the hills and thrills of a San Francisco cable car ride

Have a blessed Thanksgiving!

Even crows enjoy good food.



Speaking of good food, I'll be cooking (and eating!) up a storm the next two days so I'll catch you on the other side of Thanksgiving.

oceanside

I could wake up to this every morning.

(Or is it too close for comfort???)

Dripping flowers.

Seaweed.

Home Sweet Home-less.

Think the homeless use the saying "You can't tell the rich from the poor"?



(snapped this as we were driving by in the car! I saw it coming and by the time
I wriggled the camera out of the bag from the back seat this was all I could get.)

beach.

Birds.

big blue nation is back!

Did I say we were excited about last year's coach?

cough cough

Well, let's just say we're more-excited-than-you-can-imagine that he's gone and

we

have

John Calipari!!

We were able to get $10 (TEN DOLLARS!!) tickets for the best seats in the house for the Blue White Scrimmage game last week.

We had a great time watching the best recruits in the country on OUR court!

Sophia and her doll even made it to the big screen for 10 seconds when the camera zoomed in on her!!

royalty

The troops have been home for 2 days and we've been busy sharing cuddles and kisses and snuggles and stories. They had a great time and Daddy spoiled them rotten with multiple visits to Chownings, The Cheese Shop, the candy store, and the pool.

And despite Sophia's declaration before they left that she was going to be the Mommy there and help Daddy in the kitchen, Daddy did all the cooking, cleaning, dishes, and laundry (he didn't want to bring home any dirty clothes for me to do!).

He also was nurse and doctor. Sophia hurt her leg and had poison ivy. Isaac was battling asthma and woke Dad up in the middle of the night for help.

All while I was home alone eating my way through a box of dark-chocolate covered cookies.

Really? Really. I've got the best husband ever and don't know what I ever did right to be blessed with him.

And while my Honey makes me feel like royalty, they had a brush with royalty when the royal Governor drove up to dissolve parliament. Sophia captured a picture of it for me (she was staff photographer for the week).


And on their last day Daddy spoiled them more with a ride in the royal carriage! The Governor's carriage! (I would say that's so not fair since I wasn't there, but I can't exactly complain, you know.)








Neat story on the photos:
The driver tried to take a pic of them in the carriage but Sophia's camera often wasn't working when she needed it most, and this was one of those times (the other was at the Fifes and Drums!).

But a sweet lady standing nearby offered to take pictures with her camera and email them to us, so the pics above (minus the horse's rear when Sophia's camera WAS working) are courtesy of a stranger named Donna who works for Hersheys! (I told you she was sweet.)

progress report

I'm at the half way point. I've got 4 more nights, 4 more mornings, 4 more days, however you want to look at it. I prefer to look at every angle because they each have their merit.

When you're used to getting other people ready for bed and getting other people up and fed breakfast and getting other people through their day with meals and school, and now it's just YOU (or me actually)... makes things a little different around here.

So what have I done? Let me see if I can name a few things.

-washed kids' shower curtain
-washed 2 loads of towels
-defrosted ice maker
-watched 2 two hour Photoshop courses
-figured out and ordered school books
-photoshopped and reprinted 2 living room photos
-watched a third photoshop course
-did Pilates
-knocked down cobwebs from basement ceiling
-cleaned off high ceiling fan in MBR
-washed all bathroom rugs
-cleaned kids' bathroom (and I don't mean just the sink, toilet, and tub. I mean I wiped out the sink cabinet, washed out their utility basket, soaked and cleaned garbage can (gross), cleaned out closet and pitched 9 used toothbrushes, 6 half used travel size tubes of toothpaste, 5 retainer cases, 3 bottles of old skin lotion, and a myriad of other old stuff, and wiped down cobwebs that were stuck in the steam buildup over the shower)
-organized basement
-organized garage
-cleaned grease off the garage/kitchen door that sophia's neighbor friend smeared all over this summer (or was it last summer??)
-cut cardboard for shipping prints
-cleaned off my desk (mostly, almost done)
-pitched malfunctioning cds and dvds
-transferred 2 music tapes to digital on the computer and burned CD
-watched 4 Jessica Sprague classes I never finished this summer
-washed our sheets and Isaac's
-washed Sophia's coat
-installed 3 fonts I downloaded this summer
-burned Hannah a CD of her photos I used for the wedding video
-cleaned up computer desktop of wedding video files
-backed up My Documents to external hard drive
-scheduled program to automatically back up Documents at shut down
-put away pile of vacation things from APRIL
-organized ribbon into 2 three drawer containers
-watched Bro. Billy Paul's testimony
-organized recipes (still have to tidy up a few things)
-cleaned off kitchen ceiling fan
-went through filing cabinet folders and pitched some things, pulled other things to read
-put new battery in Timed Timer
-cleaned dust and organized cords behind my computer (only because I couldn't JUST plug in my external hard drive)
-worked on some vacation photos
-took a bath with the sea salts Eileen gave me a year ago from Israel
-read

And just because no post is complete without a picture...

I'll leave you (or me rather) with this one.

I Miss

fix photos. check!

On our first trip to California 3 years ago, I got some fantastic photos. Or so I thought. As they hung on my living room wall for all this time, I've grown to hate them. Be embarrassed by them. Wanted to rip them down.

Slowly improving my photography knowledge and photoshop skills over the past 2 years meant a slow death for those photos, but also a rising eagerness to fix them.

Honey and I sit on the loveseat most every day and inevitably my eyes and mind would wander to the photos on the wall behind him while he's whispering sweet nothings. My eyes have traced and cloned and brushed those photos over and over. It's a wonder my eyes didn't bore holes in them.

Today, while I watched my Sweets blow me kisses from Williamsburg on one of the town's webcams, I hunted down our 2006 vacation photo disc and went to work.

And tonight I will sleep much better and dream of actually listening the sweet nothings on our next loveseat date.