What a bizarre trip to San Jose this was.  It was our first time for more than a few hours when both of us would be without Landen.  And it would be for three full days.  How would we fare?

Thursday – We leave immediately after work, realizing that we forgot to pack lunch for Landen that day (we told Ash’s mom we’d have lunch for Thurs and Fri covered… oops!)  Not a real issue.  We get on the road, and it’s raining.  Oh, but wait, when you start climbing in elevation, it starts SNOWING (May 27…), and of course, they have the road closed off to all but snow tires.  So we have to pay $70 to get snow chains put on our car.  Well, I guess it’s good we have them.  Odd, when I go out for Memorial Day weekend, I don’t think to pack snow chains.  We stop off at dinner (we had read the menu online) and were excited for some BBQ.  What we got was lousy.  Ash didn’t even eat it.  So we hit In N Out so she could get something.  We get lost a couple of times getting to Cyrus’.  But finally we get there.  It’s only got to get better.

Friday – With Cyrus at work, we go to the heralded Delaveaga Disc Golf Course.  This is the site of an NT event (that happened the weekend before) and I’ve heard amazing things about it, especially it’s final “Top of the World” hole.  Well, we played all 28 holes, give or take a couple.  It was a mixed bag, as our weekend would be.  There were some very good holes indeed – holes I hadn’t seen anything like on any course I’ve ever been on.  And a few very very stupid holes.  (Throw over all these trees to a basket that’s down there somewhere.)  I thought the course overall was overrated, though not terrible.  However, I lost two discs (my longest driver and my favorite midrange… grr) in some very thickly wooded cliff-like areas.  More on that later.  We finish, drive down to the Santa Cruz boardwalk, and have lunch that consists mainly of garlic (not a bad thing, mind you.)  We drive home and hang with Erin for a little while, then Cyrus the rest of the night.  Dinner and good conversation were highlights there.

Saturday – It is rapidly occurring to me that I’m long-winded.  Saturday was Erin’s graduation, the reason we were there.  After some massages in the morning (thanks CHI!) we head to the graduation and watch Erin walk up nearly last of 300 students to get her diploma in a short, sweet ceremony.  Then it was on to the afterparty at Erin’s boyfriend’s place.  SO MUCH MEAT there.  And Asians.  Lots of meat, lots of Asians.  It was a really great time.  We played games, had jello shots, decapitated a pinata.  The entire day was just great.  Then home to some very late night conversations with Cyrus, and off to bed.

Sunday – After a nice sleepin, we got up and had lunch with Erin and Cyrus (leftover meat!)  After a wonky start, we were pretty excited as the weekend ended great.  Oh wait, it wasn’t over yet.  We had a flat tire.  Much to our surprise, we had a full tire spare in our trunk, and not a donut, so on a Sunday (of a holiday weekend) we didn’t have to search for someplace open.  One changed tire later, we got on the road.  Oh, wait, we stopped at the pharmacy first, because I had to buy something for my MASSIVE poison oak that I got while rooting around for my discs at Delaveaga.  Another reason I think it’s overrated.  The trip home was uneventful.  We spent all yesterday with Landen, who was finally his healthy happy self.  It was good to be home.

Random tidbits from the unsettled jar:

- Grassroots Books was robbed at gunpoint at 7:30 last night, and police think it’s tied to a string of armed robberies committed since January.  This sucks for two reasons.  1) Because not only is it hands down the best used bookstore ever, it is arguably the best store of any kind ever.  It’s sad to see them take a loss, though it might result in increased security measures, which is a nice lining.  And, more personally, 2) I was in the store less than an hour before it happened.  They were having a sale on CDs (I got 5 used CDs for a total of 27 cents), so I booked down as soon as dinner was finished so I could catch it and still make it back in time to give Landen his bath.  Had I not been in a hurry, it’s quite possible I would have been there when it happened, as I often take over an hour at that store.  Nobody was hurt, but I still don’t think I would have wanted to be there.

- One of my childhood heroes recently applied for money at my workplace.  I won’t name who it was, since lord knows the guy doesn’t need any more press about him (he hasn’t fared too well in the public eye in the last two years).  I was initially very excited because the broker said I’d be able to chat with him for a minute, which would have been a dream come true since I was a wee toddler.  However, I started to do research about him online, and man oh man has this guy fallen pretty hard.  It’s downright difficult to find positive things about him said anywhere.  Even the Daily Show blasted him.  We aren’t able to do it anyway for a legal technicality, but reading all those things has put a damper on 25+ years of idolization.  I wouldn’t even know what to say to him if I got the opportunity.

- Ashley and I have been actively planning our landscaping and gardening.  That, in itself, is unsettling.  How old AM I?

- I have an old Sony 5-CD changer, now in the living room.  It’s been a unique piece for a while, although the fact that it’s even still working (I got it as a high school graduation present) is an accomplishment.  Anyway, for years it’s done something peculiar.  While on, it will periodically open and close.  And nearly every time you actually turn it on, it will open, close, open, rotate the tray a little, rotate back, then close again, before you can open it to load CDs.  Okay, whatever, that’s weird, but it still worked fine other than that.  Since moving to NV, it’s started opening and closing WHEN IT’S TURNED OFF.  We’ll be sitting there and then randomly its gears will grrrrrr along and it will open up the tray, as if sticking it’s tongue out at us.  Very unsettling.

- We got snow yesterday and this morning.  While it isn’t the flooding the NE is getting, I still think someone needs to smack Mother Nature around a little and inform her that it’s a) spring and b) a desert.

Working on some new stuff – more DPOD pics and some fresh Smacky pics coming up soon, as well as a long-awaited Fats’ Bad Advice column.

This entry’s batch of people who rule is brought to you by: me.

First off, in the selfish arena, the so-far only 2x winners of the People Who Rule award, The Stus (particularly Stu F.)  I won’t go into great detail, because Ash already did that over here.

The second person who rules is whoever made the following video.  If you have six minutes, click on the “HD” button and watch something that will both blow your mind and put you in a trance.  Simply beautiful.

Weather.com says we should expect 2-4 inches of snow by tomorrow morning.  KoloTV.com, the local news station of Reno, predicts 9-16 inches.  Those aren’t even in the same ballpark.

Oddsmakers would have fun if they could make money off the weather.

So we’ve had our first significant snowfall of the year, dumping probably 8 or 9 inches down on our little desert town.  So we figured we’d put our nearly-one-year old boy outside, see what he thought.  You tend to expect all babies to be afraid of new experiences… water, grass, snow… our boy doesn’t actually have fear.  Of anything.   Including crawling face-first off of tall things.  So it was only marginally surprising that after a little bit of trepidation:

he jumped right into the fray.

See, because it was a big snowfall and we don’t really have… what’s the word… plows… things got bogged down.  Ash had the day off and did all the hard labor while I still work for a NY-based company and did not get the luxury of a day off.  But Landen certainly tried to help out.  This was his reaction when Mom made him shovel.

So for a little while (read: 1 minute) he was staying only in areas that had been shovelled, probably because the rest of that white stuff was VERY cold.  But after that long, thoughtful minute, he decided to barrel right through it all and have some fun. And I don’t mean tentative, poke at it kind of fun.  I mean full-throttle immersion fun.

All in all, I’d call his first excursion into snow a success.  Too bad I keep getting told they don’t get snow out here.  (I personally have a theory that snow messes up desert-dweller’s memories, because since I’ve moved here, I’ve experienced at least 4 snowfalls of at least 6″, and one was easily over 1′.  One was on Christmas.  They have no memory of that.  I don’t quite get it.)  But you don’t need to take my word for it, just ask Levar Burton.  Or Landen, who’s answering it in this picture.

Finally, I leave you with an awesome video.  Our son has the best laugh ever.

First off, it is October 5th and we have snow in our “backyard” (Mount Peavine directly to our south.)  Reno is a strange place meteorologically.

Speaking of the 5th, that means it’s Landen’s birthday – he is 9 months old today.  And he’s every bit of that – he’s quite the little man now.  He still doesn’t crawl properly, but does the army crawl like it’s nobody’s business.  He crawls over legs, chairs… he is not afraid of anything.  And while stacking pillows up keeps most kids away from certain areas, Landen’s smart enough to simply move the pillows aside and crawl through.  He’ll even sometimes just crawl straight over them.  He’s extremely intelligent and picks things up quickly.

For instance, he has started picking cheerios up off the table and putting them in his mouth.  That sounds pretty simple, but it’s a monumental step for a baby.  Of course, now if we could just have him keep clothing and food straight (he tends to want to put his clothes/shoes in his mouth, and more food ends up on his body than down his digestive tract.)

Happy baby with a happy mom

He is a very peculiar boy in a number of ways.  At Granny’s place, he will sit with his basket of toys and can play for a half hour with them contentedly.  At our place, we give him toys and within a minute he is zooming off to another part of the house.  Even new toys or toys he hasn’t seen in a while.  And what he does play with most?  Doors.  He’ll crawl up to a door, particularly the guest bathroom door, and push the door closed.  Then he’ll crawl to the closed part and open it back up full (after wriggling himself out of the way, which is usually his major issue – being in the way of the door he’s trying to play with.)  He can do this a half dozen times before crawling off to do something else.  He also really likes drawers, cabinets – anything he can open and close really – as well as his ongoing love of instruction manuals, tags, and labels.

More playtime

Despite looking happy 90% of the time, he’s been a bit crabby and fussy lately.  He hasn’t eaten as much and he’s been generally fidgety and irritable.  In feeling his gums, we think two more teeth might be popping up any day now on his lower jaw.  This happened the first time he popped two teeth out (we’ve still yet to get a good pic of the teeth, but that will hopefully come soon – especially now that we have batteries for our cameras.)  Either that or he might just be hitting another growth spurt.

He apparently isn’t as scared of grass as I was at his age

Most people have asked about the house.  We are officially 10 days from the absolute deadline for our closing date, and we still don’t know if this transaction is going to happen.  It’s actually looking less and less likely with each passing day.  In short, the seller has been completely uncooperative and uncommunicative.  He was supposed to have had new appliances ordered about a week after we put in a bid (two months ago.)  To this date, there are no appliances in the house.  According to the seller’s agent, he ordered them maybe a week or two ago and they’ve been shipped each time and had some defect in them.  I personally think it’s BS (the fact that he changed the closing date from Oct 1 to Oct 15 was an indication that he hadn’t even done half the things he promised to do.)

While it would blow to a) lose out on the $8000 tax credit and b) have been living out of boxes for the last month, we aren’t bound to this.  And if I am not allowed to see the house this week, we’re going to maybe make a significantly lowered offer or, barring that, simply walk away.  We’re not happy, as the place was excellent, but the gloves need to come off at some point.

The realtor is supposed to swing by today and I have left a message to go with her.  We’ll see if she takes me up on that.  Obviously, her commission rests on this, so she’s going to do everything in her power to get this to happen.

Hopefully the next update will be a bit happier.

Happy Father’s Day, Derek!

Ash has lived in the Reno area her whole life, and has said she’d never actually seen a Pogonip up close (until the one we saw last January.)  Anyway, I moved out here in November 2007, and already I’ve seen this rare phenomenon twice, including this morning.  (It will likely hang around, since it’s not supposed to get above 32 degrees for another week or so.)  Here are some pics – click to enlarge.

As I stated before, the old Reno sayings says you shouldn’t plant your tomatoes until all the snow is melted off Peavine.  Today is the first day of summer and there’s still snow on Mount Peavine, which Ash says usually melts by April, maybe May.  Good thing I haven’t planted any tomato plants.

Literally.

I took a couple other pictures, but my camera phone has taken to deleting pretty pictures randomly. Anyway, I drove on after this shot for about 100′ and it was dissolved. Right time, right place.