Welcome to our new home

Hello family and friends! We moved! And we dearly missed all of your hands and muscles and help in the process! It was a rough two days!
We are still trying to unpack and find homes for everything so I don't have any pictures of it decorated but I thought you might like a pictorial tour of the layout at least. I promise I will post pictures with our stuff and also a picture of the building itself soon.
The building is wonderfully located about a 15 minute car ride to work for me and a 10 minute bike ride to Stanford for Brian. We love Menlo Park too. It has everything we could ever want, most of it in walking distance! We are apartment 1 of a 7 apartment complex but we have the best spot! We are over the garage with no one above us or beside us. There are 2 more apartments about our size. Each of them get a portion of the 3 car garage along with us (we have a garage now!). Then around the garage level are 4 tiny little apartments that he must rent out dirt cheap because I mean they are little! We have met many of our neighbors and they all seem friendly and quiet!
We all share a laundry room and our landlord's daughter lives in one of the bigger apartments so all the utilities are included in our rent! With the money we are saving to move into a larger and lovelier apartment (crazy how wonderful a deal this place is compared to our Belmont apt), we splurged and got digital cable with DVR. I am pretty weirded out by now being able to pause, rewind, and record TV but that is an entire blog entry in and of itself!

So read on for the tour and remember you can click on the pictures to enlarge them!
We miss you all and we have decided not to move again until Brian graduates unless it is to move into a home and since the chances of us being able to afford to even rent a home out here are slim, I think we will be here for 5 years or so...hopefully many of you will visit us in that time frame and get to see it for yourself!

The new place....the bedroom

Here is our bedroom. Through the window you can see a little bit of the view from our backyard. We put the bed in and realized that this bedroom is at least 25% bigger than our last one. It is great. We are going to find Brian a desk and set him up a little office in here it is so spacious. Love the his and hers closets! Saves us having to fight about encroaching items!

The new place....the kitchen

The kitchen is so amazing! We just had that little kitchenette that was basically the size of a closet in Belmont so this kitchen is like a miracle! The first pic is from the hallway doorway. I love the red counter tops....they are so 50's and fun! The doorway in the pic is our back door and it leads to our stairway to the backyard, which we share with everyone else who lives in the building.
For the second picture I am standing in the far corner. Behind me is a row of shelves and another counter with shelves below and above. Pictured is our stove....eat your heart out Rachel Ray. 2 different oven doors, each with their own temp setting and that sweet counter space next to the burners. I made french toast for us for dinner tonight and I can tell you that little space is very handy!

The new place....the bathroom

I love this bathroom! The tub and sinks and some of the walls are pink (Brian isn't thrilled ...but he will just have to get in touch with his metro side!) and it is so spacious! So the first pic is from the doorway. Off to the left you can see a little bit of a door frame....that is the separate room that houses the toilet. For the second and third pics I am standing in the doorway of the "potty room". Notice we have two sinks, a shower stall AND a separate tub ? There is also mondo amounts of storage. The toilet room has a full wall of cupboards and directly to the right of the door to the bathroom is a wall of cabinets and drawers!

The new place....the living room

So here is our living room. The first picture, featuring Brian, was taken from our front door, and the second picture was taken from the door leading into the hallway. Notice the fireplace and the great windows? I really like the green carpet which continues into the hallway and bedroom but Brian isn't as enthused by it.

My First WCN event!

Friday, October 5th we rented out the extremely posh Palace Hotel Ball Room to hold our Gala dinner. For $500 a plate, we gave our donors tasty food, great entertainment in the form of Talisman (a Stanford U a cappella group), and mounds of inspiration from our dedicated conservation heroes who are all actively engaged in on the ground "in the trenches" conservation work to help save the habitat and preserve the longevity of large land mammals in 23 different countries!

Me, WCN staff, and the conservationists! (Yes it is the Richard wedding dress again! Give me a break...I am poor and I HATE dress shopping!) Charlie Knowles, my boss is at the far right of the front row. Eve, my co-worker is the first woman in the second row and Stacey and Elaine, my other two co-workers are the 2nd and 4 th women in the back row. The rest of the gang is our conservationists.....all amazing and inspirational and living out adventurous, sometimes dangerous, always altruistic lives in places like Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, Botswana, Argentina, Ethiopia, and Kenya!

More Wedding Pics

I especially like the pic of us girls dancing dramatically to "I will survive."

Richard's Wedding

They did it! They pulled off the fairytale day!

The Green 411

Hey Family and friends and curious onlookers,

Check out our new blog, which you can link to by clicking the green 411 link to the right of this post.

It is the first step in our process of maybe one day having our own environmental education non profit. With my master's in non profit administration (on the way) I can run the org and with his PhD (on the way), good looks, humor, and nice butt (all present now!) Brian can be the front person and voice for the org!

Just a dream for now, but in the meantime read up, follow along, and spread the word! Everything we post will be things we are doing ourselves and we are poor, poor, poor so there is really no excuses for not doing them yourselves as well!

We love you all, but we'd love you more if you were working on being greenies like we are working on it! No pressure!

Brian's Birthday

I think this picture says it all(click on it it to enlarge!) This whitewater rafting adventure was my birthday present to Brian and it was an awesome and exhilarating two days! Brian had gone once before in Pennsylvania but this was my first time! We did Class III and IV rapids and this picture was taken on the class III Trouble Maker Rapid of the South Fork of the American River, which flows through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada's. We also did a day on the Middle Fork which included a class IV rapid so crazy that we all had to get down in to the boat and hold on for dear life! At one point the wave was so high that we were completely under water! On another class IV, our boat turned sideways and the only thing that kept me from falling into the water and rocks was the fact that I had my foot wedged into the boat! One of the other boat's paddlers said I looked like I was doing the "Matrix move" when I went over! Oh and in case you can't spot us in this picture, Brian is in the blue long sleeve shirt (second from the left) and I am the one with the goofy grin on my face (directly above him... opposite side of the boat)! The guy in the blue hat wore a Speedo and kept "flashing" his package but even that couldn't put a damper on the trip!

Redwoods!

Brian and I went camping last weekend at Butano State Park. We pitched our tent under an enormous Redwood. The base of it was bigger than our truck!I had seen these magnificent trees on my after high school road trip but this was Brian's first introduction! On the way home we stopped at Pescadero State Beach to walk along the tide. We got a fabulous show instead! 20 leopard seals were splashing in the surf and sunning themselves on the rocks! We watched them for an hour or so. They were adorable. They would roll over and cover their eyes with their flippers and they would arch their heads and tails up turning their bodies into a big U. The closer we walked, the more intently the big bull would watch us. We didn't want to provoke him so this is as close as I dared get. I am going to invest in a longer zoom lens so I can get close ups in these kind of situations without getting close up!!!

Mt. Diablo, or sunny skies and 70 in February....sorry Ohio and Michigan!

Last weekend we headed out of town to camp for a night at Mt. Diablo, a 3,500 ft peak North East of San Fran. When we got to the top, we were above the clouds and it was the most amazing view! The middle picture above is the sun setting near our tent. It was a wonderful February night and Brian even wore shorts during the day as it was about 70 or so! Sorry family! We even had a giant visitor: a hungry raccoon! Man, can they rip off garbage can lids fast! We had such a great time we are camping next weekend too, but this time we are heading to the beach! Stay tuned....

Spindrift January 16th, 2007

Just a typical day at the office! For our midyear retreat we went out to Spindrift, this really fabulous cottage that was donated to TNC several years ago along the ocean. Because of its small size it was perfect as a meeting location and so TNC kept it. One whole wall is glass and you look out and see nothing but blue; blue skies and blue ocean. Makes it hard to concentrate on a meeting! Luckily, I work with some pretty cool people. The crew from right to left is Barbara (LA), Amanda (SF), Guadalupe (SF), Craig (San Diego), and Gail (Newport Beach).

Meet Kota Bear.....

This is our puppy Dakota seen here in her new Christmas finery! She is recovering from a horrible shaving ordeal and she gets cold! Also in the Boro is my kitty Frosty but she doesn't like to have her picture taken! So this is the beginning of your introduction to my Ohio/Michigan crew who I miss dearly and feel so very lucky to have in my life!

Meet the Family.....

This is my beautiful mommy. She is a respiratory therapist at the Cleveland Clinic and she has the biggest heart in the whole world. She is one of those women who was born to be a mom but as I have become an adult I have realized that she is also an interesting and complex person and I am glad to be able to call her my friend as well as my mom.




This is my step-dad Al. He married my mom when I was only ten so he has been a solid influence in my life for quite some time! He is extremely smart and hardworking, but funny too. He has that dry wit that he passed on to my little sister Melissa who you will meet below.







This is my big sis Kalli and her fiance Marc. She is a grad student at Cleveland State and about to graduate and he is an architect hoping to soon establish his own design firm. They are perfectly matched, in my opinion. Although I do think Kalli is a little too cool and worldly for him! He fits into our family like he was born to it and he makes her happy so that is all that matters to me! PS: Please don't ask about the cat sculpture in the foreground. Just understand my family is sometimes a little bit....off.


This is my "little" brother Richard and his fiance Erica. They just got engaged this Christmas! I haven't known her long, but she was a rock for my brother during the hardest time in our life, losing our Daddy, so she is family to me already. Rich has shouldered a great deal of the burden of the aftermath of losing Daddy due to his proximity and I think she really does a great job of both lightening his life and keeping him grounded.





This is my little sis Melissa who some of you met in the Colorado Summer blog. Next to Brian, she is my favorite person on the planet. She is hilarious and you never know what she will say next. Since the time she started talking I have had to fight the desire to follow her around with a tape recorder to forever capture all the crazy things that come out of her mouth!