6-17-17 Sat.

The weather has finally started to warm up like summer. I guess I would say I like the heat better than the cold, how about you?

Next Saturday I'll have a picture of those little plants out front they are greening up so nicely I am pleasantly surprised. Pretty much everything is responding really well to the miracle grow plant food.

Yesterday, Friday morning, we finally got some wave action. It's been 11 days before that that I posted a video because the waves of been so poor. My friend Larry is coming over in about 35 minutes and were to head down to the beach and videos some more this morning.

I had a really nice surprise yesterday morning while we were videoing on the cliffs overlooking the ocean in Del Mar. some friends of mine that I surfed with for a number of years but I've not seen them for almost 2 years came over to say hi and I'm including a picture I took with my drone.

They all go to Rancho Bernardo community church. They're all very nice. The young man in the blue T-shirt is the pastor. I've been thinking about these guys for some time because I haven't seen them.

A gentlemen that lives in the Sam Clemente area came down and I met with him at Bob's house yesterday and he bought one of the surfboards I'm selling. It's the standup surfboard 10'6" long and 32 inches wide.

Those are pretty much the highlights of the week. I hope everyone is doing well.

Maranatha,
Frank

6-10-17 Sat.

I had a busy week last week. It was time to put all my surfboards up for sale. My friend Bob volunteered his place to store the boards and show them to buyers. Bob, Larry and I cleaned the wax off the deck and got them ready. Here is a picture of them:

The above board white with the orange stripe was sold yesterday, it is brand new. You might be asking yourself how do you end up with so many surfboards? Well the First one is a Hansen surfboard, I bought that one. I bought the WaveJet surfboard when they first went on sale in Dec. of 2012. I was their very first customer and made friends of all the people that worked there.
When the company went out of business, they gave me four surfboards. And now it's time to liquidate the entire stock.

This is the plant that was almost dead, but its doing really well. As you look at the picture notice how the leaves are all facing the light. Well after I took the picture I turned the plant 90 degrees to see if over time the plant will slowly turn toward the light again. I will let you know.

 

The picture below was taken two years ago on our last trip to Hawaii. It is on of the last pictures I have of Harriet.

I hope you have a great weekend, Maranatha!

Frank

6-3-17 Sat.

I went through my old work computer looking for some new pictures.  The next pictures are of our grandson Samuel. Yesterday was his 11th birthday. I took Samuel and his younger brother Ethan to see the movie that just came out called "Captain Underpants". It's a kids movie that's rated PG. It's always fun to take them and see them laugh and giggle.

I would guess that Samuel is about 1 years old so the picture would been taken in 2007. In the first picture little Samuel looks a little cross eyed,  it's the only picture or time I ever notice this, because he's totally a normal kid. And of course my beautiful wife.

This picture is Samuel falling asleep in my lap. What a beautiful boy!

And this pictures taken a couple years later of Samuel.

I thought I'd include a couple more pictures of my little plants that are growing. Carolyn suggested that I name the plants. So I've started working on that.

The two plants on the left are doing much better since I have fed them and they produce some flowers. The plant on the right, his name is Fred, I think he has leprosy. Here's a closer picture.  I'm hoping that with the feeding it will green up and lose all the dead leaves.

The next picture is of the plant next to Fred. This plan does not have a name yet, I think I need an epiphany.

Overall it is going pretty good. That one plant that is pretty much Brown, I don't think it's going to make it. So I'm not sure if I'm going to paint it or put a new plant there.

I know that you're probably thinking I'm kidding about painting it. If you recall about six years ago when we had a drought and they restricted watering the lawn's. The front lawn at my father's house pretty much died out and I looked up on Amazon they have a green paint for coloring your lawn. I purchased it and applied it a couple of times during that summer. It's not the same as the real thing but it looks pretty nice. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures or I'd share them with you.

That's about it for this week I hope everyone has a great weekend and Maranatha!

Frank

5-27-17 Sat.

It looks like the Miracle Grow is working. It's been about two weeks since I've fed the plants and I could definitely see the one that was in the worst condition (not the one that's almost dead) has deeper darker greens in it that it has had for a long time.

The first picture is the one that included in last week's blog. The next picture I just took a few minutes ago. You can definitely tell it's greener. So, I guess on Monday I'm going to give all the plants another dose of the Miracle Grow. Isn't it exciting to watch your plants grow? Just kidding. The only reason I'm doing this is because they were Harriet's plants. Yes I do enjoy seeing beautiful things, as long as they are self-sustaining and I don't have to babysit them.

 The surf has been pretty poor this past week it's really kind of a bummer. Larry and I went out there a couple of times earlier this week and did not even get our equipment out because the waves were not worthy of people going out to surf. It's not just size, it's form and water conditions & wind. But, I received an email from my friend David and he said that the waves were really fun this morning even though they are very small. So, Larry and I will head out there by 5:30 AM and start shooting for a couple hours.

This is Memorial Day weekend. As we are planning our activities let us not forget the reason for Memorial Day. Men and women have laid down their lives so that we might live in freedom. I thank God for all of them.

I hope you have a fantastic weekend.

Maranatha,
Frank

 

5-20-17 Sat.

Today we're going to have a gardening blog. No, I'm not going to give you advice on gardening. If you've been following this blog for any period of time you know that I am "challenged" when it comes to gardening. So I'm going to show you some pictures and then ask for your advice.

I wrote in last week's blog about adding Miracle Grow to the plants. The first three pictures are all taken of the same identical plants, but as you can see the third picture, well we'll just say it's not doing really good. Or it's completely dead. A couple of weeks ago it still had green on it when I fed it and I've watered all these plans equally. The question I have is can we resurrect that third plant or should I just get some green paint and paint it?

If you would please write your answer in the comment section below that would help me out quite a bit and maybe help others too. I need to mention that these plants get a lot of afternoon sun. The same as the next two plants.

The next two plants are on either side of the steps going up to my home. For some reason, I can never get these to be perfectly green. The one on the left side which is in the second picture has always been more sickly than the one on the right side of the steps. I'm hoping that my feeding them the Miracle Grow will help. The instructions say that you can use this product every two weeks, which I will do. I'm sure it takes a period of time for the food to go up the root system. That reminds me of something. These two little plants in the last couple of pictures is it imperative that the roots are always covered with dirt? Is that sort of a rule of thumb?

Okay, now you have your work cut out for you if you know anything about gardening, please let me know what I need to do.

I hope you have a great weekend and Maranatha!

Frank

5-13-17- Sat.

Good morning everyone! It's about 3:45 AM on Saturday morning. My friend Larry and I are going to head down to the beach and check out the waves this morning. Hopefully the ocean has calmed down and the swell has straightened out so the surf will be good.

This past week was uneventful. I guess in many ways that's a good thing. Unfortunately we've not been able to go out and do a whole lot of videoing of our friends surfing because of the weather.

Our son Daniel got a dog a few months ago and he sent me a very short seven second video clip of his dog. He'd trained his dog to do something and when I saw the video it made me laugh. So I made it into a YouTube which is a total of 12 seconds long. If you are in need of a little laugh I'm including the link.

https://youtu.be/mQkr_2fLxxc

This afternoon we have a get together planned at my good friend Dave and Tracy's home in Lakeside. It will be really nice to see our friends.

You know I saw something on television which made me think. (What a concept). It was a commercial and a little boy was going to the refrigerator and he opened it up because he was looking for something to eat and all there was inside the refrigerator was bottles of water. And the announcer said is that all your feeding your plants is water? I realize that I've not fed Harriet's plants anything but water for the past two years. So I got some of that Miracle Grow plant food and started adding that to the water. It will be interesting to see if my couple of little plans that I'm having difficulty green up, will actually flourish. I will let you know.

You know there was a lot of things that Harriet did and I took for granted. But now those things are for me to do. It seems I can never keep up with all of her hard work. She had amazing organization skills and discipline. Whereas I am relatively disciplined but, sorely lacking in organization skills. So it always seems like I'm behind trying to catch up.

I hope you have a great weekend and a good week.

Maranatha,
Frank
 This picture was taken at Turtle Bay on the North Shore of Oahu

5-6-17 Sat.

Good morning everybody! Do you know what the little birdie told me? Nothing! But that's okay because I have pictures. I've mentioned to you in the past that it's hard sometimes to come up with ideas for this blog. When life settles into a routine, well it's just difficult to think of things that might be interesting.

So I want to tell you a true story. When we were growing up, my father's business was in the little shop behind our house, it was a single car garage and we had moved to this house in 1954. In 1959 my father added it to car garage directly behind the single car garage. Another two-car garage size building was added behind these other two a few years later.

There used to be a bluebird that would come by and I'm not sure exactly how this occurred but my dad started feeding it peanuts that are still in the shell. The bird would take the peanut and fly somewhere into the yard and hide the peanut in the grass or some other area. Then he would immediately fly back for more peanuts. The bird was probably thinking, "I Found the Mother Load!" This went on for quite some time not just weeks but months. Somewhere along the road, the bird lost one of its legs. He would still come and get peanuts but he only had one leg. Then, he stopped coming. We can only speculate on what happened.

Fast-forward a number of years and this would be in the late 80s early 90s, my dad allowed me to do my upholstering business in the first two-car garage behind his little shop. Then a different bluebird started coming around. Both to his place and to mine. We are both feeding him peanuts. The reason we know this is a different bird is because he had two legs.

I'm going to include some pictures which I thought you would like to see. In the first picture, I'm standing in the doorway of my little shop looking out toward the yard. I'm holding the peanut in my left hand and taking a picture with my right hand, so it's a little blurry.

This next picture was taken inside my shop. You can see the sewing machine in the background.

You see I kept moving the peanuts further and further into my shop and the bird would fly inside because he knew he would get a reward. Then we would give the little bird a hard time and make them work for it. I would hold the peanut tight in my fingers and he would try and take it out but I wouldn't let him. So then he would peck at my fingers and try and get it loose. Very cute. The next picture is the bird trying to get the peanut out of my hand.

I never knew what happened to this bird because it to stop coming after a while.

That's it for today. I hope that you have a great weekend!

Maranatha,
Frank