24 July: Friday

La Quinta, California: The days are beginning to seem the same. Go to the house. Unpack something. Organize something. I am going to bed so early that I am waking too early - thus anxious to get to work. Today we had a bit of a reprieve. No deliveries. No service people servicing something. We only had one task on the schedule - go to the farm to fetch our CSA box, anytime between 10a-3p. Instead of hanging around waiting for our CSA box to be delivered, we went with a different service (same farm that provides much of the food in the CV Harvest Box) that allows us to go the farm to get our food. The farms isn't too far from us, in Coachella, and we weren't there two minutes. DT popped the trunk, the box went in, and we drove off.

So much food this week from Temalpahk Farm. Our box included avocados, mango, cherry tomatoes, onions, potatoes, eggplants, jalapeno and shishito peppers, lettuce/salad mix, New Girl tomatoes, edible flowers, basil, dates (everything in the Coachella Valley contains dates), a bouquet of zinnias, a half-gallon of milk, and a dozen eggs - all organic... and - randomly - a purple kerchief!

So much delicious food! (And we already had so many tomatoes... but tomatoes are our most-consumed food, so probably a good thing).

This week, we could also opt for a special add-on from Popping Off Pies - a  (pre-pandemic) traveling pizza oven company. The add-on was for four personal pizzas, but (after cooking two personal pizzas tonight, realize we can only eat one personal pizza between us), so this will be quite a good bargain! Yes, I still had to "cook" (technically), but little prep, so it was nearly like having a night off. Just kidding. You all know I made a salad... using the little tomatoes Popping Off Pies added to the pizza kit with tossed greens. (BTW: this pizza kit usually comes with pepperoni.)

After organizing (washing, sanitizing) the vegetables, we headed over to our new house to continue nesting.

TA-DA! My spices are organized, so I am beginning to feel settled. (For someone who was a typesetter/newspaper production for years, I have a serious problem with "centering" these days. At least my handwriting is legible.

My goal today was to organize the cabinets that will hold my office supplies and cameras. Everything is stored in labeled boxes... which, of course, OCD much, had to be re-labeled so all the labels matched with the same font. (See previous-life-as-a-typesetter comment above.) This project was finished before 2p. Easy to do when you now own only the bare necessities.

DT is at a stand-still in his office organization, as he is still waiting for one piece of furniture for his den. Dave began hanging "art" in our house. The first thing Dave attached to a wall in our new house was a poster of my boyfriend...

Backstory: In 1990, Dave's parents came to visit us in Portland, and we all (Lisa would have been 9) drove up to Seattle to see a Russian art exhibit, Moscow: Treasures and Traditions. At one point on the tour, exhibit visitors come around a corner and see this:

Except not this teeny framed poster, but a huge painting of this gorgeous and gorgeously-appealing and most interesting-seeming man, the writer Leonid Andreyev, painted by Ilya E. Repin in 1904. The painting just knocks your socks off, and kudos to the curators for placing this intriguing face in such an intriguing space.

Before we left the exhibit, DT went into the gift shop and purchased a poster of this painting for me, had it framed, and since 1990, I have been ironing with Mr. Andreyev. Yep. We put it in the lower laundry in our house in Portland. 

And now Leonid is hanging in our laundry room (sadly, our new house has but one laundry room) in La Quinta.

And the master bed is ready! Not only do we have a Chinese bed, a Filipino cabinet, and a Thai elephant chair in the room, we now have an Indonesian ikat quilt. (Please ignore the ugly window coverings - they are coming down as soon as the white shutters are installed... September-ish???)

Arriving back to the Motorcoach Country Club, it was super simple to prep the pizzas: let the dough warm to room temperatures (two were used tonight; two were frozen for later), brush-on the sauce, sprinkle the cheese and bake.

Garnish with the provided fresh basil. Eat.

Tomorrow? More of the same... but maybe a little later. We are having the bus washed in the morning.

Until my next update, I remain, your Russian correspondent.