Old friends and new memories...

I spent the last week reconnecting with friends at my 30th high school reunion. It was a lot of fun. I missed seeing Dennise, Cindy and Kamei... and especially Claudia, may she rest in peace.


After the reunion, John and I drove to California for a four day cruise to Mexico. We spent the day shopping in Avalon (Catalina Island).





Tuesday morning I woke up early and went out onto our balcony where I was treated by a whale surfacing about 10 yards aft of where I was standing. We were able to watch the whale as "he" swam off.


We spent the day at the beach in Ensenada Mexico. The water was freezing but the sand was spectacular and the company was even better.




Then to finish out the wonderful week we spent two partial days at Disneyland/California Adventure riding rides and pretending we weren't really old enough to have just attended our 30th reunion ;-)

The week came to a close all too quickly but I wouldn't trade any of the memories.

Welcome Little One...

Weighing in at 8 lbs, 1 oz - welcome to Jackson Thomas Vanderpool. Born to Lindsay and Peter on April 13th.

New Year and a New Job!

Ok so the pay and the hours suck, but the title is the right one. I interviewed and was given a part-time job at Home Depot as a Kitchen/Bath designer.

So instead of doing this for myself ... I actually get to get paid to do it. Definitely a step in the right direction.

Welcome Nikolai

Robin & Sisko welcomed their new "little" one.





Nikolai Manuel Farinas arrived at 7:25 this morning (August 11, 2009), weighing in at a whopping 10 pounds, 5 ounces.

Here is Uncle Travis holding baby Nik

Nikolai, Mom & even Dad are doing well.

Nikolai Farinas

We went to Robin's 3-D ultrasound last weekend and Nikolai was being a stubborn little boy (wonder which side of the family he gets that from?) and not showing us his face; so they are redoing the ultrasound this week and hopefully Robin will send us some pictures of it. In the meantime, this was a picture from last week's go around - Sisko was jiggling, wiggling, tickling, and making Robin do squats to see if the baby would turn so we could get pictures. I thought this picture was really, really sweet.

Desert Botanical Gardens

We visited the Desert Botanical Gardens today to see the Dale Chihuly exhibit. Mr. Chihuly is an extrordinary artist in the realm of blown glass. His work is breathtakingly beautiful and anyone that is capable should take the opportunity to see it if at all possible.

Before we went to the gardens, we got together for lunch to celebrate Ryan's 4th birthday!

One week to go!

Yes, it looks like I'm going to make it through another semester. The highlights... I've actually completed my first "painting" - it was for my color class. We had to create patterns and then colorize them. I built my own canvas which was a hexagon (Barb can't do anything "normal" can I?) and then we had to trace one of our patterns on it and then paint it. They get hung up in the hallway at school for the next semester. I actually spent about 10 hours painting it. Kinda cool...

For my custom class; we had to design a custom rug and then a custom chair for a celebrity who's name we pulled out of a hat. I got Jack Black and had visions of doing a "Kung Fu Panda" chair - but I actually ended up doing a Nacho Libre one; because there was no doubt that it was for Jack Black - the panda chairs I sketched just ended up looking like a child's fun chair. We actually then had to hand off our drawings so someone else could build the scale model. Which means I had to build one that looked like a clear parfait glass... which entailed trying to stretch a plastic parfait glass to about 4 times its original size! Can you say four-letter words? LOL! Our last project is working in a group to design a hotel lobby with a theme we (*again*) pulled out of a hat. Our theme was "planets" but Kim & I decided to take it a step further and do "space" in general. I created an elevation of our registration desk and then rendered it. What do you think? Look a little "spacey"? Wait... don't answer that! LOL!

Art History was a piece of cake class - I took it online and I honestly should have waited until this summer to take it so I could have done another class this semester. Oh well ~ hindsight!

My last class was space planning - we had a partial building where we had to design a Culinary Arts school for our first/second projects and our last project has been a three-story art gallery where the first two stories are for the art gallery & peripheral stuff (offices, restrooms, etc.) and the top floor was living quarters for the owners. It was kind of neat being able to work out all of the details, find all of the furniture, lighting, flooring, paint, etc. I still have a little bit of work to do on this but am having problems concentrating on homework right now since I've been awake since 2 this morning (and up doing homework since 3... yeah I know there is something terribly wrong with me!).