New camera

We finally got a camera (for Angela mostly), haven't used t a whole lot yet, but I like it so far. We got the silver version. 12.1 MP and it takes 780p video. Then we bought an 8GB memory card that will allow Angela to take some 2400 pictures without offloading them.My biggest problem with it is that I now have to scale down the photos I post here.

Another Month

I think I worked the least in November that I have worked since starting my job. We headed to NM at the beginning of the month for Angela's best friend's wedding, so I took the 3rd-5th off. While on the trip I pulled a back muscle, by the end of the trip I also had a good cough to go with it. Between that and a holiday day the next week, I was out of work the entire second week. I did make it to work for all of the third week though...I think. Then back to NM for Thanksgiving. All in all I worked 10 days last month.

Pictures:
Angela's sister has 5 chickens, if you lean over the speckled one will hop up on your shoulder:
We got into Flagstaff just around dark on Saturday with it starting to snow, by the morning it looked like this:Luckily (or unfortunately) it was not enough to stop us from getting home...
And the car passed 40k miles, actually this was just leaving NM. That's 13,000 miles in less then 7 months, hopefully this car is good for at least 200,000 miles at this rate.

Well, I missed October...

October is over, with me never making a post. I think it was probably because I can't think of anything really great that happened last month. I'll use what the camera time stamped for dates.

Matt and I went for a hike on the Pacific Crest Trail on the 10th. We probably did about 5 miles, would have done more, but the first hill we went over was a: not something we needed to go over, and b: really steep.

Looks like on the 18th we were somewhere in a hotel with a nice sunset...

Ah, I remember, we went down to Ontario and Angela did some shopping on Saturday and then we went to the Pamona swap meet on Sunday (15 miles of cars and car parts), where I got a new dash board and a new in box center console body for the Trans Am for $120...or roughly $300 less than I would expect to pay for them elsewhere. Most of the stuff there was for cars that were much older though.

I think all we did the weekend before Halloween was look for some costume stuff.

We went to a party on the 31st with the usual people and then some. There was way to much eating with some games mixed in...which also involved eating. We took truffles and cupcakes, I decorated this one:

The next morning we got up and I had the largest bowl of Grapenuts ever (roughly 4 servings) using the leftover rasberries from the truffles Angela had made.

Big Bear Cruise II

This weekend along with Angela's business moving to their new office, we went on the F-body cruise to Big Bear Lake. We left Ridgecrest a little after 7:30 am on Saturday and headed for Wildwood Park in San Bernardino. We got there first just before 10 am, and cars came in until about 10:30 and we headed out.

This was the slowest cruise I have been on going up the mountain, mostly because we got stuck behind some slow traffic going up. It was a little before lunch when we got up the mountain and the group headed for the Alpine Slide. Angela and I both went down it once - its kind of like a single person bobsled without the ice. Then we all broke for lunch and whatever around town since the scheduled dinner wasn't until 5. We ate at Boo Bears Den, just a normal family style restaurant. After lunch we just walked around the town and checked out the shops. After an hour or so we headed to the lodge, where we found everyone playing pool and watching TV. Angela picked up a stick and proceeded to beat everyone that was playing. We ate at 5 and sat and chatted for a while longer and then everyone headed home. We took off north out of Big Bear through Lucerne Valley, Apple Valley and on up 395.

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Other things that have happened were a trip to NM to see family, but most who read this already knew that. Angela flew to Abq for a bridal shower for Jen. I built a stand for shooting targets...and proceeded to shoot one of the legs off it on the first outing.

Anniversary Trip

This last weekend was our planned one your anniversary trip. On Thursday we both took the day off and headed to Monterey. Friday morning we ate breakfast at our hotels resteraunt and watched the otters out in the ocean while we ate. Then we headed to the aquarium at the bay on Friday. We were able to see a lot of it before it got to crowded. They had a special sea horse exhibit open and they have a huge jelly fish exhibit. There were also a lot of otters and seals, and we got to watch the penguin feeding.

Monterey Slideshow 103 pics

After the aquarium we ended up going to see an X-games 3-D show at the theater that we had seen previews for on TV the night before. It was pretty cool.

On Saturday we did the 17 mile drive around Pebble Beach. After that we headed down the coast on the 1 to Pismo. We got there in the late afternoon and it was rainy, so we ate at the Marie Calendar's and then checked into our hotel room and relaxed most of the rest of the day.

17 Mile Drive, Drive to Pismo Slideshow

102 pics

Sunday we had a rental set up with Sun Fun Buggies at 11, so we headed to their shop. This turned out to be the biggest pain during the trip. When we got to the shop at 10:15 the sign on the door said closed though their hours were starting at 9 - we called the phone # and they said they were going to pick us up at the hotel - this was never mentioned to us when making the reservation (thank goodness they didn't), but we had already checked out so we drove ourselves over to the beach - having to call them 3 different times to get directions that were different every time :(. Finally we got to the beach and one of them came and picked us up and took us out to their staging area. We got out there (~1.5 mile drive) and got ready to rent, only to find out they didn't have our reservation info (made over a week before). To make an already long story shorter we ended up walking over to the business next to them and renting a 2-up atv for the same amount of time for half the price, win. The thing that made me really glad about this later was seeing at least 3-5 of the buggies stuck in the dunes and one having to be towed back to the trailers. The atv was great and we had a blast riding all over the dunes. The people we rented the atv from (http://stevesatv.com/) were nice enough to give us a ride back to the car after our rental was over and we headed on home down the 1. A few spots of bad traffic adding nearly 2 hours to the drive home was the only bad thing after that.

That was our weekend, and if you watched the slide shows it was about 1/3 of the pictures.

Happiest Place on Earth

The weekend before last, Angela and I both got eye exams on Friday, got some new trial contacts and ordered new glasses. Then we headed down to Anaheim for the weekend. One of my friends (Thanks Matt!!) had gotten 3-day park hopper passes for Disney Land/California Adventure and only used 2 of the days, it was a nice anniversary present. So we spent the Saturday all over Disney Land, we got there when the gates opened at 8 am and left the park at midnight. We stayed in a hotel that was about 4 blocks away, so we didn't have to worry about parking or anything.

^This is what an LED flash does^

Short Post

This is what you want to do when you live in the desert. I was just glad that it cooled into the double digits this weekend so that I didn't fry while watching some of the race. The race was only full size ish vehicles from stock Volkswagon Beatles to large trucks and buggies that probably ran in the 6-700 horsepower range. They ran 3-5 (class dependent) laps of 44 miles each. The race started at about 7:30 pm, I think we left around 10 or 11.

Friday I went riding, its been so long that the battery had gone dead on the Pred and I had to go get a new one. Bouncing across the desert also made for sore arms for 3 days - not to bad though.

We also saw GI Joe this weekend at the theater, I thought it was good, but I hear the critics are giving harsh reviews. Umm...thats really all I have for now.