New cars are fun

Well, it's a new-to-me car anyway :) Finally picked up the new ride on Saturday and it's been fun to drive so far, though I do need to get used to the smaller windows. Visibility is not as good as in my old Civic so I find myself triple-checking for cars before I switch lanes. I love having leather seats. Oh, and the adjustable lumbar support thing in the driver's seat is awesome!

There are so many little toys and bells and whistles to learn about. Right now I'm just focusing on learning where all the radio and climate controls are without having to look at them...funny the things that become instinct and how lost you are when the environment around you changes.

So many updates...

Our S.F Trip
The bad news is that we had to postpone our planned trip to Vail this year because the friends who were going with us had some things come up and couldn't make the trip anymore. The good news is we spent a week in the bay area recently boarding with said friends in Tahoe instead (tough life, I know :P). We boarded for three days straight at Kirkwood, Heavenly, then Sierra.


We had a fantastic time. The first day at Kirkwood was a little icy, but well-groomed so it was still pretty good. That night it dumped several feet of fresh powder and continued to snow all day. For a beginner like me, it was a bit too much of a good thing as the deep powder along with the snowy conditions made it a little difficult to do any carving. In fact, we ended up hiking a good portion of the day because our friend S's board didn't have enough wax on it and even on a solid downslope she wasn't moving more than a few inches in the slightly wet snow. Between hiking back down to the shop and digging out of huge drifts all day, I got more of a workout getting out of trouble than actually boarding :P

The last day at Sierra though was epic. Just the right amount of powder, sunny conditions, relatively short lines--it was great! And I did improve my carving skills a bit, so all in all we ended the trip on a very high note.

So what do you do after spending three days straight snowboarding? Go rock climbing the next day and then play volleyball two days in a row after that, of course! :) Amazingly, our bodies held out; no injuries, no major pains. We had an absolutely fantastic time on our trip, all due to seeing and spending time with all our friends out there. Special thanks to S, R, and their dog Rocky for hosting us in their lovely home all week. Can't wait to see you all again in July when we're out for the first wedding this season!

Big Weekend Purchase #1
Since we've been back, we've been pretty busy. We've been missing a few big furniture items even after six months of (painful, tedious, boring) shopping, one of which is an entertainment unit for the TV and stereo components. Right now the nice new TV is sitting on our old coffee table and the stereo components on a $10 BB&B nightstand. This weekend though we finally decided on a wall unit that fits all our various technologies and matches the furniture we already have. Phew.... That was pretty painful. It should be here next week. Then we just need to get another chair or two for more seating and the living room will be finis!

Then there's Big Weekend Purchase #2. After even more painful shopping, today we finally got our hands on the car we've been shopping for since November. We ended up with a Certified Used 2005 Audi A4 1.8T Quattro. I kind of still can't believe it. My '98 Civic is going to my sisters so they can finally have a car and I'll be picking this baby up in a week or so. On a side note, Audi has a pretty amazing Certified program compared to the others we looked at: 2 additional years or 50,000 miles on top of the original 4 years/50,000 miles. So my '05 car has slightly more coverage than a brand new '07 would. That's pretty cool.

So now, basically, we have no money left :P Guess we'll be sitting at home enjoying our TV for entertainment for a while!

Gung Hay Fat Choy!

Happy Chinese New Year, everybody! It's been a busy few weekends for W. and I getting ready for the holiday and today we did the requisite visits to different family members houses. Tomorrow we finish up the visits with my immediate family coming over to our house and then the extended family gathering at my aunt & uncle's place. I'd write more but, frankly, I'm exhausted. Spent almost all day yesterday cleaning the entire 2400 sq. ft. house to get ready for the new year. Time for some rest....

Happy, healthy, and prosperous new year wishes to you all!

Curtains and blinds

Yay, we finally got some curtains and window treatments! Only did a few of the windows for now to try out the different vendors we're using and their products, but we're very happy so far. The curtains in the living room are a pretty dramatic red, but I think I like 'em. They're a faux silk material, fully lined, and they helped us pick the curtain rods and finials (did I spell that right?) that they're hanging from. If you look at the upper left hand corner of the first picture you'll see our rear speaker hanging riiiight next to the curtain rod. That's where the wiring is for that speaker and we would have had to move the pre-drilled (and pretty large) hole in order to move the speaker further from the window, which didn't seem to be worth the effort. So we had to work the curtain rod selection around it a bit, but it all worked out. Now the final thing we need to finish off this room is an entertainment unit for the TV and surround sound/stereo components. It's been a really tough search so far because nothing seems to fit both our large TV and W's oversized components, but we'll keep hunting.

The second room to get window treatments was the study. Poor W. was going blind because his desk faces the window and the glare coming through the temporary paper shades was making computer usage pretty hard. On the advice of the window designer lady we got faux woods blinds that are routeless--that is, it doesn't have holes for the strings to pass through so you can more fully block out light when the blinds are closed. The strings wrap around the invidual slats instead. W's loving 'em so far. Still need to get some curtains in here, but the new blinds are a big help for making the room look a little more polished. What would really help though is if we each cleaned up our desks :P

Finally, the last room we did was our bedroom. Here we got double honeycomb shades that you can pull up from the bottom or drop from the top for more privacy. They're like two layers of honeycombs you'd see in a beehive, only hollow, so the air in between actually helps insulate against exterior sound and loss of heat or A/C. The bedroom windows face out to the street so some sound insulation was important to us and anything that helps keep the heating bills down is a good thing. Can't wait to get some pretty curtains in here too to finish off the look. Notice W's very high-end end table, aka my stereo box. His actual end table is currently being used to hold the stereo components in the living room.

Wow, big haircut

I last cut my hair in September just before I left San Francisco (and got a great cut for free because I did one of those hair model things where you let someone practice new techniques on your hair). Five months went by fast and my hair was starting to look a little...just, eh. You know what I mean? So I finally made an appointment with my local hairdresser who I've been going to since college. Even when I moved to S.F. I'd often wait until I came home for visits to get my hair cut by her. So, obviously, I trust her and told her to just do whatever she wanted and to just give me something fun and with lots of layers.

45 minutes later and my hair went from right about at my shoulders to now ending just about where the back of my head meets my neck. And I love it! So fun, so different. No pictures to post, sorry; maybe later. Big changes can be a lot of fun.

Curtains

Yay, the curtains for the living room are coming next week! On Tuesday, actually, so only four more days to wait. They originally told us it could take 6-8 weeks or something like that but it's only been about 3 weeks--hooray! I hope I like 'em once they're in; I wasn't 100% sold on them but W. and the designer convinced me to go with it so we'll see. Even if I don't like them, I will make myself like them given what we spent!

The Secret to Workout Motivation

My husband is a genious. He's figured out the secret to consistently staying motivated to work out:

That's right, play video games *while* you're on the mini home stepper machine :P You can't see it because I couldn't get the pic at an angle where you could see the stepper and the TV, but he is indeed stepping up and down on a little machine "working out" while playing Gran Turismo.

Also pardon the lamp sans lampshade in the pic that's blocking the TV. Still haven't posted a new pic yet of the living room because, as you can see, it's still not totally done. Still need an entertainment unit so the TV can stop resting on my old coffee table and so Willy can have a nightstand again instead of using it to rest all the components on. Obviously still need lampshades to go with the lamps. And we did finally order some curtains for the windows but it'll be a few more weeks before those come in. Who knew, by the way, that curtains could be so expensive! *sigh* but this home and all its accoutrements (did I spell that right?) are what we've been penny pinching for all these years so we have to indulge ourselves a little, right?

For the time being, here's a pic of the table in the eat-in kitchen area. We got a counter-height

table, which is a lot of fun. Like our dining room table, this table also has a hidden butterfly leaf so the table opens up to a big square. We wanted the option of having more seating for all my family if we ever get around to hosting them all at the house. Half the family still hasn't seen our place!

Fun toys

Our favorite new toy is the GPS system my family bought us for Christmas. It's awesome! And definitely a neccesity around crazy roads-based-on-old-cow-paths Boston. We didn't see this gift coming at all; what a great surprise. Thanks, family!

I've definitely made more use of it than W. so far, but then again he seems to have a GPS built into his brain so he doesn't need this as much as I do. We looked at some of the integrated GPS systems when we were still shopping around for a car for me, but those cost about $2000 as an add-on, which is multiples more than the stand-alone units cost. And we can move the stand-alone unit between both our cars, which is nice. Woo-hoo, no more getting lost for me!

56 degrees in Boston...in January....

Today is Jan. 4, 2007 and I am blogging from Boston. It's bright, sunny, and in the mid- to high-50s here. What is wrong with this picture? Better yet, on Saturday it's forecasted to be in the 60s (but raining)! Craziness.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, everyone! Sorry we haven't been around with any updates, but the holidays have been keeping us busy. Lots of fun events with family, visits with old friends, etc. We've probably gained about 10 lbs. each with all the food we've been eating (but I thought there were no calories at Christmastime?).


Here's the infamous tree, all decorated. Well, somewhat decorated anyway. We depended on borrowed ornaments from my family this year since we didn't have any of our own purchased yet. Turned out OK, if a little sparse.