Movin on up....

to the east side. Well, like the Jefferson's, I'm moving. I've moved the blog and won't be updating here anymore. I've moved all the posts, all the pictures, all the insanity over to a new spot. So you can keep up with our lives still, just need to bookmark a new site. Here's the link and I'll be updating with some of the things that have been going on in the past few months. Trust me, there's no shortage of stories and pictures.

WWW.EASTSIDESWELL.COM

More TV time

Guess who got more TV time yesterday? Chris did. Here's the video for everyone not able to check out the non-sense of Fox 5 here in S.D.

 

Surf's Up!

Last weekend the earthquake in Chile set off a Tsunami warning throughout the pacific. I only learned about the earthquake while waiting to get my haircut at 8:45 on Saturday morning. Thanks to my trusty iPhone I was hoped right onto weather.com and found out what time we were expecting to have the "Tsunami" hit SoCal. Scheduled to arrive at 12:02 in La Jolla Chris and I made the decision that any smart red blooded American would make. So we threw the dogs in the car at 11:45 and headed for the best spot on the water that we could check it out. As we stood in the rain with the dogs waiting for something to happen 12:02 came and went. At about 12:15 we looked at each other and said "so that was it huh?" It was nothing more than a slight tidal push that was hardly noticeable. What a weird feeling of letdown when you don't get the destruction and drama that CNN and the Today show have come to make you expect.



"Tsunami?"

Let there be light

Last weekend we finally got rid of the last item in the house that was left over from the previous owner. Well, except for everything in the kitchen. We rented a 12 foot ladder so we'd actually be able to reach that terrible track lighting in the foyer. Nothing too tough, just had to repaint where the lighting was mounted. Then just wire the new light up and let it hang. My arms were burning by the end from holding everything up above my head. Really the only snag that we hit was renting a ladder that was too big the first time. Luckily the guys at the "Tool Shed" were able to give me a 12 footer in between chuckling at me because we originally got the wrong size. Regardless, light is up and functioning.

Happy DOGentine's Day!

We've created a new holiday, DOGentine;s day! Chris and I don't really make too big a deal out of Valentine's Day. It's a holiday exploited by Hallmark and Proflowers to get people to spend money in the middle of February. We decided to make a change, we'll make it about the dogs. Now it's all about the dogs and doing the stuff they love the most. This benefits both us and them, they do what they love most in the world and we enjoy how tired they are. No longer are we celebrating Valentine's Day, we're celebrating DOGentine's day.
Since this was the time we've celebrated there was no better place to do so then at Dog Beach. For an hour they ran around like complete manics playing in the sand and ocean. Thank god they have finally figured out that drinking the ocean water is a bad decision. We played for a solid hour with 10,000 other dogs in 75 degree sunshine. It was an awesome day and even though they don't know this change has been made to Feb 14th, we know they'll enjoy the extra playing and time devoted to them each time it comes around.

SD>NYC>NJ>SD

36 hours of east coast fun, that's what we had a couple of weeks ago. It was originally going to be longer but due to our rainy/windy winter our flight was canceled and the fun began. We were headed out on the red eye on Thursday night for Natalie and Matt's wedding. Our plan was to land at 6 am and be able to see everyone on Friday and Saturday then head to Summit NJ for the wedding. When our flight was canceled the insanity began. It was a scramble to reschedule and get another flight that would get us into Newark and still leave enough time to see everyone. With only flights leaving at 7 am on Friday morning available we knew it was going to be a stretch. Unfortunately we couldn't go direct so we had the opportunity to visit beautiful George Bush airport in Houston. After a 2 hour layover we took off for Newark.

We landed in Newark at 6pm. From there we drove directly to the Goodman's place to see Samantha(the newest Goodman.) It was about 3 hours there before we then made our way across town to Adam and Callie's. We got there at about 11pm and had some dinner. I think that we went to bed around 2am. I was more than excited to hear my alarm go off at 7am. Chris dragged me out of bed and we headed downtown to Lyndsey and Andrew's to see Kimball. An hour or so there and it was off to Montclair to her great Aunt's house. The next 3 hours were spent around the dining room table eating. Lucky for me, my tux is a little loose so I didn't have to worry about how much I had taken in. We arrived at the hotel about 4pm, sat down for a 1/2 hour and then started getting ready.

In all of our non-sense I managed to forget to bring cuff links, luckily Ed had me covered. Then Chris' dress broke 10 minutes before heading to the bus. Thank god Patience the hotel cleaning lady had 4 safety pins because we were able to put her dress back together enough to get through the night. Then it was off to the wedding.

It was an awesome ceremony outside in Short Hills. We had a great time, danced a ton, drank even more and had ton of fun. At midnight everything started wrapping up and it was back to the hotel bar for more drinks. 2am seemed like a good time for us to head to bed.

5am my alarm went off, we jumped up, showered and headed out to Newark. Arriving at the airport in just over 20 minutes we got through security and onto the flight. 11 am PST we landed back in sunny SD. For those of you keeping score, we arrived at 6pm Friday night and left at 7am on Sunday. Not too shabby.

Namaste

This year I decided to make a whole bunch of New Year's resolutions. With so many studies and so many news stories about how small the percentage of resolutions that people follow through on. I figured, if the percent done is so low, then I'll make a ton of them and increase my odds. Good logic huh? Well, I'm telling you it's working for me.

Last night I successfully checked another one off my list, start doing Yoga. I was extremely nervous that all the people there would judge my lack of flexibility in between their judging of my form. I was completely in my own head as usual. If people were judging, I certainly didn't care, I was enjoying it too much. Yes, my flexibility was quite an issue, at least for me. Yoga is great and to anyone who is thinking about starting, I highly recommend it. It's really a great workout as well very peaceful. I was amazed at how much I was sweating from just stretching and contorting my body in weird ways. My one piece of advice for anyone thinking of making the leap, get your own mat. You spend a lot of time face down getting to know your mat very well. It's best that you not be using someone's or even the gym/studio's. That's just gross!
From here on out, if you want to get a hold of me on Tuesday nights from 7-8, you'll just have to leave a message. I'll be busy fanning my inner flame.

This makes 4

Can you tell that Chris isn't around tonight yet? Thursday nights, for the month of February, she's a her "cooking with wine" class. I'm still not sure if they are using wine in the recipes or actually just cooking while drinking wine. I'm pretty sure Chris has her doctorate in the latter, so hopefully she learning some good techniques. Just want everyone to know that this is the 4th new post tonight, so read through everything if you can. I'm done for now, until the next time. Shouldn't be long, I've got more stuff to write about and more pictures to get up here.

Skiing anyone?

After having such a good time our first time back in the snow, we figured we'd head back to Mammoth to make more snow angels...and maybe do a little skiing. For MLK weekend we packed up and jumped in the car on Friday night. Now, Mammoth so you know, is about 6-7 hours away from our place, 400 miles almost exactly. So when we backed out of the driveway at 8pm you could say I was pretty psyched to be driving till 2am. Luckily the trip went really fast, Chris only feel asleep for the last hour or two and we rolled in almost exactly at 2am.
This time we were up there for our friend Brent's birthday with a whole crew of people, luckily most of whom were asleep when we showed up. So we could just go to bed and get up early for a long day on the slopes. It was awesome, they had gotten a lot more snow so things were much more covered up, we were in much better shape and it was bright and sunny. We even ran in a friend from our Utah days at Backcountry. So here are some pics from the day.

Tom and Chris


The Crew


Mt. Whitney way out there






Chris in action

Wow, I'm 30?

This subject line is the first time I've written it. Actually, I remember and think everyday about the first time I said it. It was at the new job. One of the girls I work with asked me how old I was. He's the transcript of how I remember it going down.

Kristy: "So how old are you?"
Me: "I'm 30, hmmmmmmmmmmmm, whoa, that is the first time I've heard myself say that, hmmmmmm, I'm old!"
Kristy: "That's not old"
Me: "Sure feels like it since its taken me 10 days to say it."

What's really interesting about turning 30 to me and just my getting older is that I guess I was really stressed about it. I mean really stressed. It really didn't seem like that big a deal. In fact, the only way I know it was stressing me out was that I started waking up with a really sore jaw every morning starting around December 20th. It was weird, I thought I had a real bad cavity but it was definitely the joint and not a tooth. I quickly realized, thanks to the WebMD app, that I had been grinding my teeth while sleeping. Not knowing what was causing me the stress I just figured I'd stop doing it eventually. When did it happen? January 2nd. I woke up on the 3rd and for whatever reason, my jaw felt better, was still sore from all the grinding, but no new pain like usual. So I guess it was a big deal for me after all. Ah well, I survived, Chris even took me to Mammoth for some skiing to celebrate. Not that my jaw didn't hurt, but my birthday. Glad to be sliding on snow again after taking all of last year off!

Back part of Mammoth





Think someone misses the snow?

Guess who's back?

Finally my hard drive is up and running. Actually, it's now full of 500 gig's of music, pictures and other non-sense. It feels really nice to finally have everything off this computer and have it move quickly again and be able to load photos. Now I just have to get everyone caught up on 2010. Shouldn't be a problem....we've only been super busy. So I'll start with our Christmas vacation home.

We headed back east as usual for a quick Christmas run. It was only for a few days but we had a great time as always. I would say we are pretty lucky having both our parents living so closely because it allows us to split the holidays. We start out at Chris' parents for Christmas eve and then the morning. At about 1 or so, we head to my parents and do it all over again with my family. The way I look at it, we do Christmas twice in one day, who wouldn't want that?

Amazingly enough, this was also the first time in the last 8 years that we've actually headed home for a white Christmas. We lived in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah during that span and would get on a plane and leave tons of snow for luke warm temps and green grass. Not this year, we left 70 degrees and 156 straight days without measurable rainfall for the low 20's and 18 inches of snow on the ground. It felt great to get the sled out and compress vertebrae on poorly built ice jumps. I think I might have to get change my height on my drivers license after the pounding I took.

Shelby's new Tutu, made by hand by Chris....impressed? Me too!


Snow's cold! I've become a pretty big sissy since moving to SoCal


Christmas 2....why not make the greatest holiday better by doing it twice in one day?

Could I be taking any more time between posts?

Geez, it's been forever. Well I can explain. I've had a full hard drive on the Macbook for the past few weeks. It's actually gotten so bad that there is a seriously lag in my typing showing up because the computer is moving so slow. Last night I finally pulled the trigger on a new external hard drive that's is 1 terabyte. Now we'll have plenty of space to get all these pictures off the computer. That should free up a ton of space considering we have every single picture from our wedding that was taken on here. It actually totals to 7000 pictures between those and then the ones we've taken. Both camera's are also backed up with almost 400 new ones from are adventures over the past couple of weeks. Amazon says that it's 2-5 days before this thing arrives and once it does I will be transferring data immediately. Bear with me during this down time, find another blog to read or pick up a good book. I can recommend a few as I've got a few going on right now. But I do promise you can avoid "Team of Rivals," there is no way I'll allow anyone to read 900 pages before I start getting the computer cleared out.

Happy New Year!

My first post of 2010 is just a little update and explanation as to why you haven't heard too much from me lately. So, we've added lots of pictures and music to the computer and it turns out that I filled it while on my little vacation. So there are pictures from our trip home for X-mas, my birthday trip to Mammoth and some more random stuff. Unfortunately that means you have to just suffer through my words. You can rest easy though, I'm ordering up an external hard drive and this problem will soon be fixed.