Our hotel

We stayed at the Balboa Inn which was built in 1929. It's a great hotel with a fabulous entrance. It does need some help in terms of repair but we love staying there. One of the reasons I love this hotel are the small details that you don't see at modern hotels, like our towel rack was held up by a pair of swans, and our soap dish was a fish with a seashell on it's tail. Marvelous. Also the weekend we got to watch a wedding right outside our room.

The Ocean

Last weekend we went to Costa Mesa for Justin's birthday. We didn't do awhole lot on Saturday and it was great. We just bummed around the beach and the harbor all day.

House

Here are some pics of the downstairs of the townhouse after it was painted. The upstairs it white so I didn't take any pics of that.

Settled In

Hurrah! The move is over! So we actually moved like 3 weeks ago but its taken awhile for me to get comfortable with the condition of the place to actually sit down and write a bit.
The move it self, was hell. We procrastinated big time on getting a U-haul so there were none on the Saturday of the move, but we were able to get one for Sunday. Saturday then, was spent driving back and forth all day with our cars delivering boxes, and we didn't even get them all finished like we had hoped. Sunday, our friends who owed us a move came over and Jason helped load the u-haul while Sarah who is pregnant, and can't lift over 10lbs was designated throwing the random things around the house into boxes, then to vacuuming the house. We ended up doing 3 runs with the truck cause we had a small 14-footer. We have way to much crap. Oh and this whole weekend we had the cats in the Pet Hotel in Petsmart for their sanity/safety and ours.
By the end of Sunday, we had two freaked out cats, a garage full of boxes and a townhouse full of random furniture/boxes. We now live in a gated community with an actual guard house with security people. But with new communities are the dreaded Home Owners Association, and they have some truly frustrating rules. For example: the townhouse that we live in has no drive way it goes straight from the street to the garage, which fits two cars. In the HOA rules, residents are not allowed to park in the visitor parking lots. We had to get special permission to have one of our cars parked in visitor parking since we were moving in and our garage was packed with boxes. the security people made it known to us that this action is not tolerated by the HOA and that they were being gracious and that we should be very thankfully that they let us park in the visitor parking. Fast forward to today: this weekend we're going to Costa Mesa for a visit to the ocean (we'll be bummin on the beach all day Sat Rayna if you're interested in visiting) and a trip to Ikea Sunday so we're renting a pick-up cause our cars are too small for furniture. Anyways, today I asked if i could park said pick-up truck in the visitor parking for 2 hours while waiting for Justin to get home and they said NO!! PARK ACROSS THE STREET AT THE CASINO, NO PARKING ALLOWED!!
Never live in a HOA community! The neighborhood may look nice but individuality is not allowed. Ok..venting is now over.
So for the last couple weeks we've been slowly getting things to where they need to be and it's starting to look pretty good.
In other news, Justin has a new job. He's working at the hotly debated Yucca Mountain Project. Yucca Mountain is the possible future home for a nuclear waste depository. The test tunnel has been completed and now they are getting ready to start making the real tunnels. So what Justin is doing is a field geologist at drill rigs, so when cores come out from the drill rig hole he does a quick field identification of the rock strata then boxes it up and is goes to the lab for more detailed identification. Once the drill rigs hit the desired depth ~1000 feet, seismic detectors will be placed in the holes so any movement can be detected. Me, I'm doing the same thing with no interesting news.

Moving-Again!

Yes, we're moving again this is now the 3rd time in almost 3 years (yikes has it been that long!) of living here. The place we're living in now is about 20 years old and thus an energy hog. We spend so much money a month on electricity it's scary. Thankfully our friends in California a few months ago decided to buy an investment property here in Vegas. We told them that we'd live there if they wanted. So they said Ok, they ended up finding a 3 year old townhouse in an area of town that we really like. Since it's only 3 years old, it's got 2 air-conditioning units one for the up-stairs and one for the down-stairs. All the appliances are energy star and the townhouse is just awesome. It's even in a gated community. Not the kind where you just have to know the code to punch in, but the kind where there is a security person and if you're a visitor you have to give them your name and where you are going. Sweet. So, we've been packing slowly all month and are now at the point of not having anything else to pack till the last couple days. Which will be next weekend. When we get in and un-pack my camera software for the computer, I'll take some pics.
In other news, I'm sick. I should be at work right now but I'm so stuffed up I knew I would do nothing productive so I called in.
So yeah that's it, I'm going to go lay on the couch and watch some infomericals or something. Later!

Ok, I'm back Again!

So big surprise, my computer died again and for the last time. We ended up buying a new computer from dell, and it took awhile to ship. But now I'm up and running again. There should be no problems from now on. I won't see this weeks epi of Lost until probably Saturday. I won't recap the last couple that I missed, but I will say this. Watching Hurly zooming around in that old VW bus was the funniest thing i'd seen in awhile!!!

Go Bears!

Ok, so the Bears lost the Superbowl. But it's still a cute picture.

Redrock

So here I am at Redrock, sitting on redrock sandstone. We had just reached the end of the trail and we took alittle break before heading back. I really like this picture. Is that conceited?

Christmas Day

Here we are on Christmas Day, aren't we cute!

All wrapped up

So here is Ash, on Christmas morning, ignoring all his presents and playing in the wrapping paper.

Field Museum

In November we went to Chicago for my b-day weekend. My present was a trip to the Field Museum to see the King Tut artifacts exhibit but of course you can't go to the Field Museum without getting your pic taken in front of Sue the Tyrannosaurs Rex!

Ash

Here is Ash, being attacked by Godzilla, but he does not seem to care =)

LOST

All right, so last night we got together with our friends who have a dvr and a huge wide screen HD tv. The show was amazing in HD, so clear and awesome..now Justin will be hounding me even more for one, great.
So the mid-season premiere (i think that's what they call it) was pretty good. Kate and Sawyer made it off the Others Island with the help of Alex and Juliette. Plus they have Alex's drugged up/brainwashed boyfriend Carl, that will be interesting.
So Juliette's flashback was interesting. I has assumed for some reason that they had been on that island for most of or all of their lives. From the way that her ex died, I'm guessing that was the Hanso foundation getting rid of her fear of leaving that company. Jack shoulda killed Benry, that guy is EVIL. From the previews for next week Juliette is in a cage too, so i don't think she gets to go home like promised. Hopefully the dahrma shark doesn't attack kate and saywer..that boat doesn't look terribly sturdy.

So Sorry!

So sorry about the total lack of post but windows XP crashed and it's taken us awhile to bring my computer back from the dead. I think by this weekend I'll have everything installed again. Including the software for my new digital camera. I have a bunch of pics to post from Chicago, maybe one or two from Vegoose, and some more random pics from Nov-now.
As for Lost, I'm not staying up until 11pm to watch it. We have friends that DVR it, so we're going over Friday night to watch it. So I'm sorry no more right-after-the-show-postings. I'm a big wimp for staying up on work nights.
Is anyone watching Heroes? Man thats a great show..it'd be fun to discuss that one as well.

Busy, Busy!!

Once again we've got acouple of weekends coming up where we'll be swamped doing fun things so hopefully we'll take pictures along the way so I can post them when the crazyness dies down again.
This Saturday is the Vegoose festival, actually it's all weekend but we just bought Saturday tickets cause thats when everyone we want to see is performing. We'll be seeing The Killers, Tom Petty, Damion Marley, and The Racatours. They have a Little White Chapel there where you can get "married." Justin and i didn't do it last year but I think we're going to have to this year. They have a front of a chapel, you stand in front of the doors and the drunk priest marries you, then a music legend (Elvis, Ozzy, or Tina Turner) come out and sing a song as your first dance. It's awsome. Some co-workers are going so we'll have to have them come to our wedding and have them take pics.
Next weekend, Nov 2-6, we're flying to Chicago for my Birthday! We'll stay with Justin's parents and hang out with his friends, shop, and see King Tut at the Field Museum.
So hopefully between then and Thanksgiving I can post pics and talk about our fun times, then when Thanksgiving comes around we're going to San Jose to our friends place for turkey day with thier family then we'll be taking off the next day and driving to Lake Tahoe for the weekend! Busy, busy!!

Lost

Ok sorry I forgot about last week. I saw the episode but had been working crazy hours so my motivation was zero.
This epi was really painful to watch..poor Sawyer. He got the crap kicked out of him several times, thought he had an exploding pace maker in his chest (I knew they were bluffing), I'm surprised that Ben told him so quickly that he was conned.
So what the hell, there's two islands!? And I don't remember when this was in the show but did Ben mention a submarine? How in the heck do the others get back and forth between the islands so quickly. I mean they had that whole fake village set up, they just seem like they are constantly on "our" island harrasing our group. And where the heck are all the ppl that got taken from the Tallies? Where are the kids? Ugh i'm so frusterated.