Monthly Archives: March 2019

SMM Three Gun

I’ve become a little lazy about posting lately. I haven’t written a post in 10 days! It’s mainly due to the routine we’ve fallen into here at Viewpoint Golf and RV Resort in Mesa, Arizona. It’s hard to believe we’ve been here for almost three months already. Our routine consists of pickleball games most mornings, tennis lesson a couple of times per week for Donna and I instruct a pickleball class on Wednesday afternoon for players graduating to intermediate level play.

I have happy hour with my friends at Lucky Lou’s a couple afternoons every week. I spend time with some of the guys I knew and hung out with when we lived here 10 years ago. In one week, we’ll be moving on – back to San Diego for a month. With the coach set up at Mission Bay RV Resort in San Diego, we’ll take a week off and kick back in Belize.

Last week, I finally got the Traeger wood pellet fired smoker grill out of the trailer and prepared my famous babyback ribs. Our neighbor across the street from us, Dick, was a bachelor for the week as his wife, Roxie, had to take care of business back at their home in Spokane. We invited Dick over to have a smoked rib dinner and we enjoyed the company and a few adult beverages. Originally we intended to include our other neighbors, Chuck and Sue from Illinois, but Sue’s brother unexpectedly passed away and they hastily packed up and headed back to Illinois.

There’s an outdoor shooting range up on Usery Pass – a couple of miles up Ellsworth Road. They hold an annual competition there for three gun competitors. Three gun competition is exactly how it sounds – you must be proficient with three types of firearms – pistol, shotgun and rifle. I went to check it out Friday afternoon – there’s no charge for spectators.

Rio Salado Sportsman Club at Usery Mountain

The event is called the Superstition Mountain Mystery Three Gun. Competitors complete various scenarios in different settings called stages – this competition had 12 stages. In each stage, targets are engaged from different positions and distances and the competitor has to transition from one gun to another.

In the picture below, the shooter is knocking down steel plates with a shotgun. He started on the left side of the helicopter chassis and knocked down six plates, then he had to move to the right side to knock down six more plates – he’s shooting at the last plate.

In another stage, the competitor is shooting a pistol at a variety of targets, then he drops the pistol and picks up a rifle as he scrambles onto an inclined board to engage targets 500 meters away with his rifle. This is a long shot! Five hundred meters is about 1,600 feet – well over a quarter of a mile. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking so they have to make the shots as quickly as possible and don’t have time to catch their breath during a stage.

Pistol shooting – judges and time keeper behind the shooter
Transition to 500 meter shot with a rifle from prone position

I had the opportunity to meet a legend in the speed shooting and competition shooting world. Jerry Miculek (MITCH-e-lek) was competing in the Superstition Mountain Mystery three gun event. Jerry has been at the top of the game for as long as I can remember. I think he’s been sponsored by Smith and Wesson for nearly thirty years. He holds several world records for speed and accuracy. He has a TV show on the Outdoor Channel called Shootout Lane that I enjoy watching.

The greatest shooter of all time – the Legend, Jerry Miculek

I had to opportunity to meet and speak with Jerry. He’s truly a nice guy – if you’ve ever watched his TV show, he is just as soft spoken and humble as he appears on TV. Jerry’s 64 years young and still at the top of the game. His daughter, Lena, is also a top competitor sponsored by Sig Sauer – she was the top female shooter in the world in 2014. She wasn’t at this competition – she’s concentrating on Pistol Cartridge Carbine (PCC) competition at this time.

Saturday morning, I competed in a men only pickleball tournament. We started with a series of round-robin play to establish the qualifiers for the semi-final and Championship round. I played nine games of round robin and qualified for the championship round. Unfortunately I lost the in the end and wound up in second place again. It was fun, but I was whipped after 10 games. My S-Health app recorded nearly 15,000 steps on Saturday. You can see from the bar graph that most of them were before noon during the pickleball tournament. I keep my phone in my pocket while I play to record the steps.

14,873 steps!

On Saturday afternoon, we went to a pool party and barbeque at Jeff and Krissy Van Deren’s house. We had a fun time with plenty of good food and drink. The only person in the pool was Mike and Kim Child’s granddaughter Abigail. We said our goodbyes to Mike and Jodi Hall there as they’re heading out for week-long vacation in Jamaica.

Pool party

My post wouldn’t be complete without a dinner plate picture. Thursday night, Donna made Chicken Lombardy. It was absolutely delicious served with forbidden (black) rice and asparagus.

Chicken Lombardy

The weather has been very pleasant although we had a couple of cloudy days and gusty winds last Tuesday. The daily high temperature ranged from 70 to 80 degrees. The week ahead looks a little warmer with mid-to-upper 80s. I’ll have to get busy and finish a few maintenance chores before we pull out of here next Sunday.

Spring Ahead

We had a great weekend. It started with the usual Friday happy hour at Lucky Lou’s but the highlight was Saturday’s lunch. Our friends, Jeff and Deb Spencer (Rolling Recess) organized a lunch for members of Xscapers. Xscapers is a sub-group of the Escapees RV Club. We aren’t really Xscapers – it’s geared more toward young, working full-time RVers. But, we are Escapees members and although I’m retired, we still feel young enough – most of the time!

The lunch meet-up was at the Monastery Bar and Grill adjacent to Falcon Field on McKellips Road in Mesa. The Monastery is a unique place. Although they call themselves a pub, it’s mostly an outdoor restaurant, bar and activity center. The menu has everything from nachos to steaks. They have a full-service kitchen and wait staff – but you can also order your steak, chicken or burger uncooked for about half-price and grill it yourself on grills they provide in the courtyard. They also have a huge beer selection.

Xscapers group at The Monastery
Jeff Spencer in his usual pose


The indoor seating area has limited space, but there’s a bar on the patio with a stage, tables and several outdoor seating areas. There are also two sand volleyball courts and bean bag cornhole games.

Outdoor sand volleyball court at The Monastery

The only people in attendance that we had met previously were Jeff and Deb. We had a good time meeting several new people in the RV community and we’re glad that Jeff and Deb organized this and invited us.

After the big lunch at The Monastery, Donna kept it simple for Saturday night dinner. Simple but delicious! She made an Asian chicken stir-fry that I loved. The sauce she whips up for it makes the dish – it includes soy sauce, sesame oil, honey, chopped fresh ginger and garlic.

Asian chicken, broccoli and mushroom stir-fry

We had another social event on Sunday. It was time for the annual Viewpoint Golf and RV Resort Pickleball Club meeting and banquet. There was a short club meeting in the ballroom at 4:30pm here at Viewpoint to discuss club business. We learned that the pickleball club now has over 500 members in good standing. They had door prizes and Donna won a free membership for next year – a $15 value.

Viewpoint Pickleball Club meeting

The dinner was catered by Buca di Beppo restaurant and they served a great lasagna with dinner salad and bread. The serving line was very slow though as they only had two people staffing the cafeteria-style food service.

The rest of the country set their clocks forward over the weekend. In Arizona, we don’t do that. In the winter months, Arizona time is equivalent to Mountain Standard Time. When everyone else springs forward, Arizona doesn’t change their clocks, but now we’re the same as Pacific Daylight Time. Someone forgot to tell Verizon that. I have my phone set to automatically reset to the local time. On Mondays, I have an alarm set for 6:15 am so I can get up, have coffee and breakfast and be ready to hit the pickleball round-robin match at 8am. Yesterday I got up at the sound of my phone alarm and fixed coffee and breakfast. Donna came out and asked if I realized we were up an hour early. What! I checked my phone and sure enough – the clock had reset to Mountain Daylight Time. Grrr!

The weather was great last week – mostly in the 70s with clear to partly cloudy skies. That changed yesterday. Rain moved into the area and the temperature will only reach 60 degrees over the next couple of days. We expect rain showers to continue through tomorrow morning. By the weekend, the forecast improves with highs in the upper 70s to 80 degrees for the remainder of the month. That’s more like the weather we expect and love in this part of the country at this time of year. This has been and long, wet and relatively cold winter here.

Who Let the Cat Out?

This blog is written on a template from WordPress. Periodically, WordPress updates the platform. I was told, by someone in the know, to always update to the latest version. Sometimes the update fixes bugs or plugs vulnerabilities. So that’s what I do. Well, the latest “upgrade” changed the whole platform. My photos no longer are reduced to a smaller image that can enlarged to their original size by clicking on them – they are sized to fit the page automatically. I don’t see this as an upgrade.

It’s taken me a while to figure out how to insert links in the new format. The biggest issue I have is with the sidebar widgets. I have affiliate links in the sidebar. Some no longer work – for example, I’m an Amazon affiliate. If you go to Amazon from my website link, I earn a small referral for anything you buy from them on that visit. You pay the same price – I just earn an small referral fee. It isn’t much and now that the link has broken, my last statement showed I earned all of 54 cents in the last month. I’ll have to figure out how to fix it. I’m never going to get enough referral money to even pay for the web hosting cost of a blog, but a few bucks here and there doesn’t hurt.

I don’t have much to report on the RV side of things. We’re settled in and I haven’t had any real projects here in Mesa. We stay active at Viewpoint Golf and RV Resort though. I’ve been busy playing pickleball and instructing pickelball lessons. Giving lessons has helped me focus my own play – so it’s beneficial to both me and my students.

We enjoy the birds here at Viewpoint. When I bought the second quail block to attract and feed birds, I wondered if I could keep it up. The birds demolished the first one in about 10 days. At $14 per block, I wasn’t sure if I should keep it up. Now that we have much warmer weather, the birds have an easier time finding more naturally occurring food sources, so the block isn’t disappearing as fast.

Ozark the cat loves the quail block. She sits on the bottom step of the entry and watches the birds through the screen door. She doesn’t try to go outside though. I think she had enough of the outdoors when we found her as a young kitten hiding under our coach at Turkey Creek near Branson, Missouri. She’d much rather stay dry and well fed in our coach.

Ozark the cat stretching out on the dashboard

Our friends Mike and Jodi Hall have a rescue kitten that looks a lot like Ozark the cat. We were talking over happy hour at Lucky Lou’s and Jodi told us her cat story. Apparently, the night before, their kitten, unbeknownst to them, went out the back screen door sometime after 10pm. Jodi knew something wasn’t right when the cat never came to snuggle in bed all night. In the morning, she couldn’t find the cat and it didn’t come when she put food out.

She checked the backyard fearing the kitten may have fallen into the koi pond or got into the pool and ended up in the filtration system, but the cat was nowhere to be found. In the backyard they have an aviary built around a tree. In the afternoon, Jodi looked at the tree carefully. Sure enough, the kitten was up in a crook in the tree. Jodi had to climb up on the aviary, then into the tree to bring the cat down. Mystery solved and now their cat doesn’t seem as inclined to go outside anymore.

While I don’t have any RV related things to post, I want to post a few meal pictures. I know this seems like a food blog at times, but I like to make the point that full-time RV living doesn’t mean always mean eating out, grilling hot dogs or microwaving frozen food. It doesn’t always have to be fancy either. Last week Donna diced leftover pork tenderloin and prepared street tacos. Yummy!

Street tacos

I took advantage of the fine weather and grilled steaks on Sunday.

Steaks right off the grill
Steak with baked sweet potato and asparagus

Monday Donna made a dish called chicken Gabriella and served it with mashed potatoes and roasted Brussel sprouts.

Chicken with mashed potatoes and Brussel sprouts

Speaking of fine weather, we’ve had daily highs in the mid to upper 70s over the last 10 days and even hit 83 degrees yesterday. The forecast looks good although we may have a couple of cooler days with rain showers next week. Overall, we can expect upper 70s and low 80s in the foreseeable future.