Working backwords... Jonkman visit.

Matt's family flew out our way and we met them in Fairfield (30-40 min from Napa) for the weekend. We spent a day seeing the sights along the coast at Point Reyes National Seashore, the San Andreas fault line, and a little drive down good ol' Hwy 1.

At Point Reyes we went to the light house, where you have to walk down 308 steps to get to it.

It was really cool to see all the crystals, and hear about the crazy people who had to travel down to the lighthouse every couple of hours to reset everything, and pretty much continuously feed it coal, 24 hours a day. They obviously don't use that one anymore (there is a new, electric light and horn right next to it).We spent a day going to a Brewery (Russian River) and a few wineries in the Sonoma Valley area.

And then one more day wine tasting at wineries in Napa Valley. We had beautiful weather (except for it was a bit cold and windy at Point Reyes), enjoyed the beautiful scenery, and good company.

Chateau Montelena from the movie, Bottle Shock

Berringer

A wine cave tour at El Dotto

Josh had to leave early on Monday, after Napa, but then Mel, Kathy, and Amy stayed at our house Monday night. They headed out to see the rest of Matt's fam and returned on Friday, before they left Saturday morning. We showed them around town, at our schools, went to In-N-Out, and enjoyed having an extra handy man and kitchen hand :)

Home, Sweet Home.

I am going to try to write a little on here this morning, since Samson woke us up with some kind of coughing/hacking noise at 4 am and I couldn't get back to sleep after that! Boo. Poor puppy though too; I don't know what the coughing was about, but he's been acting strange and sleeping and hiding a lot since Saturday morning, and I took a closer look last night and found dozens of tiny scabs/bumps all over his back :(. We are going to get him some special shampoo today, hopefully that will work so we won't have to take him to the vet.

Anyways, I go back to work today (in about an hour, actually), and I must say that I may not be quite ready for school to start, but I am ready for being home and settling into a routine again! I love weekends away, vacationing, and exploring as much as the next guy; but it's exhausting and a lot of work to be gone so much!

Midwest Adventure

I am not really going to write a whole lot about our midwest trip, since it was like a month ago now. But I'll give you the highlights and a link to pictures.

We very much enjoyed our time with Matt's family, whom we have missed a lot. It was especially nice to see Mel, because we hadn't seen him since we left last summer. We got to spend one day in Chicago with Grace, and one day in Chicago with Matt's fam. We saw a whirlwind of people in GR. I visited my old daycare. We stayed with our friends Zach and Sarah and their new little guy, Brandon. We miss them so much! We saw Matt's grandparents, friends Marcia and Nathan, my old babysitting kids, a few college friends, and our old small group. It was a great time, but very bitter-sweet, as we were reminded of what wonderful friends we left behind and how much we miss them. God blessed us more than we knew, especially in that last year in GR.

Pictures...

LA Adventure

Our friend Andrea got married near Anaheim at the end of June. The wedding was on a Saturday and we decided to leave on Thursday to drive down south (5 hour drive... which became 6.5 in traffic, ugh). In Visalia, on our way, Matt's grandparents graciously let us trade our car, sans air conditioning, for their old Mazda 323, with air conditioning. Thursday also happened to be my birthday, so after we got checked into our hotel, we went to Red Robin for my free birthday burger :). And since it actually was my birthday, I got a free sundae too, yum!

On Friday, we got Grace from the airport, helped with wedding set up, and had a great time seeing everyone at the rehearsal dinner that night. Saturday we went to the beach for a little while, then it was wedding time! The ceremony was outside on the church lawn, with cute white chairs, and the reception was right next to it all. We had such a great time with our college friends and were so glad to be a part of Andrea and David's special day.

Sunday was Disneyland day!! I can't even describe to you how excited we were for Disney, and we were not disappointed one bit. I hadn't been there since I was 12 (neither had Grace) and Matt had never been there (although he had been to Disney World). Imagine, the happiest place on earth with like 7 of your great college friends (who know all too well how to be silly and have fun... we may have reverted back to college-like obnoxious behaviors...), for one long, amazing, exhausting, fun-filled day! We were there from opening at 8 am to closing at midnight :). And thanks to Fast Passes, the best invention ever, we never waited in line for more than 30 min (also thanks to the Disneyland app to give you wait times for rides, hee hee).

Monday we drove back home with the addition of Grace for more fun, evidenced on my previous post.

It's not letting me put pics on here right now... here is a link to the album on facebook, I will try again later.

A Visit From Grace

After our weekend in the LA area (see next post, I am working backwords), Grace drove back to spend the week with us in Merced. We got back Monday night, Tuesday we slept in, lazied around, got some sun, ran errands, and watched movies.

Wednesday was actually our anniversary, but since we had Grace in town, we decided to postpone celebrating it much. We drove about 1.5 hours to Mission San Juan Bautista, where I will be taking my class on a field trip next year. I am slowly visiting a bunch of field trip sites for next year to get a feel for them first. There is a historical museum that stretches through an old hotel, house, and a couple of barns. Then there's the mission itself with a museum as well.
After that we continued west to the coast to Santa Cruz. I love Santa Cruz! It is one of my favorite boardwalks because of it's old fashioned classic appeal. They have this amazing old school wooden coaster called the Giant Dipper. We didn't go on any rides this time, but it's still fun to watch and listen to the click, click, click of the cars, just the same :). I just love the buzz of excitement there. I could people watch there all day. We just walked around and then walked on the beach and down the pier. There were a bunch of seals that were very fun on the pier.


We had one more day in town in which I got a little school work done while Grace got some sun, then we made amazing tacos, and went to see Eclipse. Friday we headed out for Yosemite. Oh how I love that place! We stopped in the Indian museum and village there, another field trip preview :). Then we walked about a mile to the trail head for our hike on the 4 Mile Trail. It's 4 miles and 3500 feet up to Glacier Point from the valley floor. We didn't have as much time as we would have liked, so we went 3 miles and 2500 feet up (and down) to Union Point instead. This hike was a bit more difficult than the last few that we have done, but it had the most amazing views!

Indian Village

Yosemite Falls from the valley

Yosemite falls from the hike

Half Dome

Grace had to fly out of Oakland on Saturday afternoon, so we left early to make a little stop in San Fran at Pier 39 beforehand. We walked around, basked in the character that is Pier 39, and shared a loaf of amazing, Boudin, San Francisco original sour dough bread.


The whole album on facebook

Playing Hookey on the 4th

I think this is the first 4th of July in my life that I am/we are doing absolutely nothing to celebrate. We have had such a crazy last several weeks that we decided to excuse ourselves from the festivities to have a relaxing day at home. The first day like that in a LONG time! Plus, Samson was already freaking out last night from a few small pops of fireworks. He was hiding in our room, so we thought it would be nice of us to stay home with him too. We had our own little BBQ with teriyaki burgers and corn on the cob, we hung more pictures on the walls, watched TV, and played with Samson. I finally had time to post all of the many pics from the last weeks on facebook, and am starting to write and get caught up on here. You will see in my next posts just how busy we have been :).

A few updates before I get on with rewinding to all of our recent adventures. We have a few days of work for next week! What an answer to prayer to have some payed work, and perfectly during the only 2 weeks we had left to do it in. We will be doing some painting at my school :). Another answer to prayer is that my ER bills are going to be MUCH less than we thought! On our way to Chicago at the beginning of June, I began having severe abdominal pains, and ended up leaving the seatac airport (where our layover was) to go to the ER. The pains eventually subsided, and the doctor really didn't know what was causing them. Her best guess was irritable bowel syndrome, which cannot really be diagnosed nor treated. Anyways, we were kinda worried about how large the bills for the ambulance, er, and cat-scan were going to be. God sure is providing for us, because they are less than half of what we were expecting! One last update... we haven't had a dishwasher in this house since we moved in (well, it's there, but doesn't work), and a new one is FINALLY coming this week!

The House

So sorry I haven't put any pics up yet of our house, I took them a while ago, but here they are now! We still haven't done much in so far as decorating and putting things up on the walls. I thought we would have more time for that this week, but we have had a lot more to do than I realized. And we're already leaving tomorrow morning for the midwest!

This is the view when you walk in the front door into our living room.

The living room from the other side.
The living room/kitchen have high vaulted ceilings,
so there's this normal height partial wall/divider between rooms.
We got that storage cube organizer to have more space to put
things and take up some wall space (since there's so much!)

Around the wall into the kitchen.

Our last kitchen had so much color... we need to get some in here asap!

This is really a formal dining room, attached to the kitchen,
but we only have one small table so we chose to make it the office.
Down the hall is our bedroom, which is very spacious
Master bath (we had never had one before!
But then we had to buy stuff for another bathroom)
Master walk in closet! AKA: Erica's closet!
Guest room (tiny)
Spare/storage/craft room (also tiny)

My most talented husband built me these shelves in the garage!
Backyard
That's all folks!