day 102: First stop on our cruise was Catalina Island. Since the major selling point of a cruise for us was the all-inclusive part, we decided not to go with any shore excursions and just to roam around instead. We tried out the beach for a while but were surrounded by strange giant bees so we changed plans and explored the city a little bit. Avalon is teeny tiny and so are the houses. This small house had a very strange collection of bird houses out front. The boot reminds me of my good old Texas days. Yeehaw!

day 101: To celebrate our summer birthdays, Allison and I took a cruise to Catalina and Mexico. It was a fabulous trip and so nice to get to spend some sister time.

to bring you this message from carnival cruise lines : OUR WiFi IS TERRIBLE!
Allison and I are on a girly birthday cruise and had hoped to update our blogs with our laptops and wifi, but the connection is FAR too slow to upload photos if we want to do anything else at all while we’re onboard. I’ll catch up with a mega post when we get back in town Friday. Stay tuned!

day 100: Allison picked this photo to be my super-fab 100th post. We went to Disneyland for fathers’ day and while we were waiting around for said father to arrive, we took some photos of the jungle cruise shop merchandise. Want a pillow?

day 99: We planned to meet friends at Hollywood Forever tonight, but the cards were definitely stacked against us. After circling for parking for a half hour we found out the gates were closed. We decided to head to Santa Monica to catch a showing of La Vie en Rose instead. We entered a garage that claimed to have 12 available spaces where we circled from top to bottom for about 15 minutes. Once we finally found a space we rushed to eat some of the food we’d brought for the picnic and ran to the theater only to find out it was the wrong one… and too late to make it to the right one. At which point we gave up and watched Pirates of the Caribbean instead. That is a looooong movie.

day 98: After work last night some of my coworkers and I went out for a drink at a local bar. Thank you so much to everyone who came out and for all of the kind words. It meant a lot to have you all there. We will definitely keep in touch.

day 97: Ben’s softball game got canceled so we decided to have a night out instead. We had some tasty sushi in culver city… mmm veggie rolls.

day 96: I have been hard at work updating the vector art/illustration website that I run tinyfacedesign.com to make it better and easier to use. It is still in need of a couple adjustments, but it has a brand spankin’ new contact form that I’m pretty excited about (I know, I’m a nerd) and I think it’s looking pretty good. Yay tinyface!

day 95: This gate is at the entrance to a duplex in Manhattan Beach. I’m going to take a guess here but it *seems* as though each half of the gate is owned independently (one half for each unit) and that one of the owners repainted and the other didn’t bother. Now if it were me, I would have offered to repaint both halves while I was at it… but maybe they like it this way.

day 94: I love our place but it has a couple of “quirks”, one of which is that there are upper cabinets above the sink. The cabinets make it really hard to get in and wash large dishes, and completely block out any available light, making it impossible to tell if your dishes are actually clean. Enter Ben’s handiness and our under-cabinet lighting over the sink. Clever and he does the dishes… what a great husband!