A visit to Organ Stop Pizza

I've written before about visits to Organ Stop Pizza... in January, the Venture Out Activities Office arranged for a "Venture Out Day" at the restaurant -- so folks from our community were the only ones there. They had to have at least 50 people sign up, and it ended up that about 100 attended, to have a lunch pizza buffet and to be entertained by their Mighty Wurlitzer Organ!

The organist was Brett Valliant - probably our favorite organist there of the ones who are still playing.

Besides the pipes (which are behind glass that can be opened/closed to control the volume), there are also all sorts of other instruments controlled by the console -- mounted on the walls, hanging from the ceilings, and mounted in the balcony areas.

Brett explaining about the console and answering questions

Some of the folks from our park who were also there with us

This is looking up at the ceiling at some of the instruments -- you may be able to see the LED lights lit on the instruments (indicating that the instrument was currently being played), and on two of them, one LED light in a different color or brighter (that was the note that was being played at that moment on that instrument).

One of the songs that Brett played was the theme from Somewhere In Time -- we had never heard it played the at Organ Stop before: https://youtu.be/6gYc-zrclVs 

While we enjoy going to Organ Stop in the evening, we particularly like going at lunch time with a private group as there are more explanations and it feels like a personal performance just for us!

Impromptu porch concert

On Saturday afternoon, one of our neighbors, Hollie, invited us over for an impromptu porch concert. One of her friends had a friend visiting from back home who would be playing some songs on her porch, so she invited us to come over and join in listening (I figured part of the goal was to prevent neighbors complaining about being disturbed by noise -- if the neighbors are invited, they are less likely to complain!).

There was a nice group of neighbors on the porch (Hollie has a corner house so has a very large porch).

Carl took a couple of videos -- "Little Bitty": https://youtu.be/Q8rjkrsLZVs

and Louis Armstrong: https://youtu.be/Tu-xsiQuULQ

Carl and I got up and line danced to a couple of songs, 

... and then a fellow line dancer, Sue, who is also a neighbor, came over and she and I danced to a couple of more songs!

What fun to join with neighbors on a sunny warm Saturday afternoon! (Especially when much of the country was getting slammed with cold wintry weather!)

Crème Brûlée French Toast

Each club in Venture Out participates in fund raising. The Ham Radio club started providing a crème brûlée French toast last year, and continued this season.

Servers on the line

We had a nice turn out -- about 160 tickets were sold, I think.

People were happy to get their plates of crème brûlée French toast!

Fellow volunteers were working in the back -- in the dish pit...

... in the baking and prepping area...

Michael is separating the individual pieces to make it easier to serve.

Monitoring the oven

A tray of French toast -- I think this is pre-baking.

The completed product with two slices of French toast, a sausage patty, blueberries, and whipped cream and a strawberry on top! The folks joining us for breakfast also got orange juice and coffee.

The proceeds from the club fund-raising events goes to the Social Board whose members are responsible for the budget for social activities in the park. The Ham Radio club may ask the board for funds for projects that they need (like a new antenna or radio for the ham shack) -- it may be funded from the proceeds of events that the Ham Radio club participates in, but the requested projects may need more funds than the club has generated this season. The Social Board may decide that the need of the club is worthy of funding the project from funds generated through activities of other clubs in addition to those generated by Ham Radio. The Ham Radio club is a relatively small club (probably 30-35 members) but provides services to the community for no additional charge to the community (e.g. parking direction assistance for special events like tennis or pickle ball tournaments, safety monitoring during 5K fun run/walks, parade assistance within the park) -- since the Ham Radio members have radios that they are legally allowed to use, they can be strategically positioned at various places in the park and able to communicate with others who are located in other places quickly and easily.

The crème brûlée French toast was very yummy! It is prepared the day before and the bread soaks in the pudding and butter/brown sugar mixture overnight before baking in the morning. Delicious!

Friday night dance

We enjoy going to the Friday night dances at our community

At one of the dances recently -- the band was "The Campbell Band" made up of several members of the Campbell family (two sons, their father and uncle) along with other friends who have been "adopted into the family". They are a country-western band so we enjoyed line dancing and Arizona two-stepping!

A couple of our friends at the dance -- Carl took our pictures so I could send it to friends who have not come down this year (Liz and Jerry whom we visited in Iowas last summer). We're missing Liz and Jerry and are hoping that they may come next season!

Since it was a country western band, we wore the cowboy hats that we got when we became honorary Calgarians. They looked neat, but boy were they hot!

What are they doing????

We are renting out our RV lot for the months of February and March, so we need to vacate that space. Our golf cart is still not running, so we needed to push it from the RV lot to our park model lot (about a block), and we also wanted to move our patio heater.

When we had to push our golf cart a couple of months ago, we got a lot of jokes from people as we walked past them ("Aren't you supposed to be riding in that?" or "Taking your cart for a walk?") -- Carl wanted to avoid that, so we decided to move the items after dark. I didn't get pictures of pushing the golf cart...

... but here is Carl "taking our patio heater for a walk!"

We were a little concerned that a concerned fellow resident would report us to security for stealing a golf cart and/or patio heater, but we seem to have gotten away with it!

Exercise

We try to take advantage of exercise opportunities here at the park...

Stretch and Tone is held each weekday morning at 8am in the ballroom.

There are a number of pool exercise classes -- we like the one at 9am in the west pool -- this was posted for the participants in the various pool exercise classes -- a social and potluck -- I think this may counteract any benefits we're getting from exercising! Someone cheeky will usually say, "Come see what we look like with clothes on!"

No pictures of us actually in the pool exercising -- we like doing the exercises in the pool because it is low impact on knees and back, and we can make it as energetic as we desire by moving more underwater, using the resistance of the water to our benefit. It is also a social time -- in fact, for many of the participants, we think they exercise their voices more than any other muscles! But, it is a fun time, and there are definitely some who are there to get exercise!

Refrigerator saga - part 3

After they had finished getting the refrigerator into the hole, the lead guy informed us that he had not hooked up the water line for the ice/water dispenser because we had our own line there. We had read (I guess on another store's website, maybe Home Depot) that we needed to have a new water line, that they would not hook up an old water line. I guess Costco's rule is that they supply the water line, and since we had one already there, they wouldn't hook ours up... I wish they had said that up front because we would have been happy to remove ours and use their water line... but... they wanted to finish up quickly (see previous post).

So, one of us needed to climb into the hole behind the refrigerator to hook up the water line. We also wanted to put shims in behind the refrigerator to keep it from getting pushed too far back in the hole (the doors would hit on the countertop on the side if it was too deep in the hole).

We pulled the refrigerator out... I volunteered to go into the hole,  

... but Carl insisted (he said that he was afraid I wouldn't be able to get the fitting loosened).

There's not much room in there!

But he was able to get the water line hooked up. We also strategized what we needed to put behind the refrigerator so it wouldn't go all the way to the back, and I got some pieces of wood that we could put behind the refrigerator.

Then he had to get out!

We weren't exactly sure how wide the pieces of wood needed to be to put behind the refrigerator, so we made a stack of 4"x4" plywood pieces that the previous owner had left in the shed. We put a piece of duct tape around them to keep them attached, and tied a string so we could pull it back out and adjust it if needed once we pushed the refrigerator back in. We checked it, and found that we had made the stack a little too wide, so we removed one piece of plywood and that seemed to position the refrigerator just fine. We did a similar task on the side to keep the refrigerator from pushing too close against the left side counter as there is a on/off switch for the disposal (or "garburator" as the previous owner (Canadian) called it!) on that side.

Refrigerator in place -- hurrah!

We waited for 24 hours to be sure that it was operating and had cooled down and then moved all the contents out of the side-by-side into the French door refrigerator. Now we'll move the side-by-side to the casa at some point -- yet to be determined!