MICKEY MOUSE GRAND MARSHALL FOR CITY OF CERRITOS PARADE

Today the city of Cerritos (the city just to the East of my city, Lakewood) celebrated its 50th birthday with a parade and other festivities. One of the four Grand Marshalls was Mickey Mouse (probably because Disneyland is celebrating its 50th birthday. I took my DVD movie camera and then captured some stills of Mickey to share with you here. The parade was very nice. Almost two hours long with floats, bands, horses and all the other stuff you would expect with a parade.
In some of the pictures you will notice an inflated cow in the background. Cerritos used to be Diary Valley and up into the 70's the area was mainly diaries. I can remember the smell driving from Los Angeles to Knotts Berry Farm in the 50's, 60's and early 70's when we drove through this area. So the theme of the festival and parade was "Party 'Till The Cows Come Home".


I have not resized these pictures. If you have high speed, then no problem. If you have dial-up, well ... they will take awhile; sorry about that.

JENNIFER'S CAKES

As most of you know Jennifer is taking Culinary classes at Long Beach City. Her goal is to get the certificate for completing the program for Baker/Pastry Chef. She has not yet taken the Professional Cake Decorating Class (which is only offered once in a blue moon) but what she has learned about decorating has been at Rossmoore Pastries where she did her service hours. She has now made two cakes. One was for me to take to school for the April birthdays. I signed up for the April cake last Fall figuring by then she would be able to do something nice. I paid her for the ingredients. Here is a picture of that cake. It was chocolate with a layer of whipped cream in the middle and real sliced strawberries. It looked and tasted good. She got a lot of compliments on it.

The second cake was for a fellow student at school. Her birthday is today and she asked Jennifer if she would do an elegant cake for her. Jennifer is only charging her $10 mostly for the ingredients and she made a couple of mistakes with it. She is a novice and doesn't feel she can charge more at this time. It is also a chocolate cake with a whipped cream filling and dark cherries. She learned to do the roses at Rossmoore.

ROSES IN BLOOM

It has now been 10 days since my last blog and the pictures of my first roses. Now the roses are blooming and look pretty good. There are not as many as last year when we had our record rainfull here in the LA basin, but for me and my not so green thumb they are looking AOK. Here's some pictures.

FIRST ROSES OF SPRING

In mid January I cut back, pruned, weeded and fed my meager rose garden in front of my house.

Now all that hard work is paying off. All five of my rose bushes have buds all over them and a couple have bloomed. In January and part of February we had beautiful warm weather. Starting in mid February and through much of March we have had nothing but rain. When the sun does come out (like today) it is nice and warm. My roses are loving it! So enjoy some pictures of a couple of roses blooming.


I just realized it has been almost a month since I last posted ... me bad. In an another week Jennifer and I will be on Easter (I refuse to call it Spring) break. We plan to go several places and I will attempt to remember to take pictures and also post.