Hey folks. Thought we’d check in. We had the most delightful Valentines Day. The rainy winter weather broke just enough to create a gorgeous weekend and we took advantage of it on a whim. We went up to Mount Bonell and hiked around Laguna Gloria. Perfectly romantic…

… Then we got sick. Both of us are now pretty ill suffering from 2 completely different sicknesses. Jessie has Ancient Indian immunities that protect her from most sicknesses, but poor girl is being attacked by a virus. Since I work from home and typically don’t leave the premises but for 4 structured hours a week, I fall into the highly-susceptible-to-anything, hermit-me-away-from-small-children category. But by the power of NyQuil, we will get through this.

Maybe this decline in health will lead to a boon in blogging!

It seems everyone has been sick this winter at some point and we’re now just keeping up with the Joneses.

Other than that hrmmm…. I keep trying to convince Jessie to let me have people over so we can hang out in the garage and do stuff. Like a weekly Garage Hangout. A weekly CAR-nival. A BAY of Sunshine. I’ll win her over soon and one day you might find yourself hanging out in my garage.

Ah the joys of home ownership! Jess and I have really been enjoying our house. And so have other friends and guests! It’s actually been crazier than you can imagine. Our dance card has been pretty full and we calculated that we will have had only 4 weekends “free” (with no guests or trips planned) at home from the time we bought the house all the way through Thanksgiving. It’s all a joy, please don’t misinterpret, we’ve just been busy every weekend.

On separate weekends we had the Rices and the Von Kanels come visit with their kids and we forced them to sleep on our pull out sleeper sofa. We even forced a sleeper sofa on Jessie’s own mom! How tragic! No matter how great a couch is, a sleeper sofa still a thin 2″ mattress on a mess of metal.

This extreme guilt led us to make some changes for our future guests. We bought a mattress and after a couple trips to Ikea (our generation’s Sears), our guest room was complete. It now features a firm, but comfortable Queen-size bed and a gigantic, humongous, gargantuan desk.

The Office (aka “Paravel South”)

The room also doubles as my home office. This obviously isn’t ideal, even I know that. But until we have the time and money to build my modular MD100 Manchaca (pronounced “Man-Shack”) with solar panels and a heating/cooling wall A/C… it’ll have to do.

We buttressed together 2 Ikea Vika Byske table tops on some Vika Lerberg trestles. It creates a gigantic workspace that is definitely pleasing to me, and spacious enough when Paravel is in our 3-man formation and needs to meet down South.

There are more photos over on our flickr set.

Coming for a visit?

If you’re planning on visiting us just know that we’ve got a bed waiting for you now instead of a lumpy metal death trap. The door to the room doesn’t quite shut, and there’s no paint on the baseboards… but these are all improvements we’ll make in time. We’ve got to have something to keep you coming back…

And act quickly, because we might get a Japanese foreign exchange student! We hear they pay madd bank! So unless you got the benjis to subsidize our extravagant lifestyle, you just got usurped!

I kiiid, I kiiiiiid!