Joan's family visit

Joan and family drove over from California to visit for a long weekend and get to see some Cubs spring training games.

They wanted a taste from Chicago...

... so we met them at Lou Malnatti's for Lou's pizza.

Joan and Carl

Roman and Reese

Our pizzas!

In Chicago Cubs gear in front of our guest casa, ready to go to the spring training game!

After church "Gabfest" at Venture Out

At Organ Stop Pizza

Looking at the huge organ pipes

It was great to have them for a visit, even though we'd always wish for it to be longer!

Dollar store or not?

We visited a couple of dollar stores looking for decorations we could use on our golf cart for the St Patrick's Day parade...

The Dollar Tree is now becoming "Dollar Tree Plus!" -- framing the fact that their prices are now $3 and $5 as a positive!

"More Savings, More Fun!"

Most of the things that we saw were $1.25, not that much more than a dollar.

Other "Dollar" stores have always had products priced over a dollar (Dollar General, for example). And... with rising prices, I'm sure it is more difficult for them to come up with anything worth getting that costs just $1!

Safe selling through social tools

We had a couple of things that we wanted to get sold while here in Mesa -- for one of the items, we were selling an electronic device. The buyer had contacted us and we decided to look up a "safe selling" location at which to meet her... we found a website: https://safetradespots.com/ that provided information about locations at local law enforcement offices where buyers and sellers could feel better about meeting to exchange property and cash. We suggested a location at a local police station... unfortunately, we did not realize that the location was really only manned until 4pm Monday-Thursday -- and we were meeting her on a Wednesday about 5pm. 

When we got to the parking lot, it was empty...

... but we did see this sign, where we learned that the hours were only 9am-4pm.

We were a little concerned, the buyer sounded like a young woman, and that she might be a bit concerned arriving at an empty parking lot. Nonetheless, we let her know we were there -- she responded that she was running late, and asked if we could meet at a location that was closer to her. We agreed since it didn't seem that meeting at an empty parking lot, even if it was outside a police station, was any safer than any other parking lot. We ended up meeting in the parking lot of a strip mall beside a pretty busy McDonalds. It seemed to us that we were more concerned with the young lady's safety than she was!

I think we would, in the future, again look for a "safe transaction" location to provide security for both buyer and seller, but I guess we had better do a better job of figuring out if they are only a safe location during certain hours!

Venture Out Swing Band

One evening, we got to enjoy music by the Venture Out Swing Band...

The Swing Band on the Venture Out stage

Singer with the Venture Out Swing Band 

A short video of one of the songs that they performed: https://youtu.be/kcmPkOe135Y

All of the participants are residents of our community here at Venture Out -- what a talented community we have the privilege to live with!

Visits from friends

Patti's former co-worker, Dennie, and her husband, Jim, are wintering in Scottsdale. We arranged to get together with them one afternoon...

One of our neighbors offered to take a picture for us!

You may remember Dennie from our visit at their lake "cottage" in New Hampshire a couple of years ago: https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2023/07/visiting-friends-in-new-hampshire.html

We are hoping to see them more often in future seasons here!

More notes from the bulletin board

Someone here at Venture Out does a good job of putting things up on the bulletin board!

An event that we may have been interested in! (It was posted before the event, I just didn't get it posted to our blog until after.

The contents of the bulletin board make me walk through that part of the post office just to see what might be new!

"Artistic" photos

When we went out to a nice restaurant a couple of weeks ago, we had a bit of a wait for our meals, so Carl took some "artistic" pictures of my drink...

I like this one for the composition of the glass and the straw, but the red thing near the top of the liquid is actually an exit sign on the other side of the restaurant!

This one got rid of the exit sign, but then the straw as a bit too upright...

The things we do to keep us busy while we're waiting!