What [lack of] luck!

When my mom was with me waiting for Costco to open their doors among a hoard of other people, she brought up the idea of postponing our northeast adventure for next year because of a "bad feeling" she's been having about the trip. If this was coming from any other person, I would scoff at her and roll my eyes. But... my mom has had several experiences in her life that solidified her belief in the existence of God and that these bad feelings she gets is a warning from Him about some impending doom if she does not stray from her current course. So, here we are, thinking about cancelling everything over a whim. I'm more concerned about finding a way to reuse funds for Jet Blue, of all airlines.

Anyway, we're on schedule to replace the dry rotted exterior window trim around the house, starting with the most grievous one. Though, once it was removed, we noticed the wood within the walls was rotted, too, including some structural supports.

The window didn't seem to be the source of the leak, however, and so it was then that a hole in the roof was found where the rain gutters were improperly installed and was essentially pouring all the rainwater into the hole in between the walls.

Now we're trying to think about how to make this claim on the house or sue previous homeowners for negligence and incompetence. It's no fun having a lot of drama in your life.

Lake Tahoe

Lake Tahoe (Jan 2015)

My childhood memories are often represented by camping trips to Tahoe with my mom and brother, but like many children, I focused on doing rather than seeing things. I had no idea where I was when we were hiking or swimming or biking, but as an adult amateur photographer, scenery has become significantly more important to me now than it was back then. This year, I took advantage of South Tahoe's Restaurant Week, a friend's cabin to stay in for free, and my mom's extensive knowledge of the area in order to spend a few days driving around and taking pictures of beautiful places.

If you want to introduce yourself to Lake Tahoe in all the right ways, make your way from the south on Hwy 50/89 towards South Tahoe. The drive is stunning and precariously cliffy, with distant views of the lake and surrounding mountains from high above.

Fallen Leaf Lake

Most of my childhood memories involved camping during the summer at Fallen Leaf Lake camp site, watching (from inside the tent, in the sleeping bag, in pajamas) my mom cooking breakfast at the fire pit, sunbathing and picnicking on the pebble beach after mountain biking up dirt hills, and my mom precariously passing a car on the cliff side of a single-lane service road towards a hiking trail to one of my favorite waterfalls. You could imagine how excited I was to hear that the service road down to the lake was open from the lack of snowfall. I only wish the trees would smell the same in the winter as they do in the summertime (they smell like a happy childhood). 

Unfortunately, the service road was too icy in the shade for us to attempt to make our way towards the waterfall, but it isn't likely that it would be terribly exciting anyway after a season of drought. I'm going to try to make a point of visiting again this summer, perhaps making use of the ol' camp site.

Hwy 89 & Emerald Bay

Feel free to stop at turnouts along the highway to take pictures of the views or of the rocky cliff sides above. Over around Emerald Bay are two vista points to view a small island called Fannette Island in the middle of the bay with a little viking castle perched on top called Vikingsholm. It's just adorable, and according to my mom, in the summertime it's a great place to kayak.

Hwy 28 & Crystal Bay

There's a lot of small towns through this route along the shoreline that showcases lots of docks, boat launches, water buoys, and the California/Nevada state line. I recommend stopping in Incline Village and making your way down to the shore of Crystal Bay for some wicked shots of Lake Tahoe and Stateline Point to the west. 

Along the east shore, there's a public parking area to walk down to the boulders where I managed to get some pretty awesome sunset shots on the lake. 

Hope Valley

Off of Hwy 88 South of Tahoe is a road called Blue Lakes Rd that hosts this beautiful valley and creek.

Monitor Pass

Lucky for us, Monitor Pass on Hwy 89 was open during the winter, thanks again to the bittersweet lack of snow California has been having. Take lots of stops along the way to enjoy the mountains, but be sure to make your way over the peak to view the distant horizon of Nevada from the top. My pictures of this didn't really translate the beauty of it in person. 

Kingsbury Grade

After visiting Monitor Pass, we turned back to Hwy 88 to Nevada in order to come in from the east onto Kingsbury Grade on Hwy 207. There are some good turnouts to stop at on the way up for some more Nevada horizon views. 

Meanwhile, going up over the top to the west, the trees often blocked potentially good views of the lake. Boo! It wasn't all bad, though. This road happened to be home to one of the restaurants I ate at for Restaurant Week: Chart House. Their food was delicious. I ate off of their pre fixe menu: caesar salad appetizer, flat iron steak entree, and mud pie dessert, while my mom tried the mango salsa chicken entree and crème brûlée dessert. 

Downtown South Tahoe

It was weird realizing that South Tahoe is both part of California and Nevada. We ate at Ciera Steakhouse within the Montbleu Resort in the Nevada side of downtown where the casinos flourished. The pre fixe meal was so delicious and the service was exquisite! It just felt a little awkward with my mom because the atmosphere was more romantic than anything. I had my first ever (real) french onion soup (my mom's was not real, haha) appetizer, mango/papaya salmon entree, and lava cake dessert with surprise chocolate covered strawberries to finish, while my mom enjoyed a salad appetizer, filet mignon entree, and pina colada cheesecake dessert. 

 

 

On our last day in Tahoe, we had lunch at Artemis Mediterranean Grill because for the last few weeks I've been itching for some gyros. They packed in so much meat in my pita, I had to bring my delicious spiced fries home with their dipping sauce.

As we were heading home west on Hwy 50, it was starting to sprinkle lightly and my car Milo got pretty dirty, but I managed to take a pretty cool picture of the mountains on the go. 

See you again soon, old friend!

There's a pond in my closet.

I wrote this awesome post about my little trip up to Lake Tahoe, but I still haven't put pictures on it so it's still saved as a draft. Booo!

This past weekend I had suffered my first woe as a homeowner. The water heater burst, but I didn't really find out until I walked into my closet and suddenly my socks were wet. So then there were lots of phone calls and dealings with insurance and home warranties and plumbers and heatvac people and water damage restoration teams. People have been in and out all week. I was sleeping on the couch while hot air was being circulated noisily in my room and taking sponge baths at the sink with water I boiled myself, like the old days. As of now, the floor has been dried and I'm back in my room, but our water heater is supposedly so special that they had to order it from the east coast.

But hey, I'm just excited that it's finally the weekend, that I just got my tax refund, and that I can finally shop for new work clothes. I haven't allowed myself to ever since last summer. Just can't wait anymore! I need the things!

Where is the snow?

Well, if you haven't been able to tell from my instagram feed above, the trip to Tahoe was photographically successful! Hooray! I was so pleased with how everything worked out weather-wise and timing-wise in each location. I'm just used to seeing more snow there in the winter; there was hardly any due to the drought this past year, I would assume. Booooo.

But wait, there's more!

My mom finally got to check off three of the major stressers off of her to-do list. 1.) Divorce! Sounds terrible, but it's really not! This process has been going on for 2.5 years and it's finally over and the relief is visible. 2.) Our old home on sale has gotten an offer (two, actually!) the same week we put it back on the market after our fixing it up some more. We did good, sirs, yes, we did. 3.) Ben is moving in tomorrow, and we finally figured out the logistics. Phew. I was wondering how we were going to pull it off.

On the drive back from Tahoe, there were many discussions about what to do for my birthday in two weeks. Originally we wanted to go to San Francisco to one of the restaurants participating in Restaurant Week, but we would want to do something else in SF besides just eating dinner, BUT that means we either couldn't bring my brother along to do something funziez OR not do anything funziez at all. He can't walk around anywhere, really. It's very restrictive and makes us sad about doing fun things when he can't join us. Anyway, the other option we were discussing was a flight down to San Diego for the weekend, but that also seemed silly. I don't know what we'll do.

Not New Years Resolutions

Feeling a bit listy today, I do, so too bad if lists offend you.

Happening things:

1. Fell asleep early on New Year's Eve, again. I don't believe I've ever been to a New Year's Eve party. Do I want to go to one? I don't know. I have this weird personality where I both do and don't want to do things with people, and I'm constantly conflicted like this 24/7.

2. For this week's $6 Tuesday special at the movie theaters, I went to see The Imitation Game. This man's life was so brilliant and tragic, there was heartbreak on both sides of the screen. I'm a sucker for films involving genius and misunderstood people, as well as romantic tragedies, and it had ALL THE THINGS. As a consequence, I've added it to my numerous list of favorite films.

3. My brother is moving in with me and my mom in less than two weeks! He will be taking up what was going to be a guest bedroom. There would have been another bedroom upstairs in my mom's space, but she converted it into a dressing room (it no longer has a door). So, poof! No more guests allowed. (Just kidding.)

4. I've finished the preliminary work on my research project, but I'm waiting on a physicist to help me with the second portion of my research. I just don't know how to do the thing, help me do the thing! Hopefully, he musters up the effort before the deadline in March to submit my poster abstract to the annual meeting I'll be attending in Orlando this summer. And yes, I will undoubtedly take the time to visit The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Duh.

5. Thanks to the numerous vacation days I have on standby, I decided to take some time off next week. I've been meaning to go to lots of picturesque places for my shutter happy finger to be satisfied, and with South Lake Tahoe featuring its Restaurant Week during that time, I figured hey, that sounds like a good time. Let's do that. Expect snowy mountain photos!

6. Speaking of picturesque places, I really, really want to go to other US states, Iceland, Canada, Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Austria, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Italy, and Japan. I want to buy a compact professional grade camera that's easy to travel with but takes great panoramic and wide angle shots.

7. At the same time, I'm conflicted about spending money on travel versus the house. I intend to make a lot of changes to my new home, and it will take years for sure. But I'm really excited about living in a space I've made for myself, and I already drew out a new floor plan for my master suite (not that anything will happen to it for a long, long while).

8. My mom and I have been neglecting exercise a lot recently, so we've taken it upon our selves to share in the expense of buying our own elliptical. Hopefully, by placing it within view of the television, I might be able to convince myself to exercise more often. I could say to myself, Abriel, look how easy it would be to just step over there while you're watching your show.

9. My ideal form of exercise would be to swim laps, though. I've had trouble finding an affordable gym with a pool, but at the same time, I've never really been good about keeping up with going to the gym at all. The best thing to do would just be for me to build my own lap pool in the backyard. Muy expensivo! This definitely won't happen for ages, if it ever does happen.

10. I don't have anything else to say, except that it felt weird to me to end my list at 9 items. Happy new year!

London

July 2014

I was apparently becoming a traitorous American on my way to London from Paris, as my stay overlapped Independence Day. Woops. But as soon as we got off at Charing Cross station and made our way towards the Underground, we were relieved to hear English speakers again, as well as find out just how cheery and helpful Londoners seem to be. A complete stranger noticed us looking puzzled at the Underground map and offered to guide us to the correct platform. He happened to be going the same way until he exited an earlier stop, but had us join him and offered to help us with our bags up the stairs (we said no). There were multiple instances in London where locals would elect to offer us help without any provocation to do so. Only ONE crabby person happened upon us on our entire 1 week stay: an Underground employee at the exit gates who decided to vehemently ignore us when we needed help passing through the gates with dysfunctional tickets.

 

After dropping our luggage off at the hotel (worth the number of stars it boasted, as opposed to the Paris hotel we stayed in), we sat around being lazy until it was time to visit Her Majesty's Theater for the long standing production of The Phantom of the Opera. I've seen the Broadway version before in the U.S. (and blubbered like a baby at the end) but it only seemed fitting to see it again in London. I'm proud to say that this time around, I wasn't sobbing hysterically, but merely tearing up a bit. The Phantom's voice was beaaauuuuutiful, but I didn't care for their Christine.

 

We wanted to save as much money as we could for food, so a lot of the times we picked up something small from places like Pret A Manger or Starbucks (they had Mocha Coconut Frappuccinos there, I was so excited because I haven't seen them in California for a couple years). Otherwise, we did visit some local restaurants to chow down on some bolognese (only kind of meh), pizza (I don't know why it was so good, but it was one of the best pizzas I've ever had), or barbecue ribs with rosemary fries (delicioso). At Wildwood, my mom was let down that a creme brulee cheesecake she was dying to get her hands on was out of stock, so the restaurant deducted the cost of my sundae as well as prepared us free limoncello shots.

 

One of the first places we visited in London was the Cutty Sark, a trading clipper that was used primarily for importing tea from India, as well as the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. The observatory houses a large, stationary telescope whose exact location was used designate the Prime Meridian. And yeah, I stood on that line, straddling the two halves of the world!

  

The oldest place we visited was the Tower of London, built and expanded upon in the 11th-14th centuries. There were so many interesting, old artifacts, including armor worn by past kings. VERY cool. Also within the Tower of London are the royal jewels, though I didn't bother peeking my head in there. There were some royal guards hanging about, and one in particular was there just for posing with. He didn't mind talking either. I was trying to get a photo with him for over three minutes when families would jump in before me over and over again and finally he helped defend me: when someone else said they've been waiting a long time, he pointed to me, "She has, too."

On a particularly overcast/showery day we had scheduled a ride on the London Eye that was meant to coincide with the arrival of the Tour de France cyclists on the other side of the River Thames (England is apparently part of France, now). For some reason, I had expected us to have great views and I could take epic photos with my zoom lens, but lo and behold, the capsules we were in were oval and distorted the images, and the street below where the cyclists would pass were tree-lined and therefore invisible to us. Luckily, the cyclists were late, or we were too early. We made our way on top of on of the bridges passing over the street they'd ride down and wouldn't move despite "police" asking us to (there was a large crowd congregating with the same idea we had). Getting there early enough granted us front row passes and a victorious photo shoot for a once in a lifetime experience.

 

I really enjoyed walking through St James Park, which held a pond full of wildlife including a huge array of birds like heron's and the Queen's swans. Yes, the swans are the Queen's swans. It is apparently considered treason to kill one. There were so many museums nearby, I didn't quite go to all of them, but there was so much history in the National Gallery and the Queen's Gallery that we were kind of "art"-ed out for the rest of the week.

 

Before our trip, we pre-booked a bicycle tour to Windsor Castle (essentially one of the homes of the Queen of England and her guests), about a 40 minute Overground ride west of London. We rode on some dirt and gravel roads for eight miles, passing Eton College (an elite, prestigious university for men that requires a qualifying examination at age 12 to be considered for admission), the home of Elton John on the other side of the river, a property that is often used in high budget film making, as well as one of the oldest churches in England.

We propped our bikes up in the town of Eton and passed a bridge over the Thames into Windsor where we stopped for lunch before touring the visitors section of Windsor Castle. It was truly immaculate: the grounds, the decor, the chapel, the art and artifacts, including love letters between Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. I've noticed English royalty have much more refined tastes than the gaudy French royals. After our tour, we revisited our lunch destination for their famous hot chocolate. They melt chocolate pieces in milk, and have so many different varieties of flavors that I could probably feel just fine about living there indefinitely: Windsor Chocolate Theatre Cafe. Go there now.

Another pre-booked day was dedicated to the expansive journey via train to Leavesden Warner Brothers Studios where they filmed Harry Potter and showcase many of the props, sets, and costumes used in filming. I'm pretty sure I fangirled the most in two situations: staring at the box of horcruxes, and standing on the Harry Potter bridge. I also kind of felt like a huge dork, because there were mostly kids present, as opposed to grown ass adults like me. I had to repeat to myself, "It's okay. I belong here. I am the real Harry Potter generation."

London was a blast, and definitely one of my favorite cities to travel in. It seems distinctly designed for tourism: excellent public transportation (everybody uses it, including affluent folk and celebrities), street maps everywhere that include landmarks and walking distance/time, very friendly and helpful people, and rich culture and history. I intend to visit again at some point, because I didn't see everything, and I would want to do more day trips out of the city to small, picturesque villages.