A little news for you. . .

It has been forever and the reason there are such huge gaps between posts and is that once you stop writing, starting is hard again.  You never really know what to write about.  So today is going to be a “in the news” post.

1.)  EARTHQUAKE!!!  Here in SoCal we had a 5.4 earthquake up near L.A.  I happened to be at work at the time and got to enjoy the rumble (yes, we felt it) in the building that “no one knows how it will respond to a big quake”.  Let me just say, it was interesting.  I thought that someone had run a cart into the empty shelving outside of my office, but as the shaking persisted and I started to feel like I was getting pushed out of my chair I figured out what was going on.  But it was pretty cool.  The building didn’t fall and all is well.  My boss did say that she saw the bridge into the library swaying a bit. . . scary much?

2.) PAYCUTS!  Yup, that is what I said. . .  the terminator signed an executive order on Thursday slashing the pay of state employees to minimum wage and laying off 20,000 temporary/seasonal workers.  Evidently the order also calls for laying off student employees statewide and a hiring freeze.  Why should you care?  dude, I work at the University of California, San Diego!  And guess what, I am a state employee!!  Luckily, the governor doesn’t have direct control of the University (thank you Regents!) so he can’t impose it on us but he has asked the the UC’s “support his efforts”.  We’ll see what happens. . .

3.) SAT IS AN OLD FART!  Our little 1/2 Mex cutie turned 26 yesterday.  He is now in a different age bracket than me. . . what an old-timer. . . At least he still has a hot young wife!

And for tomorrow. . . a response to Lolageek. . . and maybe that meme I saw a while back and wanted to try. ..

~Colleen

Fatigue

I’m not sure what it’s been but the last few days both Colleen and I have been extremely tired. Colleen has been passing out on the couch at 8 or so every night and I’ve overslept on two occassions this week. As a result of our fatigue, we haven’t been as active as we would like, and that includes writing blog posts. Rest assured, we are trying to keep you updated and entertained the best we can

Last night I was able to draw some energy from my reserves in order to make some cookies. Pink Haired Cyn suggested I put my white choco chips to use in some white chip macadamia cookies and I thought that was an exceedingly good idea, so I went for it. Continue reading »

Recall!

So we got a recall notice for our car in the mail yesterday.  Normally when you get one of those the immediate reaction is anger, followed by frustration in trying to plan when to be without a car.  Me though, I laughed.  A lot.  I think the guy walking behind me thought I was nuts. Continue reading »

Long Weekend Comes To a Close

The only bad thing about a great, extended weekend is that it eventually has to come to an end. Luckily the weekend was able to end on a positive note so hopefully this coming week will be a happy and productive one.

Today I was itching to get out and do something outdoorsy. Our default activity when doing something outside usually involves going geocaching so I used that as a starting point for our day. Unfortunately, I’ve been (unsuccessfully) trying to catch up on my sleep deficit so we couldn’t get an early start to the day we would need to go somewhere slightly farther away than our normal UTC/La Jolla/Mira Mesa stomping grounds. I have a whole list of local places that I want to go geocaching but it’s been slow getting through them. (On a side note, if you aren’t using Gubb to handle all of our listmaking, you are really missing out!)

Since the plan was to be around for 12:30 mass, we played it conservatively and tried to get a couple caches we couldn’t locate a couple weeks back. After going one for two (damn you, “Short, Steep Stop”!), we decided to head to the mall so I could fulfill my desire for new t-shirts. After spending some time at Sun Diego, I was ready to call it a day and head to church with Colleen but she apparently had other plans. I think she was just trying to make it so we didn’t go 3 weeks in a row (what evil machinations could be in that head of hers?) but whatever the case, we ended up forgoing church for some more shopping. For all of Colleen’s talk about cutting back on spending, she sure does like to browse It was another beautiful day out though and since the Westfield UTC mall is an outdoor shopping center, it wasn’t a soulless experience.

After spending way too much time at the mall (and buying a couple Stansport Expedition Trekking Poles at Sports Chalet in the process), we came back and decided that the good weather called for more BBQ’ing. We had hoped to work on rearranging the furniture in the office today but Colleen got sucked into watching The Tudors (on DVD) this afternoon so we didn’t get much done after that. As a result, I still have plenty of stuff on my todo list (the one on Remember the Milk, not Gubb ;-)) including bike maintenance and fixing some more cookies. I also placed another cooking task on my list: make a vegan “cheese” cake. I’ve found a promising recipe but since Colleen isn’t a big fan of lemon cheesecake, I’m thinking that we’ll end up doing something similar to SusanV’s eggnog modification but with orange liqueur instead. I’m looking quite forward to it!

Well, it is getting late and I don’t want to add onto my sleep debt any more so I think I’ll wrap up this little (and, admittedly, bland) post now. Please check back tomorrow when I am hopefully successful in convincing Colleen to write an exciting post.

- Sat

Celebrating Independence

Yesterday I celebrated independence…  from crappy, over-processed vegan sausages! Yes, it was 4th of July, one of my favorite holidays. Why do I love it so much? Well, just ask yourself this question: how do you not love a holiday that revolves around BBQ’ing and fireworks?

Usually we like to have people over to BBQ with us but Continue reading »

Losing One Addiction, Gaining Another

Back long, long ago when Colleen and I were in our engaged and before Colleen moved out here, she mentioned that we shouldn’t get cable. It would make us lazy and anti-social, she reasoned so it was best to not even have it hooked up in our (then) new apartment. Of course, I didn’t listen and things turned out a lot like she expected.

Who would have thought that it would take the purchase of a fancy new HDTV before we finally were ready to give up our cable addiction?

Continue reading »

Bad Drivers, Flat Tire, and Cell Phone Laws

As I mentioned yesterday, Summer Session I started this week so that means it is back to the daily grind. Unfortunately, things got off to a bit of a rocky start. As we were about to head off to campus yesterday, Colleen caught Roxy peeing on the bed. Had it been Rubi, it might not have been so bad (since she has a history of this sort of thing) but now that Roxy is on the act we are a bit worried. Luckily, we caught it before it had a chance to really seep into the sheets so we quickly got everything thrown in the washing machine. In practically no time we were off to the mean streets of La Jolla to get Colleen to work.

Californian’s have a reputation for being poor drivers (especially when even the slightest drizzle appears) but there must be something about the beginning of summer session that brings out the worst in people. I think we were cut off, nearly ran into, and (in general) mortified way too many times for a 10 minute commute.

Continue reading »

Wasted Time

Have you ever been in the situation where you have had some many cool things to do but you never got around to doing any of them? That’s what my past week or two has been like and I’ve been really grumpy about it.

I guess it all started after the spring quarter ended and we were off to Ohio for my brother’s wedding. I won’t go into the trip in this post (I promise I’ll catch everyone up on it later) but lets just say that it wasn’t the best vacation I’ve ever had. It wasn’t a disaster or anything but it was just way more stressful than a “vacation” should be.

Fast forward a bit to after we had gotten back from our trip. Continue reading »

Mmmmm, Mongolian Hot Pot. . .

Yesterday we decided that it was definitely time for us to get out of the house and get around the town.  Since we have started playing Wii I have noticed Sat isn’t pushing me to leave the house as much, which I don’t mind, but I don’t think it is so good for him.  If he doesn’t play outside for at least an hour every day he gets a little. . . well, mean. Continue reading »

Lettuce Challenge

Colleen and I have been bad lately.

We’ve been getting lazy with our fruits and veggies and, as a result, we are accumulating a backlog of produce in our fridge. Particularly troublesome is the amount of lettuce we have floating around our fridge. We usually get about 2 heads of lettuce from our CSA but this week we ended up with 2 heads and a bag of spring mix. Plus, I don’t even think we have touched our lettuce from last week.

So, what’s a couple of crazy kids like us supposed to do? Sit around and cry about it? Maybe.

Wait, no!

We gotta fight. Fight hard! That’s why we are creating a challenge to ourselves (and maybe our readers): every meal this week needs to include lettuce. I’m not talking about 7 days of garden salads either; we’ve tried that and it just doesn’t work. We’ve gotten some good suggestions via Facebook (lettuce wraps sound good) but we still have a long way to go before we can meet this challenge. Please, oh fair blog readers, supply us with your favorite non-salady uses of lettuce. You will be rewarded with our eternal love.

Oh, and stay tuned for the results of our challenge. Can we make all 7 days?

- Sat