How to protect your hot tub awning from blowing over in a dust storm? Two words: Ratchet straps.

Because apparently the Warrior Dash wasn’t enough adventure for the month of May, Chris and I, along with 10 or so of our friends, signed up to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. This is the conversation that was had about two weeks before The Event. Co-worker: Oh, you guys are going skydiving out at that place in Jamul? Us: Yes, that’s the place! Co-worker: My buddy used to work at that place, I know it pretty well. Lots of people around here skydive there. In fact, do you know that older guy who works for one of our…

So at the beginning of May, Chris and I participated in the Warrior Dash, along with some good friends of ours. To put it mildly, none of us had really spent much time on those things that people typically do before running a race, like “training” and “eating healthy” or even “stretching.” Except Payson’s wife, who happened to do all three. We had a friendly bet amongst the four of us. It was girls against boys, and whoever lost had to cook a fancy dinner for the other two. The winners got to dictate the menu. Now, who won the…

My husband, for those who don’t know, grew up in Iowa. He was raised on a farm (really!) growing corn and hogs and plus this one lady wrote a great book about their library cat. And also, in case you didn’t know, my husband has a twin brother. My husband and his twin — Frick and Frack to you — have been farming corn since they were knee high to a grasshopper, or something like that: But now we live in southern California. And Frick has come out to live in California, too. So what did these two boys do?…

Last night, Chris and I were relaxing in the living room, watching an episode of House. At one point in the episode, Dr. House has the team meet him in the parking lot of the hospital. The following scene takes place: House has driven Colossus, a bright chartreuse-and-blue monster truck, right into his handicapped parking spot (and several others). He’s got to lower a rope ladder from the window just so the team can climb in, which they all do. As House and his team are careening around the city, discussing medical diagnoses in the giant monster truck, Chris turns…

Things have been a little quiet around the blog lately, I’ll be the first to admit it. Work has been absolutely insane, 12 hour work days six days a week. There are days when the weather is beautiful and I’ve accomplished so much and I love my job, and then there are days when I have to go home and cry for an hour on my lunch break. You know, the usual highs and lows? And not that there isn’t a lot to talk about. But it’s all work. In fact, a co-worker and I were just commenting on how…

Let’s just take a minute to appreciate how much I love pizza. Although, ironically, I didn’t like pizza so much when I was growing up. The irony here is that when I was growing up, my father owned a pizza restaurant. When I was about 8 or 9, my parents hauled myself and my younger brother out to this small university town in Kansas. My father was going to open a pizza place. He bought a space from another pizza place that was going out of business. The place was located across the street from campus, and the previous owners…

Maybe you remember that last year we forgot to make reservations until February 13. And the year before that we didn’t have reservations and ended up with a three hour wait at Claim Jumper in which I was so hungry by the time we got our food I ended up with a migraine, so this year I was determined to make Valentine’s Day reservations early. I booked us a romantic dinner cruise. Basically, we get dressed up fancy and eat aboard a cruise ship while it does hot laps around the San Diego harbor for three hours. If you’re not…