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Wrights in Oz!
Hello from sunny Sydney!! How fitting that the first line of my previous post is “All good things must come to an end”… Nick and I had no idea while we were on our road trip through SoCal that in just a few short months we would be gone from San Jose and living on the complete other side of the world. We were set to stay in San Jose for at least another three years, and maybe even longer. We had even kicked off the process to apply for permanent residency (green cards)! However, in late summer, I learned of an incredible career opportunity, still with Adobe, but in Sydney,…
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Hwy 1 Road Trip – Part 3 (San Diego Zoo)
All good things must come to an end, and it was now the tail end of our amazing SoCal road trip. We left Anaheim in the morning, and headed down to San Diego for the final two nights of our tour. We stopped at Balboa Island for a frozen banana and walked all around the island, but unfortunately I forgot to take pictures (wtf). You can read about Balboa Island here though, and look at some nice pictures that other people took. We arrived fairly late the first day, so only had time to grab some dinner and sleep. The next day though, it was off to the San Diego…
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Hwy 1 Road Trip – Part 2 (DISNEYLAND!!!!!)
Finally continuing my last post, here’s part two of our big road trip down Highway 1…we spent 2 days in Disneyland!! But first, we had to get there from Cayucos, the tiny little beach town where we stayed. We didn’t make too many stops along the way, but had time for a picnic by the beach and a little bit of a photo op by the ocean… [googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m29!1m12!1m3!1d208369.88457889954!2d-120.91552930851637!3d35.31146133643884!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!4m14!1i0!3e0!4m5!1s0x80ecdf88ee79c031%3A0x80edbb62a64c9c15!2sCayucos%2C+CA!3m2!1d35.442751099999995!2d-120.8921254!4m5!1s0x80ecf834e9cc5417%3A0x5c42c6f63f4629b6!2sAvila+Beach%2C+CA!3m2!1d35.1800113!2d-120.7319127!5e0!3m2!1sen!2sus!4v1410634490255&w=600&h=450] We didn’t really stop again the rest of the way down, but drove through several beautiful beach towns like Santa Barbara and Malibu as we made our way to our hotel near Disneyland. The map isn’t retaining my custom route for some…
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Hwy 1 Road Trip – Part 1 (Hearst Castle)
For those who don’t know, State Route 1 (SR 1) is a major north-south state highway that runs along most of the Pacific coastline of the U.S. state of California. (from Wikipedia) “California State Route 1” by User:NE2 – Email me if you would like a copy of the GIS data I created for the highways.. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Since moving to California, Nick and I have had it on our list to drive highway 1 all the way north, and all the way south. We drove the northern portion during our road trip to Seattle in February of 2013, and we’d driven as far south as Monterey together. Earlier this year, we…
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Napa wine tour
Back at the beginning of May (omg, I know, I’m so behind on blog posts), Nick’s mom and two of her friends came down to visit us! We had such an awesome time showing them around the Bay Area. We took them to many of our favorite places and a couple of new places as well – namely, to Napa! Nick and I hadn’t been up to Napa yet, despite visiting a few other wine areas (Sonoma, Livermore) several times. Napa has a reputation for being a little snobbier and a little more expensive than the other regions (since they were the first big region and have a lot of…
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Tourist adventuring with P&K&D
Back in April, some very good friends of ours from Canada came to visit for a week. We had a busy week showing them around and taking them to do some of our most favorite things around here – beach, hikes, SF, and sports. The day after they arrived and got all settled in, the first order of business was a surfing lesson in Santa Cruz….at 7am. Santa Cruz is about a 45 minute drive from us so that meant we left at 5:45am to be sure to be there on time. It was a pretty grueling morning with a bleary-eyed stop at McDonald’s, but we made it. Not all…
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Berry Creek Falls Hike
The Berry Creek Falls loop has been on our “to hike” list for a while now, pretty much ever since the first time we went to Big Basin State Park last June. It’s rated as a strenuous, 11-mile hike with about 2,000 feet of total elevation, and we’ve overheard park rangers telling others to set aside 6-8 hours to complete the full hike. If you’re curious, you can read a lot about this hike at the following links: http://www.redwoodhikes.com/BigBasin/BerryCreek.html (beautiful photos) http://www.bahiker.com/southbayhikes/bigbasin/waterfallloop.html (bahiker.com is the bible of Bay Area hikes) http://www.everytrail.com/guide/berry-creek-falls-loop-at-big-basin-redwoods-state-park (detailed walkthrough with step-by-step instructions) We finally decided to embark on the hike this weekend. We had a huge breakfast…
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Build-a-Bar!
So, Nick and I have known for some time that we were rapidly running out of space on the bookshelves in our home office that we were using to store everything from books to camera equipment to computer cables and accessories, and of course our collection of fine adult beverages. I forgot to take a “before” picture but you can kind of get an idea of how crowded the shelves were from the background of this photo: Basically the shelves were a mess and we needed to do something about it. We started looking up home bars, and were absolutely shocked to find out that not only are they pretty rare…
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Juicin’ 3-day Liveblog
I’ve been hearing about these juice fasts for a long time now, and kind of wanted to try one. If you’re not familiar with the concept, basically for the next three days I won’t be eating any solid food, drinking coffee, or drinking alcohol. I’ll be drinking 6 bottles of raw, organic juice per day instead. A few things finally tipped me over the edge to try this thing: My eating over the holidays, and since the holidays, was atrocious and I haven’t really felt the same since. Some coworkers were doing one shortly after the holidays, and universally reported feeling more energetic and more “well” by day 3. Nick…
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A long post about U.S. healthcare
**NOTE: this is a really long post. If you’d prefer to cut to the chase ($$$), scroll down to the section that starts with “THE UGLY”**. Nick and I joined a recreational volleyball league, and I was having a lot of fun until I injured my left ring finger in the second game while trying to block a ball. I knew when it happened that I had done something bad (it hurt a LOT!), but figured it was just a sprain and kept playing through all 4 matches we had that night. When I got home, I was barely able to get my wedding ring off my finger was so…