Back in Business

Good morning, my friends. I'm happy to say we've banished One Drive from the laptop for the second time. Strangely, there was, for a while, a folder marked "One Drive." There was nothing in it, and anything related to One Drive had been disabled. Still, if we deleted the folder, it would reappear within just a few seconds. Kinda made us wonder why Microsoft wants in tentacles in everything we do. Weird. But you’ll note that was all in the past tense. Mike spent some time watching a video that told him how to delete it completely, and it’s gone. For good. He could not have accomplished any of this without the assistance of his trusty cat, Sadie. She watched him like a hawk, making sure he didn’t F anything up.

In conclusion, you can rest easy knowing I've turned off all automatic updates. We won't be fooled again. Also, thank you to those of you who sent helpful links and comments. They were all taken under advisement by the resident engineer.

Okay, so a new day. Our friend is out of the hospital, but not feeling up to visitors just yet. We decided to spend our day visiting a winery I'd read about, The Vitagliano Vineyards. The "Only in California" newsletter described this winery thus: "[W]e think this Tuscan-like vineyard with a serene lakeside setting is pure magic." Well...if there's magic, then lead on!

So we headed north on I-15. We could see snow in the San Bernardino mountains in the distance.

Heading east on Rancho California Blvd., we crossed under this arch announcing we were entering Temecula's Wine Country.

I've mentioned before that the explosive growth in this area in the past 50 years since we married and left the area has been remarkable. Our memories of Temecula have it as a mere wide spot in the road. In a previous post, I wrote about the growth. The history of the place borders on the comical. You can read more about it at this post from 2024. 

It was a little over a half-hour drive to reach our final destination. Before leaving, we'd checked and found out they had a "bistro" here. The menu looked reasonable, and so we'd planned to have lunch here as well.

Parking at an upper level, we entered through these trellises.

The steps were lined with roses.

At the bottom were two lovely lakes. To our left, it looked like this. 

Turning more to the left, those are the steps we just descended, and there were also grapevines there. The walkways and roadways were all paved with those cobblestones.

Planter boxes lined all the walkways, filled with cyclamen, geraniums, and pansies. Very pretty.

Walking to the far side of the same lake, it looked like this:

Behind me was a structure with a small waterfall.

Walking on to the second lake, we approached this statue and more flowers.

Look at all this color:

You can book this place for a wedding, and wouldn't this be lovely? (Expensive too, I bet.)

I love these happy little daisies.

Here's some lantana.

As we walked along, we met up with a nice woman who informed us the bistro was closed on Tuesdays. Bummer! Oh well. We found another place we could get lunch just down the road a couple of miles. Many of the wineries in the area serve lunch, brunch, breakfast, and other light meals. There are also beautiful hotels and spas. As we left, I snapped one more picture of the roses.

And this...my phone tells me this is Leadwort.

Okay, so we ended up here at the Ponte Winery.

Seated at our table, we could gaze out at this courtyard. Lovely. The weather was perfect.

We got a chuckle out of these Angry Wife wines. You could have either a white or a red.

We each ordered a glass of the Petite Sirah. Mike had just taken a sip of his when I snapped this picture.

The service and the food here were excellent. It might have ended up for the better that the other place was closed. They brought us some homemade bread and "scallion oil" right away. The scallion oil was delicious. They had it for sale in the gift shop, and we bought a bottle. Included was the recipe for that bread. Also, I love it when there are fresh flowers on the table.

I ordered the Mediterranean Sandwich at the bottom of the menu. It was served with sweet potato fries (my favorite). Sheesh...a lot of food, and it was delicious.

Mike ordered the beef sandwich at the top of the menu. His was served with a pasta salad. Neither of us could finish our sandwiches. We each brought half home with us and had them for dinner.

We visited the gift shop before heading back. Along the way we passed by this pretty potted tree. My phone tells me this is Rose of Sharon.

On our way back, I was able to capture the roof of this building in a shopping center to our right. Don't you think this roof was designed by a quilter?

And there you go...that was our day. You can file this under the heading of "Something to Do."

There isn’t much on today’s agenda. I need to do some laundry. If our friend is up to seeing visitors today, we’ll head over to their place. Mike borrowed a vice from them, and we need to return that as well. We’ll most likely get out and walk around the park again, but mainly, it’s just going to be a quiet day. Maybe I’ll get out the sewing machine. We’ll just have to wait and see what the day has in store for us.

Technical Difficulties

Good evening, my friends. We had an easy-going day today. We visited the Quilter's Cottage in Fallbrook, California. I was on the hunt for a backing fabric for the Shop Hop 4.0 quilt...this one:

I didn't find any fabric I liked. That's okay...I'll find something somewhere else. There will be more quilt shops down the road. From there, we walked in a nearby "preserve." We walked most of the trails in the Los Jilgueros Preserve. You can read about it at that link. While there, I took around 35 pictures. Sadly, when I uploaded them to my laptop, they went...somewhere...who knows where. Even Mike, the engineer, was unable to find them again. I saw them on the screen, and then they disappeared. We're at a loss. So...I regret that I have no pictures from our hike to show you. 

As a background, the computer automatically updated a few days ago, and we ended up with a "One Drive" app that seems to have decided it can do whatever it wants on the laptop. Mike spent some time this morning undoing everything it had done. Now, in our effort to find the pictures again, we added the One Drive app back to the laptop, and it went back to doing its dirty work. He'll have to undo all of that again, but somehow the pictures have disappeared, and we are unable to retrieve them. 

At this point, I'll just avoid deleting the pictures from the camera when I upload them until we're certain we can find them on the laptop. I won't lose any pictures that way, but we're still trying to figure out how to avoid this problem with One Drive. With that going on, I might take a couple of days off from blogging until we can get these technical issues set right. 

Sorry for the interruption in our conversation. I'll be back in a day or two.

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park

Good morning, my friends. We had such a fun day yesterday. As usual, I took way too many pictures and so I have a lot to tell you. We haven't got a minute to lose, so fill up that cup with whatever your drinking, and let's get started.

Along our way, we stopped at our favorite farm stand and scored some Hass avocados. On the right are limes. They're yellow because they've been allowed to ripen on the tree.

It was a beautiful day with good air quality. There were only a few clouds in the sky, but we just crossed them out.

It's a drive out there from where we are, but very pretty. We passed through huge orange groves.

Also, lots of avocado groves.

This is Lake Henshaw. More often than not, Lake Henshaw is a dry lake bed. You know there's been lots of rain when you find water here.

Looking to the right, you can see where the high water mark is. Even though there's water, it is at a drastically lower level than it has been at other times.

Of course, we saw plenty of this granitic rock.

We pulled out at a viewpoint at the top of the mountain. You can see Borrego Springs, California, off in the distance. The body of water way out there is the Salton Sea.

This plaque was posted at the viewpoint.

Driving on, we saw less rock, and more color...like that we see in Death Valley.

Eventually, we passed into Borrego Springs. The state park is adjacent to the town.

Turning left, we found ourselves at the visitor center.

Here's a little blurb about the park.

The visitor center was an interesting structure. We've visited this park at least two times before, but never the visitor center. It was constructed by digging out the hillside and tucking it into the landscape, then covering it over again.

We could also walk on top of the structure. The benches you see there have tiles around the edges with the names of donors.

This plaque was located there.

Inside, I was on the hunt for a refrigerator magnet. We also thought this was interesting. They poured molten lead into an ant hole to see what it looked like underground. (I don't imagine the ants appreciated this.)

We were wanting to hike "The Slot." I'd learned about it from this newsletter. Just a couple of corrections to that newsletter. First, the elevation change is more like 300 feet, making it far more strenuous than indicated. Second, it was two miles to walk the entire loop. And, third, the day-use fee was for the park. The hike is located inside the park, and so yes, there is a day use fee. For us, it was $9. The newsletter also goes on at some length about how difficult it is to find the trailhead. We were given this map at the visitor center, and we found it with ease.

There was a nature trail outside, and we walked around the loop there before heading to The Slot. This next image is blooming rabbit brush.

This ocotillo was budding out, but not in bloom just yet.

Here are a couple of images I've taken at other times of an ocotillo in bloom.

This is cuparosa.

I'm not sure about these next little cuties. They were tiny...smaller than a dime.

This is phacelia.

We marveled at the fronds on these palm trees. At their feet was a small marshy area where pupfish can be seen. We couldn't find any yesterday.

Okay, and then we drove through Borrego Springs on our way to our hike. Along the way, we saw these giant metal sculptures, placed at random along the way. This first one is an eagle.

This roadrunner and rattlesnake are the newest installations. That woman was kind enough to provide scale.

After some 17 miles, we came to the turn-off for our hike. It was about two miles of dirt road.

Okay, everybody ready? Have you securely tied your hiking boots?

Okay, and this was great fun. Look at these narrow passages.

In this next image, I was standing with my back literally against the wall.

Here, there was a rock slide. If we were to continue on, we had to climb over that big boulder.

On the other side, it was about a four-foot drop to the ground below. I ended up sitting on my butt and sort of sliding down.

Continuing on...

Good thing I lost some weight several years ago.

Check out that leaning tower above Mike.

This wedged rock put us in mind of Aron Ralston. He was the hiker who got pinned when a rock rolled over his hand. After three days, he had to cut off his own hand in order to escape.

There was good signage on the trail. At some places, signs showed the trail with another sign in the distance telling us it was "not a trail."

Our shadow selves were misbehaved as usual. I'll show you in a minute what I'm talking about. They did enjoy the sunshine, though.

Eventually, we left the slot, and then continued along the road back to the parking lot.

The geology of the area was interesting. Notice the bands of color on the hillside in the image below.

Now here's where we take issue with the author of the article I mentioned earlier. The slot passages had taken us down, down, and down. It's a wash, right? And it's not easy to tell from the image below, but we now had to walk up, up, up this nearly-vertical slope.

We were huffing and puffing by the time we reached the top. The views were pretty from there. Notice the diagonal "lift" of the landscape in the image below.

How about these "Swiss cheese" rocks.

In the image below, we could see where we'd come from.

And in the image below, you can see where the trail left the slot. And here's what I'm talking about. See my shadow self in the lower right-hand corner? I told her not to go out there. Did she listen? Of course not. I told her she'd better get a move on because we were approaching the truck. If she wasn't with us when we drove away, we were going to leave her behind.

And, yeah...there's our truck. A sight for sore eyes by this time.

Thankfully, I found a refrigerator magnet, but no shot glass. Oh well. Not every day can be perfect, but this one came pretty close. 

Today, we're kind of in wait-and-see mode. One way or another, we're going to head over to the coast to do some hiking in Torrey Pines State Park. We can also hike the La Jolla Coast Trail. We're in wait-and-see mode because we're waiting to see if our friend will be discharged from the hospital today. If she's feeling up to it, we'd like to visit her. If she's home, we can visit her there. We also need to return a tool Mike borrowed from her husband when he repaired the slide.

So there you go. I've probably yammered on long enough now. I'll leave you to your day, and I'll get on with mine...whatever it may hold.