Sunrise

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Today’s challenge is to take a picture from your front door. Luckily for us, our front door has an amazing view.  Especially at sunrise and sunset.  Our front door face southwest to overlook the Cajon Pass and the San Gabriel Mountain range which host Mountain High ski resort and Angeles Crest Scenic Byway (Hwy 2).  This highway is a haven for motorcycle riders with lots of twisting mountain roads, sweeping curves and switchbacks. After the ride, then you can rest at Newcomb’s Ranch which serves great food, weekend bbq and lots of classic and new bikes to view in the lot. A very congenial atmosphere and beyond biker-friendly. Our favorite road to travel during the summer.

Today is day 23 of the Brave, Bold, Blogger Challenge (BBBC) 2017 hosted by Kathy at ToadMama.com

Purple

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When I bought my first motorcycle, it was a 1991 Yamaha TW200 Trailway. The color scheme for that year as I call it “Barbie Purple”. Russ suggested I come up with a name for my bike. I decided to come up with a name based the color since I didn’t think I would be changing the look anytime soon. When I first started looking into name of characters that were purple. Upon research, I could only find a handful of characters that were purple; Barney (oh heck no!), Cheshire Cat (a tongue twister for me), Grimace (eh?), and the Purple People Eater (that is the one I decided on). So that became my handle which is kind of long winded. Most people either call me Purple or PPE for short.
Which hence why I choose the color Purple for our today’s blogger challenge.

Original version of Purple

Purple playing peek-a-boo

Purple trying to play hide-n-seek

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Purple with wildflower

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Purple with Lizrdbrth

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Purple sunset over Cajon Pass

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Purple Gears Gas Tank

Life after Grief…

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A friend of mine, who is also a widower, shared my blog post about “A Widow’s Romantic Predicament” and received several comments asking if “he has moved on”. I replied that we really don’t move on, we just learn how to carry on with their memories in our heart.

Sadly, until you have loss a loved one, there is a lot of misinformation about grief. The biggest one for me, is that you’re not just mourning for the loss of a loved one but you’re also mourning the loss of who you were with the loved one. You lose the life that was created together. You lose half of who you were all of those years. You also lose all of the hopes and dreams you had for and with your loved one.

As you try to learn how to carry on with those memories, your perceptions of the world around you changes. Everything you once believed in also changes. Your belief in God, your security in the world, and your expectations about life being predictable and fair is no longer the same.

However, the world around you still evolves as it used to. When families and friends think its time that you move on or thinks that you already have, assumed that everything goes on like it was before the loved one has passed. The reality is that nothing is the same as it was before. What was important before, no longer is. Other things in life becomes more important. A lot of times, it will seems like its a “mid life crisis” type of behavior to the friends and families. To us, we learned that life is precious and should not be taken for granted.

As my friend, Jeff wrote in a poem, “I am driven by death to live”

Today is day 21 of the Brave, Bold, Blogger Challenge (BBBC) 2017 hosted by Kathy at ToadMama.com

Old Woman Springs Rd. (Hwy 247)

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One of my favorite back roads in the high desert is Highway 247, also known as Old Woman Springs Road, runs between Apple Valley and Yucca Valley. It’s the road that I travel a lot when I go visit my friends in Desert Hot Springs. In between, it host a lot of local history which I have written previously. Today, I will share how the road got it’s name as Old Woman Springs Road.


In 1850’s, a surveyor, Colonel Henry Washington, who was the nephew of our first president George Washington was hired by the government to survey the West. As the story goes, when he passed through conducting his survey, there were several elderly Native American women living at the spring, thus he named it Old Woman Springs. It is said the Indians used to leave them behind at while the young ones went into the mountains after pinion nuts.


Then in the early 1900’s, the pioneer came along and it became a prominent grazing area for the cattle during the winters. During the peak of the area, even Cottonwood and Southern Railroad created a train depot at the Springs. At some point someone built a landing strip.


To this day, Historic Old Woman Springs Ranch remains as private property. The ranch consists of over 400 acres of deeded land with water and grazing rights to another 1600 acres.

Today is day 20 of the Brave, Bold, Blogger Challenge (BBBC) 2017 hosted by Kathy at ToadMama.com

Reflection

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“We do not learn from experience…
we learn from reflecting on experience.”
John Dewey

You know the old saying, “It is not possible to go forward while looking back”. How can you move forward without reflecting on the past? If you don’t reflect back on life and review where you have been or what you have been through. Then you will keep making the mistake over and over again.

Just like Nature is my Church, while being outside in solitude, I spend time reflecting on life which allows me to look back at life and see how far I have come and how far I still need to go in life. It also allows me to review who I am and who I want to be? It’s the time to look deep within myself and figure out how to become the person I want to be.

Today is day 19 of the Brave, Bold, Blogger Challenge (BBBC) 2017 hosted by Kathy at ToadMama.com

Nature is my Church

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Damn, Lynne from curvyroads.info stole the words out of my mouth on today’s challenge. I too am not a religious person for several reason which I will not elaborate here. However, I do believe in a “Higher Power”. Actually, I personally believe that everyone has their own definition of a “Higher Power”, whether it is God, Buddha, Allah or even a unicorn. In my humble opinion, I do believe that regardless who it is, it sole purposes is to give guidance and motivation for personal growth.

Some has to go to church to seek it. Some has to read it to seek it. For me, there are several places that I go when I need to seek serenity. Most of the times, it involves being in the outdoors. Whether its taking a hike in my backyard or out riding my motorcycle one of the many back roads in the desert.


It something about nature that I find peaceful where it can clear my head and listen for the words of wisdom in the wind.

Today is day 18 of the Brave, Bold, Blogger Challenge (BBBC) 2017 hosted by Kathy at ToadMama.com

Just Little Things

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At the last minute, I’m completely rewriting today’s challenge that I have written earlier. As of right now, my simple pleasure is just being DRY. As many may have heard on the news and the internet, Southern California is getting slammed with the biggest storm of the season.

For us in the Cajon Pass, the wind came first. The wind has been averaging 30 to 50 mph with gust of 60 to 85 mph. Throughout the day, I would go and check on our horses to make sure that they were doing ok. At one point, I noticed that their shelter were starting to lift up. So, I went out to move them into the arena. It was a good thing that I did when I did, it just collapsed right after I moved them out.


As the day progresses, then came the rain. We realized that the horse shelter is to mangled to be able to fix it tonight. It might be too far gone to salvage it. As we try to find a solution to getting our horses under some kind of shelter so we can feed them. A friend of our offered to house them at her house but found out that our road is too slick to travel on. None of our neighbors had room in their barn. So our DIY solution was to load them up in the horse trailer.


This was no easy task to do while it was down right pouring out. Mark and I tag team this process. I fetch the horses and load them one by one. Then we had to dry them off before putting their blanket on. Then hang up their feed. Note to self, we should have hung the feed before we loaded them into the trailer.


Now, it is dark and the wind is still howling and the rain is pelting the windows. We won’t know until morning what further damage we will get. However, at least we are dry so are the fur babies. Just life simple pleasure.

Today is day 17 of the Brave, Bold, Blogger Challenge (BBBC) 2017 hosted by Kathy at ToadMama.com