Alyssa and Andrew

I like to think of myself as someone who’s traveled quite a bit. However, I just discovered this TravBuddy map which asks you to input every country you’ve visited, then generates a travel map showing where you’ve been. You can see mine here.

Needless to say, I was disappointed by the result. Less than 15% of the globe? No South Africa, no Oceania, and no Asia? I must try harder.

The Bowen family was down visiting for Thanksgiving, and we decided to take some Sadie photos with her new striped outfit.

You can see the whole set here.

Tuesday, Alyssa (for the first time) and I (for the third), exercised our democratic obligations. Only because we couldn’t be inconvenienced to actually spend an hour waiting in line at the polls, we just dropped off our absentee ballots and stole some “I voted” stickers.

There weren’t any close races we got to vote on for the national election, but there were a couple competing local initiatives about development in the hills. Both billed themselves as being about saving the hills. One, “U” was written by developers and endorsed by the city council. Another, “V”, was written homeowners who wanted the development proposed under “U” to go in somewhere other than their backyards. The problem is that both were far too broad. They covered all sorts of things, and while both had parts that I would have supported, in the end, we decided not to support either.

Yesterday I found out that “V” won, even though in my opinion it was the more poorly written bill. However, I’m guessing that it had an air of authenticity simply because it was written by a “grassroots coalition” instead of those untrustworthy developers. We’ll see if anything comes of it.

Last night Bugaboo’s (Sadie if you must) parents thought that we should shoot her Anne Geddes style. So we did.

Bugaboo didn’t really approve, but we were able to catch her in a few moments of disguised unhappiness.

You can see the whole set here. You can see all of Bugaboo’s Pictures here.

Bugaboo in her gratest moment to date, originally uploaded by lenordbater.

There is one more bowen in the world today than there was yesterday. Because she hasn’t yet been named, we’ve decided to call her Bugaboo. We think it’ll stick.

She was born very quickly, at around 10:00 this evening. While I wasn’t viewing the process, I was listening, and everything sounded dissapointingly painless.

She is already quite cute, and you can see more of her here.

We are cultured people. As evidence of this, we spent Saturday afternoon at the La Brea Tar Pits, viewing fossils. We also drove through many exciting ethnic neighborhoods of downtown Los Angeles on the way to the Tar Pits. Both were very educational experiences.

You can see all our photos of the event at Flickr.

The tar pits are areas of, well, tar. Bubbleing with methane. About 11,000 or so years ago, quite a number of saber-tooth-cats, mammoths, and gigantic ground sloths got stuck in the tar. Now the tar has become stuck in downtown Los Angeles. A vicous cycle as you can see. We were able to become stuck in neither the tar, nor the city. Thankfully.

Really the most exciting part of our visit was riding the statue’esque animals that live in the park sourrounding the Tar Pit’s. Alyssa chose a standing sloth, I chose a meandering one.

Also, in another very exciting development, last weekend my mother visited us. Not only that, but she bought us a keg. Of rootbeer. I didn’t know it came in kegs, but was quite glad to discover it did.

We would have had 80 quarts but…,

On Sunday, we decided to buckle down and turn all the apples we had acquired last week into applesauce. We turned Joe and Jana’s into an applesauce’atorium and began the process at 8:00 in the morning. We cooked the apples in the kitchen, then took them outside on the driveway to process them through Scott and Andrea’s amazing-applesauce-machine. When we realized we had 20 quarts by 9:30, we decided it was time for a break.

After some delicious pasteries, we continued, and were joined by cousin Scott. Jeremy and Mandy came over near the end and got stuck cleaning. When all was said and done, we had seventy quarts of applesauce and enough apple-butter for about 10 jars. Quite a productive day alltogether.

You can see the entire photoset at Flickr.

When I got Alyssa the turtles for Valentines day, they were the size of quarters.  Now they have grown considerably.  Also they have begun to bite.  Hardly friendly little turtles.

This weekend was the Medical School retreat at Pine Springs Ranch. We were going to go up Friday night and stay with our good also-newly-married friends Heidi and Greg Eiseman, but some unforseen events caused us to not go up until Saturday morning. We drove up out of the depressing inland empire to the San Jacinto Mountains and the little town of Idyllwild. We found quite a good breakfast at a place called the Bread Basket. Alyssa had an omlette with avacados and bean-sprouts, I had whole-wheat apple pancakes.

After Breakfast, we went out to Pine Springs ranch for church, then came back to Idyllwild after lunch when everyone else was hiking. We took a nap on some boulders, and I tried out my new climbing shoes (free from where I work at fiveten). We walked down the main street of Idyllwild until we found a candy shop with nearly everything you could imagine dipped in chacolate. Also Caramel.

Really it was quite a satisfying day.

This is my first time blogging. I guess I am finally blogging because I married a master mind blogger. Yes, Andrew. Isn’t that right dear?