Sunday, January 10, 2021

Sunday, January 10, 2021

Tonight's picture was taken in December of 2007. That evening we took Mattie to Peter's office holiday party. The husband of one of the founder's of the company looked just like Santa. Mattie got a kick out of this fellow and as you can see I snapped a photo of them together. Mattie had a great time at the party and even got to pick a gift from the company's grab bag! I will never forget the gift as it was a light up ceramic gingerbread house. 

Quote of the day: Today's coronavirus update from Johns Hopkins.

• Number of people diagnosed with the virus: 22,300,696
• Number of people who died from the virus: 373,669

Given yesterday evening's intruder on the property, I went to investigate the area this morning. I took this photo from my parent's front door. You will notice straight ahead a wooden gate door opened by the driveway. We installed a lock on that gate door.

When you open the wooden door, you will begin to see city of Los Angeles property and the LA River. It isn't like a typical river that we think of. Instead, the LA River looks like a catch basin for rain water. So most of the time it is dry, expect during rain storms, and then it can be raging. 

Once you walk through the gate, you can see big buildings across the way. This is NBC and Universal. So across from the LA River, there is a lot of security 24 by 7. 

After walking through the gate, if you make a left turn, you see this. This is where I found the intruder trying to scale the wall. 

The owner of my parent's house says no one ever comes back there! That this was an isolated incident. WRONG! This morning, I found graffiti on the wall to the right of the tree (see it in purple) and beer bottles and other garbage which I picked up and disposed of. 

If you walk through the gate and turn right, this is what you see. 

After turning right, I kept walking and found this tall metal gate open. So it would be easy to walk along the river and land up at my parent's house. Keep in mind that this is all parallel to my parent's driveway. 

Needless to say, I closed the gate and am working on getting a lock for this gate. There is barbed wire on top of the fence and gate, so I think if the gate is locked, that would be an extra layer of protection. 

The area where my parent's live is filled with giant sycamore trees.  These are very messy trees, constantly dropping leaves! But last night these leaves signaled to me that someone was there. As you walk on them, they make a loud crunching sound. 

I had a request today for beef stew. A very labor intensive recipe, and not a great match for my busy day. 

The same caregiver who told me to clean out the inside of trash cans last week, started on me about the windows. It is true the windows were a mess and the garden has many spiders who spin webs all over the place outside. So today, I took it upon myself to clean the windows. I know it is hard to tell from this photo, but the windows are now crystal clean. 

The windows in the kitchen are now clean too. It is truly laughable that I added this to my already very full list of things to do!