Fun with Annie & Steve

After the smashing success of Summerfest, we got to spend even more time with Annie & Steve. This does not happen often, so I was super excited!! We drove up north to camp at Humboldt Redwoods State Park. This was extra fun because Steve had just had shoulder surgery a few weeks beforehand. And yes, we really did need all this stuff, and more.....


Avenue of the Giants:


Sweet shady campsite:


We may or may not have taken all the leftover beer from Summerfest......


Nothing better than camping food:


And drinking out of squishy cups:


I love these two:


After a couple of days, we drove home along the coast, where someone who will not be named did some brutal carsickness-side-of-the-road puking. We also got to stop at a couple different beaches in Mendocino.

Annie discovered the Pacific Ocean is cold:


Jason & Steve did some serious kung-fu-fighting:


There were Bigfoot sightings:


And Shrek:


After a one-night detour in Ft. Bragg (which involved the very creepy Carnival-by-the-Sea and a lot of women's softball), we made a final stop at the Korbel winery for lunch & champagne tasting. Sweet!


This was the most time I've got to spend with Annie and Steve in a few years and we had a blast!! I miss them and wish we didn't live so far apart. Moving to Maine won't help, since I was informed that Minnesota is pretty much smack dab in the middle of the country. So hurrah for good times and good memories!!!!!

House for Sale!!!!

Have you been wondering what I've been up to during my long absence from the blogosphere?? Since our Memorial Week camping trip (which I'll post pics of in my next post), we have been working on our house, day in and day out. Cosmetically, the house needed a lot of updating. A lot. Especially if we wanted to sell it. Which, as you can tell by the title of this post, we have decided to do.

Jason has always planned to move back to the promised land of Maine and that was something I agreed to before I jumped on this marriage train with him. Although truth be told, even before he and I became "we", I was itching. Restless. Wanting a change. Looking for something different. somewhere greener and cooler. Maine is alright by me. Close to his family. Close to cheap lobster. A place where we can have an old house with some land. Maybe even some animals. I'm hoping this will bring me one step closer to fulfilling my childhood dream of being Laura Ingalls Wilder. And I'm not talking about Melissa Gilbert, I'm talking about the real deal:


This was always our "someday" plan, but thanks to the recent shenanigans of those wacky UC Regents, our "someday" plan has become our "now" plan. And so, we prepared our house. We painted and tiled and painted and recarpeted and painted and planted and remodeled and painted and cleaned and painted and packed and painted and painted some more. I am proud to say, the house looks fabulous. All things we have wanted to do, given a certain sense of urgency by events out of our control.

Which leads us to the next thing out of our control: selling the house. We hope and pray that someone will fall in love with it's quirky charms just the way Jason did when he bought it years ago. We have a wonderful realtor and we've done all we could to make this house beautiful and welcoming. Now, we wait. And curse the Sacramento weather for killing off all my new flowers after I planted them.

Welcome in...............









It has been completely bizarre to come home from work this week and realize that there wasn't a project waiting to be completed, a door that needed painting, a box that needed packing. We have an open house on Sunday and after that, I plan on getting my scrapping supplies back out (in a controlled fashion of course) and catching up on my pictures with all the free time I suddenly have!

Wish us luck!!!