Category: our adventures

June 2010

June was a busy month for us. We went to Ruby’s for one of our first Kids Eat Free Tuesdays.  It was a huge success, Samantha loves French Fries!  While Google was switching from Windows to Mac, we were celebrating my sister and brother-in-laws anniversary on June 3.  I made the mistake of watching two very bad movies the first week of June too, Mall Cop and Pitch Black.  Samantha however, was having better luck and she scored a very cool Elmo shirt as a gift from Grandma Gigi.

Needless to say, the kids at the park are very jealous!  The next week I had better luck with movies.  I saw M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, which I really enjoyed.  By the 9th I was feeling better and starting to get over a cold I had had since May.  Well enough to watch the last match-up of the Stanley Cup Final game.  I read and watched Hamlet in June as well.  I liked both the book (very much) and the movie adaption that Gibson did. I had a great birthday.  On the 13th this year the whole family drove up to Santa Barbara to watch as my brother-in-law Philip graduated.  On the way up we stopped at the Santa Barbara mission for mass.

I also discovered that I share my birthday with 27% of the world’s population about 17,995,207 people.  Just after noon on that day we watched as Philip graduated.

Congratulations to Philip!  Afterwards, we had my favorite pizza at Rusty’s by the beach.  With full stomachs we went back to our motel called the Eagle Inn, which was AMAZING.  Michelle picked it out and I have to say it was an amazing place that I hope we can go back to soon!  I would highly recommend it if you ever find yourself in Santa Barbara.  The next morning we took Samantha to Chase Palm Park, a very cool park with a playground made to resemble a huge ship.

When we got back on June 14 we were welcomed home to a small shaker well, small by the time it got to us.  Always nice to be reminded that we live in earthquake country.  Later in the month I learned how to spell my name in Elvish.  I just know that will come in handy some day 😉

On the 19th I had a great birthday celebration in Carlsbad.  I hope everyone had a great time.  Plenty of food and good times.

I know Samantha had fun!  It was a celebration for a lot of people actually.  It was my mother’s birthday on the 16th and that weekend was Father’s day as well!  We had four dads there:  Duane, Jim, Tommy and myself.

We also managed to watch the new Alice in Wonderland film which I think we all liked, but then I tried to watch Pan’s Labyrinth, which I had heard good things about, but I didn’t like it at all.  On June 27th, we were lucky enough to be invited to Disneyland by my sister-in-law Lauren.  She works at Disneyland so she was able to get us in for free.  We met my parents when we got there and had a great time on the rides and watching the street parades.  While there we also celebrated my other sister-in-law’s birthday, Lisa!

Samantha wanted to visit Pooh, so we went on the ride and afterwards we were lucky enough to meet the bear in the flesh or fur as it were.

The shot above is right after she gave Pooh a kiss on the nose.  Everyone in line erupted in a instantaneous “AWWE!”  It was pretty adorable!

By the end of month I watched two more movies. Inglourious Basterds which if you can get past the strong language and gore, was a pretty good movie.  Lastly I watched Zathura, which is really like Jumanji, but in space.  I thought Zathura was really good.  In June, I also finished reading The Book Thief and Animal Farm.  The Book Thief was a recommendation from my friend Tim, and he was right on with this one.  I really like it.  I had never read Animal Farm in school, like most other people, but I did really enjoy this book as well.  Great month for books, not so much for the movies though.

Lastly, we took another Higson over to the dark side in June by purchasing David a Macbook Pro for his 8th grade graduation and birthday!  He was really surprised and we are very happy to have given him a gift that he will use in high school playing Mafia Wars and surfing Facebook, or I mean writing reports for school.

Speaking of Facebook, if your a friend of mine or Michelle’s there are a ton more pictures on our profiles.  Have a great day.

Samantha

Finally, I’m making a post. Hopefully, I will be better at making posts. My last post may have been prior to Samantha’s birth. So much to share.

Samantha is nearly twenty months. Every day is a new adventure and very rewarding and exciting. Milestones: She’s now walking. She’s had a professional teeth cleaning in February and her next scheduled appointment will be in July. We walked to Ruby’s for dinner this week. We’ve dined there several times with Samantha, as it a fun place and kid friendly. Samantha gets an activity book and crayons. Samantha has been coloring for several months now. Her favorite activities are going to story time at the library and playing at the park. My mom takes her to story time twice a week; they both enjoy the outing. Our library is adjacent to a lake, so Samantha has an opportunity to see lots of ducks there. Actually, a couple of ducks are regular visitors to a neighboring condo, so she’s very familiar with ducks and other bird types. She likes pandas. She was the cutest panda for Halloween last year and will be a panda again this year. She has a panda stuffed animal and our 2010 calendar has only panda pictures. We are looking forward to the summer months. The beach club lagoon will be a fun experience for Samantha. The lagoon has a sandy shore and water slides. Depending on when we sell our condo, we will be moving at some point soon. We have a holiday weekend next weekend, Memorial Day Weekend, which will be so nice! Thanks for reading.

Samantha’s 8th Week

Can’t believe Samantha is already 2 months old.  We had a great Thanksgiving (pictures of that coming soon)!  I also took the week off to so I could spend it with Samantha and Michelle.

Here is a picture of David holding Samantha.


Here is one of Samantha hanging out in her crib, which she can play in all by herself for 10 minutes at a time with no help.


This is a photo of me holding Samantha at the Sepctrum outside Santa’s house near Target.


Here is another one at the same place, but with the whole family.


Here is a shot of Samantha being held by her Great Grandma Georgie.

And finally a picture of Uncle Philip holding Samantha.

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5.8 Earthquake in Chino Hills

Shook pretty good here in Irinve thought too!  Hope everyone is ok.

USGS Website

Comic-Con 2008

On Friday, July 25th, I took the day off work and traveled to the San Diego Convention Center for the 2008 Comic-Con via Amtrak trains.  When I first got to the San Diego train station, there was a massive nerd herd slowly traveling to the trolleys.  I chose to walk with a few other geeks.  I walked quickly to the conventino center dodging cars, trolleys, and those guys to haul people in bike drawn carriages.  Our train arrived at 9am and it took me 30 minutes to walk the 1.1 miles with a every growing group of geeks.  That turned out okay, since the convention started at 9:30.  I walk into a line for those people who had pre-registered online (which was everyone since you can only buy tickets online).  There was so may people!  It was the most crowded place I have ever been in my life.  The convetion might not have been as large as CES but it had more people per sq foot for sure!

I went straight to ballroom 20 to see the Stargate Contiunum panel.   There were to Jafa warriors outside the door and I knew I was in the right place.  Just inside the door they were handing out free t-shirts.  The shirts were black and had a stargate image on them.  They said Stargate Worlds on them, more on that later.  The first panel consited of Richard Dean Anderson (of MacGyver fame, but also a star of Stargate SG-1), Amanda Tapping (from Stargate SG-1 and soon to be star of Sanctuary), Michael Shanks, Ben Browder, Christopher Judge, Beau Bridges, Peter DeLuise (director and writer) and the moderator was Martin Wood (director).  It was a great panel.  All the actors were very funny.  I guess it was Anderson’s first Comic-Con and possibly his first convetion.  Judge commented that he had been to several conventions and really enjoyed it.  Anderson really got into and was very funny.  You could see that this group of people really enjoy working with each other.   They were all there to help promote the new movie Stagate Continuium, wihch is being released on DVD only.  I saw it in todays (Sunday’s) paper in the Best Buy ad.  It is $17 for DVD and $29 for Blu-Ray.  Maybe sometime I will watch it.  I would really like to.

After the first panel was over, it was only an hour long.  They brought out the developers of a new MMO game called Stargate Worlds.  They talked about the new PC only game that is going to be released sometime in 2009 and took some questions from the crowd.  It was clear that there was not a lot of interest in this MMO.  Seems like most people who play MMO’s play WOW only.

The next panel was for the show Stargate Atlantis.  It brought out three stars from the series including Joe Flanigan, Robert Picardo and Jewel Staite.  Again, another very funny entertaining group of people.

After the Stargate panels were over I was starving since I had not eaten anything but a granola bar all day and it was now about 1pm.  So I headed down to the expo floor.  There I was confronted was a huge crowd of people that just didn’t seem to move.  They just milled around, it was almost impossible to get around and see the booths.  There was so many people it got very hot in the convention center.  It is hard to convey just how many people were there.  It was very overwhelming.  While I was in line for horrible convention food I got a call from a friend, Nick, to let me know that he was now at the convnetion center as well.  That was great becuase I had so far been on my own at the center.  I bought a cheeseburger, fries, hotdog and soda.  I was full and sick of the horrible food before I got to the hot dog, but thankfully, Nick finished it for me.  We then started to explore the expo floor and see what was to be seen.

While out and about we saw that Johnathan Frakes was going to be signing autographs at 4pm in the Star Trek booth.  So I wanted to be around for that.  I’ve always liked this actor not just because I think he is talented and I am a self-confessed Treky, but believe it or not he looks a lot like my biological father!  I was dissapointed to find out that they were charging $20 for his signature.  But since I was not planning on buy anything else at the show and I have always liked this actor/author I decided to go ahead and get it.  I then precded to put my thumb over the signature making it look lighter in that one section!  Terrible!

I was starting to get worn out so I asked Nick what panel he wanted to see.  He chose a really cool one where all the child voice actors from the Peanuts television shows.  It was very informative and a great panel!  After that we went to dinner at a place that Nick had been before called the Cheese Factory (couldn’t find their website).  I had breakfast for dinner there and Nick had a sandwich.  Great place, I recomend it!

When we got back we went to the panel that was the main reason for my trip to Comic-Con.  The Totally Rad Show.  I had a great time for the part that I was able to see, but unforteuntely I had to leave early (8:30pm) to catch the last Amtrak back to Irvine.  I can’t believe that Amtrak didn’t have anything else leaving later.  I have always been disappointed with their offerings.  Their service people on the train are nice, but on my way back home a homeless person with a racist bad attitude and a god aweful smell got on the train.  I had the perfect seat that I had to give up to get away from his foul mouth and smell.  He admitted that he did not pay for his ticket.  Other people also got up and moved to elsewhere on the train.  This IS is reason why I chose not to take public transportation most times.  The story of my Comic-Con trip ends here, I got home at 11:30pm and was exhausted.

More pictures at Picassa.

Playstation at Comic-Con

I will surely be stopping by this booth.  I hope to come back from Comic-Con with lots of loot!

Each morning from 9:30am to 12:00pm, we’ll be holding BUZZ! Quiz TV competitions on the stage, come test out your knowledge of trivia and win prizes. Come by Thursday and Friday to play SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Confrontation with real Navy SEALs in the competition area. They will be making appearances at 11:00am, 2:00pm, and 5:00pm. LittleBigPlanet. Onstage demonstrations will take place daily at 11:00am and 2:30pm, but the LittleBigPlanet feature area will let you get hands on time with this falls most highly innovative title. Our booth number is 4901

Happy Anniversary

Happy Anniversary Michelle!  The last five years have been amazing.  I am looking forward to many many more!  I love you very much!

Target Attempts to Kill My Unborn Child

In a study released Thursday they found that the smell released from new shower curtains is toxic.  This smell may cause:

liver damage as well as damage to the central nervous, respiratory and reproductive systems

But you’re okay after the smell goes away right?  Wrong!

some chemicals were found in the air 28 days after a PVC shower curtain was unwrapped and hung.

Throw away your PVC/Vinyl shower curtains now!  Then was your hands very well!

Link to the LA Times article.

Link to the Study.