Our office, like many across the country, has a group football pool. And doesn’t it always seem like it’s someone’s random friend that seems to win? It’s not the dude who lives and breathes football and can recite every team’s stats by memory. No, its that dude’s roommate’s girlfriend’s best friend from college, who knows nothing about football, and just put her $5 into the pool on a “whim.” The win comes out for the week and everyone’s like, “Katie? Who’s Katie? Does she even work here? Didn’t she win last week?!” I, also, know nothing about football. And yet,…

It’s not that there’s nothing exciting happening. It’s just that most of my life right now consists of : get up, go to work, go home, go to bed. So I give you just about all I have right now – a pretty picture from last weekend. Here is the Salton Sea at sunset, from 9,500 feet: And here’s another one, from a different trip, of the Pacific Ocean near the Ramona airport:

Whenever there is a spider in the house (or scorpion, or just about any living creature except ants), I am not the one who kills it. I rescue it and set it free in the great outdoors. I just can’t bring myself to kill it. There was a tiny spider crawling across our kitchen yesterday. Chris was barefoot, and since I was wearing shoes, he asked me to step on it. ME: No. CHRIS: Why not? ME: I can’t kill it! CHRIS: But why not? ME: Because it’s just hanging out minding it’s own business. It doesn’t deserve to die…

Yesterday afternoon there was a giant power outage. It affected people from Yuma, AZ all the way to San Diego, and as far south as Baja Mexico and as far north as Orange County, CA. This means there was no electricity. Also if you had Sprint or AT&T cell phones you had no bars. However, if you had Verizon, like I did, people were still calling you about work stuff. You would think the advantage of a blackout would be that you get to leave work early. I was not so lucky because my work has generator backup and my…

Sleepy and Mrs. Sleepy get their revenge for Prank of the Century. We came home to the stone tortoise at the bottom of our pool. He was wearing a work shirt with the name of Sleepy’s business printed on it, as a little souvenir.

So, we recently moved from Rental House A to Rental House B in San Diego, because House B was a bit nicer and also had a fence for the dog and our lease was up at the old place. Anyway, some of the last items we moved from House A to House B were the cleaning supplies, because we needed them to clean up after all our stuff was moved out. So here we are, one of our first nights in the new house, and the dishes were dirty and I wanted to wash the dishes. We had no dishwasher…

So, Chris and I rented our house out for a year. The tenant’s lease has just ended and we have informed them that we’re not renewing. They are not too happy with this decision and the retired gentleman confronts my husband and our agent on the front lawn with a baseball bat. BUT WAIT IT GETS BETTER. I MEAN WORSE. IT GETS WORSE. Once the tenants have vacated the property, we are left with the aftermath. They managed to break, dirty, or otherwise destroy almost every square inch of the house. They violated multiple conditions of their lease including, but…

When Frack and I met, he owned a house that he had purchased at the tail end of 2005 – in other words, the height of the real-estate bubble. It was a pretty nice house, about 1800 sq ft with 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. It had an open floorplan in the kitchen/living area, and the master bedroom was a generous size with a walk-in closet. We spent a couple years putting some sweat equity in it – landscaping the backyard, painting walls, putting in new wood flooring, etc. However, no amount of sweat equity was going to make up…

I spent the past weekend in Vegas with my husband and some of my good friends. Although we had a fantastic time, I noticed a few changes from the Vegas of my early and mid twenties. I present to you: The Top 5 Signs You Are Getting Old(er) – The Sin City Edition The Casino employees stop having to verify your ID card’s authenticity with their supervisor. In fact, they stop carding you alltogether. During the cab ride, you don’t bother asking which casinos have the best mile-high margaritas or which after-hours clubs are the most happening. Instead, you discuss…