn't and she took a small plate of them over to our neighbour to the east [Janice].  She seems to be taking her under her wing this winter and it seems to be going over pretty well with Janice.
  Being such a nice day, we decided to spend the day out.  Our first stop was out to the Mesa marketplace.  I had some books to sell and picked up a half dozen new ones.  Well new to me at least.  When we left, we decided to go to the Santan shopping center.  It must have been fate, but I took a different route down Baseline to catch the Santan freeway [202 southwest].  Along that route Marg spotted an estate sale sign on the roadside.  She had good luck at a couple of these already this winter, so we went to check it out.  It turned out to be one run by an outfit that handles liquidation of estates and this one was the estate of Bill Irwin.  He was an actor and composer with a host of impressive credentials and success stories to his credit.  The house was large and full of paintings and pictures of all sizes and around 3 main themes: clowns, European scenes and American landscapes.  The walls were 12ft high and were covered floor to ceiling with pictures in every room and hallway.  There were huge numbers of stuffed and porcelain clowns, to say there were 500 would not be an exaggeration.  There were also a number of music items including a couple of organs and a piano.  The big organ was offered for sale at $54,900, as I imagine a music producer would have need of such a fine piece.  Marg ended up buying a small print with a bathroom theme.  The sale is being run over a series of dates and apparently this is at the mid-point and they have sold more than half of the stuff.
  Then it was on to Santan where a stop at the Total Wine store produced a nice Macallan scotch, some adult rootbeer and a mixed drink concoction.  We also looked around a in a store or two, but nothing came of it.  Then over to Ruby Tuesday for lunch.  Marg really likes the salad bar at these, so a nice lunch and we were at the tail end of the lunch hour, so got right in.
  After I had to use the GPS as we wanted to go to Trader Joe's, one of her favourite grocery stores.  They are kind of a specialty store in that they have a lot of unique stuff.  I think it's kind of trendy and is always busy, you know one of those places that doesn't do plastic bags, rather they are all brown paper bags with handles.  Anyway two bags full came home with us.  The freeway traffic was light and we made good time coming home.  Kind of funny as we passed 3 Rat Rods on the freeway.  The were booting along at about 65 or 70 and looked like they shouldn't even be running.
  When I got back I had to get the pictures from the Cord Price dance last night posted to the tenants association FB site, I think I had about 70, so it took a while.  Supper was a light meal and we ate in tonight.  Shortly after we went to the ice cream, Marg had a sundae and cake, me I went back to the banana split.  Most of the conversation was about the estate sale and what we had seen, well among the ladies anyway.