Even for Los Angeles, it has been an unseasonably warm winter. Not like I know any different - it's the most unseasonably warm winter I've ever had in life. All the better to take advantage of family visits!!
My parents came to town to play for a weekend. We had a grand old time – we got to kick it at the beach, we paid the Knapps a visit, and of course, we spent some quality time playing cards.
We also visited Huntington Botanical Gardens. David had to work that day, so I had to take over with the photography. We’ll definitely have to return in the spring, when the Japanese garden is open and David can capture some quality shots.
Emily also came to spend some time with us.
And we went sailing! This Saturday was 80 degrees and clear – perfect conditions. Uncle Brad got certified to sail a catamaran, so a bunch of us joined him for a nice leisurely jaunt up to Palos Verdes and back. (See David for more pictures.)
Then we got some pizza and got back on the boat and dined with the Queen Mary and the Long Beach skyline as our backdrop.
It was lovely.
And as an aside, sometimes when I’m stuck in traffic sometimes I have killer sunsets.
David and I went running in the Christmas Eve snowfall. There is nothing in the whole world like running in the middle of a snowfall. The way all sounds are muted. The sound of your shoes crunching in the snow. The way the sky and all of the trees are covered in a fluffy, white blanket. It was stunningly beautiful. It was utterly peaceful. It was pure magic.
It was two miles all downhill and then two more all uphill!!!
We spent our Christmas in Spokane this year with the VanderLouws, the Colin Croshaws, and my parents. On Christmas Eve everyone spent the night at the Croshaw's so we could all be together on Christmas morning. And so we could all be together to open our Christmas Eve jammies!!
Thank you Jack and Naomi for looking my way. :) (And thank you DC for making sure I too had a pair of Christmas Eve pj's!)
Christmas morning! Let's all play with everyone else's toys!!
This was definitely the least organized Opening of the Presents I've ever participated in - which one may expect, with the army of kids we had present that morning. David and I just sat and watched for awhile - we were enjoying witnessing the pandemonium. Plus, we figured all the well-behaved adults would be opening their own presents in a more orderly fashion once the kids got through their spoils. Then we looked around and noticed that even the grown-ups were tossing organization to the wind and had already begun digging in! It was every man for himself!!
P.S. Yes, David grew a beard. The Proposal Beard. Chalk it up to workplace camaraderie - they found a way to commiserate together through the insanity at the office. More on that later.
Once again, David has shown the world that he truly can sleep anywhere.
But it's okay - he was just building up energy to play with this little bundle of goodness!
So David is kind of like the Pied Piper of children. As soon as he enters the room, they respond to the siren sound of his footsteps and come running from all over the house to vie for his attention. That said, you can imagine their glee when he asked them if they wanted to help him shave off the Proposal Beard!!
Oh yeah. We went through phases. First there was just taming down the beard...
The foo man chu...
The soul patch...
And whatever this is...
And the clean-shaven eye candy!!
(Good thing it was out of focus. You’d all have to hold yourselves back if you could see the real thing! Just take my word for it.)
Thanks everyone for helping!
It goes without saying, but I LOVE getting to spend time with all those kids. But, I also really love when I get to chill out with the adults.
Thanks to everyone in Spokane for letting us come play and providing the snowy backdrop that these LA residents were craving!
I can't really tell what season it is. The weather doesn't change much around here. But enough about that.
Your wait is finally over. Here is our house.
Aside from that, there are lots of other things I could show and tell about, but my phone got an update and it deleted all the pictures I'd taken - which was essentially all documentation I have of the last while. But there are a few pics I managed to salvage.
More of the house updating. It's weird to be putting holes in walls just to hide cords, or to be removing paint on a wall just so we can add more paint. Ah, the difference you see when there's a man around who isn't afraid to play with those power tools...
Halloween...we did the classic punked out costume for a dinner party. We went to the Farmer's Market later dressed up like this. As I kind of expected, most people thought nothing of it. I must also include our friend Pierce's costume - he grew a beard for six months just so he could be Brian Wilson from the SF Giants. Pretty impressive, eh? We also branched out a little this year with the costumes. We were invited to another Halloween party and the invite said that costumes were encouraged, so of course we jumped at the opportunity. David wanted to use some goodies he got when he was in Saudi Arabia, so we showed up looking like this: First thing we noticed: whoever threw the party neglected to mention that costumes were only encouraged if you're under 7 years of age. Yep, we were pretty much the only adults who bothered to not wear our street clothes. (And did we EVER!) We were pretty much the lone costumed grown-ups until another childless couple showed up much later dressed as Mary Poppins and the chimney sweeper guy.
I really hope we don't stop dressing up when we have kids. Just sayin'.
Thanksgiving! I had to work the day before and after Thanksgiving (made it real hard to get into Thanksgiving mode. Kind of a bummer.) so we stayed local and kept it small this year. Emily came out from Phoenix to hang out with us, which was AWESOME. Although our numbers were small, we prepared a delightful feast that lasted through another week and a dinner with the missionaries. And then we skyped about it during Let the Magic Begin!! To commemorate the fact that we live in So-Cal, the three of us spent a quality day at Disneyland. Kind of amazing how much work they put into decking out the place for Christmas. Two words: Fast Pass. Best invention of all time. (It snowed on Main Street after the castle-lighting/firework show. I'd show you proof, if not for my phone update FAIL.) And finally, for some current events. LA had a crazy wind storm - some actual inclement weather! I took pictures of all the fallen palm fronds all over our yard but...yeah, you already know this story. This is all the proof I have of the effects of the storm - our power outage!
"Occupy" has spent some time in California. Here's the insanity we've seen... Oh yes. They occupied the port and barricaded the trucks to keep them from shipping stuff. I'm holding back from commenting on just how backwards I think the logic is on this one. But this, I think, is my favorite: THIS is Occupy Torrance, right across the street from my office. Cute little protest, isn't it? :)
So, David has been in South Korea for almost three weeks. I promised myself I would blog before he got back, and maybe even (eek!) get caught up. Well...he gets back tomorrow. The time has gone by mercifully fast. I have a lot of ground to cover. But I'm going to do this in 3 installments to try to be at least somewhat organized with my thoughts, so keep reading after this one, there'll be more!! That said, I dub this post the catch-all because that's where everything else fits. :) Hope you enjoy.
David and I tried to go camping on the beach one Friday night, with the intent of waking up in the morning and going diving. It was kind of a spontaneous decision (read: we wasted a lot of time getting out the door and on the road and we didn't reserve a camping spot in advance), and it kind of backfired. We were driving down PCH in stop-and-go traffic and had reached Malibu when we were graced with this view: It was about then that we realized that there was no way we'd actually get ourselves a camping site, so we pulled over and watched the sun go down over the ocean until it was so dark that we started trying to spot constellations instead. Not a bad way to salvage the night.
Speaking of sunsets, I really love our Marina del Rey apartment. It has such easy access to the beach, great options everywhere for running, and the views all around were amazing. One day I realized that this was the view we got of the sunrise from our living room: And this is what we get at night: Not to mention, we have easy access to Venice Beach, which is quite possibly the most entertaining people-watching venue in existence. My personal favorite is the drum circle that seems to randomly materialize every so often. Everyone just somehow knows when it's time to pick up your drum and head down to Venice and jam.
MDR is also close to Abbott Kinney, home of First Fridays, where all the food trucks in the area cram into every spare inch of the street. Given our newfound interest in food trucks, of course we had to check this out. The diversity of selections was impressive! We sampled dishes from the Dim Sum truck, the Korean/Mexican fusion truck, and the ice cream cookie sandwich truck. We wanted to check out the grilled cheese sandwich truck, but the line was just too long. Who knew grilled cheese could be so popular?
MDR is not close to Disney Hall. But we wandered over there one day anyway because it's just a photographer's paradise, with all the fun little curves and angles. As usual, David has all the good pictures and I have the self-portrait we took from my phone where we're blocking most of the building with our heads.
MDR is also not close to Bakersfield. But that's where I spent General Conference weekend. Emily came up to visit from Phoenix and we gathered with some cousins and aunts and uncles and had ourselves a fine weekend where we ate way too much good food and junk food and indulged in the Good Word. It was a delightful time.
And just because this is a catch-all post, look at the flower me and my co-worker made out of DUM-DUMs!
Keep reading! Looks like there's some more stuff down there...
The search is finally over. We fell for a house that we could actually commit to. And so we did.
Here's a sample of what has been consuming our lives over the last month.
First of all: we refinished the hardwood floors. Of the entire house. By ourselves. Sanding, re-sanding, sanding the corners, sanding some more, staining, re-staining, polyurethaning, buffing, more poly, more buffing, more poly. Wait, wait, wait.........okay, go ahead and walk on it now.
I would not recommend the DIY method, if you have a full-time job and not a lot of vacation. If you're considering doing this for the first time, my suggestion is to take whatever amount of time you think it will take, and then multiply it by three. Or four, if you're extra-ambitious like we were.
Here are some floor-finishing statistics:
Days we thought it would take, start to finish: 2
Days it actually took: 11
Trips to Home Depot: 17
Number of tools rented to do the job: 5, but that doesn't count repeat rentals of the same machinery - in which case the number goes up to about 20.
Number of different types of sanders we used: 7
Coats of stain we wanted: 1
Coats of stain we ended up doing: 2 (long story, but just going with 2 saved the day)
Number of days we used the fridge while it was plugged in on our back patio: 8
It was a huge learning experience, and it was also kind of fun (when it wasn't extremely frustrating) to work together on our home beautification. And now we have floors that we utterly slaved over, and we utterly love them. So. If you ever come to visit and you take a look at our floors and they somehow aren't particularly to your liking, do me a favor: lie. Tell us they're amazing. Please and thank you.
I don't really have any other stories - just some fun pictures. For example, look at the random assortment of light switches and covers you can find in The House (this isn't an exhaustive list):
And look at how high I've been able to stack the packing paper so far:
Here's our first meal in our first house:
The movers came before the floors were done, so they unpacked everything into the garage. Before David left for Korea, he got most of the furniture in the house, but our garage was still loaded to the ceiling with all our boxes. While he's been gone, I've been slowly by slowly whittling away at the mountain of boxes. This is all that is left:
And yes, I put a rug down, simply because I could.
And also, look what I built!
This probably isn't nearly as interesting to all of you as it is to me. I think about this house stuff A LOT now. But really, this post is just a teaser to get you extra-excited about a FUTURE post in which I will actually show you the finished product!! I promise I won't make you wait too long for The Video of The House of ACDC.
