Happy New Year – again!

Wow, it seems like I just had a New Year post! It’s been a crazy year and 2010 should be just as crazy.

Let’s see… We got married – yay!
We had some friends come and visit us from Maine. Yay!
I lost my job. Boo!
Patrick’s company launched a game on Facebook. Yay!
We made new friends here in San Diego. Yay!
Some of them moved. Boo!
Now we have a reason to go to SF. Yay!
Tess is still keeping us very entertained. Yay!
I started taking some photos with my Holga camera. Yay!
That’s a film camera and my scanner isn’t working so I can’t share. Boo!
We discovered new wine stores. Yay!
Patrick started to run. Yay!
He also started to workout regularly. Yay!
I’m working out too, but it all comes much slower for me. Boo!
I’m doing stuff with my sorority alumnae group. Yay!

So the Yays! outnumber the Boos! – so I think that means the year was overall successful. Let’s home 2010 brings more blogging!

She's 8 years old and plays like she's 8 weeks old!

Happy 2010! I can still manage to take an unflattering picture of myself!

More wedding pictures

Here are some pictures that Patrick made into a digital scrapbook.  If you have the sound on, you can hear the music we were supposed to walk out to, but had technical difficulties on the day of.

http://mpa.naremiki.com/vwed/pictures/

Watching the wedding

Our friends Craig, Mike and Karrie watched the wedding and taped themselves watching the wedding.

Marriage FTW!

I have him now!

We are back in California and recognized as spouses by the state of Nevada!

Getting married in Las Vegas was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made! First of all, the chapel does a lot of the work for you. The system is streamlined enough that getting the paperwork done is not as annoying as getting a library card. And you are already at your reception because you are in one of the funnest places on the planet.

And being a bride in Las Vegas elevates you to instant rock star status. When we walked into the Imperial Palace after the ceremony to go up to our room for the toast, about half of the full casino irrupted into a congratulatory cheer. A Gwen Stefani impersonator gave me a shout-out during her performance. A roulette player asked me to pick a number for him. I did, and he hit on that number. He tossed me $50 in chips.

Vegas Bride, Superstar.

More to come! I mean, I’ve just talked about me, I bet Patrick has a point of view as well.

Getting Married this weekend!

We are getting married in a few short days! We’d love for you to join us virtually on 9/6/09 at 9PM Pacific for our ceremony. The wedding feed will be streaming on our wedding page at Metaplace. Metaplace is the company that Patrick works for and he built the Wedding World for our ceremony. You will be asked to create an account the first time you log in, but it’s totally free and secure.

http://mpa.naremiki.com/vwed/

By the way, Patrick’s screen name is Tachevert and mine is Emide in case you want to add us as friends on there.

If you’d rather go right to the chapel’s website to view the stream, please visit http://www.702wedding.com and click on the “other cameras” tab. We are being married on the Terrace, so choose that camera’s feed.

Love you all!
Laurie

Happy New Year!

Let’s see if I can keep up with this for 2009!

We both stayed here for the holidays. It definitely felt different being in sunny, Southern California rather than snowy Maine, but we tried to make it as special as we could.

First of all, it’s been getting cooler here in the mornings and evenings. So much so, that I’ve actually taken to wearing my winter coat and scarf! And when I say cold, I know it isn’t NEARLY as cold as New England. My birth rights have probably been revoked, but after living in Atlanta and then here were it is usually 70 all the time, I’ve been getting cold!

People hear do decorate for Christmas, but not quite to the same level as Georgia and Maine. On Christmas Eve we went for a walk around the neighborhood looking at lights. But probably the most different think I’ve seen was palm trees decorated for the holidays. Here are some from one of the malls here.

The lighted palm trees are surprisingly festive!

We’ve also been getting more rain. We had 4 or 5 rainy days in December, which is enough to make places flood and to increase the pot holes in the streets. It’s also making the local plants come alive more. This photo is a spot near where we get on the highway. The trees were burnt in the fires in 2007, but as you can see the green stuff is growing around them.

It may not have been a white Christmas, but it was a little more green than brown.

We went out to a New Years party last night and I took this before we left. I hope everyone had a great NYE and New Years Day! I’m making it a resolution to post more in 2009!

Happy 2009! Pat's expression is entirely my fault. He tried to stick out his tongue to I had to make him stop before I took the shot.

Fall round-up: Red Sox, possums and beer

I’m *really* trying hard to get the blog updated and hopefully back on track. We had a fairly exciting Fall here in California. Yes, some leaves even changed color.

This was the view from our seats.

At the beginning of October we got to go to one of the Red Sox playoff games in Anaheim. It was my first MLB game so I was totally excited! We went with our friends Andy and Meg that we met here in California. They are from Boston, so they are good people. Since it was on a Friday, traffic to Orange County and beyond can be hellish, Andy suggested we take the Amtrak train to the stadium. Since I work in La Jolla, which is south of everyone else, I got on the train first and everyone else was going to meet up with me on the train a couple of stops up. This was a great plan. So great, in fact, too many other people came up with the same idea. I got on to a packed train. I found a place to sit finally in the café car. When we pulled up to the stop that everyone else was at, I saw them out the window… and I saw them get turned away. It seems they denied people who had already bought tickets online their seat, but were still selling seats to people who wanted to buy a ticket north of LA since it was more expensive.

Luckily, that didn’t stop them. They jumped in the car and beat the train to Irvine thanks to crazy Boston driving. The conductor let them on in Irvine, so we all got there on the same train. The game was so much fun and it was exciting until the very end! The Angel’s Rally Monkey was extremely cute, but got to be a little annoying. There’s just so much monkey jumping around on a jumbotron that you can see before it gets old. Rally Monkey didn’t save them, and the Sox won. The train back to San Diego was full of Boston fans who had a great time singing and talking crap. I definitely hope to see more games next year!

This possum found a car that wasn't moving for a change.

We also had a wildlife encounter at the condo! Pat went out one night to get ice cream and thought he saw a cat on the walkway. It wasn’t a cat, it was a possum. He hid under the car and decided he liked it there. He was nice enough to let us take photos, but he didn’t get out of the way for Pat to back out with the car. So they possum had a nice place to hang out that night and Pat didn’t get ice cream. I had never seen a live possum before, so it was pretty cool.

Stone Brewing IPA

On Halloween we had a small party at our place. We live in the same town as Stone Brewery so we thought it would be cool to get a keg for the party. Stone rented us a keg, but didn’t have any taps. We rented a tap from a grocery store and thought we were all set. Unfortunately, none of us actually knew how to tap a keg ourselves, and some internet research led us to the conclusion we had the wrong tap type. Eventually we got it right. Meanwhile, we had more trick or treaters than I’d ever had before, combined. We went through 6 bags of candy. There were some really cute kids and then a lot of kids that just came around with an empty plastic bag from a store and dressed in sweats. I decided to just give them candy because I didn’t want anyone messing with the car later or anything like that. Overall the party was fun. Most people wore costumes, and I’ve posted Pat’s pirate costume here. The parrot he got to sit on his shoulder didn’t really cooperate. My costume was super-lame. I went as a golfer. I didn’t even take a picture because it was so bad! Everyone liked the keg and we had a fun time talking and playing drinking games. We’re doing alright at making friends here in California… but that may have something to do with providing food and drink. Oh well, we aren’t above bribery!

Summer catch-up #3: Jason comes to visit.

Here's Jason and Pat in the green machine.

Right before I started my new job at LIAI, our good friend from Maine, Jason Fickett came out to see us. So, unfortunately Amanda will not be able to claim the first visitor distinction again. It was great to have someone else to explore San Diego with and it forced us to leave Escondido! We hit the Gaslamp District one night, and had great burgers in North Park at Crazy Burger. One the day Pat had to work, Jason and I went to the San Diego Wild Animal Park which is part of the San Diego Zoo, but is actually pretty close to where we live. We got to snap some pictures there.

The park incldues large stretches of area where the animals can roam. The Zoo uses the park for its breeding programs.

Here's Bella the Serval that we got to meet. The park has various Animal Encounters throughout the day. Some of them are planned and some aren't. We happened to be walking by when they were taking her for a walk.

There's also a tethered balloon you can ride in to see the bird's eye view of the park. (I didn't go on this as I'm a little afraid of heights.)

Here are some lions basking in the hot Escondido sunshine. I really didn't get that close, my camera just has a great zoom!

Summer catch-up #2: Pat goes to Comic-Con

A shot of the wait to get in to Comic-Con 08

Patrick got to go to Comic-Con this summer with people from his work. Comic-Con is held in the San Diego convention center and covers comic books (of course), movies, TV, games and most anything Sci-Fi, fantasy or cool. Since I didn’t get to go, I can’t really tell you all about it. But he posted about it on his OTHER blog, so I’ll just repost what he wrote there.

The convention center floor.

Patrick said:
Comic Con 08 was almost everything I’d been led to believe. Grown adults doing cosplay, a barrage of multimedia, and a squirming mass of people EVERYWHERE. It was fun but exhausting — 5 hours and I was completely fried. Read on for some impressions.

A panel of the cast of Stargate: Atlantis.

I managed to get into the tail end of a session on Stargate Worlds, and then stayed for Stargate Atlantis (OMGWTF, they started the season two weeks ago???). I don’t know who was funnier, Jewel Staite..

Q: What’s different about this show and other shows you’ve worked on?
A: This one didn’t get cancelled.

… or Robert Picardo…

“I think the aging, balding male hero demographic is underrepresented.”

After these sessions, I lurked around the exhibit hall, bought some souvenirs, and met a few people! I dropped by Penny Arcade and had a brief chat with them, wandered the hall looking for some gifts for friends, checked out some of the game demos (getting unexpectedly excited for the upcoming DC comics MMO in the process), and got a few introductions by virtue of running into Raph Koster and tailing him for a bit. (Sadly, now that I’ve met John Smedley, I find him quite likeable and retract some of my more hideous plans for NGE revenge.)

The Millenium Falcon!

The Doctor Who area

And if that wasn’t cool enough, I also got to meet Peter Mayhew — the mighty Chewbacca himself! Note the normal-sized people at the sides of this photo. (Costumed Chewbacca is, of course, some random attendee.)

Chewbacca is REALLY tall. By the way, he got his autograph for me.

Summer catch-up #1: Surf School!

I’ve been TERRIBLE at keeping this blog updated. We’ve had a fun summer and taken lots of pictures, but I haven’t posted ANYTHING. I’m going to change that.

Learning the ropes.

One of Pat’s coworkers is a surfer and got some of the other folks at the company interested in trying it out. So they all went to San Elijo State Park one Saturday in July to take a lesson from some pros. I was the official photographer.

The beach is beautiful and I had a great time watching and playing in the surf. It is so awesome to be near the water again. Atlanta had the Chattahoochee and some nice lakes, but nothing beats the giant salt ponds. Pat says surfing is very fun, but hard. He was pretty sore after all the fun in the Pacific!

The MetaPlace surfing crew

Getting ready to hit the waves.

I was told standing up on a moving surfboard is rather difficult.

It does look like fun...