What an Adventure!?

WARNING...THIS POST IS FILLED WITH SARCASM!

Well the Disney Company is pretty smart and during the Spring they have a special called a "2fer Ticket" that allows you entrance to both Disney parks for the price of one ticket. The visits have to be on two different days, within a 30 day period. As I mentioned in a previous post, we went to Disneyland in mid-April, so exactly 30 days later we came back to go to California Adventure. None of us particularly like that park, but it's a free ticket and there are a few good features of Cal Adventure that kind of make it worth the trip? The smart part about it, is that they get you back in there "for free" so you'll spend more money on parking, food and some merchandise that isn't offered in Disneyland.
So we headed out in the late morning on a Saturday and our first adventure was hitting quite a bit of traffic. I had "fun" using my brother's hand held navigational device to try to find side streets to avoid the freeway. We did it for a few miles and now we are very familiar with all the street names of the offramps South of Disneyland.
The second adventure was to get off the freeway at the original Disneyland exit on Harbor Blvd. We tried to recreate our youth a bit. Surprisingly it still had a some of the same feel as it did years ago. This is how I remember it. We drove on all the streets around Disneyland and found an alternate parking area, which I hope we can use the next time we go.
So yeah, just over the hedge in the background is the parking lot! I was just so excited to know that one existed. The main parking structure is a little creepy. We ended up parking there anyway this time though, because we had already driven in circles around Disneyland and didn't want to take anymore time driving around.
Finally and reluctantly we made it inside the park and we saw all kinds of exciting things.

More baby ducks! I wonder how many generations have been born here?
Monterey? I lived in Monterey and sorry, there's no bridge that crosses the bay there. Maybe this is suppose to be the Bay Bridge in S.F.? There are lots of mysteries in the park like that.
The Drive-through tree or I mean walk through tree. This is a one of the nice parts of the park, with lots of trees providing shade and peace. Hopefully the redwoods will survive there.

Yellowstone ...in California? Still is pretty cool though.
Devils Postpile Monument...with a waterfall. I guess I don't need to see the real thing now.
My grandma's backyard fence? What? Seriously, my brother took this picture in the redwood area somewhere and I didn't even notice it when we walked by.
Las Vegas construction. This was so strange, they are working on a water show there, but had the construction completely exposed in most places. That is so not Disney!

Our tired feet. We are all wearing the same shoes as we did to Disneyland!


A Hollywood restroom straight from the 1930's! Wow!
A Disneyland stray cat. This is the fourth one I've seen in 3 years. Yet again, I wonder how many generations of cats have lived in the parks? Poor kitty, we kept following him so we could get a good picture.A sign outside of the Bugs Life Land. Thanks to my brother for this picture too. I thought it fitting.
All in all, I'm glad that we went. It's all about spending time together anyway, even if it's not our most favorite place...just NEXT TO our most favorite place! :(

I learned things from this last trip though that I need to remember.

1. Always get a Fast Pass for rides where people tend to be annoying in line i.e. Tower of Terror. (Or just bring a bodyguard along with you to the park.)
2. I'm getting too old for staying until (and after) the parks close and driving all the way home the same night.
3. If I do stay until the parks close and drive home the same night, then I better leave myself the entire next day to recover!
4. I need to take some more time between visits to Disneyland so I can appreciate it more and see the "magic".

My next post will have more Sunshine in it, I promise!

40 hours of driving in 4 days!

My husband and I took another whirlwind trip at the beginning of the month to check out another university. Here are "exactly"538 pictures to document the drive!

Day 1

We started out quite early on a Saturday morning and enjoyed the deserted highways. This is Hwy 395 heading towards Mammoth.
One of my favorite places, Mono Lake. We just flew right by this time though.
The little bit of Eastern Oregon we saw before the sun went down. It was a lot like Nevada really. We made it into Idaho the first night after a 15 hour drive and stayed near Boise.

Day 2
After a good nights sleep and checking out Boise, we kept going North. This is the "scenic route" on Hwy 55.
We stopped just for a second to appreciate the rushing river. I believe this is the Salmon River.
Yes, if you looked closely there are railroad tracks on the right hand side. There was a tourist train that followed the river for miles, called Big Thunder Railroad! The trains weren't running that day, but it must be so beautiful when they do.Beautiful bridge we went over. We still had a couple of hours until we got to our destination!
Our first view of Moscow. We thought that the drive through Idaho was going to take 3 hours tops, but it took us over 5 hours. We were exhausted by this point. It's slower going without an Interstate!
We took a walk around the University and downtown. Agriculture is one of the things the school is known for, obviously.

Here are some of the beautiful old buildings and grounds on campus.

Statue of Lewis, from the famed Lewis and Clark.
The symbol of University of Idaho. The giant yellow "I".

Day 3

We took another walk around town. This was taken from a street above our hotel. It had a nice view of the university.
I couldn't get enough of the tulips. They were everywhere, in front of homes, businesses, and even by the side of the road. Some yards were just full of them.
The old neighborhoods were absolutely gorgeous and so quiet and affordable. Hmmmm, maybe I should rethink where I'm going to school? haha
This is coming back into Idaho from Washington. We took a little drive around some of the areas of town we hadn't walked through. We knew we were close to the border between the two states but we had no idea that our room was only a 1/2 mile away from it! Add another state to the list of states we drove through this trip!
After an official tour of the campus, we hopped back in the car and started driving towards home. We were in town only 22 hours! We tried a different route through Idaho to see if it would save time, but it was pretty much the same. This was another quick stop by the side of the Snake River. There was a campground here and I didn't want to leave. We stayed in Winnemucca, Nevada that night after quite a wild ride!

Day 4
Back in Nevada. This was shot out the windshield of Walker Lake. I remember camping here one night years back and feeling so far away from home! This trip, I felt like we almost were home, compared to where we had been to. Although Idaho was gorgeous, I got a little thrill being back in the desert. I just love the desert for some reason!

It was a good trip and I'm really glad we got to see what the town and university was like, but it's not the best fit for me and what I want to study. I don't think we will be taking any long trips again for awhile! The next trip we do take, I hope we don't have to rush so much.

Blogging from work

This is my first blog post from work. There isn't much for me to do right now and I've exhausted all of my other "time users". You can only do Solitaire so much! I've noticed a big lack of self esteem since things have become slow here. I can feel myself getting dumber and dumber here and it's bothering me. I gave myself Calculus problems to do the other day, just so I could practice thinking! I have to constantly remind myself that this is just a temp job and I'm saving money for school, which really is a noble thing! I could be working retail, making much less money and working much harder at something I truly hate doing. I should be grateful that I'm bored and unchallenged. Pretty soon I will very busy and very challenged I'm sure.

The bad part about blogging here is that I can't post pictures. Oh well. Perhaps it's better that way for now. I still need to write about my trip to Idaho and my day at California Adventure! My evenings go by so fast and I have so much that I need to cram into those few hours that blogging gets put on the backburner.

I've been thinking about blogging lately and how I love it and hate it. I ask myself "Why do we do it?" Is it to show off to other people, or to connect with people we know? It's not letter writing, it's not journal writing, yet it has characteristics of both. It's just putting stuff out there. I feel uncomfortable having this open for all the world to find if they want to, yet I feel very limited making my blog private as well. Technology is sure making some interesting dilemmas for us all.

I don't have much imagination for making interesting posts like I use to on my old blog. It was such fun to do, kind of like publishing your own little magazine. Now I'm just rambling. The sun is coming out now, we've had quite a bit of fog the past week. I've enjoyed the coolness of the fog, but my soul is enjoying the sunshine for now. At lunchtime I will go soak some up.

Not your typical Disneyland post

Went to Disneyland last month with my sibs on the official tax preparer holiday, April 16th! Besides the entire state of Utah celebrating Spring Break there on that day, we had a great time and managed to find little pockets of quiet. We also saw some new things. New to us anyway.


Before we went into the park we checked out the grounds of the Grand Californian Hotel. I was fascinated by these blossoms growing right out of the branches of the tree!

I was also fascinated by these log stepping "stones".

Once in the park, we stopped and got some breakfast.


Our first quiet place, in Bear Country. Oops I mean Critter Country. (I'm living in the past. We did see a bear though..and a fox!)

Another great place where we love to take a break is in New Orleans Square, drinking Mint juleps and eating fritters and gumbo. I loved this shot with the lanterns in the big oak tree.

Near the castle, another quiet, deserted spot where we saw the cutest baby ducks. They are in that photo somewhere.

Our tired feet, waiting in line for the submarines.

The sun setting on Pinnacles, I mean Thunder Mountain. Then all three of us rode the ride, squished into one seat. Good, good times!

Looking over the Rivers of America on the Mark Twain at dusk. As my brother said, I've never ridden a real riverboat in my life, but for some reason I feel very nostalgic on this "fake" one.

We had our dinner at the Plaza Inn on Main Street. We timed it just right that afterwards we could sit there and watch the fireworks. (The lamp added a nice effect.)

We had planned to get there early and leave early, but that didn't happen. We stayed until closing as usual, but it was so worth it because it's less crowded late at night and you can enjoy the atmosphere! Hopefully we'll make it back sometime this month, to the much lesser of the two amusement parks. Look forward to a future blog post on that.

Last chance for April

I was thinking today about how few times I've written a blog this month and realized I better write one tonight before April is over!
I'm just going to share a few things that I'm grateful for.

I'm grateful I have a job in this unstable economy. I'm grateful that I work with people that are pretty much easy to get along with. I'm also very grateful that it is temporary.

I'm grateful for the mild weather we've been having lately and that it hasn't been too hot or cold. I think I really enjoy 60 degree weather the best now.

I'm grateful for the small storage of food that I have right now. If it comes down to a pandemic in this country and we have to be quarantined in our home for awhile, I think we'll be okay.

I'm grateful to be accepted to all of the schools that I applied to. Even though I received a rejection letter many years ago, I forgot that it isn't usual to be accepted to every school you try for.

I'm grateful that my brother and sister-in-law have been back in the area for a year, tomorrow. I'm grateful that they have put up with me while I wasn't always patient or understanding during this year of transition. I'm grateful for the rest of my family putting up with me as well.

I'm grateful for my husband and his willingness to change our life so that I can pursue my dreams. I'm grateful that I have the freedom to make these changes.

I'm grateful for the freedoms and the choices we have now and I hope that my fears for the future do not come true.

So frustrated

As I sit here and write this and hear the unknown visitor staying at our neighbors place, clomping up and down the stairs and banging in and out the door, I am so frustrated. Although I know there are much bigger problems I could be having and that others DO have, I'm still frustrated. There is a lesson that is suppose to be learned from this, but I don't know which one it is. Should I learn to live with things I cannot control and try to ignore them? Should I learn conflict resolution with people that drive me crazy? Should I take this as a final straw that we should move? Or is it some other point that I'm missing entirely?
I'm so tired of living in a place where you have no idea from one moment to the next who is going to be staying around you and how noisy they are going to be and what times they will be making that noise! It's so unsettling and most of all very hard to get a good night's sleep. I feel like I'm living at a Motel 6 much of the time.
I am very, very, very grateful though that we don't have bedbugs. It could always be worse, I know.
Most of you that know me have heard this all before, many times. Sorry to bug you. I just need to get this out somewhere and I had the computer on.

Oh look, it's now midnight. Happy Easter everyone! I'll try to put my frustration in the tomb with Christ and hope that it will disappear with all the other problems he died for. What a weird way to talk about Easter. Anyway, goodnight.

I have the computer to myself!

Finally! A chance to use the computer at home and write a blog!

I went back to work 3 weeks ago and I use the computer all day long and I don't really feel like using it in the evening after work too. My husband also believes I get to be on the internet all day, so I don't NEED to use the computer at home either. So not true, I usually only check my e-mail for a few minutes.
Work has been good. Quite a change from the previous three months of nothing I'd had, where the big event of the day was taking a long walk. Surprisingly going back to work hasn't been that big of an adjustment as I thought it was going to be. I went back to my old job and after 18 months of being away, I was able to remember almost everything. Was a nice boost for my self confidence. Now in my 4th week, I am remembering why I quit (I was very bored and not challenged) but it's only temporary and I'm so thankful just to have a job.

I have not been taking pictures this year like I had been the previous year. I just now created an April 09 photo folder that has a total of 3 pictures in it! So different from last April! It's okay though. It was fun to document every aspect of life for a year, but after awhile it gets tiring.

I do have a few photos taken on my cell phone camera and I will use some of them to tell what has happened to me over the last few weeks.

My husband and I went hiking early in March and made our own trail through this wall of poison oak. My husband got it really bad, and I didn't get one blister. Still not allergic to it, yay!

Fun with shadows on our hike.

I took a walk to "my tree" the Thursday before I started work again as a final "goodbye". I knew I would walk there again, but it put an end so to speak on that chapter of my life. It was bittersweet. It's been good to have so much free time and to work on all my Math classes, but the 18 months was full of a lot of depression too.
On my second day of work, I went to try to velobind a report and found that the "arm" was very difficult to push down to punch the holes. I tried to pull out the tray and it was so full, it almost didn't budge. Obviously nobody had cleaned out the tray in over a year, because what you see in this picture is the pile that fell out of the "machine" after I had emptied out the drawer!! I also had a similar experience with the moistener on the postage meter. Nobody had ever cleaned out the water reservoir since I had left, so it was positively green with mold! Glad I could come back to do those jobs if nothing else!!
I have been on some long walks since I've started work, but not as many as I was taking before. This was taken on very beautiful Saturday
Later in the afternoon on the same Saturday I was on the way to the grocery store and was rear-ended by a very young tourist driving a very large vehicle. Not much damage, but I was very shaken up. As you can see, the bumper did it's job.
The following week I met up with an old friend who has moved away and we went out for a great dinner and great conversation. This was our dessert, Brioche with Pumpkin pudding and vanilla ice cream. Kind of kicks the pants off of pumpkin pancakes, more like really fancy pumpkin french toast. I will be definitely trying versions of this in the fall!
Last Saturday my sister spent the night at our house and we had lots of time to hang out. We took a walk on the beach and I was joking around getting a picture of the surfer that was checking us out while we were sitting for awhile.

There are some fun and exciting things ahead and I will blog about those when I come to them. For now, it's work, work, work and wait, wait, wait. I should probably pray in the middle of all of that was well!