Happy New Year!

We spent New Year's Eve day working on our new kitchen floor, which is looking great! We rang in the new year with the neighbors, as we did last year. Our hosts, Mike and Deneen have the best parties. The food is always amazing, and last night was no exception. Deneen made pasta, MADE the pasta, rolled it out herself. It was unbelievably good. I'm sure it's been mentioned on our blog at least once, but we love our neighborhood, and the people in it. We know we're lucky not only to know our neighbors, but to have found such good friends in them.
This is how we get around the neighborhood, especially when we have a lot to carry. We got the wagon idea from Jared last new year's eve. Since then, we picked up our own. It comes in surprisingly handy on nights like these.
Our toasting champagne (actually it's sparkling wine, since it's from California - Champagne isn't really Champagne unless it comes from the Champagne region of France) was from Wilson Creek Vineyards in Temecula. So good. We love our almond champagnes, this one, and a slightly sweeter version from Rapazzini Winery in Gilroy.

We're Updating our Kitchen!

After days of shopping, we made our first purchase to start our kitchen remodel. We bought our "Burnt Mocha" bamboo floors. They are beautiful! We've got a lot of work to do. We'll be painting, doing the floors, tearing out the old countertop and sink, putting in a new sink and countertop, and adding some additional cabinets (with a butcher block top - we're very excited about getting more counter space). Yes, we're keeping our stove...don't be silly.

Happy Holidays!

We hope that whatever holiday you and your families celebrate at this time of year are happy, healthy and full of laughter and love. We didn't get around to sending out holiday cards this year, maybe we'll send New Year cards!

We started our morning early with a little egg nog french toast, which might be my new favorite breakfast. It was excellent, if I do say so myself. Pretty darn simple too. Mix up 1/4 gallon of eggnog with an egg, cinnamon and nutmeg (for 8 slices of bread). Drench your bread with it, and put it in a nice hot frying pan. Let it get nice and brown, then drizzle it with whipped eggnog and some powdered sugar.
We don't really "do" gifts at our house. Mostly because there is really nothing we need, and that is perhaps the greatest gift of all. Somehow though, a gift or two always seems to sneak up under the tree. My Pop loves his Bah Humbug Certified Scrooge t-shirt. When I saw the Golden Humbugs at Harrod's in London, I knew I couldn't pass them up. Chico got a Bengals jersey, he really likes it.
Dan and I made our traditional Christmas dinner, Hawaiian Steak (inspired by the one at Houston's). He's such a great griller, dinner was fantastic. Seriously, fantastic. For dessert, an apple crumble that was so good that while reaching for seconds, Dan spilled his glass of red wine on the rug under the dining room table. So we ended the meal with the shop vac running, and we saved the rug.

Here was our Christmas wine, we'd definitely recommend it. At $12-15/bottle, it's a deal. You can get it here if you want to give it a try. http://www.mariposawine.com/yosemite-view/wines/ You know me and wine labels. You can see why I picked this one.

A Day of Baking

I spent Sunday baking treats for our friends and co-workers. I really enjoy baking, and should do it more often. Maybe once we get our kitchen updated, I will be more motivated to spend time in there.

Timber!

Whenever Mom & Pop are here visiting, we always get so much done on the house.

This trip, one of the big things we wanted to get done was to take out the big tree in the front yard. Pop and Dan worked on it today, and Jared came over to help. It's going to look great when it's all done.

Here are the manual laborers.

Here they are after the first tree came down.

Christmas Came a Little Early

We've been eyeing these kayaks for a year or so. We finally found a good deal on the exact models we wanted (both made by Ocean Kayak), so we went up to Santa Barbara and picked them up yesterday. We can't wait to use them!

A Trip To Morgan Hill

We spent this weekend with Jen & Ben. Jen is my oldest friend, since we were 3. We got up there on Friday night, it's a 6 hour drive. On Saturday we all went to Super Taqueria for lunch, it's always the first restaurant stop whenever I go back to Morgan Hill. Jen and I did some shopping while Ben and Dan watched Alabama lose in the SEC Championship. That evening, we went to downtown Morgan Hill to watch the Christmas parade and have dinner at Papi's on the Wharf. Sunday was a relaxing day, until it was time for dance class. Jen and I started dancing at Lana's Dance Studio when we were 3, and our first recital was in 1979. Next summer, on June 28, Lana is having her 30th anniversary recital. There's a big "retired dancer" number, and so yesterday was an "old people's" dance class to get us ready for it. We drove down to the studio, like we had done thousands of times before and went to class. It was so much fun to see some of the girls we used to dance with, I think we all had a great time. I'm looking forward to future classes, and to getting back in shape for the big show!

Here are some snapshots from "home". This first one is the Granada theater. It was the movie theater when I was a kid, until the big one was built sometime in the late 80's.

This is just one of the fields out in San Martin. It's kind of amazing to still see so much open land. A lot of it has already been developed, so it's always nice to see some wide open space.

This was basically what it looked like across the street from our old house. Lots of walnut trees, the beautiful hills, barns, chickens, etc. Not quite what people think of when they think about California. There are still tractors that drive down the roads, and lots of horses and livestock on just about every piece of land.