Nineteenth Bloggy Anniversary!

The photo above is of my brother Steve working on setting up my blog. We were all gathered at Greg’s brother’s home in Anaheim Hills.

Way back in March of 2007 my brother Steve strongly encouraged me to start a blog and he helped me to set it all up. When things didn’t post right he’d help me sort out the glitches. We were living temporarily in Camarillo, California at the time and it was a good season for me to have something extra in my life like blogging. It has been a fun journey and has morphed over all the years.

In February of 2008 I met my first Blogging friend, Willow. Here’s what I wrote about it 18 years ago.

God is so good to me. He gave me two desires of my heart today! I’ve said over and over again how sweet it would be to meet one of my bloggy friends and how I’d love to have a walking buddy in Southern California after I left my walking buddies in Seattle, Washington. Today Willow and I met and had a walk and plan to walk on a regular basis, keeping each other accountable. How sweet it is! We found each other through blogging and realized we both live in the same city. We’re in the same stage of life and have a lot in common. Check out her blog, she has very exciting news today! She became a grandmother!

In April of 2008, Willow, Sara and I met up at the Getty Villa. Here’s what I wrote way back then.

On Monday Willow and I met Sara from Much ado About Something at the Getty Villa. This was the first time I met Sara face to face. Sara in person is true to who she is on her blog. She’s gracious, thoughtful, and kind. What a fun experience to meet bloggy friends in person. I’ll be posting more about the Getty soon.

Here we are at lunch at the Getty Cafe. Willow from Willow’s Cottage, Sara of Much Ado About Something and ellen b. from the Happy Wonderer. See ellen b. leaning over without wincing with back pain. Whoohoo!

I met the lovely Cori G. in Southern California just before Greg and I moved back to the Seattle area. We met up in January of 2009. Here’s what I wrote…

On Tuesday I drove to Orange County for a family dinner at my parents’ apartment with my sisters, SIL’s, and nieces. Cori G. form Gingerbread Crumbs & Co. and I have been regulars on each others blogs and she happens to live in Orange County so we arranged a face to face meeting close to my parent’s apartment. We had a very short time to meet and “talk” but what a joy it was to spend this short time asking questions and sharing a little bit more of our lives in person. I was surprised how fast our time went.

Cori G and I met up one more time before Greg and I moved back at a restaurant in San Marino.

The Monday before we left California Cori G! met me in San Marino for breakfast at Julienne. I was a distracted blogger that day and forgot to get a fresh photo of the two of us at Julienne.

In March of 2010 Greg and I met up with Sandy and her husband. We were driving from Camarillo back to our home in Kenmore after selling our condo in Camarillo.

On our trip back to Washington from California, Dear and I had dinner with Sandy from The Reluctant Entertainer and her husband. We had our fabulous meal and time of fellowship at the Winchester Inn in Ashland, Oregon. I knew Sandy lived close by and it worked out that she and her husband were available to meet us. We didn’t run out of things to talk about. Sandy shares my passion for food and fellowship around food. Her blog is about simple entertaining and creative hospitality. If you haven’t visited there yet click on over. This is Sandy’s photo that I asked for since my photo was blurry. Thank you Sandy! Look at those great salads! I’ll be posting more about this great Inn later…

This epic meetup with 5 of the Mennonite Girls Can Cook was life changing and it all grew out of blogging! This was in April of 2010 after Greg and I had moved back to Kenmore and left our sojourn in Southern California behind for good.

Whoohoo! I finally got to meet some of the Mennonite Girls from MGCC face to face on Tuesday. Five of the Canadian Mennonites had a field-trip down to the Skagit Valley to see the tulips and we all met up for lunch in La Conner. It was like we were old friends. Each gal is so unique yet so cohesive in the group. I don’t know if that’s the right word but I hope you understand what I mean…

I feel so blessed to have been adopted into the fold even though I’m not Mennonite. Many of our Russian recipes are similar to the Mennonite favorites.

Seeds of Friendship

I planted some seeds of friendship
All nice and neatly in a row
I tended to them with love and care
Then watched them sprout and grow

All ten of us when we gathered in British Columbia to sign contracts for our first cookbook in September of 2010.

So what makes it easy for 10 women all together for the first time ever to be relaxed and enjoy each other? I think it begins with our faith in God, our savior Jesus Christ, our common comfort food experience, our heritage, and our openness to new adventures. I am aware of what a gift it is to have made this wonderful connection with these beautiful girls.

And then Herald Press came knocking at our door. This is a link to our October 2010 announcement.

In July of 2010 Dear and I met the Scrabble Queen from Scrabblequeen Knits for breakfast while we were in the Sacramento area for a funeral. She gifted me with some wonderful loose tea from England!

In April of 2011 during a ‘sister’ trip to Victoria on Vancouver Island my bloggy friend, Pondside, who lives on the island offered to pick me and my sisters up and give us a mini tour of some of her favorite spots. What a treat that was!

The last stop on our Victoria tour with Pondside was Hatley Castle. I can imagine how beautiful this location would be for a wedding when everything is blooming.

I really do thank God for many wonderful people I’ve met through blogging and blossoming friendships that continue. Pondside is one of those people who I thank God for bringing into my life.

On a weekend in July 2011 Jill a bloggy friend from Utah flew in for a visit at our house. We treated her to the usual tourist spots including the Lavender festival in Sequim. (pronounced squim). Andrew was in Afghanistan during this time so our daughter, Katie, was living with us and she was a great addition for our time at the lavender fields.

It’s a lot more fun with my navigator and a bloggy friend who understands that we take photos of everything! Jill and her camera are great companions for me. Here’s a link to Jill’s post about our time at the lavender fields.

And here’s another link to our Saturday shenanigans.

At a book signing in Winnepeg/Manitoba I was able to meet Millie from Wreathmaker. What a fun surprise to see her and her hubby at McNally Robinson bookstore.

In 2014 on Katie and my roadtrip from Seattle to North Carolina we arranged a meeting over lunch in Kansas City, Missouri with Pam from Abiding With Love. We had a wonderful meal paid for by Pam’s husband and great conversation with Pam and her daughter.

Pray for dear Pam as she has had health crisis after health crisis stemming from Lyme’s disease and now from a brain tumor her and her family call Georgia on my mind.

Several of these gals do not blog anymore. There are other gals who stopped blogging that I never met in person but would have liked to meet. Let’s see if my brain can remember them, Rosemary, Kim at Hiraeth, Gumbo Lily. There are some bloggers that I miss who have left this earth like Vee, and Sally from Blue Monday.

To those of you who are still blogging, thank you and It would be a treat to meet you in person!

All in all, blogging has been a joy to me and I’ll keep going as long as it is reasonable for me to continue.

I’m coming to you today from somewhere on the Danube river! I prepped this post for my anniversary before we left on our trip. Hopefully by now I’ve posted some postcards of what we have seen so far! Thank you for following along!

Back Again…

Dear and I arrived in Los Angeles and hit the L.A. freeways to our old stomping grounds in Camarillo. The rain that California has been enjoying has greened up the hills. Traffic is same old same old. The freeway trip up the 405 and on to the 101 (Ventura Freeway) went well and we got through Thousand Oaks and started the descent into Camarillo.

A couple of our favorite restaurants were closed since we lived in Camarillo from 2006-2010. One of our favorites was still open so we stopped in for lunch. We recognized a few wait staff that were still working there. We stopped at Establos Market (another favorite from years past) and bought some fresh made salsa and guacamole to enjoy at our beach house rental. After enjoying the weekend festivities that we flew to California for and after we checked out of the beach house on Monday and before we headed south into Los Angeles again we met up with Willow from Willow’s Cottage.

These are Willows photos of our time together. She gifted us some of her hand knit items for our little Addy. It was so good to catch up with my walking buddy from our Camarillo days. Thank you Willow for the beautiful gifts and the time we had to catch up on life.

I am finally home again after being away since January 13th. It feels so good to be in my own home with Dear. I still have so much to share from my time in California.

California Signs

Dear and I lived in California from 2006 until 2010. These are some signs from our day and weekend trips while living there.

This was our go to Mexican restaurant in Camarillo, California.

Between Santa Barbara and Santa Ynez we stopped at the Cold Spring Tavern for breakfast. I got a kick out this sign.

I saw this sign in San Francisco.

This sign was from Willow and my weekly walks in her neighborhood.

Most Saturday mornings we’d arrive at this beach and have our beach walk. We miss our walks here.

I’m linking up to Signs Signs hosted by Lesley.

All of our children were born in California and this week we will be celebrating our oldest with a dinner together on Saturday. Our second born son will be celebrating this week with his fiance who has a birthday this week, too, in Eastern Washington. Our January is full. I’ll be traveling next week to California to celebrate our niece Hope’s 7th birthday and one of my brother’s birthdays. I’ll share photos from all the fun times we manage to enjoy! Is January full or quiet for you?

InSPIREd Sunday

A simple offering this week during this very busy extended weekend. This church is in Camarillo, California where Dear and I lived for a short 4 year stint while he worked in Thousand Oaks. St. Mary Magdalen Church was kiddy corner to a restaurant that we enjoyed frequenting. In the future I will show you the stained glass windows that have a wonderful story behind them.

For those of you in the good ole U.S.A. I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Ours was fabulous and then we started our Christmas decorating. While in the thick of that I managed to break one of my little toes on my left foot and I’ve been moving very slowly around this old house. I’ve been able to keep doing a little here and there between keeping my foot elevated and rested. We got our first dusting of snow on Saturday!! This Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent. After church we are going to go purchase our Christmas mystery tree.

Enough of me…you can visit InSPIREd Sunday hosted by Beth and Sally and join in some sacred viewings around the world.

St. John’s Seminary~Camarillo, California

Dear and I lived in Camarillo, California from 2006 until Spring of 2010 because of Dear’s work. Driving around Camarillo I noticed St. John’s Seminary set high on a hill. I tried to see if I could get on the grounds but it was a private property with a gated entrance that was locked up tight.

In December of 2008 I had the rare opportunity to visit the grounds of St. John’s Seminary for a Christmas Concert that a friend’s son was performing in. When I found out the campus would be open for this concert I was there with bells on. The concert was beautifully performed in the historic chapel.

In 1924, plans were being made for a minor seminary for the training of priests in the Los Angeles Area. Sixty five students were registered for the academic year of 1926-27. At that time, Juan E. Camarillo made a gift to the archdiocese of 100 acres on the knoll of Rancho Calleguas, which land separated the Calleguas Ranch from Rancho Las Posas. The purpose of Mr. Camarillo’s gift was the location there of a major seminary. Ground was broken for St. John’s in March of 1938, after a speedy and successful drive for funds.

The original buildings, including the chapel which is unique in its marble decorations and stained-glass windows, are built around a quad with interior porticoes.

When Archbishop Cantwell was planning for the new seminary, he approached Mrs. Edward Laurence Doheny, Sr. about the possibility that she would donate the library. Mr. Doheny, her husband, the great oil tycoon, had passed away in 1935. Together they had built the library at USC in memory of Edward Laurence Doheny, Jr. and Mrs. Doheny considered this new opportunity a most appropriate way to honor the memory of her husband. It also afforded her the opportunity to create a permanent home for the thousands of rare books and art objects which she had collected since 1930 and which would burgeon before her death in 1958.

Mrs. Doheny hired her favorite architect, Wallace Neff, and commissioned him to design a building which would house a working library for the students and faculty as well as quarters for her collection.

The result is a classical Spanish building which reflects some of the overtones of the 1,100 years of Moorish influence in Spain. The pale pink stucco structure complements and enhances the neo-Spanish architecture of the main buildings.

It was a very bright sunny day when I visited. On some of the photos you can’t see the pink tone to the building but this photo that I took at this angle the pink shows through nicely.

The first floor of the library serves students and faculty, and the second floor housed the Estelle Doheny Collection which contained some 8,000 volumes of rare books. There were also displayed much of Mrs. Doheny’s fine French period furniture, canvases by Barbizon and western American artists. The collection was distinguished for an impressive array of Bibles which were significant type, among which the premier volume were one of the few extant original Gutenberg Bibles. I found out today her entire collection was sold off to over 40 different buyers from around the world in 1988! Oh how sad that this collection is scattered all over the world now.

I wasn’t aware that this significant collection had been housed in this library when I was on campus in December. After researching and finding this information I was disappointed to find out it was no longer there.

I found my experience on this day to be quite privileged. Experiencing the amazing architecture in person was so much better than my photos can afford.

I’m linking this post that I copied from a post I published in 2009 to InSPIREd Sunday.

Thank you Beth and Sally for hosting!

Yard Art On Thursday…

This week I have some rather tame yard art for you. Do you recognize this Willow?

Please visit Mary at Work of the Poet to see more.

Photobucket replaced all my photos with ugly black and grey boxes and they are holding my photos hostage until I pay them lots of money. I’m slowly going through all my posts and trying to clean them up and replacing some photos. Such a bother.

Ruby Tuesday ~ Memories…

Time for Ruby Tuesday and my photo editor is giving me grief so I can’t upload new photos but I had this one in my drafts and I’m missing and remembering our fun times at this old Camarillo establishment. So bear with me as I reminisce about the good ole days a few months ago in Southern California. Visit Mary at Work of the Poet to see more Ruby posts! Mary! I was going to be posting a photo of my very young and new pears that are just starting to grow on my tree but my photo uploader is failing me!!

And for clarification we moved from our Southern California condo back to our home in Washington State at the end of February of this year. We are very thankful to be back in Washington but that doesn’t mean we don’t miss our friends and some of our favorite restaurants! We’d love to transfer the great chips from El Tecolote to our favorite Mexican restaurant here. The salsa here is fabulous but their chips “…have been weighed on the scales and found wanting” .

Happy Tuesday to all who pass this way…

ht: The Holy Bible; Daniel 5:27

Yard Art ~ For the Birds!

Mary at Work of the Poet has started a new Thursday meme called Yard Art. I’m playing along this week…

I always get a kick out of yard art. Some is pretty ridiculous. These were just fun. These are from a walk with my friend Willow in her neighborhood. I keep threatening my kids and Dear with bringing home some yard art. They just roll their eyes!

Photobucket is holding all my photos that I stored on their site from 2007-2015 hostage replacing them with ugly grey and black boxes and asking for a large ransom to retrieve them. It is a slow process to go through all my posts deleting the ugly boxes.

Walk With Willow ~

8:30 A.M. on Tuesday has been our walking time these days. Today I had to get some shots of things that make us smile and growl. There’s Willow with her huge bunny friend. We walk past that frog everyday and it is motion activated so it croaks at us and makes us jump and then we growl at it. Our walk in Willow’s neighborhood includes a nice stretch through a nature park. There’s Willow taking a shot of something…I hope it’s not my behind!

On my way home I spotted this Egret in the river bed and pulled over to take some photos. It got annoyed with me and took off for a different spot down the river…

Tick, tick, tick, …the clock is winding down.

Wolf Moon Grand Opening!

For my combination of Mosaic Monday and Blue Monday I have photos of the Grand Opening of the Sports Complex behind our Neighborhood.

It’s hard to make out the wolf moon from the sports field lights in the center picture. The fields were full of activity into the night after the Grand Opening began at 4:00 P.M.

“Full Moon names date back to Native Americans, of what is now the northern and eastern United States. The tribes kept track of the seasons by giving distinctive names to each recurring full Moon. Their names were applied to the entire month in which each occurred. There was some variation in the Moon names, but in general, the same ones were current throughout the Algonquin tribes from New England to Lake Superior. European settlers followed that custom and created some of their own names. Since the lunar month is only 29 days long on the average, the full Moon dates shift from year to year. Here is the Farmers Almanac’s list of the full Moon names.

• Full Wolf Moon – January Amid the cold and deep snows of midwinter, the wolf packs howled hungrily outside Indian villages. Thus, the name for January’s full Moon. Sometimes it was also referred to as the Old Moon, or the Moon After Yule. Some called it the Full Snow Moon, but most tribes applied that name to the next Moon.”

After getting some photos we decided to return during the daylight hours on Sunday.

I took this shot through the Baseball backstop. There are no baseball teams practicing here till Spring. Right now it’s all Soccer. There are 3 baseball diamonds and more soccer fields then we could count. At least 12 and probably more portable soccer fields of play.

Lots of blue teams and blue accessories for Blue Monday!

Here’s what the field looked like before the Sports Complex was started. And this next photo was taken today…

We are so pleased they protected and showcased this great old California Oak Tree. This next shot was taken back in January of 2008.

A beautiful winter day in Southern California…

Thank you Mary for hosting Mosaic Monday and thank you Sally for hosting Blue Monday!

ht: Wolf Moon info ~ Farmer’s Almanac

The Happy Wonderer ~ ellen b.

To honor and encourage

Tag Archives: Camarillo