Catching Up

Yes, another catch up post. Funny how I can never stay current, and always end up having to post in retrospect.

Couple quick updates first. We leave for vacation in 6 days! Here's our itinerary:

• Next Wednesday, 5pm, we fly out of Newark and land in beloved Portland International Airport!
• Spend Thursday - Sunday in Portland visiting friends, visiting work, going to the SignaCert picnic, going to The Creek with the gang, etc.
• Monday morning we drive to Redding, CA with Miles. Damion stays in Portland with friends
• Tuesday, Kristal and I leave Miles with my parents, and we book it to Eureka, CA -- on the coast. We then spend two lovely days on a mini-vacation touring northern California breweries, coastal towns, and the redwood forests.
• Thursday we come back to Redding and spend the evening celebrating my brother's birthday, July 31 (and Kebra's birthday, although she's in BFE Alaska! :-)
• Friday we go back to Portland and spend the weekend
• Sunday we fly back to New York

Needless to say, we cannot wait!

In other news, we managed to spend too much money over the past few weeks overhauling our living room. We bought some living room furniture that was long overdue - a bookshelf, some cabinets for DVD's and Nintendo games, a TV stand, and a ginormous TV to set on top of it. Also managed to pick up a A/V receiver so we could finally take advantage of the amazing surround sound the owner of our place has wired into the whole living room. We bought a great area rug for the whole thing, and have created a space we really enjoy. It's been great having people over and hanging out in our new living room.

Work has been going well, we have nearly closed on another big deal which, for a startup, is great news. Kristal has been staying busy (as you will see) with the boys now that summer vacation has set in. The boys have been busy with summer music camp for the past two weeks. The Hoboken School of Music, where they take lessons, lets out for the summer, but they took two weeks of summer lessons with Miles' teacher and have been having a great time. They actually recorded CD's of themselves playing, which I will post this weekend.

OK enough of the rambling, let's get to the pictures.

Last weekend we made our maiden voyage to the Jersey Shore. So first off, we haven't heard anybody out here call the beach the "coast" as we do on the west coast. It's called the "shore." Clearly New Jersey has a "shore" and the real motivation for visiting is that it supposedly offers surfing. So we went to the closest beach there is to us, which is about an hour away (about the same as the Oregon coast from Portland). These pictures were taken from the 'pet-friendly beach' which wasn't actually on the ocean but rather on a little bay where boats passed from dock to open ocean:








As for surf, let's just say that if I felt like surfing crowded, ghetto New Jersey beach break with self-inflated jock New Jersey types, maybe I'd brew the board out. After all, I did bring it all this way. However, it really was a downer out there because even though it was great being on a beach again, it was full of beach-type people. This, as opposed to the great oregon coast -- sweatshirt-wearing, hippie, granola, chill people. Here, it's bikini's, lords with fake tans, way too many muscles for me to feel comfortable, and tons and tons of people on the beach. Will we return? Most likely. But enjoy it like we do the Oregon coast? Never.

Onward.

On the way home, Kristal captured another classic "Andrew-driving" pic:


And we had the good fortune of encountering the really cool self-pay toll on the highway. See, most of the tolls around here (and there are PLENTY; we keep a $20 in the car nearly all the time just to take care of the frequent tolls we encounter) are "you-pay-an-attendant" type. This kind is cool -- you just toss your change in this plastic chute, it automatically counts it, and authorizes you through. Clearly difficult to capture with a stil pic, it was really fun tossing a handful of change into a plastic bucket and having it auto-count it!

See the chute?


The other day, Kristal and the boys had a great day out. First, they hit a couple of parks, one with a fountain. If I had kept a blog of us in Portland, these pictures would have been commonplace -- nearly every park in PDX has a fountain.







We're trying not to take for granted that the New York skyline, specifically the Empire State Building, is our backdrop for things like this:




Afterwards, Kristal and the boys went to lunch and Johnny Rockets, a retro burger-joint. The boys ordered, for the first time, "grown-up" burgers. In fact, so grown-up that Miles said to the waitress that he would like a "grown-up Smokehouse burger." Obviously they had their mouths full, no pun intended!




And a few more pics to round out the day:






Until next time!