Hi everyone!

I found a few spare moments tonight to snap a few pictures of my new room and kitchen. The house is a gorgeous home, built in the 1930s I believe. This means lots of interesting architectural elements, and nice, solid building materials, along with a lot of quirks (i.e. doors that take an extra push to get them to latch)



Currently, my desk chair is that rather small balance ball...a la a suggestion from Manda. It's really a terrible chair, but it'll tide me over til my new one arrives!

My favorite part of the room...these gorgeous built in little step/shelves (my room is over the front entryway downstairs, hence the stair outcroppings. I'm quite the fan, however. The blue parasol up in the top corner was my Christmas present from Stephan :)



Love the tile work in the kitchen, and all the dried herbs and plants from the garden..

And here is the infamous washer/dryer. I tried to use it last night, and it took me 2.5 hrs to wash/dry a small load of jeans...well mostly dry...and the jeans came out so wrinkled I had to iron them anyway. Damn! Guess I'll be putting in some quality iron time for a while ;-)

I'll put up pictures of the outside of the house and the garden soon!

In honor of Mom's snow day in PA, here are some photos of the beaches in San Diego! It's also unseasonably chilly here, but not nearly cold enough to snow :)


Pretty sandstone cliffs above the beach






The patterns in the sand are really cool, right? They reminded us of that sandscape toy that Grammie Sheard used to have.

Hammy, as always :)





A reindeer kelp!





Beautiful Pacific sunset! We had an awesome time at the zoo and Sea World as well...will post pictures soon.

Yes, we're running a bit behind on the blogging...but here are some pictures from the second day of our Thanksgiving road-trip, when we left the ocean and headed over the hills and into the highland plains!

Carrizo Plains National Monument -- it was pretty deserted at this time of year!

Did you see the bird?

Coyote!

Antelope!

Pretty flowers, I forget what the sign said they were...


Native American rock art -- apparently some of the most important remaining examples (though it was hard to take pictures...this one is breaking apart but you can at least see some of the patterns and colors)

'Twas a very flat landscape -- it seemed to stretch on forever!

The San Andreas fault!!

Don't worry Mom, we saved Laura from falling in :)


Sunset on the plains....where the deer and the antelope play, yodel yodel yodel....
Overall, a very fun trip and cool experience! The whole trip felt a bit like we were stepping between those diaramas we made in 7th grade! We'll post the desert pics soon :)