August 11th - Survivor's Outreach Services weekend

Huge thank you and hellos to Sara Blazik, her team, the NDPG, and Dr. James Coyle.

It was an amazing weekend in Bismarck where we got together to learn and share stories with our families of the fallen.  Our presenter, Dr. James Coyle was a riveting speaker and his words soothed and touched our hearts.  There is still so much to learn about our emotions and how we manage them instead of having them run our lives.  We engaged in a project where we took blank tiles and wrote words of description for our feelings and such. After doing that, we put the tiles into a bag and broke them up, symbolically taking control of them.  A day later, we took picture frames and put parts of every body's tiles on them so we would all have a share of each other.  We had a church service on Sunday and had some great dinners and did a lot of singing.

Arlen Halverson's sweet ride with all the fallen heroes on the saddle bags

The shards of our frustrations

Displays of the fallen

Craft time.  The fragments have put in bags for us to pick.

Dr. James Coyle

Dr. Coyle's books

Our Art

At one point in our day, we visited Bismarck Brewing.They had a nice restaurant and taproom downstairs and the main brewery room upstairs.

April 3rd - An afternoon in La Jolla

With just about a week left in SoCal, we ventured to La Jolla to scope out the cliffs and a nice park area where our daughter is planning on getting married.  On the north end of the beach is the La Jolla Cove area and Seal Beach.  There were a lot of seals and sea lions lying on the sand.  People were down with them in some areas taking pictures and such.  The main part of the beach was covered by many, many sea lions and sea gulls.

After being there for a while, we checked out the one craft brewer there, and, unimpressed, ran down to Ocean Beach hoping for a sunset.

South end of the cove area

Local lady watching the seals

Seal Beach

La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art

Ocean Beach

April 2nd - After the fools

Had a couple of days in San Diego now that our truck was running right.  We took an afternoon to see Ocean Beach.  We really didn't get out there too many times this year.  Parked on Newport about four blocks from the beach, in front of Culture Brewing.  They usually have a good selection though too many IPAs for my taste.  Culture is a place that has art work on the walls by a particular local artist.  Nice big and open room, lounge chairs, and a bar across the front with the front wall open, so it's like a patio and you can watch people walking by.

We left there and went to Belching Beaver, a brewery out of Vista, CA.  They have  3 or 4 places in the county.  This was our third one visited.  Pretty nice.

A quick walk down the street to Helms.  We'd never been there before and enjoyed a couple of tasters.  They had an okay Irish Stout on nitro and a passable Dopple Bock.  They also showcase local art talent.  On display were paintings of various comic book and sci-fi heroes. 

We continued down to the beach to visit one of our favorite restaurants, Shades.  Shades is closed and the owners are converting it to a new place called San Diego Surf Club.  We had some appetizers there before heading home for the day. 
It was a warm cloudless day and the crescent moon could be seen hazily in the sky.

A great day for cruisin'

Helm's Brewing

Local art

December 10th - A random Geocache attempt reveals a local artist's work

I have been accused and probably not unjustly of having am obsession with Geocaching. The big surprise here, is that this post is not about Geocaching.  This is about something we found pursuing a Geocache. It goes like this.

We had made a visit to our farmstead in Petersburg and were going to Eliza's in Fargo to stay until Laurie and possibly myself were going to head for California.  If I'm not driving on a particular part of a trip, I'll often look at my Geocache app just to see what is around us.  I noticed there was one a ways north of highway 2. It was interesting because the highway bends south and there is a small road that continues straight from there which led to a cache.

The cache was a small container put behind a street sign, but the description of where to find it was between a water pump house and an iron welding sculpture.  We decided to go find it despite the day being snowy and windy.

On our way, cruising down gravel and sometimes dirt roads, we came across a farm based seedling company.  Out front, all along the road and the surrounding area were these sculptures.  Apparently the work of the same local man who had a small one by the cache.  We got out and took some pictures.  We did find the cache, but the real find was the artwork of this local man.

I think you'll enjoy the pictures.

The propellers on the tail spin in the wind

Weather vane. This was around 6 or 7 feet long.

I think he was saying something about America defeating Germany and Japan.  It's too bad the flag is tattered.

Dinosaur

Snake 7 ft tall