What the hail was that?

February 4, 2008
Peoria, AZ

We’ve had a couple of good days, even though it’s continued to be on the cool side, sometimes with a good dose o clouds thrown in. On Saturday, we had lunch with Ana and Larry at a restaurant about halfway between us (they live in northeast Phoenix). We ended up back at their house after lunch for wine, cheese, and conversation – all good.

Yesterday was Super Bowl Day, of course. The media hype has been excessive, but at least we didn’t have too much disruption to our daily routine. We decided to make it a quiet day at home. Geri made noshes: a white pizza with olives and a good dose of garlic that was absolutely fabulous. We had some lamb shanks in the freezer, so I got that in the oven around noon. With some roasted potatoes and haricots verts, it came out nicely (we can’t say the same for the Dutch oven, which needed a good scrubbing after getting a bit crusty during the braising process). We opened the wine box and out came a 2001 Stag’s Leap Fay Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon – fabulous!

And, how about them Giants? Even though we’re originally from Connecticut, and I’ve always been partial to the Yankees, I’ve never really been a huge Giants fan. And, even though I grew to have a soft spot for the Red Sox, I’ve never really cared about the Patriots. Over the last few years, they’ve just become a team that’s really hard to warm up to. I suppose that I was lucky, since I could have been happy either way, with a perfect season or a big upset. It was a great game and we’re glad it was here - -and that it's over.

Today was an “inside day”. Geri had Physical Therapy in the morning, but other than that and a quick walk for the pups, it was a good day to stay inside and out of the wind and rain showers.

I continued our project of simplifying our utilities and reducing monthly costs, this time focusing on email and telephone services. Geri and I both have email accounts that charge an annual fee (Hotmail for each of us, plus Yahoo for me), and we’re converting to Google’s free Gmail service. This makes sense, since it’ll tie together our blog and picture web services, both by Google. I’m also working to extricate us from the high cable bill, which involves Internet, TV, and digital phone. By moving to DirecTV (which we already have for the coach) and using the Verizon Wireless Broadband service (which we also have for the coach) at the house, we’re almost there. I’ve added Skype, a cheap Internet-based phone service, which will allow us to maintain a local number here in Arizona for neighbors and local businesses. I’ll start sending out emails with the changes over the next week or so. We could have changed our cell phone numbers to be local here, and we may do so at some point in the future, but the work associated with changing every place that uses the cell phone numbers was just more effort than we wanted to tackle right now.

In looking out the windows to the back of the house around 3:30 PM, we could see a good deal of sun, so we decided to walk the dogs early. Imagine our surprise when we went out through the garage and saw a huge line of clouds that were almost black. We quickly saw lightning and heard thunder, so we made it a short walk. We weren’t home for very long when we could hear it start to rain. Very quickly, it turned to pea-sized hail! It didn’t last too long, but the temperature dropped over 10 degrees inside 15 minutes. Snow levels dropped to around 3,000’ (we’re at 1,200’) which is very low for this area. We’ll have to check out the mountains to the north and east tomorrow. According to the forecast, we may finally be coming to the end of the month-long spell of cool temperatures. Woo-hoo!