Life and Times in SoCal

Spring 2021

Hello and welcome back.

Well, Spring is finally here in SoCal, yep, we have rain, snow on the mountains and flooded roads! But we did have our first swim in mid January, the temperature was an exceptionally warm 30 degrees, so we switched on the pool heater and had 2 days of just floating around!

Julie and I are well on our way to having our jabs, (vaccinations to my American readers), I’ve had both mine and Julie will get her 2nd by the end of March. We are super excited, It really does feel like this pandemic is now starting to be overcome, we have vaccination records (proof of vaccine) from the CDC so this will hopefully help us travel. Still some way to go but we have started to turn the corner.

All this is good news for travel, both in to the US and for us to get back to the UK.

We have visitors planned for June and July this year. My Mom and Aunt are due here mid June and my daughter Dominique, son Jordan and their families are due at the end of June. hopefully the COVID restrictions will be eased enough for them to make the trip.

It will be Dominique’s first visit to us in 11 years, but better late than never! It will be exciting for all of us to see Dom, Hugh and Taylor’s reaction when they step off the plane at LAX and then the drive back to our place.

Taylor has been worried that she may get bored whilst she is here, so here is a little web site for her (and you) to check out and see what’s around in SoCal

https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/states/southern-california/

Also for any one else wanting to come out here is a link to some of the things that makes SoCal unique and different from other places.

https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/southern-california/dangerous-things-to-say-so-cal/

Although why they are dangerous remains a mystery!

We are still planning to be in the UK in August this year, my niece Lizzie is getting married so we are looking forward to being there to celebrate with them. Also my mum will be 80 yrs old on August 22, so it will be a double celebration, and of course we will get to see Pip for the first time in “real life” rather than FaceTime. We can’t wait!!!!

I may not have mentioned in previous blog posts that we added a cinema room last year. Technically its more of a drive-in but without the drive! Ok, to be clear, it's an outside cinema. It has a 100 inch screen with a 4k projector attached to an Apple TV paired with a bluetooth 360 degree speaker. We also have a popcorn machine (thanks Diane & David) so hot popcorn and cold beer from the keg makes movie night something to look forward to.

Since the start of the year we have - finally - started to personalize our home. we had the kitchen cabinets painted white and painted the walls in the kitchen, over the course of the next few weeks we will be adding mirrored closet doors to the 3 remaining bedrooms and possibly more paint to other walls around the place. I will include some pictures of before and after in future blogs.

As I have mentioned in previous posts we are in the naturalization process. This should have been completed by the end of March but due to COVID this has been delayed until June, so there is a chance we maybe doing our citizenship interviews when we have visitors here! 

On the work front, I have now recruited my team and virtually finished the construction and installation of the new dressing facility for Taylor Farms (taylorfarms.com). We will be starting to make dressings from March 29. Our first dressings will be Poppyseed and Asian Sesame that go in to our Sweet Kale Chopped kit and Asian Chopped kit, followed very quickly by Caesar Chopped kit and Sunflower Crunch Kit. with Caesar Dressing and Sweet Onion Coleslaw dressing respectively. 

We have the capacity make 1,000,000 pouches of dressing per day!!

We are very excited to bring this plant on line and start to get our dressings into the mouths of consumers. 

Thats all for now, again thanks for reading and for the feed back some of you give and your little bits of news, it’s great to hear from you.

Chat soon

Paul & Julie

March 2021