We have been staying put in Jojoba Hills far too long. We got back from Rochester last October and haven’t left for travel beyond San Diego and Los Angeles since. I’ve been knocking the rust off my travel planning software and beating up other travel links to put together a busy period starting April 1 (actually March 31, but April 1 sounds much better).

Today I cleaned the shafts on the hydraulic leveling jacks to see if they would retract and extend. This operation is very necessary for us to be able to move as we learned when they failed as we tried to evacuate during the Highland Fire. While I was at it I retracted the hydraulic  slides for further proof of operation. All is good! Of course this entailed my getting down under the coach, flat on my side to do the work. The hard part was getting back up. 

I have booked a spot for routine service on the coach on April 1 – hence leaving on March 31 to be ready for early morning service work. If all goes well we will roll out of Redlands CA no later than April 2.  This should put us in Las Cruces NM on April 4 or 5. We will plan to stay a couple of nights to visit. Other stops we are considering are Kansas City if we can connect with the Lustigs, Indianapolis – if Terry is there, Columbus OH to see Lee an on to Rochester.

May is so full I am tired just thinking about it. We plan to be 4 nights in Boston around Cali Berbeco’s Bat Mitzvah. Then back to Rochester for Josh’s graduation from UR a Gala for the RPO on the 18th then on to Providence for my 60th Reunion from Brown.

Then back to Rochester where we will have some time to pack our bags for a 60th Anniversary trip to United Kingdom where we expect to be joined by our boys for the celebration at the Lygon Arms in Broadway, just up the road from Stratford on Avon. We stayed there on our honeymoon and have been looking forward to a return for 60 years. When we return to Rochester we have no further plans, yet.

Finally! We have 4 planned trips for the summer and one of them will be on the motorhome. We are flying to Charlottesville on the 16th to celebrate Alexander’s graduation from UVa. We will be staying with Malena and Dan, along with the boys and Yechiel and Josh. sounds like a full house I will report with pictures at some point. 

We are back in Jojoba Hills SKP Resort from the 22nd of May until  June 1 when we will drive down the coast to San Diego, well actually Coronado. We met Beverly on our cruise in December and she invited us to stay so we will be staying for 3 nights with her before retuning to Jojoba Hills. We have a lot to see there, not least is Friday Night services at Ohr Shalom where the Rabbi we met on the cruise is the leader. 

We will stay put in Jojoba Hills until the 18th of June when we will stop in Redlands CA to have the coach serviced on our way to Salt Lake City where Azriel is working nights, servicing regional aircraft. We will return to Jojoba Hills before the 30th of June. We have no current travel plans for July.

No plans does not mean we are sitting still. I expect my duties as President will be rather light and we may take the coach out for another trip. On August 2 we fly to Rochester to pick up a rental car and drive  to Hamilton ON for Aunt Dorothy’s 100th Birthday. Dorothy is the last survivor of seven siblings including Carol’s mother. Our return to Rochester will be just in time to prepare for departure to France where we plan to embark on a river cruise on the Rhone ending with a three night extension in Paris. 

On our return to Rochester, our current plan is to stay there until the day after Yom Kippur when we will leap back into the fray in Jojoba Hills SKP Resort for the balance of my first term as president. 

I have refrained from blow by bloody blow of my term so far and will continue to do so. It would be of no interest to most of you anyhow and I am keeping a separate journal for my own amusement. When my term on the Board is over I will store it on the secure park server for the eyes of my successors only. 

Since mid March we have been mostly in recovery mode. Carol has been improving day by day and we have been entertaining and being entertained quite often. I have had my own medical scare. During an unrelated procedure a cancerous cell was noted in my bladder. There was a wait for the procedure  and then there was a wait for the biopsy report which came back negative. Someplace along the way, I chaired a board meeting wearing a catheter bag on my belt. I do not recommend this to most people. 

The support of our friends in the park has been wonderful. One couple, awaiting their own surgery, drove us to the hospital for my procedure and hung around for 4 hours until I had “recovered.” They used the time to shop for their planned event the next week. Naturally I have not been able to have any privacy, but in an elder community where the ambulances come and go and surgery and recovery is an ongoing happening it is rare to forgo the support of friends. We even had an emergency run on a Saturday and a good friend, Bo, drove us to the ER and waited for 4 hours until I was released

As the weather has warmed and the blossoms continue to advance from yellow to purple we are thinking about some travel, mostly by plane. Charlottesville May 16 to 21 for Alexander’s graduation. A drive in the coach to Salt lake City, timing to be determined, to visit Azriel who is working there. We have hints that we may have to go to Hawaii at some point and we have our trip to France in August with stops in Hamilton to celebrate 100th birthday with Aunt Dorothy and maybe a stay over in Rochester even. To be determined. 

Much is in a chaotic state of planning. Our Board will meet April 24 and May 24 before shutting down for the Summer. We will pursue our travel as we are able and tolerate more heat than we are used to here in Jojoba Hills SKP Resort home for active +55 years olds.

I haven’t posted much about the goings on at Jojoba Hills SKP Resort. I’m not sure anyone is even interested, but I do need to record some thoughts. Carol I are up to our eyeballs in activities here. She is planning a first opening in a new gallery space. After we renovated and revised our center around the pool the Library has space for hanging art and it has been approved to use it as a gallery. There are a lot of new prints on metal in our shed waiting to be hung in February right after our Annual Meeting on February 2 the opening is on the 6th.

My term on the Board has two more years to run. However this year we are looking forward to extensive training for the entire Board. It is planned for three days. It should be interesting.

The resort was built over 30 years ago and much of the infrastructure has passed its “use-by-date” Fortunately our predecessors wisely set aside a substantial reserve fund and the new water tank and the repairs to the septic systems are covered by those reserves. I did say systems. There are 17 distinct systems serving the 283 sites and the public buildings. Septic 11 is the system we are on and the heavy rains overloaded the leach field for our system. We have been “camping” with our holding tank valves closed for the past week. It’s sort of like being out in the desert where there are no utilities although we do have water and electric. This should be fixed by Monday.

My work as Treasurer has been satisfying. I have managed to spread our CD investments out almost evenly – laddered – so plenty of cash will be available very 90 days. Working with the Finance Committee we have an excellent budget going into 2023. And even with crazy utility and other inflated charges it looks like we will have a small surplus to carry forward into the new year.  It does remain to be seen whether I will continue as Treasurer after the Annual Meeting. We are electing 3 new members to the 9 person board and we immediately have a meeting of the new Board to elect officers. The current President has said he will not stand for reelection to that position. Stay tuned.

Tonight we are going with a gang from the resort to Mexican dinner and a performance at Pechanga Casino of the “Fab Four”, a cover band with excellent reviews. There is a group called “Trips and Tours” that regularly puts together these events. 

I just turned down an invitation to play Bridge this afternoon because we have other plans to get together with friends in their rig, just to catch up between their travels and ours. We now have enough people to actually play Bridge fairly often and even some men, so I am no longer the only guy in the room. I hope I can find the time after the Annual Meeting to report on that and other happenings. We are not the US Congress so I do not expect multiple rounds of voting to elect the new officers. 

Since my last post we have been staying on our site while actively participating in the social life of the park while also doing the things required by the volunteer positions we have taken on.

A day in the life is a high example of total involvement. It was a Wednesday so I got up to go to the JCATS 8 AM meeting to have coffee and learn if someone needed a tech fix. After the meeting 3 of us met in phone room to install two VDSL DSLAMS to replace one old ADSL DSLAM. Just ignore the acronyms, the translations may also be meaningless – we installed 2 smaller faster boxes to replace one older slower box. I had to leave to join a zoom from George Eastman Museum that I had signed up for. As that came to an end I got a call to take a couple on a tour of the park. Carol had the cart so I walked down to Ranch House to meet them and begin a tour that was to last 2 hours. I walked back up the hill by 3 just in time to join an impromptu Bridge game in the Card Room. By the time Carol came back from town and I walked back to the coach I was tired. 

 That may have been at the extreme end of daily activity, but it certainly is not uncommon for me to find myself participating in two or more activities in a day. All the while Carol is leading an equally busy schedule. The weather is chilly, even here it is winter,  and late afternoon gatherings on the patio even with windscreens and heaters are not pleasant, so we gather with one or two couples in someone’s coach.  Life here has a rhythm and it is easy to adopt it and go with the flow.

Carol and I have been doing a lot of different things mostly overlapping at the same time. In other words we have been a bit disorganized in getting organized. Monday The chaos was peaking when I got a call to give a tour in the afternoon and rather than saying, “not really at this time” I said “sure”. 

As the time for the tour approached I was doing some paperwork preparation for our cruises which we have just booked. I was sitting on the couch with my wallet out for credit card numbers and other paperwork I keep in it. I got up to leave for the tour and I was sure I left the wallet on the couch, something I never do. When I returned to the coach 3 1/2 hours later it wasn’t there. Carol had not seen it and she had been away from the coach for 1 1/2 hours herself. Where could the wallet have gotten to?

The coach is now far better organized and clean than it was Monday morning. We have been in every nook and cranny even expecting to find the keys we lost 8 years ago in Florida. No wallet – also no keys. 

I’ve posted about this on Facebook in the park’s page just in case someone saw something. This morning I even ordered a replacement for my driver’s license. I had not seen any activity on my accounts so I was sure the wallet had not fallen into the hands of a thief (how could it have?). 

Mid afternoon, after a very active morning with meetings and lunch followed by a couple of hours of bridge, I decided to retrace my steps on Monday. I took the golf cart down to the lower part of the park – Ranch House – and walked over to the picnic table where I always begin my tours. As I walked up I saw a lump under the bench and there was my wallet, undisturbed, where it had fallen from my pocket. 

I have since removed some difficult to replace cards that are not needed very often and stored them away in an old wallet in the coach. I have vowed that the wallet will be in its usual storage place or in my pocket. Maybe I will not repeat this foolishness, but then foolishness does seem to come more often these days.

We are convinced the keys were taken by a racoon in Fort Desoto as suggested by the Ranger.

Facebook just sent me a reminder of a post I put up three years ago https://goldberg-online.net/2019/03/ There is no Super Bloom this year, except in our park where we irrigate, there is little desert bloom to be seen. On the other hand the future of our community, while never in doubt, seems refreshed and growing stronger every day. 2020 was our roughest year in over a decade with 25% of our members leaving for a variety of reasons but all influenced by the pandemic in one way or another. We ended that year with over 10 vacant lots. Today we are looking at a growing waiting list and vibrant new – and younger – members filling in the empty sites and the holes in the volunteer ranks. 

I have believed my greatest strength that I could give to the park is my financial and marketing background. As I wrote three years ago I don’t have a lot of knowledge about the infrastructure in the ground beyond knowing it needs to work. I won my unopposed election to the Board and no one wanted to be Treasurer so here I am. But I am also working with committees that are rehabbing space and restructuring space utilization and catching up on infrastructure maintenance that has been left to long since I left that committee. 

I have superb people around me and great support from the staff. The Park draws in what it needs from new membership. We have a retired CPA auditor, a landscape engineer who managed slopes for California highways, a couple of civil engineers with knowledge of sewer systems and water systems. Most of these have joined within the past year! We have a large reserve fund and we are about to make use of it to refresh the 32 year old property. 

Some days I feel like am actually “working” and I don’t mind it. No one cares if I stop for a nap as long as I get my Board material to the Secretary in time to be on the agenda. – 21 hours left! and so far only one person has stopped by to get my signature for a project that will be brought to a vote on the 4th. Is it really April already? Our plan has us rolling out on April 24th. In my spare minutes I am building  a possible route through Albuquerque to Charlottesville (a whole lot of open space there) and on to Rochester to change clothes and head for Boston in the car. 

But I do get ahead of myself. At least three Board meetings before I leave and a few committee meetings too. I need to find time to play some Bridge and enjoy social time and a concert or two, we have tickets for the 23rd.

The time just keeps galloping along. Being on the Jojoba Hills SKP Resort Board of Directors as the Treasurer has filled a lot of my time. We are meeting twice a month and deadlines for motions and proposals is 5 days before. These deadlines are creating a flurry of emails, many requiring a response until the deadline is past. Some people in the park seek me out to influence how I will respond to proposals. This is to be expected, but each interaction requires time and thoughtful choice of words. This is not a complaint, I am enjoying all of it. 

I just came back from giving a tour of the park. It lasted 4 hours. The “Tour” is an opportunity to present the park to prospective members and to encourage, or in a limited number of cases to discourage, their getting on the waitlist. Encourage can take from 2 1/2 hours to 4 (apparently). The other is 45  minutes, barely enough to drive around the park and point out what there is. A tour by an “official” tour guide is required to even get on the waitlist. 

The community is very warm and friendly. Everyone we pass recognizes me in the tour cart and will stop us to introduce themselves and welcome the visitors. Several people have interesting stories to tell and particularly if the are Founders or just very long time in the park I will encourage them (as if they need any encouragement) to tell a bit of their story of joining the park, or helping to build it. On a warm sunny day with many people moving about, this adds to the tour time. 

I am busy, fulfilled and having a grand time.