Life with Dee

Creating a beautiful life...

Amazon Prime Day is Coming Soon!

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If you are an Amazon Prime member you are probably looking forward to Amazon Prime Day as much as I am. There are so many great deals and it’s a wonderful time to pick up some of those items you’ve been wanting or to stock up on some gifts for birthdays or holidays.

Amazon Prime Day

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Amazon Prime Day

Amazon Prime Day is July 16 (3 p.m. ET) through July 17 (all day). There will be a lot of incredible deals, including some specials in the days leading up to it.

“But what if I’m not an Amazon Prime member?”, you may be thinking. Well, I have good news. You can sign up for a free 30-day trial and take part in Amazon Prime Day during that 30 days.

And even better…you can receive a $10 Amazon credit by downloading the app and signing in.

It’s super easy:

  1. Sign up for a free 30-day trial of Amazon Prime.
  2. Download the app.
  3. Sign in to your account.

You will receive your redemption code for $10 via email in about a week.

 

I have been a Prime member for many years and I love it. We live in a small town with fairly limited shopping resources. I’m a big proponent of shopping small, local stores when possible but when I can’t get the things I need I turn to Amazon. In most cases the item I order will be on my front porch in two days and the shipping is free.

 

I also take advantage of their “Subscribe and Save” program for a number of products I use on a regular basis including Shiloh’s dog food and my beloved Earl Grey tea. By signing up to receive these on a scheduled basis I get a discount. But it’s no trouble to change the frequency or skip a delivery.

 

If you’ve been thinking of trying Amazon Prime this a great time to do so. If you don’t love it as much as I do you can always cancel when your trial is over (I always set a reminder on my phone calendar for things I think I might want to cancel).

If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask. If I don’t know the answer I’ll do my best to find it for you.

 

Amazon Prime Day

Timely Tunes ~ California Dreaming

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My son, Chris, usually does the music posts for Life With Dee and he’ll be back soon with more “Timely Tunes”. In the meantime I thought I’d share one of my playlists.

California Dreaming

A couple of weeks ago I started putting together a playlist of songs about California. Not only was I born and raised there, but David and I have been on vacation in California this week. We flew there and are driving a car back for my parents. It’s a mighty long drive from California to Oklahoma but a good playlist helps makes the time go by faster.

California Dreaming: A Spotify Playlist

This playlist is a work in progress so if you have any suggestions for additions, please leave me a comment!

~~~~~

California Dreaming Playlist

Menu Monday

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Good morning! I’m in New Orleans this week indulging in the fabulous food this city has to offer. Follow me on Instagram and you’re likely to see some drool-worthy photos of our meals. What I won’t be doing this week is cooking. In lieu of a regular menu I thought it would be fun to create a fantasy menu from some of the recipes I’ve pinned on Pinterest. There’s no way we would actually eat like this, certainly not all in a single week. But just for fun let’s see what I can come up with.

MenuMondayweb

Monday:

Tuesday:

Wednesday:

Thursday:

Friday:

Saturday:

Sunday:

Whew! I think I gained ten pounds just looking at all those recipes. Which menu is your favorite?

My birthday weekend get-away

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My birthday isn’t until Thursday but David and I did our usual “weekend at the Skirvin” celebration this past weekend. We went up Friday evening after David got off work, stopping in Norman for dinner at Panera Bread so we could also buy cherry danish pastries to take with us. Because…CHERRY DANISH PASTRY! 
After we checked in to the hotel, we changed clothes and went to our favorite OKC hangout – the Red Piano Lounge in the Skirvin. We know most of the bartenders there and always have a good time chatting with them and people-watching. Mostly, we just tried to relax and decompress from the busy weeks we’ve both had recently. 
We generally don’t make any plans in advance when we take these little get-aways but this time I had a couple of things in mind. If you follow me on Facebook you probably know that David and I love to stargaze. A few weeks ago it occurred to me that there is a small planetarium at the OKC Science Museum. After lunch at The Garage Burgers and Beer (quite tasty, by the way) we headed to the museum. The planetarium is included in the general admission to the museum and since we had about a 40 minute wait until the next show we decided to walk around and check out the museum. It’s a cool, hands-on place. We had taken our kids a few times but it’s been YEARS since we’d been there. Yeah, it’s kind of for kids but we still had fun. 

The planetarium show was really interesting and the young woman who did it was quite humorous. We both really enjoyed it.

After the show we spent another 45 minutes or so checking out the rest of the museum. We especially enjoyed the train and space exhibits. David has always loved model trains and I love riding on real ones. I think we need to plan another train trip soon. 
We stopped at a Sonic for a Butterfinger Blast (David) and root beer float (me) then headed back to the hotel. We relaxed a bit then got dressed up for dinner. One of the other things I wanted to do was to eat dinner by water. I’ve really been craving the ocean but since a trip to the coast isn’t in our near future I figured the next best thing would be a large lake. I had read excellent reviews for Redrock Canyon Grill on Hefner Lake. We called for reservations but they don’t take them. It was after 8 p.m. so we figured it probably wouldn’t be that long a wait. We were wrong. They told us it would be a 70 minute wait! Ordinarily we would have gone somewhere else but it was a gorgeous night, we weren’t very hungry yet (thanks to the late afternoon stop at Sonic) and the restaurant has an outdoor patio with a bar. They also had live music. 
We spent a very contented hour listening to music, sipping our drinks and admiring this view:
It was totally worth the wait. I had the rotisserie chicken, glazed carrots and the best mashed potatoes I’ve ever had. This may very well be my favorite restaurant in OKC now. 
Back at the hotel, we settled in at the bar which was pretty empty for a Saturday night. However, that didn’t last long. There were four weddings that night and the place filled up quickly with a crowd that provided good people watching, to say the least. Over the course of the evening, there were at least seven glasses broken. The all-female team of bartenders and servers kicked it into high gear and it was like poetry in motion. Or, as I said to David, it was like watching a ballet behind the bar and a 4th grade playground on the other side. Truly entertaining. 
We never seem to get up in time for breakfast at the hotel but this time we did. Well, it helped that they serve breakfast until 11 on Sundays. We had just about finished eating when a man with several guitars set up his gear right next to our table. Turns out this was Edgar Cruz, an amazing guitarist. (You can read more about him on my Well-Groomed Hippie blog.) We stayed and listened to a few songs and had a short chat with him about getting him a show here in Ada. 

We checked out of the hotel and then went to the final destination on my list for the weekend – the OKC Museum of Art. I’ve been dying to see the Fabergé exhibit.

When we bought our tickets we found out that there would be a tour starting in about an hour. David wisely suggested we go look at the exhibit ourselves first which turned out to be an excellent plan. There must have been 100 people in the tour and it would have been impossible to get a good look at everything while in that crowd. The tour was absolutely fascinating and the exhibit items were stunning. Now I’m on the lookout for documentaries on the Romanov family and Fabergé. 
We stopped in Norman on our way home so I could pick up some groceries at Natural Grocers. We got home late afternoon, ate an early dinner, unpacked and watched the final episode of Astronaut Wives Club. Oh, how sad I am that the show has ended! We then tried to work in a little stargazing before bed. It wasn’t exactly cloudy but the moon was bright and there was so much humidity that we couldn’t see many stars. After a few minutes of looking at pretty much nothing we decided to call it a night. We were both yawning by that time and David had to be up by 5:45 a.m. Today it was back to the rat race but oh, what a nice weekend we had! 

Apollo 11 Moon Landing: Where were you?

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Today is the 46th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. If you were alive back then do you remember watching it? I do. I was almost 7 years old and my family was vacationing in Sun Valley, Idaho along with my aunt, uncle and cousins. All five of us kids were outside playing when our parents called us in to watch it. I remember sitting on the floor with my cousins in front of what was most likely a black and white television set. I don’t recall many details but I did understand that I was watching something important.

I suspect that at least on some level that experience played a role in my interest in astronomy. I recall doing a rather extensive report on the solar system in third grade. I wanted to take astronomy my first semester of college but was talked out of it by well-meaning advisors who warned me that there would be a lot of math in the course. I took zoology instead which was fine but I wish I had followed my own inclinations.

The past few years, David and I have spent a lot of nights sitting outside stargazing. I bought him a telescope a couple of Christmases ago, too. There is something both soothing and awe-inspiring about looking up at the stars and planets. It tends to put things in perspective. Our day-to-day problems and challenges seem so insignificant when you think about what a teeny, tiny speck we are in the universe. David and I have some really deep and interesting conversations lying back in our zero gravity chairs in the backyard watching the night sky.

By the way, have you been watching The Astronaut Wives Club? We are enjoying it so much for many reasons – the fashions, home decor, history of that time period and of course, the space program, astronauts and their wives. My daughter, Lisa, loves it, too. In fact she was the one who recommended it to me and she recently blogged about it: The Astronaut Wives Club, a Must-See Show.  If you’ve seen it I’d love to hear your thoughts. Leave me a comment. I’d also love to know if you remember watching the moon landing.

Love is All You Need…

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This past Friday was a great day for love. We went to Tulsa to attend the wedding of a young lady and her beloved. It was a beautiful church ceremony and a really fun reception at the Hard Rock hotel. 
#thisishowiewed
Our son, Chris, was one of the ushers. This is him with a dear friend:
Chris and Laura - #thisishowiewed
They had a photo booth set up at the reception so this happened:
#thisishowiewed
Our 34th anniversary was last weekend but since we were going to be in Tulsa anyway, we decided to celebrate this weekend instead. Saturday we slept in after a rather late night. We decided we’d like to see the Women’s World Cup game so we found a sports bar/restaurant – Fat Daddy’s. I had read some reviews, one of which highly recommended the Reuben sandwich. I decided to go with that, along with onion rings. Both were absolutely delicious:
Reuben and onion rings at Fat Daddy's in #Tulsa
We ate and hung out for awhile watching the game. It wasn’t the most exciting game we’ve ever seen and since we were a little sleepy we decided to go back to the hotel for a little nap since we would up late again that night. 
After a nice nap we went to Charleston’s for a light dinner (soup and salad) before heading to Shrine, a music venue where we had tickets to see “Let’s Zeppelin“, a Led Zeppelin tribute band. We had no idea if they’d be any good but the tickets were only $8 each so it was certainly worth a shot. They were surprisingly good and we thoroughly enjoyed the show. They were also really nice guys and we ended up chatting with them for awhile afterwards. 
Let's Zeppelin @Shine in #Tulsa
A friend of ours manages a food truck and it happened to be set up across the street from Shrine. After the show we went over to visit with her. It was well after midnight and we were a little hungry so we got some food from the food truck. It was exceptionally good and really hit the spot. 
I think it was almost 3 a.m. before we turned in for the night so we didn’t get out of the room until a little after noon Sunday. Our food truck friend had recommended the Dilly Diner for brunch/lunch so we decided to give it a try. I love chicken and waffles so when I saw that on the menu that’s what I had to order. The food was really good and I love the fact that much of their food is locally sourced and all made from scratch. 
Dilly Diner in #Tulsa #localfood
After lunch we checked out a record store but didn’t find anything we couldn’t live without. We decided to head on home after that. 
It was a nice little getaway and a fun way to celebrate 34 years of marriage. 

Tornadoes and flooding and tigers…oh, my!

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Oklahoma is one heck of a place in the springtime. One minute you can be driving along the highway admiring the dense carpet of wildflowers and the next you are in a deluge dodging tornadoes.

Last Wednesday we went to Oklahoma City for the Clutch/Mastodon concert. We were supposed to meet up with musician friends who had bought tickets for us and we were really looking forward to a fun night together. David needed to take a couple of his employees to the city to pick up their trucks which had been repaired so we left early in the day. After dropping them off we had some time time to kill and then were going to meet our friends for an early dinner. We arrived at the restaurant about 30-45 minutes early, figuring we’d each work on some things via our phones until the others arrived.

We were sitting in the parking lot facing North where the skies looked pretty clear when we got a call from our friends who were visiting someone in the hospital. They were being told that they shouldn’t leave the hospital because of the weather. I turned around and saw rather threatening skies South of us. You see, we were just barely North of Moore, Oklahoma which seems to be a tornado magnet. David decided we needed to get out of there. The concert didn’t start until 7 p.m. so he decided we would go to the Skirvin Hotel, let them valet park the car in their covered parking garage and we would hang out in the bar until the storm passed. It’s a very old (and beautiful) hotel in downtown OKC with lots of other tall buildings around it which makes it safer in a storm.

There were only about half a dozen of us in the bar at that early hour. We were all watching the weather on the television and talking about our plans. The bartender (who, it turns out, grew up in Ada – the little town we live in) told us that if there was a tornado warning for our location we would all evacuate to the basement of the hotel. I asked if we could take our drinks with us and everyone in the bar – all men – chuckled. The bartender said yes. See? You never know unless you ask.

Gradually the bar started filling up. We discovered that quite a number of people who live nearby routinely come to the Skirvin during tornado watches/warnings. We kept a close eye on weather reports while chatting with others in the bar. We always meet the most interesting people in that bar. I was sitting next to a man who is an artist and works for the Choctaws, which happens to be the tribe I belong to. He told us about the new concert venue the tribe had just built and the next thing I know David has bought tickets to see Boston there on my birthday in August. And I have a new Facebook friend.

At one point we were evacuated to the basement but almost as soon as we got there they gave us the all clear and we returned to the bar. Later in the evening we made a second trip down there – that time for perhaps 15 minutes or so. It was all very orderly and civilized. They had cases of bottled water down there for anyone who wanted it, although most of us brought our own beverages. We chatted with a guy we have seen at the Skirvin quite often. He lives in the neighborhood and apparently hangs out there all the time. As soon as were told to go to the basement he bought three beers, had them open two, and calmly proceeded down the stairs where he promptly downed the two that were open. David opened the third for him with a key – and thereby taught the guy a new skill.

At some point it became apparent the we were not going to the concert. The venue is little more than a metal building in an open field. Not exactly where one wants to be in a tornado. We tried to dissuade our young friends from going but without success. They saw the warmup band but then the power went out. Because a tornado hit a block away!!! We were worried sick about them. When the rest of the concert was cancelled they headed for home which took them a very, very long time because of the torrential rains and flooding.

Oh, did I not mention the flooding? Yes, while California is drying up and is about to blow away, Oklahoma has been issuing emergency flood warnings. They even closed the airport which got over 7 inches of rain that night.

David decided that we shouldn’t try to drive home so he went to the front desk to see about getting a room. The regular rates were crazy high that night but he’s a Diamond Club member with Hilton and asked what sort of rate he could get under the circumstances. They knocked $100 off the rate and gave us a suite. Sweet! As they say, membership has its privileges.

So, with a room for the night secured and after knowing that our friends were safely on their way home and away from the dangerous storms, we settled in to enjoy the rest of the evening. There had been a couple of earthquakes in the state earlier in the day, plus the tornadoes and flooding. One would think that would be enough for one day. But one would be wrong. Reports started coming in that an exotic animal park had been damaged and there were wild animals roaming the streets of Tuttle, Oklahoma. Soon my Facebook and Twitter feeds were filled with references to “Tigernado” and some clever person quickly started the “Tornado Tiger” Twitter account.  It was later determined that, while the exotic animal park did sustain major damage, all the animals were accounted for. Still, it was rather surreal to think that on top of the crazy storm, tornadoes and flooding there might be tigers roaming the streets. Or maybe swimming in them:

After things settled down we went to our room. Of course, we hadn’t planned on spending the night so we had no luggage. We asked for toothbrushes at the front desk and they gave us a nice little selection of toiletries – toothbrushes (really nice ones), toothpaste, comb, deodorant (one for each of us). Fortunately I carry a couple of days’ worth of my asthma and blood pressure meds with me and enough makeup that I can at least look reasonably decent.

We carried our last drinks with us to our room and then ordered some poutine from room service. We had split a burger at the bar early in the evening when we still thought we would be going to the concert and then doing the usual post-concert IHOP thing. As we sat in bed eating and watching Jimmy Fallon, I was very grateful that we were safe in the nicest tornado shelter ever.

#poutine #roomservice

We slept well and got up early the next morning because David needed to go to work. One thing about having to be up early is that we actually got to partake of the free breakfast the hotel offers its Diamond Members. We’ve never been up early enough to do that before. They have a very nice breakfast buffet. Maybe we will have to drag ourselves out of bed in time to do that again next time we stay there.  Or maybe not.

So, while our night didn’t quite go according to plan, and sadly, there was much property damage, several injuries and one death, we were lucky. Oklahoma is beautiful in the springtime but it can be one wild and weird place.

Sometimes people even find a stray camel in their backyard:

This camel and his 4 cow friends went for a stroll when their fence was knocked down in the storm. 
Word spread quickly on Facebook and they were soon back where they belong. 

It continued to rain pretty consistently the next several days and the flooding has been rather serious. It almost never floods in our town but we’ve had flash flood warnings several times in the past few days. All I can say is, so far the locusts haven’t been unleashed.