Minnesota and Arizona 2023:
Day 11 - Mesa

	Saturday, June 17, 2023: When we woke up, we got a request for an even earlier showing at 9:30 AM, so we packed up our stuff and left the unit before anyone got there. Over the course of the morning, additional requests came in for 10:30 AM and 1:15 PM.
	Our first stop this morning was a visit with Ralph at his nursing home.
	Ralph looked very alert and seemed to be doing very well. At one point, he asked Tom to look for a cookbook in his dresser, but it wasn't there. We decided that it was likely in the boxes of stuff that we had left with Rod.
	We brough Ralph's Echo Dot for Rod to set up when he visited this afternoon.
	After a nice 20-minute visit, we said our goodbyes.
	Our next stop was at Bricks and Minifigs, a LEGO reseller with stores across the country. Debbie had never been to one, and we thought it would be fun to go to one with Doug.
	Behind the counter, they had a sign built from LEGO that spelled out the store name. Cool!
	We walked around the store checking everything out, ...
	... including these minifig stands that had been 3D-printed.
	Debbie spent some time looking through the models, but decided against buying anything.
	They had a great brick pit. There were lots of pieces that we'd never seen on the official LEGO Pick & Build walls, so we all spent some time filling a cup with pieces to take home.
	We drove further west across town to the Chandler Fashion Center, ...
	... where we stopped at the food court for lunch. We unanimously decided to get Japanese food.
	Debbie got teriyaki chicken and a spring roll, ...
	... and Tom got a bowl of ramen.
	We got another Diet Coke, and once we started drinking from the cup, we realized that the sides were transparent. What a cool cup!
	Hey! While we're here, why don't we go to the LEGO Store? What a great idea! Debbie had sworn to not repeat stores and we had been here last October, but she can't resist a LEGO store.
	Debbie went to look at the Pick & Build wall, ...
	... while Tom checked out the building techniques and details on the Ninjago sets.
	Here are Doug with his own Pick & Build cup and Tom with Debbie's.
	When we got back to the condo, there were business cards from three of the four showings that we'd already had today. One of these ended up being the winning realtor.
	We went back to cleaning the condo, and the next step was to deal with all of the pens that we'd found and determine which ones still worked. Doug had performed this task admirably in 2020, so he was assigned it again. For the record, putting a cap on a Sharpie just most of the way isn't going to stop it from drying out.
	Our realtor texted with a request for a fifth showing at 3:10 PM, so we tidied up the condo and fled to the clubhouse to hang out.
	Our first stop was the small library in the clubhouse, ...
	... where we looked for the scrapbooks containing the history of the units in the complex that we had heard about.
	The history for the condo next door went back to 1980 and showed that there had been three owners prior to Bob and Becky buying the place in 2004. The scrapbook entry hadn't been updated since the new owners bought the condo from Doug in 2020.
	The file also contained the obituaries for Bob who died in 2019, and Becky who died in 2020.
	The file on Ralph's unit also started in 1980, and there had been two owners before Ralph and his wife bought the condo in 2000.
	There was a copy of the memorial card for Ralph's wife, Marge, in the file, along with Ralph's hand-written responses to a survey about why they chose Casa de Paz.
	Tom went to check the mailbox again, and this time, there was a notice inside from the postal service for the new resident to fill out. That was good to see. Ralph's son, Rod, had filed a change of address with the Postal Service and this was a confirmation that it had gone into effect.
	There were tables set up for the Spam cookoff that was scheduled to start at 4:00 PM. We put our stuff on one of the tables in the back of the room, ...
	... and right at 4 o'clock, everyone started to show up for the event. Rod stopped by our table to chat with us for a bit.
	The table at the front of the room had ten spots with numbers on them, ...
	... and there was a wide variety of dishes to share.
	Who knew there were so many things that you could make with Spam?
	There was a good turnout, ...
	... and we chatted with a couple of people. Phyllis especially wanted to thank us for taking care of everything with the condo.
	When it was all over, the host, Dan, counted up the votes and announced that Alice had won. She was awarded a nice water bottle with Spam Champion 2023 written on it.
	After the Spam competition, we headed back to the condo, ...
	... and gave Ralph's very last items to his son, Rod, and Rod's partner Marsha.
	Doug made a run to fetch Wienerschnitzel for dinner, and they had mustard packets branded with different states. We are not collecting these! No!
	There might have been some playing with LEGO at the dinner table.
	Debbie managed to get this blurry shot of a desert partridge that was running through the grass around the palm trees.
	As the sun was setting, we piled into the van ...
	... .and drove to the Phoenix airport to pick up Debbie's cousin, David, and his wife, Sandra. We waited in the cell phone lot which had a great status board showing arrivals into Terminal Four, and even better, the status of the baggage for that flight.
	Around 8:15 PM, we got the call that they had their bags, and we headed into the madhouse around Terminal Four Arrivals to pick them up.
	Next, we headed out to Buckeye, where David's parents, Jon and Evelyn, live, and more importantly, where they had been watching their grandkids for the past week while David and Sandra were on a cruise.
	We took this photo of Debbie, Doug, Evelyn, John, David, and Sandra in Arizona, ...
	... to go with this photo taken earlier in the day of David and Sandra with cousin Karl, his wife, Stacia, and Evelyn's twin sister, Ruth, at Karl and Stacia's house in Washington shortly before they took David and Sandra to the airport in Seattle. We called it a two-state mini-reunion.
	While we were at Jon and Evelyn's, Evelyn gave Debbie a cup and saucer that had belonged to Debbie's Swedish grandfather's mother, who died when he was just two years old. What a famiy treasure!
	We had a great time catching up, ...
	... but soon it was time to go because it was really late. We got a last picture of David and Sandra and their family, ...
	... and then Debbie declared that we would be leaving in three minutes. Evelyn looked at Tom and joked, "Time her!" Sure enough, we were in the van and leaving the driveway with 10 seconds to spare.
	We were about 45 minutes away from Evelyn and Jon's house and just about to pull into a McDonald's to get ice cream treats when Debbie realized that she had left her purse at their house. A flurry of text messages later, we arranged to pick up Debbie's purse on our way out of town on Monday. We should be okay without Debbie's purse for two days.   Day 12 >