Halloween 2010 - Yabba Dabba Do Style

So for Halloween this year we decided to Couples/Group costume it and went as Fred and Wilma Flintstone, with our good friends Mark and Amber going as Betty and Barney Rubble.

A group shot of the ladies, we had a Jelly Fish, Lady Gaga, Wilma, an Indian, Betty and a vampire.

The gentlemen were Justin Bieber, Kenny Powers (Eastbound & Down), Fred & Barn.  And dog Boozer as Disco-Booze.

Me and my buddy Mark, sporting the Bedrock buddies.

Me and Ash as Bedrock's favorite couple!

60 Ways To Make Life Simple Again

So was just reading this great little article and decided I need to implement more of these into my life!

Life is not complex.  We are complex.  Life is simple,
and the simple thing is the right thing.
- Oscar Wilde

1. Don’t try to read other people’s minds.  Don’t make other people try to read yours.  Communicate.
2. Be polite, but don’t try to be friends with everyone around you.  Instead, spend time nurturing your relationships with the people who matter most to you.
3. Your health is your life, keep up with it.  Get an annual physical check-up.
4. Live below your means.  Don’t buy stuff you don’t need.  Always sleep on big purchases.  Create a budget and savings plan and stick to both of them.
5. Get enough sleep every night.  An exhausted mind is rarely productive.
6.  Get up 30 minutes earlier so you don’t have to rush around like a mad man.  That 30 minutes will help you avoid speeding tickets, tardiness, and other unnecessary headaches.
7. Get off your high horse, talk it out, shake hands or hug, and move on.
8. Don’t waste your time on jealously.  The only person you’re competing against is yourself.
9. Surround yourself with people who fill your gaps.  Let them do the stuff they’re better at so you can do the stuff you’re better at.
10. Organize your living space and working space.
11. Get rid of stuff you don’t use.
12. Ask someone if you aren’t sure.
13. Spend a little time now learning a time-saving trick or shortcut that you can use over and over again in the future.
14. Don’t try to please everyone.  Just do what you know is right.
15. Don’t drink alcohol or consume recreational drugs when you’re mad or sad.  Take a jog instead.
16. Be sure to pay your bills on time.
17. Fill up your gas tank on the way home, not in the morning when you’re in a hurry.
18. Use technology to automate tasks.
19. Handle important two-minute tasks immediately.
20. Relocate closer to your place of employment.
21. Don’t steal.
22. Always be honest with yourself and others.
23. Say “I love you” to your loved ones as often as possible.
24. Single-task.  Do one thing at a time and give it all you got.
25. Finish one project before you start another.
26. Be yourself.
27. When traveling, pack light.  Don’t bring it unless you absolutely must.
28. Clean up after yourself.  Don’t put it off until later.
29. Learn to cook, and cook.
30. Make a weekly (healthy) menu, and shop for only the items you need.
31. Consider buying and cooking food in bulk.  If you make a large portion of something on Sunday, you can eat leftovers several times during the week without spending more time cooking.
32. Stay out of other people’s drama.  And don’t needlessly create your own.
33. Buy things with cash.
34. Maintain your car, home, and other personal belongings you rely on.
35. Smile often, even to complete strangers.
36. If you hate doing it, stop it.
37. Treat everyone with the same level of respect you would give to your grandfather and the same level of patience you would have with your baby brother.
38. Apologize when you should.
39. Write things down.
40. Be curious.  Don’t be scared to learn something new.
41. Explore new ideas and opportunities often.
42. Don’t be shy.  Network with people.  Meet new people.
43. Don’t worry too much about what other people think about you.
44. Spend time with nice people who are smart, driven, and likeminded.
45. Don’t text and drive.  Don’t drink and drive.
46. Drink water when you’re thirsty.
47. Don’t eat when you’re bored.  Eat when you’re hungry.
48. Exercise every day.  Simply take a long, relaxing walk.
49. Let go of things you can’t change.  Concentrate on things you can.
50. Find hard work you actually enjoy doing.
51. Realize that the harder you work, the luckier you will become.
52. Follow your heart.  Don’t waste your life fulfilling someone else’s dreams and desires.
53. Set priorities for yourself and act accordingly.
54. Take it slow and add up all your small victories.
55. However good or bad a situation is now, it will change.  Accept this simple fact.
56. Excel at what you do.  Otherwise you’ll just frustrate yourself.
57. Mature, but don’t grow up too fast.
58. Realize that you’re never quite as right as you think you are.
59. Build something or do something that makes you proud.
60. Make mistakes, learn from them, laugh about them, and move along.

Inspired by a good Friend... M.I.A.

So I've gotten to a point where everything I've done just keeps piling up and whenever I think about writing about my tales, instead it's just a little over-whelming.  So in order to get caught up, I'm going to have to wrap up the past couple months in a few bullet points here.

• Went to Padres game, saw Aroldis Chapman of Reds throw fastest pitch ever recorded @ 105 MPH
• Trip to San Fran/Pleasanton with Ashley
• Volleyball league made it all the way to Semi-Finals but lost there. Team Me, Ash, Mark, Amber and Megan
• Brad Paisley Concert for my Birthday weekend, Friend hooked us up with V.I.P. tickets. Amazing.
• Paso Robles for Ashley's birthday weekend. ~ Stayed at an amazing Bed and Breakfast
• Tim McGraw Concert
• 4th of July @ Hermosa Beach / Manhattan Beach w/ Ashley's friends
• Grandma's funeral :(

Current life consists of Softball 4 days a week, and trying to figure out who/where/what me and Ashley want to do once our lease is up in December.

Heading to Havasu this weekend, will update again with life picking back up.

Utah Weekend Rodeo & Reunion

Wow, so honestly this was one of the most fun weekends I've had in ages.  And I've had some great weekends!
Brought Ashley home to meet my sister finally for the first time, and was able to meet up with a bunch of friends and all go to the rodeo as well, made for a great weekend!

 Me and Ashley at Kareoke @ Habitz in Utah

The Tri-Fector re-united years after their last reunion, good to see these gentlemen!

Went up to Snowbird with my Sister and her BF Andy, swam in the pool, hung out in the hot tub up there, it was amazing.

My sister and Ashley in their matching team 'Move to the Mountains' t-shirts!

Me and Ashley at the Lehi Roundup 2010

The boys relaxing after the rodeo and an exhausting day of fun.

The good looking ladies from the rodeo that evening!

And that about wraps it up, a great weekend in Utah!

A Milky Experience

So here I am living in our hotel in Rockville for a few weeks.

So I go to get groceries yesterday... get a ton of stuff

This morning I make some cereal pour the milk in and taste it, and it's awful!

I'm like dang this milk must be bad

Check the date, it's definitely not, but smell the milk and it's real bad, so I'm like WTF

Read the label... Buttermilk

Then I think back to the store, and I was wondering like why this one was like a buck cheaper than the like nonfat milk right next to it

But dang they look like the same, just different colored lid! I just thought it was like 1% or something

You would think... this should be delicious, butter + milk

But your thinking would be wrong!  That stuff was horrible

Tasted literally just like spoiled milk

In fact I just poured the whole thing into the sink, and the entire kitchen just smelled absolutely awful for like the next half hour, I about gagged as I was pouring it

It was quite the experience

Lake Havasu Memorial Weekend

For Memorial Weekend we were lucky enough to go to Lake Havasu with Ashley's uncle and a couple family friends, it was a freaking amazing trip.
I don't even know how to explain the type of scene Lake Havasu is for Memorial Weekend, you're crawling around the lake on the boat, because there are sooooo many people there, and as rated by Playboy is the #1 Party location in the country for Memorial Day.  I would say that has to be pretty accurate by the amount of people there, it was absolute mayhem.  However, for most of the weekend, we really just kind of hung around the house and took the boat out a couple times.

Me and Ashley out on the boat.

Driving the boat out at the Lake.

Out on the Sea-Doo after some intense directions on how to not wreck it! :)

On the way home from Havasu we stopped by Ashley's Grandma's house in Palm Desert, it is such an amazing house, right on the edge of the golf course, with an awesome swimming pool and hot tub.  A couple hours into the drive it felt REALLY nice to hop into the pool and relax for a bit and then have dinner with her family.  Made for the nice ending to a great weekend.

Gary Visit to San Diego

Man, so this is another retro post, which happened back in late May.
Gary and Atsuki got to come down to San Diego for a quick weekend visit and we were able to take them Wine Tasting and to the Sicilian Festival downtown.


We just did a small local Wine Tasting at the San Diego Wine Company and then had some great burgers at Bangin' Burgers up in Miramar right by where we live up in La Jolla.

After that there was an awesome little Sicilian Festival which apparently according to their web-site now broke attendance records in 2010.  They do some Italian dances, play music and actually had a Sicilian wedding, so it was pretty cool, a good scene.  (Tough break for their World Cup team though this year eh.)  Ashley actually ended up with a pretty cool little art thing that we now have hanging in the kitchen from one of the million little shops they have there.

'The Softball Incident'

Ok so I am just barely getting around to this, and both of these events actually occurred back in May.

  This is the after-math of an unfortunate incident at Sunday afternoon softball one afternoon.
The game starts out just like any other, and it's a good fun game till the last couple innings.  We're up by like 11 runs and the game is all but over, some gets a hit and one of our players in running to score from third but then stops right before the Comit Line (A commit line 20 feet from home plate is used.  Once a player passes the commit line he becomes a force out at home plate.  The defensive player must touch home plate for the out and have the ball in his possession.  The defensive player cannot tag the runner.) then he runs back to third.  The other team throws the ball to home, and the umpire initially calls him Out.  Then we start letting him hear it because you can clearly see where his footprint was, behind the line still.  So then the umpire walks out there, looks at the mark on the ground and changes his own call to Safe!  This sends the other team into chaos.  Namely their second basemen(younger girl approx. age 17) and their right fielder (older lady approx 40ish).  They start going a crazy and calling all of the girls on our team Whores and Slut-Bags.  So one of the girls on our team starts letting them hear it a little back, and their right fielder goes nuts yelling more and saying don't talk to my daughter that way (So it was a mom & daughter combo) and yelling more about Whores and Slut-bags.  So things finally settle down, we end the inning and they quickly bat, then the game ends us winning by a substantial margin.  I'm in the outfield and jogging in, and the rest of the team is going through shaking hands.  About the time I get to the line to shake hands, the older woman just winds up and takes a haymaker punch at the girl on our team.  Her daughter is right behind her and also starts in on the scuffle, to make it those 2 girls against our 1.  It's all happening right in front of me, so I kind of just put my body in between them all, and try to hold back our girl some, for the record the girl on our team most likely would've beaten both of them, but this was not the first fight this crazy mom/daughter combo has been in, so I just tried to get in the way.  Anyhow, I'm trying to hold back our girl, and the younger girl, the 17 year old winds up and nails me pretty solid in the mouth with a punch.  Things finally settle down everyone goes their own ways and here I took the worst damage of anyone in the group with a bloody lip.  Didn't hurt really, it was just pretty humorous more than anything.

So in the image above here I am icing my lip recovering from the hay-maker from the 17 year old crazy girl.

Mother's Day Weekend

So a brief note here, will add pictures later and more in-depth analysis.

We went up to Temecula on Saturday with Ashley's mom and dad and we hit up A LOT of different wineries and had a great time, I'm just going to list them here briefly then provide the analysis of each of the ones we went to further later on.

We started at Hart Family Winery, then headed close next door to Callaway Winery.
Then proceeded up the road to Stuart Cellars, across the street to Mt. Palomar, we hit up one of our past favorites in Wiens. Proceeded across the way to Masia De Yabar, down the road to Leonesse Cellars and then ended up with Dinner and a last tasting at South Coast winery.

Dinner was topped off by the Jazz losing game 3 in the Playoffs on a heart-breaking D-Will missed jumper and missed tip back in by Millsapp.

Came home that night after dinner and watched The Blind Side with Sandra Bullock and it may now be one of my absolute favorite movies, great show really, I highly recommend it.

Sunday morning we headed to Beaumont's for a Mother's Day brunch and had a wonderful breakfast, but it unfortunately took us over 2 hours as we sat and waited at our table for over an hour after ordering our food.

Stay tuned for more in depth reviews of the wineries and the weekend!

Napa Valley Valentines Day!

Ok so I know it may not be the most original since we went last year also, but we did Napa again for Valentines this year!  We had such a good time last year that we wanted to do it again this year, and Ashley's sister and her boyfriend were able to come with us this trip for their first time in Napa so it made the trip great!

I'm going to have to consult Ashley for the list of Wineries we hit, (I want to say 4 the first day and maybe 5 the second day) but here are some highlights from the trip.

We started the trip at Frog's Leap Winery which is absolutely amazing as it is completely sustainable and I am influenced by my good friend Riley that sustainability is a good thing! Anyhow, they have a barn and a little hoop set up that if you make the shot you win a little prize (A Frogs Leap poster) after watching a half dozen misses or so, I calmly stepped up and hit my first shot since Christmas. Good times there!



Me, Ashley, her sister Tina, and her sisters boyfriend Julian. Posing inside one of the barns at Frogs Leap.

Not as much a fan of the wine so much as a fan of their establishment at Sterling Winery, you take a tram ride up to the estate itself, then the views from there are amazing.  We hit there last year, but just went again primarily for the view, a really pretty place in Napa.

 

We hit Duckhorn Winery the second day there, first thing in the morning and it was the absolute best winery we were at the whole time.  Generous pours, the absolute best wine, and a pretty place too, so glad we stopped there and even though it was a little more pricey than we're accustomed too we got a couple bottles from there and they are DIVINE!

 

Outside of the Duckhorn winery amidst all of the Mustard Plants outside of the winery.

 

A little bright here, I believe this was at Peju, one of our final wineries of the trip, but a great stop nonetheless.

Just a beautiful place in the world, absolutely love staying up there it is a great time always!

Discover Card is Awesome

**Disclaimer**
This post is by no means endorsed by Discover Card and I am not affiliated with them despite the fact they saved me a cool grand.  So thank you to them, appreciate you Discover!

It was just another Monday in my everyday life, get to work, get some projects done.  Sign on to www.Mint.com (another absolutely great site by the way) to check up on my budget and just see how everything was going for my monthly budgets.  Mint.com by the way is a Credit Card and Banking/ everything financial compiling site, so I can see all the balances on all CC's, Bank accounts, Retirement etc.  So I log on here and realize that everything loads, EXCEPT for my Discover card, meaning something is wrong with the online login.  Minutes later I get a call on my cell from random 800 number, but I answer, and sure enough it is Discover Customer Service wanting to verify some purchases for Fraud protection.  Yadda yadda list a couple of places I went to eat the weekend before.  Then... And 10 $100 gift cards for EBay? ... Wait what? Yeah 10 $100 gift cards from EBay.  Whoa whoa whoa, ok no I definitely did not purchase that.  They trace it back, looks like I made a few online purchases recently which any of them could be the place that the person hacked in order to get my CC number.  Nonetheless, this was a little discerning, but they canceled my card immediately, sent me a new one and did not charge me for the fraudulent charges. They talked to me about how to use the 'Encryption' card services on DiscoverCard.com and how to help avoid this in the future. Awesome.

I'm just now getting my new Discover Card, which I'm going to make sure I'm MUCH safer with and watch where and how I use it.  I was always one of those believers that Identity Theft couldn't happen to me, I make sure I use safe approved sites, and I'm pretty computer savvy thinking I was invincible I guess.  I got hit by a Mild Mild form of ID theft, which thanks to Discover Card was completely avoided.

So, good lookin out by Discover, much appreciated and to everyone out there your card number can be hacked from anywhere.  (The only online purchases I had made in the past 2 weeks was www.Southwest.com which I would think would be pretty secure.  But anything is possible!)
Be careful out there friends, and thank you Discover Card!

Torrey Pines / Poinsettia Bowl

For me this year, the holiday's started on the evening of December 22nd upon Riley's arrival into San Diego.
We hit the ground running upon Riley's arrival and really made quite the time of it in the 30ish hours he was in town.
Arrival late on the 22nd, to some home cooked Pasta and Meatballs, not my best creation by far, but it got the job done for my wearied traveler buddy.
Ran presents out to my Cousin Jen and then headed back into PB where we hit the bars for maybe an hour, but then decided that we had a big day ahead of us and didn't want to be getting home too late. (Hilarious side-story, we later were reading about the up-coming match-up of Cal vs. Utah in the Poinsettia bowl, in which Cal's coach was "Tightening up" standards for the team and changing his Curfew time from 4am to 2am before the game to get his team some rest.) Anyhow, we were home around midnight and crashed soon there after. Hit the ground running in the morning with a little breakfast, then hiked Torrey Pines and took in some beautiful coast lines and sunshine. Followed by picking up our tickets to the football game at Qualcomm (Field Level, Section F8, Row 23, Seats 1 & 2 - Phenomenal seats) Followed by some Frisbee Golf at Balboa Park which was a great time except for there being about a million people there.

 The La Jolla shores looking down from Torrey Pines.

Looking South from Torrey Pines over the La Jolla shores taking in some of the amazing coastline.

Another shot looking South over the La Jolla shores with a little bird pirched in the brush here.

 














Me and Riley at the Poinsettia Bowl game, Utah vs Cal

Holding up the number 9 for number of Consecutive Bowl wins for the University of Utah!