Lisa and Michael

We’re back from Orlando and we had a blast! The conference was good and Lisa really enjoyed her time at the resort, even if she did get a good burn on Tuesday. We enjoyed some great seafood and had an incredible time at Islands of Adventure and tons of success at the outlet malls. We did so much in just 5 days.

Plus, Saturday we planted the garden. Man, was that a lot of work, but so far, everything is looking good. Now, if we can just keep the dogs out of there! We’ve planted a variety of tomatoes, onions, peppers, and herbs.  We should be enjoying our harvest end of July, first of August.

Finally, Darrell, a Cardinals fan, made the mistake of leaving his Jeep at the house today:

I know Michael has been working/learning, but I have sure enjoyed relaxing, shopping, sleeping late, making friends with the other spouses while laying by the pool and of course sipping cocktails the whole time. You can’t get much better than this! I do worry that Oscar may be in charge at home, but we will have to deal with that later I suppose. I will continue to rest it up on this trip because it seems that we are always working on a house project back home. The day after we get home from Orlando, we will be going to a plant show to pick our plants for our very first garden. Then once the roots are good, we hope to paint the house to go with the garage door. All this and work full time too! Already a busy summer ahead.

The new garage door is installed, it looks nice. New pic below.

We switched our auto insurance to GEICO this week. Even with adding an additional vehicle, our new premium is a whopping 31% lower with GEICO than it was at Farmer’s. What a rip-off they turned out to be! Lisa and I try not to think about it, it makes us sick we did not switch earlier.

We’re off to Orlando this Monday for a business trip, I have a conference to attend and Lisa is going to hang out by the pool, read, maybe do some work. We’re going to bypass Disney for a change and check out Islands of Adventure this time.

I decided not to bring a bulky camera around and am instead going to rely on the Blackberry as camera, and what’s cool is Google allows you to email directly to your Picasa account, so I setup a new Orlando album that we’ll be able to post to instantaneously. Check it out!

Kill May flowers?

I woke up this morning around 4:30 and saw giant snowflakes the size of silver dollars floating down from the ice cold sky. Springtime in New Mexico is so unpredictable.

It was bound to happen sooner rather than later.

It’s the house’s original door ca. 1979. It’s 100% wood and very, very heavy. It took everything I had to get back it into place, or close enough. Murphy’s Law: The new Jeep is trapped inside, but escaped unscathed. Lisa and I knew this was going to happen, we were just hoping not for another few years! Not much you can do about that. Since it’s so old and falling apart, there was no sense in getting someone out to fix it, we decided to replace the whole thing. And that happens tomorrow.

4/18 Update – The new door:

Lisa is having fun with the new Wrangler, that was her request as we crossed the Rio Salado over, and over, and over. Of course, with the drought, the raging river that was last fall is merely a trickle now, not even enough to get muddy:

We stopped in Riley to check out the school ruins and Santa Rita church. Lisa had to go potty. Fortunately for her, there were facilities:

A couple of hours before Riley, we drove through Torreon. I had totally forgotten there was a fire last year, talk about scorched earth:

Anyhow, it was a nice day out. And since it’s likely we might lose the warranty should Chrysler go bankrupt (unfortunately, the government warranty protection announced March 29th only covers vehicles purchased on that day or after, so anyone who bought a car two days earlier are screwed) we wanted to get all the kinks worked out before then.

The Riley, NM loop: