Friday, March 6th

Another beautiful day in the valley.
  We were up at a decent hour, but that is no surprise living in close quarters like we are.  One person gets moving around and everyone eventually gets woke up.  After a coffee I went out to pick up a door handle for the Arizona room.  It broke off last night and being quite old was not repairable.  I have replaced lots of passage sets, but this was by far the most difficult.  After a bit of trial and error it was installed and in proper working order.  I say that because it was installed a few times but would not work properly.  Kind of temperamental I guess.
  As soon as it was done we went to the Mesa Marketplace as the kids had heard a lot about it and were anxious to see it first hand.  For my part I went to the book seller where I sold 2 and bought 3 new to me ones.  Marg took the walker along today and that turned out to be a good decision as she was able to go much further than at anytime in the last year or two.  The kids looked at lots and touched a lot of things, but exercised restraint and only picked up a few things.  They were surprised at the end to find that they had only covered slightly more than half of it.
  After we left it was home for lunch.  Marg had lots of buns and some nice lunch meat and things to go with it.  It was a nice break as by then the temperature on the truck was showing 29 C and even 30 in a few places.  When not on the freeway we were driving with all 4 windows down.

  For the afternoon we went to the outlet stores in Arizona Mills.  That was freeway time, so we used the AC as the wind at 70 mph is pretty disruptive.  We started out at Ross's as that is one of Daniels favourite stores.  Everyone seemed to get something there so it was a good start.  They were interested in lots of things that were unique to them.  After we were half way around, Marg & I took a short cut back to the truck.  The kids continued on to see the rest of the mall, it's about a mile all the way round.  I think Cassie got her eyebrows trimmed in there at some point.

  On the way back we diverted to stop at Total Wine in the Santan center.  There they had some sampling going on and they tried wine and tequila.  Marg picked up a few things as well as the kids had a few things in the cart. By the time we were done it was dark.  That stop was followed by one at the Nordstrom Rack store where they picked up a few things, well not much really.  From there we went to Taco Bell, a choice of the kids as they wanted to compare it to the one they had been to in Edmonton.  Almost forgot last night when I wrote the post.  At Taco Bell a large picture or poster fell off the wall. It was about 5 ft high, 3 ft wide and kind of grazed Daniel even though we were quite a ways from the wall it hung on.  He jumped right up and yelled I want a free taco!  An old lady sitting in the next booth along the wall jumped up and grabbed her food moving as far from there as possible.  Pretty funny.

Back to our place where we unloaded and the kids wanted to look for scorpions.  I took the black light and we went to one of my regular spots that didn't produce any.  Then we went over to the cactus garden by the walking track and had better luck, finding 3 over there.