Thursday

What a nice day.  Nice to see the sun doing it's job here, after all it is the Valley of the Sun.
  Started off with coffee and a nice fritter at the morning meeting.  I guess they call it a coffee klatch, and there were some new folks there today as well as some of the regular people returning for their winter stay.  They do cards for anyone that has been ill or lost someone close and there were 4 cards circulated this morning.  One unusual thing this AM was we have a chef in the park who is offering to hold a learn to cook session for guys only.  Little does he know that there are lots of women here who don't cook.  Anyway some of the guys are excited about it, but most of the guys I hang out with seem to be taking the - I'm married, so how would I benefit from that, approach.  I'm undecided, stayed tuned.
  After I went for a bike ride with Pat & Gary and made about 5 or 6 miles.  On the way out we stopped at the donkey where Pat fed it a few carrots.  Kind of funny as it seems to know when someone is coming to feed it and starts braying and I mean very loudly.  The other day when we just road by, it never made a peep, but today it came running right up to the fence making a racket.
  When I got back it was close to lunch, so just read for a bit and then had a sandwich.  By then it was time to head down to the pool room to assemble the troops for the big tournament road trip.  There were only a half dozen of us, so I drove to Mountainview where I was paired with one of the new guys in the park.  We played a guy and lady, who were quite good, but we beat them 2 games to 1 and had some fun in the process.  My partner has a bit of a way to go on strategy in this version of 8 ball, but he played fine.  The team we played were similar so the games were close and challenging.
  Marg did a laundry load and a bunch of work around the house.  There is always something to do here.  I did a few repairs, mainly the breezeway door that we were having trouble with the closing and staying latched.  Then it was off to happy hour where there was a larger group tonight.  Marg had arranged to have happy at our place Saturday and that we would be supplying hotdogs, buns and beans.  We always get a larger group at our place and have a bit of fun with it.  Sometimes at the other places it's not quite as lively.
  Supper was a nice chicken pot pie Marg made from scratch earlier this morning.  It was very good and had the advantage that she was able to put it in the oven before leaving for happy and it was ready when we came back.  In the past we had bought chicken pot pie at Costco and it was no where near as good as the one we had tonight.  You may recall the peach cobbler, well it was the finishing touch to another fine meal.

  Thursday so the day ended with animal races.  One of us won all 8 races, you can guess who she is.  It will be a bit of time before I hear the end of this as I only won 4 races.  The worst was I always bet the elephant and after it won twice I never.  Wouldn't you know it, but the thing won a third time and I had to endure a lot of joking about my lack of faith.  A fun night in the park.