California snow....

We went skiing and boarding!

Yesterday was a beautiful sunny day... warm enough for me to strut around in a t-shirt. Dave and Neill got off of work early, and we decided to head out for some night skiing at Mountain High. Mountain High had their snowmaking machines on during the entire week and we figured this was our best chance for some decent skiing/boarding conditions this late in the season and with the Santa Ana winds blowing in.

Mountain High is located in the San Gabriel mountains, about a 2 hour drive from San Diego. Unfortunately for us, last night was the Friday before a long weekend with tons of people heading out to Vegas and clogging the freeway. Ugh, it took us about 4 hours to get there! But dang, it was worth it! It had been 6 years since Neill's gone boarding, and 4 years for me and Dave. The conditions were great, a bit icy with a nice layer of soft snow on top.... similar to Hunter Mountain, and way better than Mountain Creek. The place has tons of jumps and fun things scattered throughout the trails. We weren't ready to go on any of them, but it's nice to know we have a decent snow park so close to us!

(My crappy picture of Dave in action)



We followed this with a midnight dinner in Rowland Heights and then headed on back to SD....

Good times.

happy vday!

after a million not-so-subtle hints....

Quick updates on life

I have scheduled my exam!
I'm planning it on my mother's birthday. Apparently, big events in our lives somehow get centered around my parents' birthdays. We got married almost 5 years ago, the day before my Dad's birthday. Guess my mom deserves a big gift as well (Keep your fingers crossed for me!). Will someone tell my examiners to be nice to me?

Dave is interviewing!
He's applying for a couple internist positions in the San Diego area. He has an interview with Scripps Mercy this week and an upcoming interview with Kaiser Permanente. He has awesome recommendations (recently, someone referred to him as the best resident they've ever had!), so hopefully, things will turn out well.

I pray the next few weeks will be a good to us.

More Sammie!

More pictures of psycho Sammie...

It's too hard to take pictures of her on my own, so someone needs to hold her, while the other takes shots. She moves too much!

In my brother's hands

Trying to climb into his armpit
Using my brother as a treadmill (she doesn't stop!)
Cute picture!
Running hard
The tube that she flies up and down in (that Aoife is so afraid of). I tried to catch her in action, but she's so fast, I just got her butt.
So my brother is going to expand his cage and link it to this big wheel cage monstrosity. So it's a BIG WHEEL with the housing in middle of the wheel. We figured it would be too big for the small hamsters to move, but since Sammie is so active, I decided to test it out on her. Oooh, she had a field day! The wheel does move with surprising ease and she runs and spins all over in it! And if you stop the wheel, she'll climb all the way up into the housing section! She's a riot... Oh and when she found that tube, she flew up and down it at least 5 times in a row. Ha ha ha...
Can you find Sammie in the cage?
A funky shot

More Aoife!

More pictures of sweet Aoife....

Lying on my chest

Sitting on the wheel
In action!
Crawling up the Melissa mountain
Cute fatty butt
I think she could fit in my mouth
Hanging out in the cage with the sis
My turn on the wheel!

Listen to me when I'm talking to you

Smoked-cooked Meal

Yesterday, my brother treated us to a (mostly) Home-cooked Smoke-cooked Meal!

Check out the spread!

A fiesta of meats made in my brother's smoker!

chicken, pork, sausages, beef brisket

smoked 'shrooms, peppers, and onion, carrot salad, sweet potato salad (err, salads were a supplement from Jimbo's)
Oops! And we forgot to take a close up of the sweet potato fries (from Brett's BBQ)!!!

Yummers....

Aoife and Sammie

Meet my brother's new babies, Aoife and Sammie!

They are 2 female dwarf hamsters. Cute as cute can be! He got them on Monday and my kitty cat has yet to learn of their existence. Ha ha.

Aoife (pronounced EE-fa, Irish for beautiful, radiant, joyful) is a little chubby grey ball of fur with big black eyes. She's calm and cautious (a little afraid of climbing this tube thing that's part of the cage since it involves a bit of a fall to come down it). Very sweet.

Sammie is a little crazy. She's smaller than Aoife, white fur with tan patches and big RED eyes. The eyes were pretty freaky at first, but she's grown on us. She's a little more skittish than her sister, but is warming up to us... Sammie is definitely the jock of the pair. If given the chance, she'll spend the whole night running on the wheel (that made her stand out at the pet store!). I call her Psycho sometimes. The tube that Aoife's afraid of? Well, Sammie just flies up and down that thing. She's quite adventurous, always running, trying to climb the walls of the cage. If Aoife is running on the wheel, Sammie will stand next to it and try to run along wtih her front paws OR she tries jumping on and ends up flying off and landing on her back! She just bounces right back up and heads towards the wheel... She's a hoot.
(with flash)
Hopefully, we'll get some more cute pictures soon. I was telling my brother last night that I thought Aoife was a little bit of a bully. He said, "No, she's not!" The two animals would take turns running on the wheel. However, since Aoife is bigger, whenever she wanted to run, she just jumped on which makes the wheel stop and Sammie had to get off (since Sammie was too small to run with Aoife on). But then, once when I was watching, Aoife stopped running, so Sammie jumped on and started running. Er, I should say "attempted" to run. Aoife just sat there, in middle of the wheel and wouldn't budge. Sammie tried so hard to run. She even got it to turn a little bit which was really cute since you would see Aoife slide up and down the wheel, but still no budge. And I swear, Aoife didn't move for at least a minute or two. It was pretty funny..... But then apparently, Sammie got her revenge this morning. Whenever Aoife was getting ready to settle to sleep, Sammie would run over to where she was and pounce on her! Aoife's squealing freaked my brother out. So he says Sammie's the bully now.... So who's the dominant one? Guess we'll find out soon...

The Bane of my Existence...

Well, tying with TBCE at this moment.... LEAKS IN COPPER PIPES!

SO, on Friday, I discovered a wet spot in our living room. This location is right under the upstairs bathroom, so I assumed we may have a leak coming from the bathtub. Or since we just had some big rains, we had a leak of some sort from our gutters outside.

I called the customer service rep for our builders and he came out and said that I must be the most unlucky homeowner around here. Sheesh.

So the guy from TSC, the restoration company that comes out and chops out all the wet drywall and restores it after it's all fixed, came out. Ha, it was John. The same guy that chopped out most of our hallway last time. He saw me, and I said to him, "You know, I was hoping to never see you again." Chuckle. He took a look and said that he would be back on Monday to cut things out. The company thought the leak was in the original location and had him come out and check it out. Since it wasn't, and it wasn't as monstrous of a leak as last time, they asked us to not use the bathroom and see if some of it would dry out on its own.

So John came by today and here are the results of his work!

A close-up of the leak. Yet another leak in a copper pipe! It's the one left of the black piping. Note the corrosion at the turn....

Sigh

Now I'm waiting for the plumber to show up.

Biking in 4S Ranch...

Dave had to work a long day today, but thank goodness he got home early enough to enjoy some of the warm weather!

Since I haven't gotten a chance to explore the trails around 4S Ranch, Dave took me out on "the loop".

Along the way, there was a big ol' orange tree, so we jumped the fence to try some organic oranges (ha ha, that was for you, Heather!).

Our bikes hanging by the trail

Dave picking an orange

Me checking out the oranges

Dave peeling the orange

Unfortunately, I didn't get a shot of Dave testing out the orange. He spit it out so fast, I just died laughing. It was SOUR...

.

Lastly, Dave took some pictures of me biking....

Kitty making it outside!

One of our kitty's favorite perch is on the window sill in the Master Bedroom. Can you see him?

He's slowly getting used to the outdoors. He'll usually only go out if someone is keeping him company.... but that's a huge improvement over hiding under the bed covers when we open the door!
Giving Dave kisses....

To my New York friends...

Sorry, this is evil of me. But this post is dedicated to those that give me grief for leaving....

Today's weather in San Diego:

(To Garland) And no, I don't miss playing in the the face-freezing, mind-rumbing, frozen-fingers-and-hands-stuck-in-claw-shape cold....

Heather in California!

Heather was in Irvine the past few days for her interview at the UCI Grad Program. She had a few hours free Saturday afternoon, so I decided to drive up and meet her. My brother had to run a few errands up there, so we decided to go up together and kill a few birds with one stone.

We took her to eat a monstrous Mexican meal at El Torito.

Afterwards, we went to my brother's storage space. Ha ha, and evil me had to take pictures to document his teeny tiny messy storage space.

Here's the whole thing. Ha ha.

During lunch we were discussing pets and small creatures. My brother is thinking of getting some gerbils, but apparently they are illegal in California. So instead, he may get some hamsters. As Heather is the premier pet owner, having owned everything on face of the earth (her mother even let her have a chicken once!), she wanted my brother to buy some hamsters right then and there! She also told us that hamsters aren't always very nice, and she said she was good at judging them (she has a high tolerance for bites). So we went to the neighborhood PetSmart. Ha ha, how funny, Heather goes all the way out to Irvine to go to a pet store!

But it was fun. The hamsters were cute. My brother didn't buy any since that PetSmart was ridiculously expensive. But they sold some rats there and Heather got very excited. Apparently, one of her most favorite animals are rats, so she had to hold one. It was actually very sweet with Heather. She was then going to hold one of the Jumbo Rats they had (and I was going to document it with a picture), but that guy wasn't very keen on being picked up at that moment... so no holding nor picture. But did you know that rats have the mind of a 2 year old? Heather almost convinced my brother to get one... Also, we had the opportunity to hold a $1099.99 bird. It had some weird name that I can't remember, but that bird has the intelligence equivalent to a 3 year old. Sounds high maintenance and trouble to me!

When we left, we were driving behind a car with 2 small dogs sticking their heads out the window. Here's a picture! They look like they wanted to jump out....

With only about an hour left before Heather had to go kiss ass with the Director of the program, my brother took us to Corona del Mar. A beach area with some beautiful oceanfront homes:

Dolphin topiary

Some homes that I initially thought looked like a restaurant

Normal looking house with crazy hedges

Pretty house

with fancy dolphin statue
We asked my brother to take a picture of us with the Pacific Ocean. This is the first he took. We asked him how it looked, he replied,

"That's decent." Nooooooo, Heather and I completely disagreed! I look like a freak! So we made him take another....

Much better
Sunset

Yay! Good to see Heather!