By The Sea, By The Stormy, Stormy Sea and The Cemetery Industry

      **This post was written on Friday, March 24th and being published today**

    I've just come back to our hotel room after having the complimentary breakfast at The Embassy Suites in Seaside, California. I loved the oatmeal and the eggs and potatoes, but for the second day in a row they had no BACON, only sausage which I detest!! But it is complimentary, especially for me as this whole trip is paid for by my sisters job.

Embassy Suites in Seaside California

    I took Thursday and Friday off from work and we drove here to Seaside on Thursday. We took our time and stopped in Paso Robles for some shopping at TJ Maxx, one of my favorite stores. Then we decided to eat on the run rather than waste time at a sit down restaurant and we drove through McDonalds, then on to Seaside.

    Seaside is such a beautiful place and the whole drive here was fabulous because we've had tons of rain in California and it now looks like the California I remember when we used to come and visit my dad's family in Santa Maria. Green and lush with beautiful blue skies and puffy white clouds. 

    Thursday night we had a meet and greet downstairs and we barely had time to get ready for that. I always enjoy the meet and greets because they have a bunch of vendors there selling anything and everything associated with cemetery management. Yes...you read that correctly...cemetery vendors. I know for some that may seem shocking, I know it was for me at first, but both my sister Lisa and I have been involved in the funeral industry since 1993. Lisa is now a Cemetery Manager which is why we were here. I left the funeral industry in the year 200o'ish. 

    So the vendors have a lot of unique things they are selling, from cemetery plot mapping by computer to vaults and urns and niche plates. They're a great bunch of people and even though most of them fell into the industry by chance, some felt it was their calling. Lisa fell into it by chance, but definitely it is a calling for her. Her compassion and dedication to service makes her an excellent manager and I am so proud of her.

    Friday I spent the day shopping. There aren't a lot of shopping centers or stores in Seaside or Monterey, I guess they really don't want you to spend your time shopping but they prefer that you go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and all the little shops along Cannery Row, which is what I did last time I visited. Friday evening there was a special dinner with dancing and a photo booth.

    We took advantage of the photo booth but the pictures were so small they really are not very sharp, but here you go. In the first one we included one of the board members that was there. They had a lot of props and things we could use to make the photos more fun, so these are pretty silly, but we had fun!

    We headed back home on Sunday and as always, there's no place like home, but it was a fun little adventure!

Blogging Inspiration - Where do I get ideas from

 I just realized today that when I was blogging regularly I always had a lot of things to blog about, sometimes I would do two or three posts in a day, but then it seemed like the well dried up and it was a chore to think about what to blog about.

Today I figured out where I was getting my inspiration from before! It was from reading other bloggers post. Many times I would read a post and it would bring up a thought or memory and I would write about it. 

I just read a blog post by Urspo at Spo-Reflections titled I Drive Like an Old Woman, you can read his post HERE. His post inspired me to write a story about my dad and when he would take Lisa and I to high school dances.

We grew up in a small community with a high school that probably boasted a whole 200 students grades 9-12. So any event hosted by the school...we were there! 

Because my dad was a farmer, we lived on the ranch outside of town, probably 8 to 10 miles away and we rode the bus to and from school everyday, we weren't city kids by any means. We didn't know what it was like to play with the kids we went to school with. We played with each other and the other kids that lived on the ranch. 

This was our home in Calipatria. This is a more recent photo, but it hasn't change much.

Our schools would host a dance about once a month and Lisa and I have always loved to dance, so we rarely missed the opportunity, but we did twice because of our dad.

The first time that we missed a dance was because dad was driving us to the dance in his pickup truck, it was him, then our mom next to him on the big bench seat, then Lisa, then me. That was way before the days of everyone having to wear seatbelts. 

Dad was talking away to mom and showing her different farms and talking about the crops they were growing. The more dad talked, the slower he drove and I have never been the most patient of people and I really hate being late to anything! So I made the mistake of reminding dad twice that he was driving too slow. The first time he did speed up but then he got to talking again and slowing down and the second time I reminded him he turned around and took us back home...no matter how much Lisa and I cried and pleaded he didn't budge. I think he just wasn't too thrilled about his two little girls going to a dance to dance with boys!

The second time we missed the dance we actually made it to the school. Again we were in dad's truck, but this time mom was missing, it was dad, Lisa and me on the bench seat again with no seatbelts! We drove up to the front of the high school cafeteria since that was where the dances were held and as we drove up this girl was heading in the front door and these boys jumped out of the bushes to frighten her...that was all dad needed to see! No way was he leaving his little girls with these animals and again, no matter how much we cried and begged on the way home, he refused to budge.

Dad was not an unfair man, he did all he could to make us happy, but there were just certain times that he would not budge. 

So thank you Urspo for giving me the inspiration and for jogging my memory.

Alicia