The Zims Dot Com

Wow...

2008-06-30T17:25:00.000-07:00

I haven't updated in forever.

I'm finally getting around to adding some information to my facebook site.

I have a ton of pictures of the puppy and the new cats. I'm sorry I left the last post up so long, I haven't really been working on the site. So sad too, poor Kira. Our new cat Barnaby really reminds me of her.

We have three cats now, up from none. Stormy is still doing really well. I'll put up pics of the kittens and the stray that we adopted (She kind of adopted us).

I'm not even going to try to figure out how many cats are living under our barn. We took in Shakespear and had her spayed, and the rest - well - we aren't feeding them. If they stay, they stay. I'm not going to go poisoning them.

We have moles in the yard again this year, although I think the cats are killing them. I found a dead one this afternoon. If Stormy is rolling around in the yard, you can count on there being something dead nearby. That dog isn't completely right in the head :)

Kira had to be euthanized

2008-03-14T17:51:00.000-07:00

I'm sad to say that Kira had to be euthenized today. She had a second bout of colon problems, and with her diabetes we didn't think it the prognosis was good for a full recovery. The vet had already anesthetized her for the X-rays (Kira never did like the Dr., she learned it from me I guess) so we had to make the hard choice to have her euthanized.

I miss her.

Bye, Kira.

New stuff coming soon...

2008-03-11T21:22:00.001-07:00

You've heard it before, but I'm actually going to update soon with pictures of the dog, house, yard, etc...

Hello :)

2007-11-04T13:26:00.000-08:00

We are alive, and we have a new puppy.

I've been busy all summer with yardwork. Who would have thought that buying a house with a large yard would be so much work?

I hope to get some of our pictures up from this summer, along with a gallery of Stormy. He's a half german shephard / half lab mix. He's going to be huge.

Site is dusty, not abandoned

2007-11-04T13:24:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone. I really mean to do more with this, but there is only so much time in the day.

If you have any suggestions for content for hammered, please email me at my Gmail address. It's aaron.zimmerman with the usual .com after the word gmail :) I hate spammers, so you don't get a mailto:

Whoa

2007-08-17T18:57:00.000-07:00

Holy crap, I haven't updated this in forever.

Let's catch up, shall we?

Lise is currently volunteering at the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum. It is a very cool little museum in downtown Tillamook, and she's really enjoying it.

I am still working for the I.T. department, and it has been a lot of fun. We have a great team of people coming together.

We bought a house in Bay City, OR in June of this year. Our condo finally sold in San Diego in April after being on the market for over a year. We dropped the price 70k from the initial listing price before it sold :(

I have a barn, around 2 acres of land, and a 100 year old house now. I just got done shovelling goat shit.

GOAT SHIT. I don't even own a goat.

I'll update this more later. Hopefully it won't be another 14 months.

What a difference a year makes.

2006-05-18T16:14:00.000-07:00

May 21, 2005.

Lise and I were on a plane to Portland, OR for a quick vacation. We sat next to a nice woman from Portland who chatted with us for a bit. She asked us where we going, and I mentioned to her that we were considering moving to Tillamook. She lectured us sternly about how we didn't want to do that, and that we shouldn't even think about moving to Oregon without a job because the tech job market was so bad.

May 21, 2006. I'll be picking up the U-Haul and loading the last of our posessions into it and finalizing our move to Oregon.

One year - and an email due to a monster.com search. Life is pretty funny. You can make huge changes based off of completely small activities.

If I hadn't been over-worked at the cable company, if other people had been doing their job, if everyone hadn't pushed off their responsibilities on me, if I hadn't written that email, if I hadn't bought the plane ticket, if I hadn't picked Monday to drive to Tillamook instead of the weekend... If James hadn't been able to get out of his odd jobs that day, if Ross hadn't lived in Portland.

So many things added up to us having this huge change one year later, but it was all because of a stupid little "What if they actually take me seriously" e-maill and a habit of looking for real estate when I was getting bummed out in Southern California.

Sometimes the best plans are the ones that you've been working on without realizing you were doing it.

Life is funny.

Whoops

2006-05-02T12:58:00.000-07:00

What the heck happened to April?

Shoot. This month is going to be even worse.

Just 17 days until I get on a plane for San Diego to fetch Lise and the last of our belongings -- then another 1,000 mile drive to Oregon. So much for a summer vacation :)

March update

2006-03-26T12:55:00.000-08:00

Wow, one a month for 2006. Don't worry, it won't last :)

What's happened since the last update... let's see. Lise has had the work completed on the house, and we've got it on the market now. We're listing it at $299 - $311 at the advice of our Real Estate agent. I am not sure if we employed REAL-TOR, the epic beast of Lore. Sorry, stupid inside joke. It's not worth explaining, but Lise will laugh if she ever reads this.

I have moved into Marty's office at work. We aren't replacing his position, instead my title has been re-worked and I am taking on many of the responsibilities of the former manager position. I'm pretty happy with this move - I'm not sure that it made sense to bring someone in to manage me where I would have to train them on almost all of the site specific things. I also hope to have many of the cross-over duties that were part of my department transitioned back into the groups where they fit.

We have been looking at houses here in Tillamook. So far there haven't been that many that stood out, but we have seen one that we would have bought. Since we are only buying one, that is a pretty good thing :) Unfortunately it sold already, but we aren't in a position to buy a new place until we get out of the other one in San Diego.

I signed up for Google's new page creator. It's pretty nice, but I still think there are things they could have done better. As far as I can tell, there isn't a way to include a file - so it looks like you can't take advantage of simple things like including a set of links on a side navigation. It seems petty, but if I had a lot of pages to update, I'm not sure I could work with their tool.

Maybe that's the point, though.

Daniel came down to a retreat in Seaside, so we went up to the Thai restaurant in Cannon Beach. I was pretty happy with it. It's not Di Chan in San Diego, but it isn't bad. I'll definitely go back. Marty told me that he thought it was closing down, but I didn't see any indication of that. Actually, it could have been Christie or Brenna that told me that.

I need to clean up the house again. It seems like I just did this! Ugh. I say Ugh a lot in these blog entries.

Life goes on

2006-02-19T20:12:00.000-08:00

A month later. I still don't have the stupid SharePoint portal fixed. I think I resent SharePoint 2001 more than I have any other piece of software in a few years. How inelegant, oh SP2001. Why it couldn't have been SharePoint 2003 -- oh why.

Sob.

Lise has been kicking ass back at the condo. She has scheduled popcorn ceiling testing, removal, and has now painted the entire place except for the kitchen and bathroom. The office is staying blue from our honeymoon remodeling job of 2002.

New carpet comes tomorrow. Discover card has already pulled my card once this remodelling job :) We'll see if they freak out and turn it off again. I paid our car insurance, carpet, and some other stuff all over a three day span and my average balance is usually under $1000, so we hit some sort of fraud prevention. They do this to me once every 6 months or so. I wish they would just call me instead of disabling everything, but I have changed phone numbers 4 times without updating them, so I suppose I can give them a pass on that one.

I really should get some of this stuff done that I am currently not doing. I'm procrastinating doing a few things right now that I should get on, but I don't want to start them. I think this is a reality avoidance procedure, which is pretty dumb, because I am much worse off if I don't get going and do this stuff.

Ugh.

Time to wash the month old dishes :) I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

10:45 on the loneliest day in the world

2006-01-18T22:47:00.001-08:00

Ok, maybe not that loney, but it was a good title.

Lise just left today for San Diego and the last four months that we have to spend apart before she moves up here to Oregon full time. We're officially spending more time living apart at this point than we have at any point since we started dating, and she lived in Seattle and I lived in San Diego when that all started.

Marty quit today. Bastard. I am a resentful, jealous person. I wish I didn't have to work, but I don't have independently wealthy money sitting around anywhere. Truth be told, I don't think Marty does either, but he has enough to make it by for a few years before things would get interesting. I'm sure he'll be bored of surfing, having a good time, and taking it easy by then. :( Why can't I test my luck like that?

So I'm sitting here right now waiting for a guy halfway across the world to read my email and call me back so that I can potentially destroy a system that I have been in charge of for mere hours. It's times like this that I wonder what I'm getting myself into. Luckily, I'm a smart bastard and I can usually get myself out of any jams that I get into. We'll see if my luck holds.

The good news is I've done everything possible that I can do before making this semi-destructive step, including 3 different methods of backing up a server that can't be backed up. I'm nothing if not thorough.

Whee. I guess I'll give him 15 more minutes before I give up. He's supposed to be working until 4am Central time, but I suspect that he isn't in Central time. Just a hunch. :)

January Update

2006-01-08T17:33:00.000-08:00

Christmas, etc. Or how I've spent the last month...

On the 23rd of December we loaded up the cat in her carrier, and took off towards Portland - then Seattle. This sounded like a good idea before we did it - I mean who wants to leave the cat at home when you could just bring her with you on the road trip?

This was our first road trip to Seattle from Tillamook, and I have to say that our estimates of how long it would take were a bit off. We left here around 11 and ended up in Seattle somewhere around 6 pm. The cat *almost* made it all the way without incident on the way there, but 5 miles from Lise's familial home she couldn't take it any longer, so the end of the trip was more exciting than it should have been.

Did I mention that our cat hates the car? She loathes it. For the entire trip, she probably averaged 15 cries per hour. I counted at one point. We've tried Ace and Xanax, but neither one has been terribly successful. I think next time we'll go back to the Ace because it seemed to work better on the trip here from California.

Christmas was fun... but quick. We saw James and Ross over at James' house, and we were able to check out Daniel's new home/office/hopeless bachelor pad in Bothell. That boy is going to have a really hard time getting a woman to come over to that place, it couldn't be more "I am the alpha geek male" vibe if you threw Bill Gates in there in a speedo.

D's was nice for Christmas and we saw Barbie and John. The cats did not make an appearance. I probably could have gone downstairs to find them but I was not interested in scoping out the coat rack.

Kira and Licorice didn't really get along too well at the parent's house. Licorice was fine if she was sleeping, but I think she enjoyed waking up and making us scramble to move Kira. Note to self: bring bungee cords next time.

Work has been good. We had a net admin for a few weeks but we no longer do. I'm still not entirely sure what was up there. My boss has given notice and is likely to end up in a mariachi band, on the amazing race, or potentially teaching highschool. Some people shouldn't have the luxury of having enough money to get by without working. Bastard. I'm just a bit jealous.

Other than that, not much else is going on here. The cat is happy to be home and Lise and I are not happy that she is leaving in a little bit, but we're almost done
with this crazy two location thing we have going on. Bleh.

One day Lise will actually write an entry here. Ha.

December Update

2005-12-18T21:09:00.000-08:00

So if you've been playing along with the home version, you'd know that Lise was coming up on Tuesday. She finishes up her finals on Tuesday afternoon and hops on a plane for a short flight to Portland. Tuesday night will be spent at Ross' house, and then she'll be taking the http://www.tillamookbus.com/ into town.

I should probably clean up the house so it looks like I claim it looks when we're talking on the phone :)

I was reading back through the first few entries on this blog, and it occurs to me that it's pretty funny that I was posting every time it rained in San Diego. That used to be a rare sight for me. Today, Portland was pretty much shut down by freezing rain, snow, and ice - and the coast is getting hammered with high winds and rain. It's been below freezing at least 25 times already... and I haven't mentioned it yet.

I hope tomorrow morning that the roads are OK over the Wilson river highway. I still worry about Don commuting over that - he's our former infrastructure guy who took a job in Portland. He hasn't moved yet, and he's commuting daily over the coastal range. That's not something I would want to do.

I'm still looking for a house here, but I can't really buy one until I sell the condo in San Diego. My lease at the new apartment here in Tillamook lasts until August, so I either need to keep this place while I work on the new one, or wait until August to buy.

I hope we can get into a place here in early May or June.

Happy Birthday Mom & Dad

2005-09-23T23:11:00.000-07:00

Chris thought that it would be a good idea for us to make it to our Parents for their birthdays this year, and last weekend was the time. I drove out to Portland after work and got on a plane, and 1.5 hours later was in San Fransisco International airport with no way of meeting up with Chris. After wandering around near the Alaska air counter for an hour, I finally got a page from Chris on the white courtesy phone, and we met up.

I mention this, because I used to be much more organized before I had a cell phone. Now that I do not have a cell phone (temporarily) I realize how much I depend on it.

Anyway, the weekend went pretty well. We spent most of one day setting up an HDTV (minus the HDTV box, which we forgot to order) and most of the second day setting up Macintosh toys (OS X Tiger, Garage Band, and two new iPod Nanos).

So... I now need a new HDTV, a Nano, Garage Band, a Mac Laptop, and an M Audio keyboard. I figure going home last weekend set me back about $3000 in future expenses.

Ach. Well, I'm poor right now, so not much risk of any of that actually getting purchased. But - it's going on the list of crap to buy when we finally sell the condo.

In other news, I am still alive, but I'm really busy at work and can't read / post from there right now. I'm hoping that in the next few months I can get it all under control there, but right now there is really just time for work. I do have a laptop at home again, though, so as soon as I find my wireless card I should be able to work online a bit more. Right now I can only get online on the couch, which is OK but I'd rather be over there (in the chair...)

Did I mention I suck at updating these things?

2005-09-14T21:33:00.000-07:00

I am a bad person.

I promise everyone that I'm going to get around to updating this thing with useful information, then go about a month without even logging in to the site to see if there are comments or questions.

Well, I can't say I didn't warn you (it is in the disclaimer at the top of the site) but I probably should try a little harder -- and it's difficult to claim that I don't have any free time...

So. Here is the slightly longer version to catch up those of you who are playing along with the home game. At the beginning of August, I quit my job with the cable company in San Diego (who I'm going to keep nameless, just because there are people there reading this and I'm sure they'd like to remain anonymous) and started the process of moving to Oregon.

If I had it all to do again, I think I would be a lot less optimistic about how long it actually takes to pack your life into a Uhaul truck. That's the first lesson that you all need to take away from this. Do not understimate the amount of work it can take to move a "two bedroom" condo into the Uhaul that they say fits a 2-3 bedroom condo. I say "two bedroom" because I wasn't really considering that we also had a 5*5*10' storage unit full of crap that we were taking with us.

Moving was a bit of a fiasco. I lined up three guys from work to help me move, but of those guys only one showed up to help. This was a bit of a pain in the ass. I'm still not really sure why the other two guys told me they could help but didn't show up. I'm not really bitter about it, just kind of curious. No matter what the reason was, I was kind of in trouble. My wife and I weren't going to be able to get it done with just the one other guy, so I ended up calling up my old neighbors and getting them to help with their two kids. Tina and Ben were a life saver - I don't think we would have gotten out of town without their help.

So. Mistake #2. I had the truck rented for 5 days, so our plan was to drive that first night (after loading the truck) to Modesto, CA to my parent's house. Needless to say, we didn't make it that far. At about 11pm Lise was too tired to go on, so we decided to try to get a room near Magic Mountain. Boy, that was a bad decision. It turns out that in the summer it is really hard to get a room near there without reservations. We tried every hotel for about 20 miles, and we had her brother Dan in Seattle making calls to any hotel he could find on Google Local.

We finally got a room. Let me tell you, the "Beggers can't be choosers" suite at the Gorman Travel Lodge was not really the plan. Our AC unit sounded like there was a helicopter taking off. It was so loud we couldn't even run it during the night. The toilet stopped up, and the shower did not drain.

The second day was better. We got all the way to Modesto without a lot of problems. We had originally planned to spend two days with my parents, but because we had stopped the first night, we only had the one night to stay there. This part of the trip is a blur to me. I think our cat liked tormenting my parents dog, but the dog never did see her. Still, the cat did everthing she could to try to get noticed.

The third day we drove from Modesto, CA to Grants Pass, OR. This day started bad and didn't get much better. When we got to Stockton, I was run off of the freeway into a different exit, so I was separated from Lise with her going North on I-5 and me going South. I got back on the freeway, only to be forced off again into a westbound exit. Finally, after driving through downtown Stockton, I was able to get on to I5 north. 10 minutes later, the rear view mirror on the side of the Uhaul decided to blow out of position (who knew you weren't supposed to go over 75 in an oversized box?) I had to pull over and find my tools to fix this. Luckily, the ratchet set that my grandfather bought me when I was 10 was still in working condition. I think my grandfather may have been looking down on me at that time - there was no reason that we packed the tools where I could get to them, and I swear I remember my grandfather mentioning to me (20 years ago when he bought this for me at a day after Christmas sale) that he didn't want me to be stuck broken down on the side of the road one day without tools.

Once Lise and I met back up a few hours later, it didn't get much better. Neither my wife nor I had a very good mental map of northern CA, so it was a bit of a surprise to us that this was a mountainous trip. I suppose the "Pass" part of Grants Pass should have been a dead give-away. After a harrowing stretch where we were separated again, with both of thinking at different times that the other had driven into a ditch, we finally made it through into Oregon. We stayed at the Shilo inn there in Grants Pass, and apart from me driving the wrong way down a one way street in a Uhaul and parking in a dirt strip near the hotel, it was pretty uneventful.

On day four we finally made our way into Tillamook. Now, we were kind of winging it, so I probably didn't pick the best method of getting in to town. We went through Salem which was weird in a Uhaul (not as strange as Stockton, but close) and ended up taking another winding road to connect from I5 to the 101. We probably should have just driven up to Portland and cut over. Once we got to our storage place, we met up with Larry Latimer and one of our two moving guys we set up an appointment with on Emove.com. It turns out the other guy wasn't going to make it - so we ended up being shorthanded again. Larry was a lifesaver - he ended up helping us out a lot. I think he carried my TV in to the house on his own - and that thing is over 100 pounds. Did I mention we are on the second floor?

So the place -- it has character. It's not a real apartment. We are in the shopkeepers apartment over a storefront, but the storefront is connected into our kitchen via a door that we have a refrigerator in front of. It's two bedrooms for $650/mo with garbage, sewer, water, and electricity. It's not cheap, but its not a bad deal considering. We moved all of our stuff in with the help of Larry and our one guy in about 2 hours I think.

I initiated Larry into the Northwest version of Mexican food... I took him to Taco Time. I think he was amused. We agreed that it was not Mexican food, but that it was pretty good. At least, I think we did - he may have been humoring me.

Day 5 came and we took the Uhaul back to Forest Grove. It turns out it was $1700 cheaper for us to return it to Forest Grove instead of Tillamook. I think someone at Uhaul is really over-valuing their time. In any case, that was also an adventure. First, I took us down a road that dead-ended in a closed for construction sign (apparently I should have read that big flashing warning sign 8 miles back down the road) and then we got stuck in traffic going the alternative route... which would have been OK if we had had more than 2 gallons of gas left in the Uhaul. We made it into town, but not until we had been idling for 20 minutes in a truck that got 10 mpg on a good day. I thought we were screwed, but we came through OK.

Lise and I spent a lot of time out exploring the area over the first week and half that we were in Tillamook together but then she caught a nasty cold which had her stuck in the house for pretty much the rest of her stay in town. She left to go back to SDSU for her last two semesters of school on August 30th, but before leaving we were able to go to the Air Musuem, the beach a few times, Munson Falls, and the county fair. We were way too active, then completely inactive.

I got sick with Lise's cold the last day she was here, and I'm just now really getting over it this week. Other than that, it's been a lot of work getting two different households set up for the short term. I'm trying to avoid unpacking everything, but I keep having to go back and forth between the house and storage looking for cables, cords, or adaptors. Lise was supposed to have an empty house to return to in San Diego, but we weren't able to get everything in the Uhaul, so she has been a trooper and has been moving around the last of the furniture, setting up stuff for Ebay, and getting ready to take stuff to a friends house for a yard sale.

On the work front, things are really good. It has been a challenge moving from a pure IT environment to a mixed IT/ Manufacturing environment. I really like what I'm doing though, and I've been able to jump in and make a difference already, so that's been really great. I'm involved with maintaining their Exchange Server, Antivirus applications, some network patching, some helpdesk work, and some light database work so far. I still haven't really gotten into the meat of my position yet which will be setting up EDI transactions between our company and other companies - but I hope to get some training on that soon. We're right in the middle of a large transition, so I'm trying to learn the new system from the get-go and so it has been hard since there are two systems sort of in play at this time.

A sad note: I can't get lots of free cheese. I do get a personal discount, and I think I can probably mail you some product using that discount. You, being those who were promised to have cows named after them, or others that I specifically mentioned I would be mailing things to them. I'm waiting one more pay check before doing that though - right now Lise hasn't found a roommate, so we're paying the full mortgage in San Diego plus my rent here, so the gift fund is a little low at this point.

Things are still in flux. I'm still not 100% sure that this is all going to work out for the best, but what I can tell you is that I am so much less stressed than I was working at the cable company. I really like the group of people that I am working with, and each time I meet a new person here - instead of dreading working with them, I'm excited. I'm sure some of this is my unbridled optimism ;) Still, it's good to enjoy going to work every day and feeling like you are learning and making a difference. Towards the end, I just felt like I was drowning - so I'm glad I was able to move on.

This post is far too long and I'll probably lose it in a freak lightning strike if I don't publish it now, so I'm just going to hit send. I'll fill in the obvious gaps later - email me if you have specific questions that I missed.

OK! Go.

I promise..

2005-08-23T12:01:00.000-07:00

I'll actually update this soon.

The short version is that we made it here OK, the cat seems to love the new apartment, and I like my job.

More to follow...

The End of an Era

2005-08-05T15:25:00.000-07:00

Dec. 22, 1997 - Aug. 5, 2005.

RIP My Cable Career.

News travels fast....

2005-07-15T23:44:00.000-07:00

I gave notice at work today. Yesterday, I accepted a new position with a new company. This involves moving to the Oregon Coast, selling my condo in San Diego, and pretty much completely starting over again in a new town with a new job.

Lise will be finishing out her schooling at SDSU, so it's going to be an interesting year. I'm sure we can get through this, and I know that our future is in Oregon with this new company.

I'm really excited, but there is so much to do. I know I should be spending more time updating you at a time like this, but this is exactly when I don't have any time to get to it.

Oof. I probably should help Lise pack at some point...

My last day at the cable company is August 5th.

More news in a week...

2005-07-04T19:40:00.000-07:00

Ok, so there is a lot to tell you, but not a lot that I can post at this time.

Let's just say that I should have a much better idea of where everything stands later this week. There are new pictures in the gallery, so if you have a password you can check under "Aaron and Lise's Pictures" for new pictures from the last couple of months. You'll get an idea when you look at where the pictures are from...

Cross your fingers for us.

Bienvenidos a Miami

2005-03-13T19:58:00.000-08:00

Jerm was here last week... we probably should have taken more pictures but the camera was left at home on more occasions than not.

You can, however, see some of the pictures from the Sonny Bono Refuge at the Salton Sea. That's about the only trip that we managed to bring the camera on.

Check out this guy:

Let me tell you, it was not fun passing him on a two lane road. He was going 25 mph in a 65 zone. The tines on that thing were 1.5 lanes wide.

Uneventful Weekend

2005-02-28T00:34:00.000-08:00

Not much going on here. This weekend was pretty standard.

Friday night was a poker tournament over at Mike's house. I did pretty badly :) I was the second person eliminated out of 10. I've never played in a tournament before, and I can't say that I really enjoyed it.

Saturday was laundry day. We cleaned up the entire house as well - so there was much complaining and soreness Sunday. Luckily, we only had to watch a hockey game. San Diego was victorious over the Idaho Steelheads. It was a pretty good game.

Even More Rain

2005-02-22T23:14:00.000-08:00

I've added some pictures... last night Lise and I walked down to the river. The flash wasn't very effective, sorry to say. I was going to get up on the steps of the trolley but there was a sleepy bum up there. We left him alone.

The Gallery is here.

OK. Off to sleep.

More Rain

2005-02-21T23:22:00.000-08:00

Well, the river was flooded again today. This is the fifth or sixth time this year that they have shut down the road that Lise's bus travels on. When the river is flooding we go from 4 ways to get to our house down to two - and one of those has the added bonus of having a steep slope that is prone to having rock slides when it rains.

Fun.

I'm going to send the camera with Lise tomorrow - hopefully we can get a few daylight shots of the flooded river. None of the nighttime shots we've taken have really come out. I'm tempted to walk down now and try again though - sounds like it is starting up again.

Lake Hodges is at 100% and about to start spilling over the dam. This wouldn't be as impressive if it hadn't been at 15% three months ago. The lake apparently holds 12,000,000,000 gallons of water - that's twelve billion. I can't find a site with that exact figure now - maybe it was millions. Here's a link to the story on our NBC affiliate. NBC 7/39.

Our DVD collection

2005-02-17T22:19:00.000-08:00

Well, I finally entered all of the UPC codes of our DVD collection into a program that tracks them... a nice side effect of this is that we have an online link to all of our movies.

Click here to view our DVD Collection.

For some reason it defaults to showing the most recently added first, which is great except that I ordered them alpahbetically, so it starts with Young Sherlock Holmes. If you click the "All" button it will show the entire collection in alphabetical order.

Neat! This is current as of right now, and I'm actually keeping it farily up to date. If I can figure out how to do the wishlist I will add some stuff there.

Also, while I'm here, if you so desire - our Amazon wishlist is located here: Amazon Wishlist. Lise put the note "Lise" in the comments field for items that she wants. We're not asking anyone to buy us these things, but if you wanted to that would be great! We probably don't already own the items on our wishlist :)

Anza Borrego Trip

2005-02-05T19:38:00.000-08:00

We drove for about two hours today to go see the wildflowers at the Anza Borrego state park. Now, it was pretty nice - but the guys running the parks website misled us a little.

It was worth the trip, but I was hoping to see more. Here's a sample of what we saw:

For more, check out the public portion of our gallery