What a week, every week

Hello everyone! Welcome! I’m hosting a virtual trick-or-treat all month long. If you had trick-or-treaters coming to your house, what kind of candy would you give them? To start, I’m giving out a tamarind candy coated in chilli powder. It’s a popular Mexican candy and the taste is a mix of sweet, sour, and spicy.

What a week! I feel like I say this almost every week. My husband has been doing lots of overtime at work this week. I’ve been on overdrive at work pushing out new programs for the hospital.

How to enjoy the heat while in quarantine

This week has been the warmest week in a while. It would have been a good time to go to the beach, but I decided to be boring and do my part to quarantine. After all I can only really quarantine two days out of the week due to my work. So here are my ideas to have some sort of beach-like experience without leaving home.

1. Read a book. If I was at the beach, I would lounge and read a book anyways.
2. Eat ice cream.
3. Open the windows and invite the fresh air.
4. Since I don’t have central air conditioning, I have fans. So I turn on the fans throughout the house.
5. If I had kinetic sand, I would play in a small box of kinetic sand.
6. Watch beach scenes

What other things can one do at home to pretend they are at the beach?

On a serious note, the real test for the stay at home orders is this week. During this time in SoCal it is a good time to go to the flower fields or go to the beach. COVID-19 and what came of it have upended a lot of spring traditions. They cancelled graduations — I had to request a refund for my graduation regalia. Admission letters from colleges and other professional schools have been delayed. If we were not under stay at home orders, we’d probably go to the dog beach in Long Beach but now we will just have to wait.

Hike 27/52: Biking along the beach

Date: July 15th
Neighborhood: Pacific Palisades, Santa Monica, Venice Beach
Difficulty: 2 out of 5 (on a bike)
Weather: Cool, breezy
Distance: 13.5 miles (out and back)

Saturday morning was a perfect morning to go on a bike ride along the beach. We started biking at 8 AM with friends to find the beaches were mostly empty. I barely recognized these beaches. I am use to seeing mobs of people filling up the beach when I go to Santa Monica or when I drive along the PCH. I am use to seeing the crowds gather all on the curb to the point of spilling a few people over to just cross the street. This time was different.

Why did I decide to bike along the beach? Maybe a change of scenery. A change of weather. The last two weekends, we’ve lived through 100+ degree Fahrenheit weather (37 degree Celsius). A 20 degree Fahrenheit difference is a short drive away from us.

I know you can’t tell from this picture, but this is Venice Beach. Again almost no one there. We ended our ride at Venice Beach and had brunch. The crowds I recognized were starting to build up and we biked back to our cars and I experienced my first taste of “bike traffic”.

I’d like to come back and bike another stretch of this bike trail. Apparently it runs 40 miles long one-way. We’ve only biked about less than 7 miles of this path. Until next time.

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