2016 year- end review: Part 3/ mid-October through December

Soon after our trip was over, Sam decided that the automotive school wasn’t really for him after all and he decided to return home and go back to the job that he held before he left. The manager there was very happy to have Sam back, so he started back to work right away. (It was a good thing we got rid of all the stuff in his room!) About a week after that, we were overjoyed to learn that we had a new grand-daughter. Olya and Adam announced the birth of Yael Kiva just a few days before Vladi’s birthday. We wanted to see her as soon as we could, but we knew that it would take some time for Olya to recover from the birth and for the baby to get settled in at home. So, we made plans to see them when the baby was a few weeks old. For Vladi’s birthday we decided to use a gift card we had hung on to for quite some time.

It was for a place called The Pearl District in a fancy part of town. We shared everything that we ordered and savored all the exquisite flavors.

The following weekend we attended the annual Halloween party hosted by our friends, the Bass family. This year we dressed as post-fight hockey players with jerseys provided by my cousin after a play-off rivalry bet during hockey season.

The party was great fun as it always is.

Early November brought a surprising and distressing close to a very nasty presidential campaign. Vladi and I did get a glimpse of the support Donald Trump was gathering as we travelled around the mid-west on our RV trip. I never saw any signs in support of the Clinton/Kaine ticket there, and there were plenty of Trump/Pence posters, bumper stickers and lawn signs in evidence. Even so, we didn’t think Donald Trump would win. And I know I have a few friends that think he’s what this country needs, but personally, I am worried about what the next four years will look like under his leadership. And I’m really distressed about the growing chasm between Democrats and Republicans. The political climate in our country feels so increasingly turbulent it scares me. But, in light of all that, a friend of my son named Jared said something on Facebook right after the election that really stuck with me. He said, “Tomorrow the sky will still look blue. The grass will keep growing. The moon will be relatively the same distance that it always is from the earth. Our bodies will instinctively keep breathing while we sleep. You don't have to be racist, or sexist, liberal, conservative, progressive, independent, American, Christian, Muslim, purple, idealistic, or practical. The only thing that matters is that you keep doing the next right thing.” I just love this. So, I take a deep breath and focus on my own actions and try to just keep doing the next right thing. That is really all that we can control.

About a week after the election we were given the green light for a visit to Olya, Adam, Gideon and little miss Yael. We decided to take the RV but not the dogs (and it was nice that Sammy was home to take care of them) so I did a Google search for a campground that was close to their home. I found one that was 6.5 miles away from them called The Anthony Chabot Regional Campground, in Oakland. We had a pleasant drive up. Our GPS again misdirected us to a building (which may have been the headquarters of the regional parks or something) but we tried typing in the address a little differently and were re-directed to where we saw a sign pointing up a hill that had the name of the campground we were looking for. We started up the hill just beyond a neighborhood of homes and office buildings and once we were out of sight of the street lights, the area next to the road started to look pretty densely forested. We kept going up and up into this forest and finally came to where we needed to turn and then had to go another mile or so. It was very much off the beaten path. The campground itself didn’t have much in the way of facilities, (rustic bathrooms with 1 toilet for each gender— and showers so far away we never saw them) but if one were seeking to “get away from it all” this would be a great place to go. It was very quiet except for the late-night screams of some wild animal probably being killed by some other wild animal, the hoots of owls and the cackle of some wild turkeys. Later in the week we counted at least seven deer at different times grazing along the side of the road. And we were warned that if they were in the road, they were never in a hurry to get out of the way. We didn’t want to have to drive the RV up and down the hill for our visits and we knew it would be difficult to find parking in the neighborhood, so we decided to rent a car for the 4 days of our stay. Then there was the question of getting to the rental car place. We decided to try one of the ride-sharing services although I was doubtful that someone would be able to find us way out in the boonies where we were. We signed up for Uber and Lyft. We had a problem with the signal for Uber, but Lyft seemed to be able to find us right away. When we called for a ride, a driver was on his way within minutes. We gathered up our stuff and waited. A nice young man was there within ten minutes and we loaded into the car and headed down the hill. He was a very pleasant young man and we had a lovely conversation with him as we drove to our destination. He told us that he had lived in Oakland for many years and never knew the campground that he picked us up from existed! We were pleasantly surprised at the reasonable cost of our ride, and with the whole experience of our virgin ride and decided that Lyft was a very worthwhile service. So, we rented a car and got on our way.

There’s nothing like a newborn to brighten one’s outlook and when that newborn is your grandchild, they are that “simple gift” that can make everything come ‘round where it ought to be. Yael looks just like her mom. We fell in love with this little doll immediately and were more than happy to give mom and dad a little break from holding her. Vladi is a natural with babies and little kids. He loves them and they love him. Yael isn’t big enough to show a preference, but Gideon definitely prefers his grandpa. He played with me, too, but if given his choice, it was grandpa all the way. Vladi and I especially enjoyed taking Gideon for a walk in his stroller along the walkway next to the bay where they live and asking him what color things were, and finding things with interesting textures for him to touch and having him jabber away about everything he was seeing, even if we didn’t understand half of it. He has a fascination with all trucks and construction vehicles and he got so excited when we came upon an off-duty construction site where all the trucks were parked. He named them all off and we just nodded and agreed that he was very smart.

We visited for a couple of days, enjoyed the kids, took some pictures and ordered takeout food. It was a lovely visit.

After we got home, it was time to start thinking about Thanksgiving. Christy and I talked about the possibility of finding a place to help serve food to the homeless or some similar charitable service. Not that we tried very hard, but we didn’t have much luck finding a place. Then Christy told me that she really wanted to learn how to cook a Thanksgiving dinner and asked if I’d be willing to teach her. Now, the thing about this is that I had not cooked a Thanksgiving dinner for yeeears. Our usual celebration of Thanksgiving has been to go to our friends, the Heatons, and bring a contributory dish or two and help out with setting the table and cleaning up afterward. I don’t even remember the last time I cooked Thanksgiving dinner, although I know I have. I told Christy that I could teach her but I wasn’t exactly excited about the idea. I always get nervous cooking for people other than my family and I realized that she wanted to invite the Heatons to our house. In a twist of fate, about 10 days before the holiday, we got news that Richard (the Heaton patriarch and main holiday cook) fell off a ladder and broke his hip and femur. He was taken to a hospital that is about 2 blocks from our house. As Christy and I sat in the surgical waiting room with his family, we came up with a plan to make Thanksgiving dinner and bring it to the Heatons in the hospital or wherever Richard might be on Thanksgiving Day. And my nervousness evaporated when I realized that I could make the dinner at my comfort level and did not have to try to make it to some level of perfection that I thought was expected. It felt good to be able to take a burden off Richard’s wife and my dear friend, Cher, at such a stressful time. It’s a little tricky cooking for Richard and Cher because they have some dietary restrictions (gluten/dairy/etc.) but their daughter, Lael, was quick to volunteer to make the gluten-free stuffing (since she is doesn’t tolerate gluten either) and mashed potatoes and later, their other daughter, Jovia, who was going to drive down to join us from Riverside, volunteered to make a pomegranate jello dish that I didn’t know how to make, so I actually looked forward to taking on the challenge. As the days passed and it looked more and more likely that Richard was going to be in that same hospital on Thanksgiving Day, we had to think through the logistics of how we were going to make it happen. Cher and I looked around the room and saw that the windowsill ran all the way along one wall and it was fairly wide so I figured if I purchased some foil pans of the right width, we could probably serve most of the food from there. Then we had to figure out how to fit chairs for 8 people in the room along with the bed and all the medical equipment and leave enough room for the nurses to be able to do their job. We ended up putting 4 chairs on one side of the bed and 4 on the other and when nurses came in, we just shifted around as needed. All the food came out great and we had it spread out on the windowsill, on the sink and wherever there was a flat surface that would hold it. For some reason, we didn’t think to take pictures of how it all came together, but it was pretty awesome how it did. Although the circumstances weren’t great that created the necessity to do something different, it was a great adventure to figure out how to continue our tradition.

This is a picture of Richard and Cher and their 3 daughters. Shana, on the left was not with us on Thanksgiving but she joined us from Portland through face time on the phone. A friend of theirs was able to provide a plane ticket for her to come down and see her dad a few days after Thanksgiving.


In early December, Vladi and I received the new license plate we had ordered for the RV.

Besides the obvious meaning, we have our initials in there, including Z for Zaretsky plus the R and Z can stand for Roscoe and Zuli. We were quite pleased with ourselves. We also got our first picture of the pups with Santa when we went to a big sale at our favorite pet store.

My dear friend, Cathy, whose career has paralleled mine, arranged a gathering of a group of people we have both worked with over our 35 years, at a local Mexican restaurant in the interest of both socializing and doing something for a good cause for the holidays. We chose a charity called Janet’s stockings that was founded in the name of another employee of the company we worked for who had recently been a fatal victim of domestic violence. We proffered a good number of donations and we had a wonderful time seeing people we hadn’t seen in many years. Cathy is the type of person that keeps in touch with everyone and can readily gather a group together with a few text messages. It was really fun and I hope we do it again.

In the interest of continuing to put the RV to good use, Vladi and I scheduled another 5-day trip in mid-December. We wanted to use one of the campgrounds we had purchased a membership for so we chose one near Palm Springs in a place called Desert Hot Springs. The info in the membership catalogue described it in glowing terms. It said there were 2 pools (heated because they were fed by the hot springs), 2 jacuzzis, a clubhouse with pool tables, a dog park, activities, and a meal service. We thought it sounded great. We planned to be there from a Monday to a Friday. So, we packed up the dogs and set out on the 5-hour drive. We found the place without too much difficulty but when we arrived they said they didn’t have a record of our reservation. The place was nowhere near full so it wasn’t a problem but it was the first indication of other problems that would soon occur. We were told to find a spot we liked and come back to tell them where we were. We settled in one spot and got set up only to realize that we were about 5 campsites away from an active construction zone. One of the 2 pool/spa/clubhouse areas was being completely gutted and re-done. We found out later that the campground had changed hands within a couple of weeks of our arrival and the new owners were doing all kinds of maintenance and upgrades. As a result, the dog park was closed and the pool tables were inaccessible. We moved from that campsite to one that was closer to the other pool and that was much quieter.

We scoped out a couple of areas where we could let the dogs run off-leash and we visited the pool and spa every day.

We found a little “game room” that offered books and puzzles and board games and we spent a couple of pleasant afternoons working on puzzles, and because no one else was in the room when we got there the dogs slept on the floor next to us. We passed a very pleasant week until Thursday night when the wind picked up. We had gone to have dinner in the clubhouse and Vladi decided to leave the awning open, even though I suggested that it might not be a good idea. When we got back to the RV an hour later, the awning arms were sticking out with no awning attached.

Vladi felt terrible for not listening to me, but I realized that I didn’t voice my concern strongly enough. The next morning, we asked around about what to do and found out about a mobile service that could fix it for us. When we called, the guy was booked up through the weekend but we scheduled an appt. on Monday. We enjoyed a few more days at the campground and when the guy came on Monday, he said that the damage wasn’t too bad. The awning arms had to be replaced, but the motor and the awning were intact. It ended up costing us about $1000 but it was a lesson we won’t forget!

When we got home, it was time to start thinking about a plan for Christmas. This year the first night of Hanukah was also Christmas Eve, a rare occurrence and probably the only time it will happen in our lifetime. Christy wanted to celebrate the convergence of holidays and honor Vladi and Sammy’s Jewish heritage so she suggested that we prepare a traditional Hanukah meal. I told her that I had no idea what that would be and Vladi and Sammy weren’t much help so Christy decided to text Olya for suggestions. Olya sent her recipes for matzo ball soup,

latkes,

and kugel.

She and I had a good time cooking together and the meal came out pretty well. The flavorful and comforting matzo ball soup was very similar to another of my favorites, chicken and dumplings, and the latkes were easy and delicious potato pancakes. The kugel was a little bland and not something we would typically think of as a dessert. It was sort of a noodle pudding. I probably will not make that particular recipe again, but we still marked the meal as a success. And lighting the candles on Vladi’s beautiful menorah was fun, too.

Our usual Christmas tradition involves a breakfast of eggs benedict with the Heaton family (the same family we usually have Thanksgiving with). Because of Richard’s injury, we decided to try something a little different, because, again, he has been the main cook of this feast. Along with the eggs benedict, there has usually been a mountain of bacon, another mountain of potatoes and nothing much in the way of fruits or vegetables. (although we introduced tomatoes and avocados into the eggs benedict fairly recently.) I offered to cook the breakfast if I could do something a little different. I had found a recipe for and open-faced ham and egg breakfast sandwich (that incorporates mixed baby greens with a light balsamic dressing) earlier this year that I’ve been making for my family pretty regularly.

Because I feel I’ve mastered it and everyone I make it for likes it, I asked if I could make it for Christmas. I offered to make some hollandaise to go with it so that it would not even be too far off from our usual meal. We decided to make some bacon, although not the usual mountain, and in place of potatoes, we decided to get some jelly donuts—in honor of Hanukah.

So, I don’t know how successful we were in healthying up our meal, but I was happy that I felt confident to be able to prepare it. As usual, the best part of it all was talking and laughing and enjoying each other’s company. We also got introduced to a new game by Tom and Lael. It’s called “Escape Room” and it’s usually set up somewhere in an actual room that you have to escape. But they have a board game version of it and we gave it a try. I did not do very well at my first exposure to it but it is a very interesting game in which you have to figure out clues in a certain amount of time. I’d like to give it another try sometime but for now, I’ll stick to playing Settlers of Catan. So that was our year, and I have to say, a very good one at that!