{"id":21667,"date":"2018-03-05T23:00:22","date_gmt":"2018-03-06T06:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adoptedjoy.com\/?p=21667"},"modified":"2018-03-05T23:06:54","modified_gmt":"2018-03-06T06:06:54","slug":"tonic-to-my-soul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/?p=21667","title":{"rendered":"Tonic To My Soul"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Today marked the end of another amazingly wonderful week with Vicki. We’ve known each other 37 years! Her visits every spring are a tonic to my soul.<\/p>\n

So how did we spend our precious 7 days?  Honestly, we did very little that could be categorized as exciting, even though there are a billion-and-one beauties to behold in our fair state. Since I was sick all week I really put the damper on things. I couldn’t do much in the way of walking, and also had kiddos at home to manage. So we mostly sat around and Netflixed our way through my latest sci-fi series, with breaks to go out for lunch. We saw some movies in the evenings, through which I was able to make it, hacking only slightly less with the help of a large bag of Halls cherry-flavored cough drops. We did a little family walk at Encanto Park Thursday afternoon, and Vicki and I took a little sight-seeing excursion on Friday. We drove up the Bush Hwy, stopping along the way for a few pics, and had lunch at the restaurant at Saguaro Lake. It was refreshing to get out of town and see some countryside on such a pretty day.<\/p>\n

Really, the most valuable thing about a friend is not whether you go out and do exciting things. It’s the irreplaceable companionship that can come into your home and live inside your daily struggle for a week, see the mess, listen to the whining kids, offer encouragement, witness the laughs and love, help you sort the laundry and build shelves for your kid-rooms, and press pause (over and over) on the TV when you cough so hard you have to pee. She’s the real deal. I am blessed.<\/p>\n

Here are some pics from our Bush Highway drive. I played with B&W on some of them… most of them I prefer the color, but there were a couple I thought turned out very nicely in monochrome.<\/p>\nngg_shortcode_0_placeholder\n

 <\/p>\n

Pics from Encanto Park. These were all taken with Paul’s new Pixel 2 phone, some by him, some by me. For some reason Natalie featured prominently. \ud83d\ude00 It’s a pretty good phone camera! <\/p>\nngg_shortcode_1_placeholder\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today marked the end of another amazingly wonderful week with Vicki. We’ve known each other 37 years! Her visits every spring are a tonic to my soul. So how did we spend our precious 7 days?  Honestly, we did very little that could be categorized as exciting, even though there are a billion-and-one beauties to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21766,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[628,249,659,3,228,248,121,273,441,436,33,156,440,250],"tags":[152,327,688,476,309,687,409,34,526],"class_list":["post-21667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adopted-joy","category-arizona","category-bw","category-family","category-fellowship","category-friends","category-fun","category-gatherings","category-landscape","category-macro","category-out-about","category-photography-art","category-scenery","category-sightseeing","tag-family-3","tag-friends","tag-friendship","tag-fun","tag-landscape","tag-macro","tag-photo-walks","tag-photography-2","tag-sightseeing","entry","has-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21667"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21770,"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21667\/revisions\/21770"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}