Secret Fears

"I have to say that zebra's situation is a little too close for comfort. That's why sometimes it's scary to sit on the toilet."

Because It's Christmas

That means Christmas DECORATIONS!!! I am sure you would like to see how my room is all decked out for the holidays:


Thank you Tasha and Amy for my new pillow case and the sweet dreams!

Who is asking who here? I'm just say'n...

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Stay Classy San Diego

I went to Christmas on the Prado on Saturday (AKA December Nights at Balboa Park). Although traffic was terrible, I don't wish to dwell on that, but only to inform you that we walked from afar across the main street to get to Balboa park.
Good times were had by all. We saw lights and heard music and people-watched. We saw a guy with an eye patch and a girl with Cruella Devile hair - except hers was half blue instead of black. And what says Christmas more than wandering a museum looking at fossils while the "Tubafours" played some seasonal tunes?
When we where leaving we headed back to the parking lot but had to stop at the main street light. Traffic cops were there to tell us what to do. When the lights turned for us to walk, the traffic cop yelled "You can cross any direction. Even diagonally. Like New York." Woo hoo hoo.

I thought San Diego was already a classy city, but we are way past classy now.

Being a Millionaire Starts with an Idea

I had been munching on Golden Grahms and so when I went to the bank, I was happy to see the bowl of mints at the window. I took one and then went into a coughing fit, turning red as I choked on the stupid thing. The bank teller kindly left her post to go into the back room to get me a drink of water. As embarrassing as it was, I left thinking what a brilliant scheme that could have worked out to be to rob the bank. The teller left her station open for a good half a minute...Of course I haven't thought into it enough to figure out what to do about the video cameras and the other teller or the security guard with a gun at the door.

Brilliant.

Pavlov's Favorite Season

I wonder if the sound of crunching leaves can cause one to salivate. With autumn comes some of the best food of the year!

Cold Stone Creamery has a new Pumpkin Cheesecake ice cream...a mix of sweet, spicy pumpkin and cheesecake!

Sonic has a new Holiday Spiced Sugar Cookie Blast made with spiced caramel-flavored real ice cream, sweet sugar cookie pieces and whipped topping.Baskin Robbins has light gingerbread and vanilla ice cream with a touch of vanilla and cinnamon caramel ribbons. Aaahhh. My mouth is watering. Wait a minute...What is the difference between one's mouth watering and drooling? Is it when the saliva flows outside of the mouth? Then maybe I am drooling!

And Bringing Up the Rear - Greece & Croatia

The latter end of the trip - Greece & Croatia...and a little bit about the boat.

Greece was disappointing. We were in Athens for part of a day and due to strikes, we did not get to go up to the Acropolis. We did climb Mars Hill and had a sermon from Acts 17 - Paul's sermon about the Unknown God. It was awesome. (Pictured is Roy Christensen)
Cassie & Michelle liked Greek food best out of any meal we had had in Egypt or Israel. I enjoyed the falafaels in Israel myself. Any who, we did see the Olympic stadium and enjoyed saying "And there you go" after everything our guide said.

Croatia was a Gorgeous country!!! Wow! It was raining while we walked around the city of Split. We had enough free time to eat a doughnut from one of their bakeries. Heaven!!! So delicious! And a huge thanks to Michael Ballam for buying.


We saw some craaaazy looking fish there in Croatia. This was at the fish market. Note its many layers of teeth. The fish seller woman picked it up by its eyes.We also ate some craaaaazy stuff. We had octopus salad which had a great flavor. (This is me and Larry, the Cruise Lady's husband.) We also ate sardines and tuna at a little mill turned restaurant in Croatia (and fed the cats). It is a place I could retire - buy some land and a couple of goats and be set.


Some of the best parts of the trip were being on the Vision of the Seas cruise ship out in the Mediterranean Sea.

We enjoyed the sun and the food and our waiters (Carlos and Dennis and the cold soups and the chocolate milk!). We also loved our Cruise Lady cruise group of 66 members more than we imagined! Larry and Diane Larson were the cruise guides and we were assigned at their dinner table along with Michael Ballam, his wife Laurie, and their son Ben. It was so fun getting to know them. We ate dinner with them every night possible and tried to soak it all in.

Indeed a vacation of a lifetime.

Second Things Second - Israel

Israel was pretty awesome!

We ported in Ashdod and then took a bus into Jerusalem the first day. The second day we ported in Haifa and bused in. In general, the whole city has been built upon. If it was a sacred site, there is now a gaudy church on it or two. According to Michael Ballam, if the Sea of Galilee was any smaller there would be a church on top of it too.

At the Wailing Wall, the men are separated from the women by a shorter wall, but the women stand on chairs and look over the wall. I peered over too. You also always back away from the
wall (and fire).
The Via Dolorosa is where Jesus carried his cross through the streets. It is a very small street and has the essence of nothing more than a marketplace nowadays - with vendors and money changers.
The Garden of Gethsemane is just outside the city wall. It now has gates around the olive trees and picking the trees is looked down upon. Luckily the trees were being pruned while we where there and and the workers were kind enough to give us branches. The church at Gethsemane is extremely dark, like the cave that would have existed there at the time of Christ.
The Dome of the Rock. We didn't get to go in to see it, but this is the view of it from the Garden of Gethsemane. This is where Abraham was to have sacrificed Isaac.
The Garden Tomb is run by volunteers. It is beautiful and peaceful as far as tourist sites go. We did have an opportunity to look in the tomb and rejoice that He is not there. (This is the sign on the inside of the door of the tomb.)I was surprised to find out that Golgatha, where the crucifixion took place, was just yards away from the tomb site. There is now a parking lot over the base of the hill of Golgatha. (Golgatha means skull and you can just make out the eye sockets on the hill now.)

The River Jordan was turquoise in color. We were in a very calm section, not where Jesus would have been baptised, but it was beautiful and I did dip my hand in! (I swear that hand looks like it hasn't aged a day since.)

We went to Capernaum where Peter's house is said to be. There is a church/structure built on top of it with a glass floor so you can see down to the ruins. It has a beautiful view of the Sea of Galilee.
I liked the Mount of Beatitudes. It is in a beautiful area with plants akin to those found in California (palm trees and impatients, bouganvilla, oleanders, etc.) with manicured gardens and a church on it with a bunch of Pope stuff inside.
Sailing the Sea of Galilee was totally awesome!!! It was calm and beautiful and our boat workers tossed in some fishing nets similar to what the disciples would have done.
I didn't have to go across the world to know that Jesus lives. He atoned for my sins and died and was resurrected. But seeing where He lived and taught and walked was an incredible experience. I would definitely go back.

First Things First - Egypt

I just got back from cruising to the Holy Lands.

My friends Michelle and Cassie and I booked a trip with the Cruise Lady (LDS tour group - I recommend it!). We started in Italy (Venice), then hit up Egypt (Alexandria and Cairo), Israel (Jerusalem, Capernum, Galilee via Haifa & Ashdod), then on to Greece (Athens), Croatia (Split) and then back again to Venice.

We named our trip the "PCS Tour" - for Pyramids, Camels, and Michael Ballam.

For those of you who don't know, Michael is a singer/actor/professor of music. He sang (mostly opera) to us on many occasions on the ship as well as the excursions.

While we were in Egypt I had the song "You Belong to Me" in my head all week (See below for lyrics) and so when our entire tour group was shoved on one bus and we were driving along the Nile and Michael asked for requests for him to sing, I excitedly shouted "You Belong to Me"! Michael turned to me and responded that it was not in his repertoire and he didn't know it. I replied, "It's about the Nile!" He then said into the microphone on the bus, "Jenny would now like to sing you a song."


I didn't want to get egged or tossed out, so I let Michael go ahead and sing some operatic number for the bus of people instead.

Egypt was dirty. The Desert was a giant ash tray.
Riding camels was an amazing thrill - they are super tall and getting up and down was incredible!
The pyramids are HUGE! We didn't get to climb them, but we did go inside of one. It was dark and moist and hot.You can see the pyramids from the city of Cairo - this was us eating lunch in a restaurant and the pyramids sitting right outside. AMAZING!
We had two bus loads of people and each bus had a body guard assigned to it - ours stayed ridiculously close to us. This is our security guard and Cassie and I at the sphinx.

The Sphinx's nose has fallen off. The Nile is dirty. There is plush land along it, but it becomes desert again before your eyes. You can see the pyramids from the Nile! We even sailed on it in one of these thing-a-ma-jigs (flooka?).

The Lyrics to the song that was stuck in my head for a week:

See the pyramids along the Nile
Watch the sunrise from a tropic isle
Just remember darling all the while
You belong to me

See the market place in old Algiers
Send me photographs and souvenirs
Just remember when a dream appears
You belong to me
I'd be so alone without you
Maybe you'd be lonesome too in blue

Triple Threat

Sometimes you just need an afternoon of listening to Christmas music, watching Remington Steele and eating fresh butternut squash soup.

It doesn't even matter if it is only September and it was 91 degrees outside when you were driving home from church. Really it doesn't.

Joe in a Cup

Java. The cheery bean. Coffee. Don't know much about the stuff besides the commercial jingles.

The other day my boss apologized and then sent me to go get coffee. He had 5 hours of meetings ahead of him. He handed me a list of sorts with gibberish coffee lingo on it. I said, "I'm sorry, I don't know anything about coffee. Is this one drink or several drinks?" (I wasn't sure if I was picking up coffee for the whole office.) He replied, "I'm such a girl." and then underlined the items on the list:

Coffee Au Lait(?)
Half Calf
Half Decaf
Lowfat milk
1 raw brown sugar packet

Still not understanding if I had 5 simple coffees listed or just one loaded cup, I took the list and left. When I arrived at the coffee shop, I handed it to the guy and said, "I hope you know what this means."
He decided it was one cup.

Let's just say no one gave me dagger eyes for not bringing them a coffee, I didn't see the boss spit it out when I brought it back to him and I even got a thank you note scribbled on my desk.

First ever coffee run down. I hope it is my last.

As Prepared As a Boyscout

You have heard that saying, if you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail, well my folks won't fail. They are prepared. I just went home to visit them last weekend. They are so prepared that one of their clocks is already set for the time change in the fall.

pa-dum-ching!

Paperboy

The Nintendo Game.
It is what I play every time I drive around the condo complex where I live.
Garage doors opening, some with cars backing out, dogs running out, kids in the street, mean old ladies staring out their windows and yelling at you, kids on skateboards, dudes with leaf blowers and lawn mowers, runners and garbage trucks.
I haven't seen any tires rolling into the street or break-dancers on the sidewalks that I have to swerve around. There is always tomorrow though!

Somes Times You Wanna Go...

For the past year, my roommate and I have been going to a sushi place across the street from our apartment. It is our own little "Cheers" - where we come and they know us and what we want to eat before we even sit down. You could probably film a short stinted tv show there - one that comes on mid-season but is not picked up the next season because it is quirky but just too pleasant for the tv audience these days. Let me explain:

1) We fell in love with a sushi roll called the "July Roll". We went back in August hoping to be able to order the "July" roll and they informed us that the name changes monthly, but the roll is the same.
2) We have had the same waiter nearly every time we go. We chat to him about our lives and work, yet we have no idea what his name is.
3) One of our favorite sushi makers there is Mexican.
4) The Manager is an Asian man named John Pierre. He bid us a good evening in French, "Bonsoir", as we were leaving last week. I can barely understand his English let alone his French.
5) They have cd's hanging on strings from the doorways (rumored that the reflection keeps the flies away).
6) They pick ivy from the parking lot and put it in old bottles/jars for table decoration.

Basically we always have excellent sushi and a darn good laugh every time we go. Cheers to you Sushi Place*!

(*Yakimono in La Jolla/UTC area- by the Vons)

Happy Joo-ly!

July 7th = Day # 7 of wearing Red, White & Blue. I am doing it for you, America!

No one has really noticed. I wear mostly white and blue with a red piece of flare (earrings or shoes).

Maybe my next wardrobe experiment will be a week of velcro outfits. I like the sound of that!