Monday January 1st 2024

Something new for 2024, because I seem to be struggling with getting the monthly reviews out in a timely manner, I’m going to take an old approach of doing smaller daily blogs similar to journal entries. These shorter blogs will hopefully be quicker and easier to edit and publish in a more timely manner, they will detail any adventures that we undertake, as well as some of our daily nomadic lifestyle, and of course the things that we encounter that are just too crazy to be made up. It has taken some time for me to fully get on board with this new idea as I have tried to get my head around this process, and those of you who know me well, know that I sometimes have an issue with change.

So welcome to my first journal blog.

This photo image gives you a little taste of the view that were greeted with this Monday morning the 1st day of 2024, a beautiful sunrise from the passenger side window of our coach. As we start another year we again realize just how lucky we are to be living our best life!

I rolled out of bed at 6:05 this morning, to pitch black skies, Mister Sam greeted me in our gallery kitchen for his morning treats. Unfortunately for me I did not get any of that valuable kitty lap time this morning as he headed to the bedroom to try to get Miss Laurie up and when he failed at succeeding to wake Miss Laurie, he curled up on the warm spot of the mattress that I had just left.

It was a cool morning with the outside temperature reading of 44ºF (6.6ºC) and the coach temperature was 64ºF (17.7ºC), these temperatures are fairly normal for this time of year and we will see some overnights that make it to the freezing mark but the daytime average through the winter months here in Arizona are low to mid sixties. Of course the temperatures are related to the elevation as the ski hills are open in northern Arizona at elevations of 6000 feet or more.

Miss Laurie has now got up and Mister Sam has moved across the bed into the new warmer spot, we are enjoying a cup of fresh perked coffee with a wee Irish blessing, as we watched the sunrise, we have the television on just to find that all the major channels just have prerecorded garbage on. As to rehash everything that happened in 2023, most of which wasn’t worth of being televised when it happened let alone being rehashed and broadcast again. Thank goodness for the local stations to keep us up to-date on the latest shooting in Phoenix to bring a little reality to the day.

Monday and it is our day off, so we are planning on watching the Rose Bowl Parade on the television, which will be followed by a collection of televised College Bowl games, the Fiesta Bowl will be played in Tempe Arizona which is less that an hour down highway US-60 from our location.

I have to report that all the Buchanan household was in bed well before midnight last night, and we endured limited noise during the evening, because for some reason our American friends set off a lot of fireworks on New Years Eve, so this morning the air quality in the Phoenix valley is beyond bad, and it always concerns me when everyone is setting off fireworks in such a fire suspectable area. I actually might have made it to the ball drop in New York but the television stations here in Arizona were just showing the prerecorded of the New Year celebration so I shut the noise box off and read till ten o’clock which just happened to match up with the end of my latest book.

I spent a couple of hours this morning updating Thunder’s diary, which is just an Excel spreadsheet where I have recorded all the data from our travels over the last six years. Today marks our 2281st day of living as fulltime RVers, and a look back through some of our previous stops and visits, like checking where we spent our last six New Years Days. Well the parade is starting so I will pick this up later until then Happy New Year!

We (I) have made no resolutions for this new year, but there are some things that I (we) are going to try to make an effort to do different this year, and I (we) have started doing some things differently already.

The Rose Bowl parade was as amazing as ever, and it has been a New Years Day tradition of ours for many years, the hours of work that go into the construction and the decorating of the floats is mind boggling. The fact that every float is covered with nothing but organic material is astonishing and I always think I would like to be there one year to watch the parade in person, and then I remember how nice and comfortable I am watching from my recliner in our warm coach. It’s like I used to think that I would like to be at Time Square to watch the ball drop at the stroke of the New Year, and then I hear how people line up eighteen hours ahead, and spend a day in December weather for that few moments of experience and again I think of my recliner. I’m starting to sense a pattern here.

So I have spent the majority of the first day of the New Year in my recliner, some time was spent watching a couple of the college football bowl games, and has become way to common lately they were terrible one sided blow outs, and the Fiesta Bowl from Tempe was a good example of a terrible lopsided game. The Rose Bowl & The Sugar Bowl which has four of the better college teams playing off we’re closer games with the Michigan team winning the Rose Bowl in overtime, and advancing to play Washington next week. But the whole process of picking the teams to play in the bowl games is based more on popularity that true performance, just one more controversy of the NCAA.

Miss Laurie went into the arboretum again today, and returned with stories of children that were out of control in the arboretum, there is a true bad parenting or lack of parenting at all epidemic going on. There are signs asking every one to stay on the trails, they are there to keep patrons safe and more importantly to keep the arboretum safe from people. This rugged appearing Arizona desert is really a fragile environment that is damaged by every foot step that can crush the delicate eco system of the desert, it can withstand 100 degree temperatures, monsoon rains, but one footprint can do years of damage to a environment that is barely visible by the human eye. So much of the arboretum is designed to be natural, that it takes very little to cause irreparable damage to the plant life as well as the micro environment.

We ended our day with some chicken wings in the air fryer, and some television that concluded with some of the inductees into the Rock and Roll hall of fame in Cleveland. One of the nice things about being in the west is that most television broadcasting is done for the heavy populated east coast so we are watching the end of award shows at ten o’clock here instead of midnight on the east coast. It’s the same with Monday and Thursday night football games, they start at six o’clock here on the west as opposed to eight o’clock on the east. The downside to the time variations are with shows like “The Voice” when we watched the final show Miss Laurie was able to see who had won before it had been aired on the west coast.

As I prepare to head to bed I find that I have read thirty books since we started our fall adventures, most where James Patterson mystery novels, but one of the novels that I have been waiting for was “Killers of the Flower Moon” by David Grann, which is now a screen play by Martin Scorsese. A real life whodunnit from the early 1900s in Oklahoma an interesting and horrifying read of American history.

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