I've been traveling a little bit lately, and of course, when you travel for work, you get a rental car. This is always a crap shoot. You never know what you're going to get, especially when everything is arranged by our office manager, JoJo whom I'm extremely grateful for, since she makes it so I don't have to worry about all of that stuff.
Sometimes I drive a Ford. Sometimes, I drive a Dodge Stratus. It's always kind of fun walking through the rental car lot, wondering which one you'll get. It's almost as exciting as Christmas. Almost. Sure, I know I'm not going to be able to drive the Cadillac STS or the Chryster 300, but I can dream, can't I?
So, you'll pardon my excitement and slight boasting when on a recent trip to Austin, this was my assigned rental car:
I have dreamed of the day when I could drive a mean machine like that. I felt honored. I felt blessed. I was just flat out ecstatic, as you can see:
I guess there comes a time in your life when you know you've arrived. And with this trip to Austin, with this beautiful PT Cruiser, this was MY time. Thank you Avis. All future car rentals will be judged by this wonderful experience.
One of these days we'll have some free time to upload some videos. In the meantime, enjoy some photos from the past couple months.
Showing some sexy shoulder. Lowriding. "Playing with (and freaking out) my buddy Frank." "I love chewing straws." "No worries, just decided to open the drawer and get a peach." "Just wanted to listen to some CDs, is that okay Dad? Today is the Kings of Leon." "Looking through Mom's wallet, but alas, there was no cash!"
We all know there are times in life that you can't help but laugh, but you kinda feel bad doing it. This is one of those times. Hopefully this isn't the kind of event that will later in life cause people to ask Peanut if she was dropped on her head as a child. I also hope that it isn't the type of thing that will cause child services to come to our door.
So the other day, Mel was sitting at our desk at home, working on the computer when she heard something that sounded like a gulp coming from underneath the desk. Let me back up and say that we keep a small trash can under the desk with aluminum cans in it that we will recycle (for not much money). Let me also say that Penny Lou is always crawling under the desk. So when Mel looks down, she finds Penny holding up to her mouth, as if she's guzzling, one of my empty (or what I thought was empty) cans of Coke. I know there wasn't much in there, maybe a drop or two. But Mel said she had a little bit on her face, so there must have been something in the can.
So yeah, that's awesome, our 7 month old is officially going to be a Coke addict, just like her old man. Maybe this explains why she wouldn't go back to sleep early this morning.
We had a lovely Easter Sunday. First off we went to a friend's ward to see them bless their baby. Then we thought, "what better place to spend Easter than at the Temple?" So, on the way home we stopped off to walk around and take a few pictures. Mel and Penny looked wonderful in their new Easter clothes. Then we got to hang out as a family, watch The Masters and eat some great food.
So, Penny is over six months old, yet we've never shared videos of her on our blog. There is a reason for this. No, we are not ashamed of her! And no, it's not because we don't have a video camera (we do). It's because our video camera is ridiculous. Let me expound. So, we have a Apple computer and we have a Canon video camera.
Wait, let me back up. When we were engaged, we bought a Sony DV video camera. We loved that camera, and used it quite a bit for a few years. Well, right after Penny was born, the Sony decided to go haywire and die. So, we needed to buy a new one to document the lil one. After dragging my feet, then looking around, we settled on the Canon FS11. I read several expert reviews and a couple user reviews, and it seemed like a good one. We weren't ready to get an HD camera, since they're expensive, and changing by the day, but we wanted something decent. I felt that this one was a good middle ground camera—we'll be able to use it for a few years till we're ready for HD.
Great, right? Wrong. I suppose I should have read more user reviews. The camera itself is nice. It's compact, pretty easy to use and seemed to take quality videos. So what was the problem, you ask? I couldn't get the videos onto my computer. Awesome. For some reason, the camera films in some weird format that my Mac didn't recognize, nor did I have any software to convert it. The camera came with software, but of course it only works on Windows computers. So I did a bunch of reading online.
To try and make a long story not quite so long, I basically found that, to convert the files, I needed to buy the new version of iMovie, which also meant that I needed to get the new operating system, Leopard top run it. Great. Of course I had been wanting to get Leopard, but I was going to wait a little while to take the plunge, but now our hands were forced.
What bugs me the most is that everything else I've ever plugged into my Mac has worked without a hitch. Most of the time you don't have to even use the software that comes with the device. It'll just work. But this camera was the only one that didn't. How can Canon design something so narrow that it ignores all the people with a Mac that's more than one year old? It's lame.
Canon, you get a demerit.
Anyway, I got it to work. Yeah! And now that I've put all of you to sleep, here is a clip of Penny giggling at a ball. This was taken in Arizona when Mel was there visiting family.
I get a kick out of it everytime I watch it. Hope you do too.
So this past week Mel and Peanut went to Arizona to hang out with Mel's family. The trip had two purposes:
#1. Allow the two of them to hang out with family, whom we don't see as often as we'd like. Mel's family had been wanting us to come out, especially since we missed the mini-family reunion last month. Plus, we'd been wanting to show off Peanut, since she becomes more awesome by the minute.
#2. Allow the two of them to actually see and interact with humans. Rob has been working some pretty long hours of late, and this week (and month in general) was going to be no different. So while he was putting in 14-16 hour days, why not let them have a little fun?
They had a grand ol' time with Lew Dog, Tauna, Emblebee, Bebo, Jen and the girls. But, much to Rob's surprise, Penny changed immensely while they were gone. First of all, she went from crawling a couple of feet to moving constantly around. Plus, when she left, she was almost bald, and now look at her! It's crazy. You're away from them for one week and all of a sudden they're off to college or something.
She leaves for a week and all of a sudden she's Rapunzel.
Robot and Frank are so glad to have them back, even if they have a hard time recognizing them. So let that be a lesson for you, don't let them out of your site ever again.
I am retarded, and never finished our Christmas post (obviously).
So, now I am redoing it (for the second time), and instead of telling a story with words, I'll let pictures do the talking. We drove to Utah to spend Christmas with Rob's family, and had a great time. It was Penny's first experience with snow (as seen below!).
Click on the link to view our pictures so you can see some of the things we did. Most importantly we just were able to chill with family, and we all loved it. I know I'm lazy, but oh well, just deal with it.
As I discussed in my earlier post (85º in January), it was an unseasonable warm January, and part of February as well. I find myself missing the rain and cold, but it is fun to get out and spend some time in the sun. In the past few weeks we've been able to do some fun things, here is just a taste of what we've been up to.
We spent an afternoon in Little Italy, where we ate our favorite deli sandwiches from Mona Lisa's. We did some shopping and ate frozen yogurt in La Jolla.
Tried Papa's favorite hat on Peanut.
Visited Balboa Park, one of our favorite things to do.
Penny got herself a new toy, which, as you can see, she absolutely loves (making our lives that much easier).
We visited Dré and met her new awesome kitty, Jack.
Some of us grew beards.
And the beards turned into mustaches.
Some of us just couldn't help being extremely cute.
Jason and Amber had us over for dinner a couple weeks ago, and we had a blast hanging with them. Penny loved seeing her cousins, Mireya and Caden and she even modeled a cute new poncho for Baby Fabulous.
We had dinner at Islands. Mmmm, Islands.
And finally, we spent an afternoon in Ocean Beach, which was both fun and interesting. This was a sweet wagon parked next to us in OB.
All in all, it was a fun month, as you can see. Hopefully we can get out and have some more fun in the next few months, although Robot's work might make that a little difficult. We'll see!
