Loan doc, anyone?

Well, Ken and I are officially California Notary Publics and National Notary Association Certified Loan Signing Agents. Yee-haw! I got our Adams Notaries site up and running tonight, so as soon as our seals arrive, we're in business. I can't wait!

Michael and MeeRa drove down Wednesday night and we went to dinner at Buca di Beppo and strolled Universal CityWalk. Thursday we did Disneyland and Disney's California Adventure theme parks. Fun!

Photo Books

I highly recommend making printed books with your digital photos. I've used (and been very pleased with) Shutterfly to create photo books, but MyPublisher.com looks pretty neat, too... CostCo members get a 20% discount. Gotta love the flexibility of digital cameras!

And, by the by, went to a movie screening yesterday for "Nana's Boy." Not sure when it comes out, but DO NOT go see it. It glorifies smoking pot and playing video games with some sexual perversions thrown in for good measure. Quite a few funny moments, but 95% trash (including most of those funny moments).

New Do

Well, here's the before and after. I'm loving it so far. The first photo is from this morning. The middle three are outside this evening, and the last one I took inside earlier. The last one is the most accurate of the color. Not sure why the middle three look so light, except that it must've been the light. I'll have to post again when I style it curly.

I have a hair appointment Tuesday for a hair makeover. Mine's gotten too long and the highlights are growing out, so I look unkempt. Having long hair is nice when you take the time do blow it out or whatever, but I rarely have the patience for that. So I need something shorter that will dry quickly. Mine is naturally curly, which makes my choices a little more difficult since I have to be mindful of frizz and puffiness. I also need bangs because of my tall forhead, but most styles can adapt to that. I'm also thinking of going darker and redder rather than blonder. The coloring things is new to me. The highlights I have now are the first I've ever done. I'm a little nervous about making a drastic change, but I'm excited, too. I get nostalgic looking at my long hair now when I actually bother to style it, but if I'm honest, how often do I do that? Anyway, look for photos Tuesday night of my new do. Yikes!

For some Sunday afternoon recreation, we headed down the driveway into the school pool. Here, Brendon does a fancy cannonball for a big splash.

Cooling off.... It's been foggy and June gloomy lately, but the gray usually burns off early afternoon. We were glad that today was no exception.

Ken diving. Woo!

Michele has a friend who works at NBC who was able to get us VIP tickets to a taping of The Tonight Show. However, she forgot to tell us that the taping time had changed from 4 to 3:30, so we were late and didn't get good seats. In fact, when the show aired, you could see people who had regular tickets and we were in a shadow and weren't visible at all! Oh well, it was really fun anyway, and while we were walking around on the backlot of NBC, I walked through "Salem Place," which is the set they use for the outdoor mall area on "Days of Our Lives." That was probably the coolest part of the whole day!

Ken's nephew, Brendon, is visiting from Sacramento this week. We picked him up at the Burbank airport today. Here he is with Brady.

As soon as we got home, we headed for the hills with the dog so we could all stretch our legs.

We recently started volunteering to exercise horses for 15 Hands Rescue, a Hogan Foundation organization. 15 Hands is an organization that gives underpriviledged kids an opportunity to interact with and ride horses. Most of the horses are retired Arabian brood mares donated from Mr. Hogan, Ventura farms and others. I'm really excited to do volunteer work, but frankly, I think we are getting more out of it than anything. In fact, we're just underpriviledged adults being given the opportunity to ride. :o) This is us after returning from a trail ride; Ken, Kalila and Alicia.

By the way...

Happy Birthday, Mom!

I take it back.

Turns out the live scanning lady at the sheriff's office today was very nice afterall. I shouldn't have been thought the worst of her when she didn't help us on Thursday. Bad me.

Flying to Sacramento and driving over to Napa for a meeting tomorrow, then home again tomorrow night. Long day!

Lots of editing to do before I leave, so I'll get back to it now.

Live scanning

I just have to vent for a moment about the process of live scan fingerprinting. At least the process of getting an appointment at the Thousand Oaks sheriff's office. I called the number from the State of California CPS website and inquired about making an appointment. The lady I spoke with said that I needed to wait for my paperwork to come from the State, but that I wouldn't need an appointment (error #1); just come on in. So, when our paperwork arrived, we went on in. The lady at the window said they only do live scanning on Thursdays (error #2) by appointment and to come back at 10:30 and 10:45 Thursday for our appointments. Turned out that our optometry appointment ran very long, so I called to cancel the appointments and rescheduled for 4:30 that same afternoon. So when we arrived at 4:30, the lady who does the live scanning, who had been on vacation until that day, she said, had absolutely no record of our appointments (error #3); not the 10:30/45 a.m. nor the 4:30. As per typical clock-watcher employees, she said she was outta there the minute her current appointment was over, so she couldn't help us (unhelpful #4). We'd have to reschedule... AGAIN. So, we'll go back Monday morning. At least this time the live scanner herself put our appointments in the book, so there shouldn't be anymore errors. We'll see.

New Blog

I just started another blog as a place to jot cool things I want to remember. Check it out.

Tidbits

I don't like to go days or weeks without blogging, but sometimes it seems we go days or week without anything newsworthy happening. Or else I'm lazy or I forget. :o) We had friends over for lunch today. We bought a grill last week, put it together yesterday ("Assembles easily with only a screwdriver!" ... Liars!). But it works (though there was one fireball incident), and we've cooked three straight meals out there. Yes, even breakfast this morning. Who knew that buying a grill would get hubby so excited about cooking that I may well have a personal chef all summer?! Money well spent.

Tomorrow we're planning to see movies; the boys will watch the new "Star Wars" and Amy and I will see something else. Maybe "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" or "Madagascar" or "Monster in Law."

Speaking of movies, we joined the Blockbuster Online DVD rental program. We used Netflix last year and were really happy with the service. The movies came next day, which is the best turn-around one can hope for. However, they jacked up their price about the time that the new TV season was starting last summer, so we cancelled the service. Now that the TV season is over, we're ready to start again, but thought we'd try Blockbuster this time. They're $3/mo cheaper than Netflix ($14.99 rather than $17.99) and you get two in-store rentals each month. Since we have a BB about a mile from us, that's really convenient. HOWEVER, the movies they sent Friday didn't arrive today (Saturday). They'll probably come Monday, which means they have a TWO-day turn-around. That may be a significant issue. We'll see how we feel after the free trial.

I think Amy and I will go for a very early morning horseback ride on Monday. Then Ken and I have to go to the sheriff's office to have our live scan fingerprinting done for our Notary Public commissioning. I'm pretty excited about the Notary thing. We passed the test and are now working on our signing agent certification. Could be a great way to make some extra money. We'll see. Anyway, the process to get commissioned isn't a cakewalk; takes time and hundreds of dollars for seminars, testing, supplies and miscellaneous expenses. But it's pretty exciting to learn something new. I really miss school. I loved buying school supplies and new clothes and learning who would be in my classes and all that excellent stuff that goes with education. Ken thinks I'm crazy when I get all worked up over pencil grips and Trapper Keepers. If it paid well, I'd just be a professional student. *sigh*

We're spending more and more time lately fantasizing about owning property, something that is completely out of reach in Southern California. I can't imagine having a $600,000 mortgage for a 1,200 sq. ft. house built in 1971 on a postage stamp-sized lot. It's just sickening. I keep hoping that my company will go virtual so that we can move somewhere affordable. But right now we're in a good situation with high-cost area incomes and fairly low cost housing here on campus (low cost is relative; our rent is about $1,200/mo, which is more than most of my out-of-state friends pay on their mortgages). But if we have to move off-campus for any reason, we'll probably have to leave the state, because we can't afford to pay $2,500/mo rent for a comparable space off-campus. God-willing, by the time we have kids, we'll have at least five acres for them to play on. Kids need dirt to play in and animals to play with, pools and treehouses and forts. Good stuff. I miss that.

Sunday I drove down to Lakewood for my cousin's daughter's college graduation party. I'm sure I'll slaughter the spelling of these names, but here we go, from left to right: Alicia, Janice, Nasime, Par, Affie, Karl, Blanche, Vern, Tamara, and Laurel.