Last half of November 2017

The last half of the month continued with the quiet theme of the first half of November and the month before.

On the day before Thanksgiving, I volunteered again to help take the luminarias out of storage, get them cleaned, fitted with new candles and then placed around the Desert Botanical Garden.  There are only 8,000 of these done and placed at the garden.  Here are a couple of photos of the process.  Excuse my finger on the first one, but it shows us with the first step of taking the stacks of them apart (they are stored this way, but the heat of the storage bins causes the wax to melt and make them difficult to separate).  The second photo is the second stage showing the cleaning and prepping for new candle holders and candles.

We continue to have problems with people parking in our parking space at our condo - we have to leave nasty notes on the windows.  Fortunately, we only have one care now and we park it in the garage and let our guest and visitors use our covered space.

A couple of weeks ago, the staff at the DBG marked the spike on an agave so that we could see the progress of its growth.  Agaves are monocarpic - most plants are polycarpic, meaning that once they reach maturity they produce blossoms annually; but agaves do it only once in their lives and then die.  Here is a series of the weekly photos of that agave.  In three weeks, it grew from about four feet tall to more than ten feet tall.

November 14

November 21

November 28

December 5

On Black Friday, Patty and I walked to The Windsor where we had a delightful brunch and then took advantage of the Black Friday Special on their gift cards - normally, for $100, you get gift cards worth $120 - but on Black Friday, you get $140 worth of gift cards for $100.

We both had more dental and doctor appointments, but the last half of the month was quiet.  On Friday December 1, Anne and Shawn came to our place for drinks, then our Christmas gift to them was to take them to Luminaria and dinner at Gertrude's - a fine way to end the week after Thanksgiving.