When life gives you lemons..

and strawberries make this:

I love my new juicer..so easy to make fresh juice now.  We also bought a lemon tree and a lime tree for our backyard! So excited to see if they actually produce fruit. There is already a full grown orange tree back there but sadly it's only yielding one orange that likely dates back to 2006. It's needs help.  "How to Revive an Orange Tree For Dummies"

My suspicion is the slugs that hang out at night have something to do with it but I could be wrong. Someone told me to get rid of slugs you fill a bowl with beer and they are drawn to it and then drown in the beer. I guess you wake to find a bowl filled with previously drunken dead slugs.  

Rudolph

this is what happens when you spend too much time at the beach without reapplying sunscreen. doesn't the angle/redness make my nose look huge?!  Wait. Maybe my nose IS huge;-) hahahaha

Elise's best week ever...

This past week Mike's family came into town and brought lots of excitement with them..i.e, two little girls Joelle and Neva-Lysie's cousins who are 4 and 3.  Elise had the time of her life playing with them and going on adventures. She was sad to see them leave today.  We were sad as well. It was nice to have the company and honestly, they kept Elise busy for 7 days-not an easy feat.  Our biggest adventure was to Disneyland and they were all troopers despite the horrible crowds and lines we had to wait in.  Holly made sure to make snarky comments every 5 minutes about the "other" park goers.  In general, her attitude is one of "I hate people", especially 99.9% of those at Disney. Anyway, we survived the day and spent the rest of the week lounging on the beach!  

Three sand cherubs:

Grandma and her girls:
Three disney girls-we dressed them in orange to keep track of them. At least it wasn't those dorky T-shirts people make for their "group":
Elise's favorite princess was Sleeping Beauty-she was always her mommy's favorite too:

Earthquake

5.0 tonight...Always scares me. That's 2 larger ones since we moved here. I still can't get used to it.

pepper

I have decided the one and only spice I couldn't live without is freshly ground pepper. Mike has noticed my obsession with it over the years and how I put it on almost everything I eat...not ice cream though.  I have an expansive assortment of spices (most of which I have never tried) thanks to Dean & Deluca but pepper wins my heart every time. See, I'm a simple woman after all..

Liar Liar pants on fire...

Don't believe anything we say. Or, at least, Holly says. In the eleventh hour we managed to snag a house right around the corner from us. So we do not have to leave our Brentwood/Santa Monica cocoon after all. This makes Holly very happy. Unlike the cheesy 80's style of the former contender, the new place is more "grandma and grandpa's lake cottage" complete with it's own set of idiosyncrasies. We'll begin to haul our things over (yes we can walk to it) end of next week probably.
We will grill corn with lime butter and "cayenne pepper" (thanks Erik) if you come visit;-)

Yosemite

We just returned from Yosemite National Park. It was, without a doubt, the most beautiful place I have ever visited. My world travels are more limited compared to Mike's but I think he was in agreement. To prove that statement, (Mike will agree and make fun of me at the same time) I cried when I first drove into the park. Yes, it brought me to tears. I'm a total loser but what can I do? It was just the most beautiful landscape I'd ever laid eyes on. We took hundreds of pictures-me with my modest Sony Cybershot and Mike with the designer camera complete with different lenses. He griped about not having a tripod with him as we watched the other nerdy tourists with theirs.

Fortunately, we could not have chosen a better time to go. The weather was glorious and there were NO CROWDS. The waterfalls were in full force having just had a warm up and snow melt. We opted to rent a house in the park. We are so glad we did-it was a darling place and it was much easier with Elise to come back to a house at the end of the day.

We saw different kinds of animals, many of which we could not capture on film because they ran off too quickly. A red fox (a bonus. sightings are rare and they are a threatened species), a black bear (which was actually brown), many deer (boring) and several different birds. The coyotes were out at night which I managed to capture on video but I won't post it-it's really boring... Mike drinking a beer on the patio with coyotes howling in the background.

Half Dome at twilight:

El Capitan=monolith

Yosemite Falls:

These birds were everywhere. I think it's called a Stellar's Jay:

Family in a carved out Sequoia tree:

Grizzly Giant..grrr. Reminded me of the scary tree in Poltergeist:

Holly & Lysie & a giant sequoia:

I honestly think E had more fun carrying sticks and poking things:

can a bear be nonchalant? I think this one was:

S'mores..mmmmm: