My aunt Marilyn and Uncle Fred live in San Diego and one of our favorite things to do in the city is to visit with them. If you’ve read this blog for very long you know that my mother had a sister and a brother who moved with her parents to California, after she had graduated from college and married my father. Thus, my parents stayed in Iowa while the rest of the family moved to California. (You’d think that with a college education they might have been smart enough to move to sunny California along with the rest of the folks. My father’s family lived in Algona, IA and that was the draw to Iowa.) But it is what it is and I grew up in cold-winters and humid-summers while my cousins grew up in Sunny Southern California. Yikes.
Because we are going out with Marilyn and Fred for dinner tonight, we though we’d spend the day in the RV working on home tasks. However, we began with a walk into Pacific Beach to find the post office to mail some things back to where we bought them.
We love living in the RV but there are some limitations: mail being one of them. We bought a new GPS which has so much glare on the screen that you can’t read it in the daylight. This we are sending back. Secondly, in Gary’s rain jacket, the rain repellant layer is separating from the out side layer. This goes back too. We don’t carry small boxes nor wrapping paper in the RV so we thought that we’d take tape, scissors and the two items to the post office which sells these things and wrap the packages there.
Great walk into town, long line at the post office but no wrapping paper and a limited selection of boxes for the rain jacket. Shucks. So we head back the way we came to the CVS or Staples where we can buy some of these things. But their sizes are too big: a huge roll of wrapping paper and big boxes, nothing appropriate.
Time to walk back home, get the car and work on this some more. But 2 doors down is a business called the Postal Annex. Aha, just what we needed. They’ve got a box just the right size for the rain jacket. We also learned that UPS will not take wrapped packages (gets caught in their equipment and possibly gets torn) so the clerk was going to put a sticker on the GPS box. But it is a store box with all the info about the GPS and we didn’t want to put a sticker on it. So, we buy a box to put the GPS box into. Hmmm. Ah, well, job done and we walk back to the RV.
Dinner was at a fairly fancy restaurant and - we’re ready. We don’t always wear shorts, t-shirts and sneakers. Well, yeah, we do, but we do have dress-up clothes. And, here we all are in the restaurant. Do you recognize us? We are ‘the kids’ according to Marilyn and Fred. He’s 92 and she’s 86. They worked together at a bank and, after both their spouses died, began to date. They’ve been married for 10 years now. Quite a romance. Can you tell that he used to be a Navy Captain before he retired and began to work at the bank?
And, can you tell that she’s my mother’s sister? They had different mothers (my mother’s mother died when she was one) but they had the same father. My mother is on the left below and Marilyn is on the right, both girls of the 40’s.
But my favorite picture shows my mother, with the wild stockings, Marilyn and Chuck when they were young. Look at those polka-dotted dresses.
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