Back to Reality

I woke up this morning and was welcomed by this view from our back deck.

So, once again, I think that I live in a very beautiful place. I'm totally showing off when I post photos like this.

Marylynn and I spent the biggest part of our day cleaning things up around the front of our home. Both of our driveways were covered in needles from our Redwood trees.

I had to get up on top of the house and clean out the gutters and sweep down the roof. Marylynn sweep the driveway and threw the needles into a pile and began burning the stuff. It was an all day a fair. I had to wash the car too. There were about a jillion dead bug bodies smeared all over it.

Part of what I wanted to do with my time away was to work on illustrating one of my children's stories with the idea of getting it published. I got three pages done. I started on the fourth one, but I'm going to have to start over on it.

Here's the first page. Sully, the skunk, has changed from an earlier effort that I posted. I wanted to make his face more narrow—more skunk-like. What do you think? I plan to continue working on the project and see if I can find a publisher that would be interested in it.

Now about Expedia...

We're not happy. We booked our cruise with them because we thought it was a good deal and they told Marylynn that we would get $100 onboard credit each if we booked before the end of May. So we took them up on it figuring that would go towards the cost of our expeditions. When we got on ship we asked about our credit and they didn't know anything about it. The cruise line e-mailed Expedia for us and got a response saying we didn't qualify for their promotion. We finally had to get on the phone and call them. The cruise line, thankfully, allow us to call them on their dime. Marylynn was on hold with them FOREVER!!! After debating with these people they finally turned us over to a "customer advocate." We had a copy of the e-mail in our hand which told us about the promotion, but what could we do? They continued to say that we didn't qualify. This was some money that we had budgeted for. It was very disappointing. The kicker is that the young lady at the cruise line desk said, "Expedia does this to people all the time." That tells you something about their way of doing business. So, I want to warn as many people as possible to not use their services because I don't want them to get cheated like we did. Expedia did finally say that they would send us $50 to us. We've yet to see that. Don't use Expedia.