College Rose

Spotted this rose on the way out of the administration building at the Riverside campus this afternoon. It's not a perfect rose, but it certainly is a favorite color.

Today was full, but certainly a change of pace. Thankfully Friday meetings are rare, but today the English faculty at the campus where I teach had agreed to meet. We hadn't met for a long time because our department meetings include the faculty from speech, reading, ESL, library, and I think that's it. So focusing on just the English courses and programs is long overdue. From 9:30 to 11:00 was entirely too short of a meeting to get much accomplished, plus the first 45-minutes of our meeting consisted of lots of "griping" about a little bit of everything. So once everyone had had an opportunity to rant, we settled into the agenda of "let's get something done." Mostly we agreed to meet again in two weeks, so the Friday right before spring break (ugh!) we'll meet in a restaurant for breakfast and more conversation. With this morning's meeting concluded, I headed home to meet Mr. Fun so we could both go to the next meeting in Riverside.

We ate lunch, put the pups in their day crates (which is different than their night houses), hopped in the car and headed east toward the campus in Riverside because I had signed-up for a retirement workshop. I'm pretty sure I'll work for another five years, but I was curious to hear the planning counselor from CalSTRS explain the finer points of approaching retirement. I took Mr. Fun along because I was sure that this would be a moment when two listeners would be better than one. My great desire would be for the two of us to both arrive at retirement at the same moment. I think that might be possible. It was a two hour workshop and I was more than ready to exit when the meeting concluded. Stepping out of the building brought me face-to-face with this lovely rose. I thought it was a fine foreshadowing of retirement.

Often when I exit the Riverside campus, I stop at Trader's Joes and we did today. It's a specialty retail grocery store with lots of organic foods. Then we headed for home. The cheering team of three pooches greeted us with lots of commotion -- barking, whining, and plenty of jumping as we hurried them right outside to the backyard for the "dance and prance" routine that always causes me to laugh and giggle and shake off any residue of stress.

Tomorrow we'll attend the 80th birthday party of our friend, Patricia. One-hundred and fifty people will be at the luncheon celebration. She has been like a mom to both of us and we've enjoyed her friendship for 25+ years. We've been asked to read a brief biography of her life during the celebration, so this evening we've done some revising and editing on her story and practiced reading it together.

Now it's late and time to fluff my pillow. Rain is on the way.
Good night from Southern California.
Rosie (& Mr. Fun, Chloe, Mitzi, and Max), aka Carol