Lazy Sunday...

Hello!
So my weekend has been quite uneventful really. Russ worked on Saturday, and I worked on a paper for my Political Science class.

It was a paper on the possibility of California's state parks possibly being closed for a bit due to our state's huge budget problems... it is so sad to me. I have such amazing memories especially of one of the parks (Big Basin Redwoods) in particular. We spent many camping trips there when I was younger, and I just loved it there...

To think of losing this beauty (though they say it will only be for a few years) really saddens me...

No idea who these people are, but aren't these trees just amazing? They really are THAT BIG. My brother and I used to love going inside the trees and exploring...

We have been planning a trip back to Big Basin this summer, and by the looks of it, we better make that soon, before we lose the opportunity.

If you are a Californian (or even if you aren't!!!) and would hate to see many of our amazing parks such as Big Basin Redwoods be closed (no matter how long they say it will be for), please check out this site to sign a petition... this was turned down last year and hopefully it will be again.

On another note, Russ and I rented Doubt from our beloved local Redbox (which reminds me, I need to drive over there and take it back when I'm done with this entry). I enjoyed the movie... I think it was very interesting, and I like that not everything is entirely answered, and leaves the viewer to make their own judgement on what really happened...

Don't want to say too much more, I'm a firm believer in not giving things away and ruining the movie for others! As you probably know it had many nominations this year, and had an incredible cast. If you are in the mood for a serious movie (and maybe even a little dark), then I would check this one out...

Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend!! I'm off to hopefully return my Redbox rental and watch the MTV Movie Awards :)

-K

My weekend (so far) in pictures

On Friday I drove to Davis to go see my friend, Andrea. Andrea is my "travelling friend", and is graduating this semester, and then off to travel again. I will miss her very much, but I know it is what she loves to do, so I'm happy for her and glad I got to see her!

I didn't take any pictures this time... we were too busy catching up. I really wish I would have though, and some pictures of Davis. I love Davis, it's such a neat college town.

I will probably take pictures next time I go to see her, because I plan on seeing her at least once more before she leaves for 2 YEARS :(

On Friday night we went to go see Star Trek. I had never watched any of the shows, or other movies (didn't even know there were any). I used to say that "this wasn't my type of thing" but I've found lately that if I just give things a chance to "be my thing" I usually end up liking it.

The movie was great! From what I've seen in other pictures, they did a great job with the casting. Russ said the same thing, and he has seen many of the shows and other movies. He kept trying to explain to me who everyone was throughout the movie, even though it was a prequel and I was understanding everything just fine. :P LOL

It was also directed by J.J Abrams, the creator of my FAVORITE show Lost!

Not much happened on Saturday... we just hung out and relaxed... I can't remember anything of interest from Saturday.

On Sunday, we met up with my Grandpa and his wife for his birthday celebration. We went to this totally adorable restaurant that was set in the middle of a plant nursery. There was so much to look at, and the restaurant looked a bit like a green house, so you could look out when you are eating. The food was yummy too! I would love to go back for a special occasion at night, when they have the trees all lit up and tables lit by candle light!

Some pictures I took there...

Actually, the one above was taken at my Mom's LOL.

My mom with some weird crocodile/alligator statue :)

Russ and a huge wind chime!

Yesterday was just a really fun day... Russ has been in an awesome mood because he finally has had a little time off to rest and not be working all weekend. We just had a great and beautiful day yesterday :)

Today we will be going to a bbq at my mom's house, which is always fun!!

-K

New Look!

OMG! I have an all new layout in here, doesn't it look amazing?!

Thank you so much to the amazing Brandi at Bwise Templates for my awesome new look... I LOVE IT!!

Now to enter all my pesky "widgets" again! Grrr to Blogger... but this new layout... SO worth re-entering them!!

Thank you again Brandi, the layout is very "me" and very "Sunny Side Up", it's just perfect :)

-K

Just Checking In...

Hello All, just wanted to check in after the weekend. Hope everyone had a nice one! It was blistering hot here, around 103 degrees this weekend. It's cooled off a little since, thank God!


Russ and I went to a restaurant for happy hour with Ariadna on Friday night. One of my favorite restaurants around here is normally a pretty pricey restaurant (though very good, always places in Best of Sacramento and Sacramento's A-List)... so it's nice for special occasions, but we definitely cannot afford it very often. However, they recently made a Happy Hour (or hours rather, since it is twice a day, and extended hours on Friday nights).



If you come during Happy Hour and sit in their bar area (which is actually very nice, as is the entire restaurant) it is five dollars for any meal/appetizer on their Happy Hour menu! Five bucks! It simply can't be beat, unless you eat at home (which we have been doing quite well at lately). It is GOOD food, I had a miniature pizza which was basically like a bruschetta, but on flat bread. Yum! Russ and Ariadna had a steak salad, which is always delicious.
After dinner, we went out and made s'mores, which they have been doing on Friday nights lately.



Ariadna, making the chocolate "disappear"

Russ tried to explain to her that we can't see the chocolate in her mouth when you take the picture, hence the expression here.

On Saturday morning, I met with the book club that I belong to for our "anniversary breakfast". That was really fun, and it was nice to see them again. It's crazy that I've known most of them for a year now! I'm glad that I have class during the day now, so that I can start going to book meetings again.

Saturday evening I took some manicotti that I made over to my Mom's house, and we had dinner there, and headed to Big Spoon for dessert afterwards.

And Sunday... not much there either. Russ caught up on some much needed sleep... he has been working a lot lately, Summer is a busy time for him at work. Later I went on a quest to find a planner... which was surprisingly difficult. I thought for sure stores would have tons of them (though apparently I'm looking for one at an awkward time). Everyone had adorable journals... but planners? Not so much. I finally settled for one at Border's (mostly because I had a gift card for the store anyways...).

Finally, today I started my first Summer class... and this time was right on time for it :)

I'm sorry, I know this has probably been an incredibly boring post...

I will update again when I have something more interesting to blog about :)

-K

Dog Park Fun

My mom called me around 5:00pm yesterday to let me know that Shirley (a friend of the family) called and was heading to the dog park with her dogs Tanky and Miley. My mom said that she was going to go too, and wanted to know if we (Delilah and I) wanted to meet her there. Of course, Delilah is always ready for some dog park fun, so we left and headed for the dog park!

Here are some pictures of our time at the dog park... the blonde (by the way is blonde spelled without an e at the end? I was always under the impression that it had an e, but blogger spellcheck doesn't quite think so...) dachshund that looks kind of like Delilah is her sister, Miley :)

Aaaaand... here's a pink and purple dog that we saw. LOL.

I don't think I'll be doing Lilah's fur like that anytime soon (rolls eyes).

After the dog park we went on a bike ride at the place that I mentioned before in here... it was absolutely beautiful, as always.

I rode 5.5 miles yesterday, and want to try and ride 25 miles by the end of the month. Now I was afraid to say that in here because 1.) It's really not that much and 2.) You're all going to know if I don't even ride that little bit!

But that's sort of the point... I need to say something and stick with it!!

-K

Some Pics from Mother's Day...

Well, I like to do a blog after the weekend generally to share my pictures from my weekend. This last Sunday was, of course, Mother's Day so I will share those pictures :)

We drove up to Grass Valley/Nevada City to meet with some other family members for a late lunch. After that we headed to their lovely home in Nevada City and just sat around enjoying the nice day and talking.


A bunch of Calla Lilies (Mom's favorite) for my mom from Russ. I also got her a couple of night gowns that she wanted.

My Grandma and I

I am in the center kneeling, along with my mom and brother :)

I love big trees!!

It was a nice weekend, and most importantly, I think my mom had a good one too :)

Hope all my mommy friends had a great one as well!

-K

P.S - was totally about to use my picture of the "K" in the sand again... but don't want to ruin my entire formatting on the blog again. Blogger really needs to fix that little issue.

Um, eager much?

So this is pretty embarrassing...

I just went to the college with all of my stuff all ready to start my first summer class. So I found the classroom and was sitting outside it for a few minutes.

I kept checking the time and wondering why even the professor hadn't shown up to the classroom yet... I mean I was only ten minutes early, they should be there... right?

Time went by and I looked at the clock again, still not believing that nobody else would be there yet. I checked my schedule again... yes, right classroom.

But then looked at the date on the paper. Class begins May 18th. But Mother's Day was the 10th which means... today's only the... 11th?

Haha... yeah.

Book Review: Water for Elephants

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Review from Amazon.com

Jacob Jankowski says: "I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other." At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn't always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn't a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn't write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison.

Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob's life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which he finds himself. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the "menagerie" and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can. August, the animal trainer, is a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose occasional flights into madness and brutality often have Jacob as their object. Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. He is the self-appointed Protector of the Downtrodden, and... he falls in love with Marlena, crazy August's wife. Not his best idea.

The most interesting aspect of the book is all the circus lore that Gruen has so carefully researched. She has all the right vocabulary: grifters, roustabouts, workers, cooch tent, rubes, First of May, what the band plays when there's trouble, Jamaican ginger paralysis, life on a circus train, set-up and take-down, being run out of town by the "revenooers" or the cops, and losing all your hooch. There is one glorious passage about Marlena and Rosie, the bull elephant, that truly evokes the magic a circus can create. It is easy to see Marlena's and Rosie's pink sequins under the Big Top and to imagine their perfect choreography as they perform unbelievable stunts. The crowd loves it--and so will the reader. The ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely.

My Review:

Everything that I could say about this book has basically been said in the review above, which I think was quite well done. I did really enjoy this book, although parts of it actually really turned my stomach. There were also some very funny parts though, and a very interesting and page-turning storyline. I also enjoyed reading the back section of this book on how Sara Gruen gathered her inspiration to write this book.

So I would say that I would definitely recommend this book, I think it was well-written and fast-moving. Sara Gruen did some great research before writing this book, and I think that a lot of it is quite factual and even more interesting because parts of it are based on true stories!

As always, let me know if you have read this book, and what you thought about it, or if you decide to pick it up and read it!

One more thing...

Has anyone here read the the book Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand? Geez, I am trying to get into this thing. It was chosen by my book club as our "Big One" (it is a little over a thousand pages, and quite literally in about size 7 font). I am having quite a problem getting into the book and was hoping if someone could tell me if it gets more fast-paced.

Take me to the river...

Yesterday Ariadna and I went to the river (Yuba River). We had planned to go for awhile but the weather had been so yucky and our schedules always conflicted. Finally, I had a week off from school, and she had a day off from work, and we took off and tried to find a swimming hole that I used to go to with my mom when I was younger.

Unfortunately, my mom told me later that she thinks we went to the wrong covered bridge (surprisingly quite a few out here). We went to the Bridgeport bridge, which I believe is one of the longest covered bridges in the states. It doesn't look very long in my pictures, but it is actually quite long.

It was funny, I kept saying to Ariadna, "You know, I just don't remember it being quite this LONG...." Sure enough I was right, but I am still glad I got to see this one too!

Anywho, it was still a great trip and totally beautiful out there... there was a point when we were going up some VERY curvy roads uphill and I looked over the edge... it was scary but so amazingly beautiful!!!

And, as always, Ariadna and I had quite the adventure getting there. We stopped to grab something to take with us to eat, and I'm guessing the owner of the restaurant didn't appreciate some "non-locals" coming into their little place. I'm not sure if we had "city-folk" written all over us but it was strange...

We admired the small-town grocery store and wished a little that we were from a town like that, rather than a town of huge grocery stores, Wal Mart, and chain restaurants. A town where you not only know your neighbors, but you know their family. I don't even know my neighbors on a first-name basis.

Then, somehow we missed the bridge (I was looking out the wrong side of the window, and Ariadna said she saw it but didn't know "that was it" LOL, I think I asked her how many long covered bridges she saw on the way ;) )

And of course, Ariadna almost hit a poor squirrel (Ariadna + Driving = A little scary) who dashed out like mad into the curvy road. I think he heard our blood-curdling screams when we saw him and hopefully ran back into the bushes. We didn't see any squirrel bits on the way back, so I was relieved :)

So that was our trip there, and here are some pictures of our little journey!

This Sunday I think we are going to the *other* bridge with my family for Mother's Day, so I will have to take pictures of our picnic out there.