Si Ortega!

Last night we had some school night fun with some good friends at Happy Hour at Ortegas in Hillcrest. We had been there for happy hour once before and thought the food and drink prices were awesome. It's one of Todd's favorite restaurants in San Diego.

We met Dejah, Roby, and Sally down there at 5:30PM. We all found parking really close to Ortegas, which is unheard of in Hillcrest. So lucky!

I ordered a pomegranate margarita.

It was either the tequila in the margarita, or the smiles and laughter with friends, that seemed to make my sinus infected head hurt less. I've had a long week and it was only Wednesday!

Todd and Sally all smiles... probably because they know food is coming! :D


Dejah and Roby all smiles, probably because of margarita and sangria!


We ordered the guacamole that they make in front of you. Besides being yummy, it was fun to watch our waitress make it.


She's got ninja guacamole skills! (Yes, I know I just mixed two distinct cultures.)


The result was super-yummy guacamole, which we had to order another batch of!


Our food came and everything was delicious. I had shrimp tacos.


Todd had chicken tacos.


Dejah had poblano pepper quesadilla.


Ahhh... full and happy!


We asked our waitress to take a photo of all of us.


Happy Hour was a huge success. Sometimes it's just fun and relaxing to hang out with friends and laugh, even if it's a "school night". :)

PS - Todd blogged about the inaugural Soup Club meeting that he started with some friends. You can read about it here.

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New 52 | Week 10: Illustrator Class

I'm currently taking an Adobe Illustrator class at ReneePearson.com called "Illustrator 2", taught by Laura Coyle. I really enjoy looking at her illustrations and like her teaching style.

This week I learned to make seamless repeating patterns in Illustrator. It is so fun! We set up our swatches for the repeating patterns on an artboard on the left side of the window. For making stripes, gingham, and plaid, my swatch board looked like this:



Then on the right side of the screen I have a 12x12 area to test out my patterns to see how they'd look.

The blue stripes above make this gingham pattern.


The green and yellow plaid swatch above make this plaid pattern. I rotated the pattern 45 degrees.


Then in other video lessons this week, we created polka dot swatch patterns.


The 12x12 test of one of my above polka dot patterns.


It has been totally fascinating and a great learning experience to learn to create these smaller pattern swatches and see how they'd tile together and make up bigger patterns. I'm loving the class so far and learning lots of neat stuffs!


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About This Project

New52 is a project started by Peppermint and I to encourage each other and others around us to try something new every week in 2011. The "new" each week doesn't have to be something big. It could be something as simple as ordering a new dish instead of old standbys at your favorite restaurant. It's simply opening your heart up to NEW possibilities.

Don't worry if you're late getting started on joining in. It's totally OK if you miss a week here or there. We encourage everyone to keep an open mind about trying something new. This is a life project, and a photography/blog and even scrap challenge if you wish. If you participate this week, please leave a link to your blog post in the link list below. You can also post images to our New 52 Flickr Group! We would love to see what you were inspired to do. 

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It's Been A Few Days

I haven't been able to blog the last few days. Not because I didn't want to. I still feel sick with my sinus infection. Last week I went to the doctor after having a cold for almost two weeks, and having headaches. The doctor said I have a sinus infection. I'm been on antibiotics since then, plus I've been rinsing my sinuses with saline in the neti pot. AND using the humidifier. I thought I was feeling better yesterday but today I had a huge headache again. It's all I could do to work in front of the computer during the day while I have my sinus headache. So at night I'm laying on the couch and not doing stuff in front of the computer. I hope I feel better soon. Seriously, I've never been sick this long before, it'll be 3 weeks on Thursday!

It has been about 12 years since our house exterior has been painted.  We moved in in 2001 and it was painted a couple of years before that.  We hired a painter to paint the exterior of our house, our deck, the trellis above our patio, and also our outside fireplace and BBQ counter. He started last week doing the prep work. He patched stucco and also sanded the paint off our deck.


It actually is totally sanded off now, and we're not painting it, we're staining it a wood color instead.

This is a before photo of the front of our house. You get the general idea what color it is.


We didn't want to rock the boat too much, so we picked similar colors. It was a decision between #1 and #2.

We picked #2, the bottom color, because it seemed more warm and inviting.

Here were the choices for the trim.

We picked the color on the left. Jerry the painter has been working at our house for a few days now, so hopefully I'll have some "after" photos to show soon.

On Saturday we went to the coast and I did an easy run/walk of 2.5 miles to test out my new Nike Free Run+ running shoes. I was sick so I didn't push it. The shoes felt very light and very comfortable, but my legs and feet were not yet used to how flexible and "free" they felt. I felt like my calves, shins, and feet were working harder than normal due to the flexible soles. I think I will get used to them and love them though. I had gone to the Nike website and answered some questions and they gave me 4 choices of shoes that fit my feet and running gait and this was one of them. If you over-pronate, you would need stability shoes and these would not be a good fit for you. I actually under-pronate a little bit when I run, so these shoes are fine for me.

Anyways, after we ran, we went to Beach City Cafe and had lunch. I had the "Son of the Beach" sandwich again and it was delicious. I loved it.


After lunch, Todd rode his bike home while I drove the car home. You can read more about Todd's bike geekness on his blog here.

Yesterday I had lunch with one of my best friends, Meera. We went to Pho Cadao (Vietnamese) in Rancho Bernardo because we both work in RB. I always LOVE getting together with Meera, she's a huge blessing to me and I love her.


We had some fried tofu skin with shrimp paste inside for appetizers. They were delicious!


I had a vegetarian rice vermicelli dish with tofu and eggrolls. It was awesome. Tofu never tasted so good!


Last night I had my hands full with a friend who was having trouble with life and ran away from home. I've known her for 19 years, ever since I was in college and she was a senior in high school. At that time she told me her parental figures were abusing her and begged to stay with me at my apartment, so I let her stay with me for a few months. She went to college and grad school and I thought her life was going to turn out well. She contacted me last week and told me she was in dire straits because her husband and in-laws were abusive to her. She has three kids she didn't plan on, but love them anyways. She's been wanting a divorce because of the lies and abuse from her husband, but he took all their joint money and put it into accounts in his own name and refused her access. She had $1 to her name and didn't have options so she ran away yesterday. I got home from work and she left two messages on my machine saying she ran away and she's at the shopping center near my house. She came and cried and vented, and we let her stay for the night. I think she wanted to stay at our house indefinitely, but we told her it wasn't a good idea this time. I haven't talked to her in years and haven't seen her in decades. It seems selfish of me, but I just can't turn my life upside down to help her right now. I felt somewhat guilty, but I told her she needed to get in contact with her mother and explain the situation. I'm praying for her and will continue to pray for her. I'm very sad for her and thoughts of her situation has consumed me and stressed me out. I'm just not feeling good right now, this, on top of my sinus infection that won't go away. I tend to take on other people's problems and burdens and it really affects me. It's something I need to change in order to free myself mentally. My doctor has referred me to counseling because of this. I've taken on my family's problems as my own, as well as my friends' problems. I think it's unhealthy mentally and emotionally for me and I need to learn how to deal with other people's problems and not take them on myself as such a burden.

This concludes a very long blog post about the last few days. I just hope that I will start to feel better physically soon.

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Breaking Out of Scrapbooking Rut

For a while there I wasn't scrapbooking very much. It wasn't because I didn't want to. It seemed like I was at a loss creatively. I'd put some things onto a page, move them around, and nothing looked good. How did I break out of my scrapbooking rut? By not scrapbooking. By giving myself a break and not put pressure on myself to create. By doing lots of other things that inspired me. I took photos with my new camera. I read magazines and books. I wrote in my journal. I knitted and crocheted. I organized my desk. Then I made a list. :) I made a list of things to do on a scrapbook page. I thought if I just incorporated one or two of the ideas I wrote down on my list, then at least I had ideas I could concentrate on each page I tried to create.

Things to do on a scrapbook page:

• Vary the size of fonts in titles
• Vary the size of alphas in titles
• Hand-write journaling
• Use stitching
• Use photoshop brushes
• Vary the size of elements on a page
• Use thought/speech bubbles
• Place a title sideways
• Do the layout, then tilt everything at an angle, except the background paper
• Journal around the layout border
• Put white borders around all the photos
• Crop photos in interesting ways
• Use doodled borders

Those are just some of the things I thought of.  Things I sometimes forget to use on pages, but I always like when I see other people use them.

I also read a great article by Ali Edwards called "Breaking Out of a Creative Rut".  It's a guest post here on Kelly Rae Roberts' blog.

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New 52 | Week 9: New Running Shoes

I usually blog about my weekends, but I didn't this past weekend.  Why not?  I didn't do anything exciting.  I didn't run or even really get outside.  Oh wait, I take that back.  I did go for a two mile walk at Miramar Lake but I didn't take any photos.  This weekend was really cold in San Diego.  On Saturday the high was only 48 and broke some 100 year old record.  On top of the cold and rain/hail outside, I was sick.  I have been sick with a cold for two weeks.  I never get colds that last this long!  I finally went to the doctor this morning because I was experiencing sinus pressure and headaches.  Doctor said I have a sinus infection.  So I almost made my New 52 this week my very first experience using a neti pot.  You can watch a YouTube video here for how that works.  I didn't even know what a neti pot was until this morning, when my doctor mentioned it.  Then Peppermint mentioned it to me too.  So now I'm a proud owner of a neti pot and nicely rinced nasal passages.  But I digress... the neti pot is NOT my New 52 this week.

I got new running shoes!

It's the Nike Free Run+. What's so great about new running shoes, you ask?

It's my first pair of Nike running shoes, and these are so light at 6 oz each that they don't feel like any running shoes I've worn before. Plus they have flexible soles to simulate shoe-less running. People say it takes some getting used to. I have not run in them yet, only walked, because of my cold.

They're special also because my last seven pairs of running shoes have been the Saucony ProGrid Ride.

After all my injuries in the last few months, I've decided that changing my running shoes would be good. I finally got rid of all these shoes I had hanging around the house. I don't know why I kept them around, except that one of the two pairs of Adidas in the lower left corner of the photo were my marathon shoes. I can't even remember which pair I wore when I ran my first and only marathon in Honolulu, but it was one of those Adidas.

I'm excited to try out my new running shoes this weekend. Hopefully I'll feel good enough to run, and the weather will cooperate!

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About This Project

New52 is a project started by Peppermint and I to encourage each other and others around us to try something new every week in 2011. The "new" each week doesn't have to be something big. It could be something as simple as ordering a new dish instead of old standbys at your favorite restaurant. It's simply opening your heart up to NEW possibilities.

Don't worry if you're late getting started on joining in. It's totally OK if you miss a week here or there. We encourage everyone to keep an open mind about trying something new. This is a life project, and a photography/blog and even scrap challenge if you wish. If you participate this week, please leave a link to your blog post in the link list below. You can also post images to our New 52 Flickr Group! We would love to see what you were inspired to do. 

Read More »