Well, it's been a long few days! Christmas was spectacular - Mom, Dad, Kati and I made the trip out to the Bay Area to Oma's house where we were joined by Adam, Eva, Tante Cati, Emy, Jake, and Jared. It was so great to see everyone again! I'll be posting pictures on Facebook soon (hint hint - people who took pictures, SEND THEM TO ME!). Jake ended up cooking the whole dinner for us... who knew he was a chef?! We had ham, schnitzel, mashed potatoes, veggies, bread and lots of wine! It was a fantastic meal - well done Jake!
The next three days were basically spent glued to Mom and Dad's sofa. I hadn't really intended to park there, but they bribed me with hash browns and bacon. I can't resist potatoes in almost any form. It was fantastically relaxing... I don't think I've actually done NOTHING for three days straight in a long time!
Santa was good to me this year and I decided to treat myself after Christmas... introducing my new Coach addition:
It's gigantic and I love it!
In sad news, today we lost a member of our family - Adam and Eva had to put Onyx to sleep. Eva has had her for the last 19 or so years - she will definitely be missed!
This is just about the best version of this song I've ever heard. Made me laugh last year and I laughed my head off again this year!
Those of you that know Shadow know that he can be somewhat of a pickle on occasion (read: pain in the ass), so generally on vacations he heads over to Archie O'Brians Summer Camp (read: the kennel). This Thanksgiving we ended up at Lake Almanor and since there was NO ONE else up there, I decided to take Shadow up to see how he did in the great outdoors. This pup had the time of his life... he sniffed everything, went in the boat, took long walks and just generally enjoyed being a dog. It was so nice to be able to let him have a little fun time too! That said, we had four people (mom, dad, Kati and I) as well as three dogs (Tucker, Darcy and Shadow) in a two bedroom cabin, so after a couple days, it was definitely time for us to go home!
We normally go up to Almanor in the summer, so it was very strange being there in the "offseason". I think the entire time we were there I saw about one other boat on the lake. The water was flat as glass... but a balmy 49-51 degrees. It was killing me not to waterski, but I didn't bring my wetsuit and I think I would need more than a spring suit for that! That said, the weather was beautiful, but cold while we were there. Here's a great picture of the fog sitting on the lake:
It would hover there until about noon and then burn off. Beautiful! Here are a few pictures of Shadow enjoying his time at the lake:
His cute little ears kept flopping in the wind... then he would squish them down to stop them and the wind would sweep under and blow them back. Too cute.
He wanted to see EVERYTHING. The ducks, geese and various other birds really caught his attention!
As with everything else in life, he HAD to help fish!
The fruits of our fishing labors. Dad caught a nearly three pound small mouth bass! That sucker was THICK! Sadly, I got skunked this trip... a couple of good bites, but no fish for me. It's been a long time since that's happened!
It's nice to be back home... today was a day of relaxing for me... I did pretty much nothing all day long! I feel like the next couple of weeks are going to be busy, so I think it's well deserved!
It's that time of year again... that's right... turkey time! No, I did not get attacked by another turkey in front of my house. Yesterday was my Second Annual Friends Thanksgiving. I present to you, my table:
Lots of people, lots of food and lots of fun! Everything was covered up because we had a bit of a fly issue (I think Chris M. counted somewhere around 50) due to the fact that the back door was open all afternoon and apparently they thought it smelled good. Take my word for it, the food was awesome! This year I had the turkey done by 3:30 (last year I had a slight defrosting issue that caused my turkey to take about 10 hours to cook...) and we had a blast!
Shadow had such a fantastic time... he was pretty well behaved most of the night and only got a little too excited a few times. In fact, today I did a bunch of yard work and then pretty much hung around the house. It got real quiet, so I went hunting for him... apparently he partied too hard:
Note the maroon blanket to the left in the picture. That's his blanket and where he's ALLOWED to sleep on the bed. Also note how he's nowhere near it...
On that note, I'm off to bed myself!
I rock.
Tonight Kati and I officially installed a new microwave. Long story short, I had the microwave repair guy (who knew there was such a thing?) come out on Tuesday, only to tell me that whatever that main component (the magnetron or something space-age sounding like that) was dead and that it would cost over $400 to fix.
My new microwave cost $280. Yeah... no brainer. The only catch is that it everywhere charges an arm and a leg to come out and install it. I figure, hey, I have power tools...
Fast forward to around 8pm tonight when I'm cussing (I won't lie, I dropped the F bomb more than once), kicking at stuff and sweating a lot. Thank God Kati was there to help me! We finally got the sucker installed and enjoyed some delicious popcorn while we watched Grey's Anatomy. Hooray!
Here are some pics from our endeavor. The first is the gaping hole where the original microwave once stood.
The second is said original microwave (anyone know what to do with one of these?
The third is Kati and Shadow displaying the new, improved, actually works microwave:
Finally, here's where Shadow got bored:
Ok, Reverend Jesse Jackson cried.
Enough said!
I know it's been forever since I last blogged... life, as usual, has been a crazy whirlwind.
Jury duty has been going well. I can't (and won't) blog about the trial, but it's been super interesting! There are times that have moved frustratingly slow (I get the point, but REALLY). I will not blog about it once the trial is done (not even sure if I'm allowed to), but if you want to know, ask me (AFTER the trial is done, of course!). The other jurors that I'm working with are really great and we're always joking around and trying to have fun in light of a tough situation. The other bad news is that the courthouse is three blocks from the mall, so it could potentially be very expensive jury duty! :)
I also exercised another of my civil liberties today - I voted! Kati and I went to the polls together at 7am when they opened. It was fun to have someone to go with and I always love actually going to the polls. As we all know, I'm not great at waiting in lines, so we were lucky that the line wasn't very long. I'm proud to say I voted for Obama and I'm hoping that tonight he wins! I'm not gonna lie - I also love going to the polling place so I can get my sticker, which I proudly wore all day!
This weekend was pretty busy too! On Friday Kati and I had our Halloween party, which was a total blast. People came up with some seriously great costumes! Email me if you want pictures!
On Saturday I drove up to the Bay Area to see Madonna's Sticky and Sweet tour with Adam, Eva and Catherine. We had such a fantastic time! As always, Madonna was amazing - it blows me away that she still puts on the energetic shows that she does and that she is in better shape than half of her dancers (who are probably half of her age!). Here are the four of us at the show:
Here's Eva and I... note our really cool glow in the dark necklaces!
I'm spending the rest of tonight in my jammies on the sofa, switching back and forth between the election coverage and just about everything on my DVR. Woo hoo!
I'm so incredibly excited... tonight I found out that I've been called for jury duty tomorrow morning. Those of you who know me understand that I've waited 9 years for this - I was only called once and it was while I was down in SD and couldn't go. I hope I get a big trial and get sequestered! Seriously, I think this is such a cool thing and a really great way to be a part of our legal system.
More tomorrow!
That's right... New Kids On The Block. You probably haven't heard that name in a while, have you? Well, last night Julie, Mindy and I were joined by Amanda and Chris (who has superhero boyfriend status for a while) for dinner and a pretty amazing show. Things didn't exactly start out very nicely though - we went to dinner at a place called Mandabar (which we've since re-nicknamed with things I won't print on my blog). We had probably the worst service that I've ever had... we waited almost an hour for our food, which was followed by Julie not getting her dinner at all, us missing drinks and my cheeseburger not having cheese. At this point, we asked for the manager because the waiter was telling us that they were too busy because of the concert (now, come on... it's a Thursday night and it's NKOTB... not some crazy rock band). He then blamed the kitchen. When the manager came out, he apologized for the wait, made some more excuses and still forgot things we asked for. Fortunately, he took the drinks off the tab and took $25 off the check, but sheesh... not a way to start your night! We missed about half of the opening act (it was Natasha Bedingfield!) and Julie had to sustain herself on drinks (I know... tough job, but someone has to do it!).
Once we made it to the show we were told that our seats were being changed... we were originally upstairs in the nosebleed seats, but they moved us down to the lower level because they were closing off those seats. We ended up being about 13 rows back from the circular stage that they came out to sing on about halfway through the show... we could not have asked for better seats! Mindy and I both loved Jordan when we were younger, so we were quite happy when he sang to us (and only us, of course!).
Here are some pictures from the show:
It's amazing how all of the words came back... the next thing I knew we were screaming and singing along like we were 12 years old again! :)
Finally, here is a video from the show... apparently the New Kids have gotten a lot racier with age (either that or I had no idea what they were doing at 12):
I won some really cool tickets at work... last night Kati and I went to see Neil Diamond. We had such a blast... that man is still 100% selling out arenas! He sang all of his classics (shoot, he sang "Sweet Caroline" TWICE!) plus some new stuff off of his lastest CD. What a cool prize to win for dressing up!
I finally got around to uploading all of my Europe videos... enjoy!
These first two are a band that was playing in the metro (subway) in France... they were amazing! In fact, every metro all over Europe had these incredibly talented musicians!
Next is a little safety video that Kati and I were inspired to make on the plane from France to Italy. You see, they started in on the whole water landing thing, however, Kati and I realized that we weren't really flying over any large body of water:
The next is our Eiffel Tower video. Sorry it's sort of sideways, but work with me. We discovered that when you ask for water in most of Europe, "with gas" means sparkling and "without gas" means plain old tap water. For some reason this struck us as hilarious (I swear we're both grown adults). Thus, I present to you, the Eiffel Tower - with gas (get it... sparkles?):
Finally, our Greek video. Needless to say, we were just goofy at this point:
On that note, I'm off to bed!
