Gardening

Here is my first attempt to gardening. Mom V gave me a bunch of Peter Pans and I planted them in an arch-like row in the front yard. I grew up with a green-thumbed mom but never understood the anatomy-physiology of plant life and how to help them thrive. I was always too afraid to try gardening..thought it was something for old people and that it's a trait you'd have naturally. After mama Colleen showed me how easy gardening can be while she and Bruce stayed over during Chloe's birth, I decided to try it myself and am really enjoying the process. I guess it could be coincidence that Colleen and I have the same (visual/tactile) learning style to get me going in my gardening endeavor. I'm thankful Colleen taught by showing me and working along side me..and the results are uplifting. My mom always taught by telling or talking (auditory learning) and she'd assumed I picked up on what she'd be saying.  Anyways I'm giving myself a year to experiment with gardening..and if I start hating it, I'll hire a landscaper to do the yards weekly.

Hallelujah!

My cousin Roxanne was singing this song at her 18th birthday party and I wanted to hear the popular version of this song "Hallelujah" by Alexandra Burke. I never heard of her before, and she sounds good! I want to sing like her. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsuXbkrA_AQ

Rotten Neighborhood

What disturbing news this evening: Bruce and Colleen's RV got egged last night (or early this morning). What a way to be invited into California. They didn't realize it until close to sun down, but Bruce heard a car drive by and a crack noise and thought little of it until the evidence showed Thursday...cracked egg shells and dried on slime on the back-driver side of the RV. Poor RV...Poor mom and dad. I'm particularly sensitive to vandalism and stuff like this because I came from an affluent neighborhood where almost everyone knows each other and watches out for each other...but not this much vandalism in a 5 year span. Here, in this neighborhood, we just know one family and know tidbits of the rest. Wishing we all had a block party (or community event) to make us closer together.

A Celebration for Chloe Joyce

Ellen is one of my very sweetest friends. She threw me an intimate baby shower and set everything up so cutely. She had it hosted in her house and provided the party favors, activities for kids, games for giveaways, food, and it seems like so much more. I like intimate parties where we get to talk with each other and catch up on each others lives. It's not very often that I get to see special friends like these who show they care for me and I think I'll try my best to make it a point to see them regularly ~ like every two weeks or so. Playdates are essential now since Breanna loves the kiddos.

I want to thank Vanya for getting the game gifts, and Mike and Sheryl for the cupcakes and fruit, and Bong and Laura for the yummy food. Many many thanks!

Noisy Neighbors

It was another long night pretending the next door neighbor kids WERE NOT throwing a LONG, LOUD party while the parents were out. At the last 3AM party, David made an anonymous police call to shut them up...and early this morning at 1AM David yelled at them over the fence to quiet down (and they did). He also mailed a letter to the kid's parents about these secretive behaviors that we've been tolerating for 5 years now ~ we've had enough. With a new baby arriving soon, we're going to need all the sleep we can get! How else can we solve this problem with the neighbors?

Rainbow Halo

There is that rainbow around the sun again. I started noticing this beautiful phenomenon in the sky in the High Desert when I started college. I've been a sundog spotter ever since. Wikipedia explains this phenomenon best ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_dog

And look at that bright spot above the sun. That's either a lens flare from my camera phone or I'd like to assume that there is a heavenly being hovering above the sun. I really cannot explain what that is scientifically ~ and if you know me, I love making sense of God's creation using science. Isn't HE a wonderful Creator. I love our Magnificent Artist!

Year 2010

Hoping to have more quality time with friends and get all my personal projects done this new year:

1. grandma Rebings story
2. yardwork
3. getting a second job
4. upping my graphic business
5. more

Our First Miller Christmas Tree

I'm so proud of our Christmas Tree. It's our first one ever and we've built a train that goes around it w/ this cool set that our daddy from Michigan bought. Yay! Check out what we used for decor: I had no store bought ornaments but didn't need them so we used fall silk leaves instead. I also found a few ornaments given as gifts, some pipe cleaners I found at grandma's and from school, and Breanna's red scarf. It looks creatively marvelous...for realz!

A Bag Glutton

Wow! I found that CVS was getting rid of their really cutesy whimsical shoulder bags Their original price was $14.99 and got marked down to $0.80. I got 5 different colors and designs to coordinate with my colorful wardrobe now. I got so greedy that I rejected my friend's request to buy one off of me because I want them all! I'm going to rethink my gluttony and perhaps give in to sharing my bag joy to her.

Apple Fries?

Ewe...Breanna is eating sliced apples with ketchup...AND LIKES IT! Yuck.

Penguins Penguins!

I've been working on a really hard billboard project for my Photoshop class. We were to pretend we were hired for Sea World who'd hired us to design a mock up of a Penguin Encounter billboard that'd show at night. I got good comments about my board as well as the dramatic night effect I placed in the background. For this blogpost...I'm only going to show the billboard design. Wondering how Sea World is doing these days.

Legoland Lesson Learned

One weekday in October I decided to treat Breanna to a surprise Legoland visit assuming that they'd be open all night. Then I arrived at 5:49PM just as they were closing! I learned my lesson to review the Legoland calendar before heading on a semi-long trip. I was only able to take a few good pics of Breanna on their ginormous lego pumpkin.

PHOTOGRAPHY

I just found my shutterfly account and found a bunch of old pictures.
http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8AbtWTFs5cs2Xa

The Gift of a New Year

December 31st - the last day of 2008. If I was superstitious enough I'd be tidying up every nook and cranny of my house, restoring prized possessions to fine detail, exercising 10 pounds away in a day, thinking totally happy thoughts until my head lit like the sun - but I'm not superstitious anymore. Over the past decade I learned that I will not get taller and richer no matter how many times I jumped with so much change is in my pocket on the first second of the new year. I learned that it's better to change a bad habit now or any time of the year than to suggest a change on my psyche with a New Year's resolution. It really shouldn't matter how many friends I have or what quality of life I'm living. Every day I live is a gift from God to repent and make matters right with the ones I love. Thank you God for my string of pearls. May the last one be the best, but I'm hoping it won't be soon.

Candy Cane Court is neighborhood's gift to the community

Christmas time is so exciting at the Vidal house. The lights are a little more festive than ever and we added more karaoke songs to our Christmas Karaoke song list. I recall an article about my mom's neighborhood published a few years ago too and I'm excited to share it again!

POWAY ---- When Rose and Rudy Vidal bought their Parkside home in 1990, the surrounding area was a brand-new upper-middle-class neighborhood filled with tile-roof and stucco houses along a small cluster of quiet streets.

The Vidals had no clue that 15 years later, the area would be a major destination for people seeking annual holiday magic.

These days, traffic is bumper to bumper in the neighborhood every night in December. The draw is thousands of Christmas lights, lawn ornaments and other decorations that transform the area into Poway's semi-famous Candy Cane Court.

Now an icon for both holiday and neighborhood spirit, the site is a regular on published lists of holiday attractions in the region. Bus and limousine tour companies also include the neighborhood among the stops in their Christmastime sightseeing packages.

Grinch types would probably resent such an annual invasion of their neighborhood. Candy Cane Court residents revel in it, however, going out with their decorations and then spending their evenings in their driveways so they can enjoy visitors' reactions.

"It's just fun," Vidal said last week. "You'll see cars driving very, very slow, like in a funeral procession, with the lights turned off. Many people are walking, children (act) like they're in a park, and there'll be people singing on the street. ... We look forward to it cause it brings us good feelings."

Big on neighborliness
Candy Cane Court extends along Hickory Street and down three cul-de-sacs that adjoin it ---- Rockrose, Hickory and Butterwood courts. Like the rest of Parkside, the neighborhood is tucked into the southern end of the massive Rancho Arbolitos residential development.

Built by Standard Pacific Homes just west of Carriage Road, the neighborhood is within an easy walk of Starridge Park and accessed via Saddlewood Drive. Houses in the neighborhood are one- and two-story with square footage ranging from about 2,200 to just over 3,000.

Most of those who bought into the neighborhood when it was new were young families with children, residents said. The years since then have seen relatively few homes change hands, they said.

When houses in the neighborhood do sell, they go for anywhere between $800,000 to more than $1 million these days, homeowners said.

Original residents described each other as friendly enough from the get-go that waves from driveways and front-yard chats were common. Hectic lives and busy schedules, however, generally kept residents from gathering en masse except for the occasional barbecue or party, they said.

That changed after Butterwood Court resident Vicki Lammers decided the neighborhood needed some kind of tradition.

"I wanted to do something that would bring us all together as a group," she said. "One of my friends told me that she was making all of her candy cane (lawn ornaments) for her house, so I asked her for the directions. It sounded pretty easy. So I wrote it out for all of the neighbors."

Thousands of lights
Lammers concentrated her efforts on getting people on her own street to make the canes and use them decorate their homes. Not everybody initially bought into the idea, she said.

Those who did produced candy canes of varying quality and aesthetic appeal, said Lammers, adding that early manufacturing methods were to blame. She and other residents said they used backyard barbecues and ovens to heat plastic PVC pipes, then tried to bend them into the correct shape and attach lights.

The first display featured about 12,000 lights, Lammers said. The candy canes' inconsistent appearance notwithstanding, their bright and cheery impact on the neighborhood prompted growing numbers of residents to join in and expand the effort to include other types of lighted decorations in subsequent years, they said.

Pre-made candy canes' arrival in retail stores brought nearly the entire neighborhood on board.

"I remember the first year that Wal-Mart started carrying candy canes," Lammers said. "I went there and I told them, 'you better start stocking up on them,' cause I knew everybody in the neighborhood would be in there buying them."

Now, less than half a dozen of the neighborhood's homes stay dark when Candy Cane Court is turned on every year, residents said. Participants constantly try to improve their personal displays, and this year's utilizes more than 50,000 lights, Lammers said.

Randy Dutcher is among the most innovative of the residents. His Butterwood Court home is drawing high praise from both neighbors and visitors this year because its decorations include lighted images of a ringing bell on the roof, snowflakes falling down the side of the house, and a star shooting out of a palm tree.

Hunt starts early
Dutcher, who moved in the neighborhood in 1993 with his wife Pat and the couple's three daughters, makes most of his decorations himself. He admitted to having a secret weapon in a friendly competition that has him and Lammers trying to outdo each others' displays each year.

"I have a computer program that controls light sequences," Dutcher said. "My goal is to kind of dink around with these computer programs and try and do something (different every year). I don't golf, so I guess it's turned into kind of my thing ---- I'm a geek who likes to play with Christmas lights."

He and other residents said they start planning and gathering supplies for their Candy Cane Court displays months before the day after Thanksgiving, which signals the start of an unofficial set-up period.

"You have to kind of start looking over the summer," said Kathie Yauk, who moved to the neighborhood with husband Mark and their two young sons nine years ago.

Like other newcomers before them, the family "chimed right in" when it came to Candy Cane Court and quickly learned that the QVC shopping channel and Costco were prime hunting grounds, she said, adding that both begin offering Christmas decorations in August.

Her family now has more money than she would like to think about invested in its annual display, which had a giant, blow-up snow globe added to it this year, Yauk said.

Getting in the spirit
Blown fuses and electric bills that are twice what they are in a normal month are common problems for Candy Cane Court residents. Many said they have installed extra circuit breakers in their homes, to handle the extra electricity load needed once a year.

The day after Thanksgiving, Candy Cane Court's creators start dragging storage boxes out of attics and garages and go to work. Set-up takes a week to 10 days for most residents.

Although grumbling is common early in that period, participants said, their complaints give way to a sense of purpose and comradery as the decorations start going up and neighbors jump in to help each other. However, they said the real payoff comes when switches are thrown for the first time and visitors start oohing and aahing.

"The satisfaction that you get from the people and everybody telling you how nice it is or that it has become their family tradition to come see the lights makes it all worthwhile," said Yauk. "A lady driving by last week stopped to say thank you. This was her fourth time this year driving by.

"We get a lot of feedback that they really enjoy it. And we get people who will tell us that we had something done this way last year, and then we moved it over here this year. So they know."

Repeat visitors include City Councilman Don Higginson, who said Candy Cane Court visits are a tradition for his family.

"I think it's neat to have them to provide a little Christmas cheer for other people," he said. "Sort of the spirit of Christmas is giving, not receiving. And I think it's their way of giving to the community."

The display usually stays up through New Year's Day, residents said.

My Life with Disney

Xeriscape Garden Under Construction - Part A

I decided a long time ago that our house will be surrounded with a supposedly beautiful xeriscape, which would help our household cut the costs in water and time. Currently we have nothing but rich dirt and weeds, but in time there will be something worth relaxing. Since I got a burst of energy (and time) today I started doing something fun for my yard and muscles. I heaved home a bunch of fist sized rocks from the field near my neighborhood. Now tell me if this is illegal so that I would stop, but for the meantime I'm having lots of fun and good cardio trudging along the brush, spotting rocks like an Easter egg hunt. The neighbors looked at me a little weird walking around with a rock-filled back pack, hunched over like a donkey, and wearing street clothes from our lastest morning adventure, but I don't care what the neighbors think until they call the police about a wacky Filipino woman rearranging the earth. What do you think?

Earthquake in San Diego County

An earthquake (magnitude 4.0) freaked me out 4:40 AM today. I was peacefully asleep until I heard a few seconds of rumble as loud as an airplane (like the passenger planes taking off that is heard inside an airport). Then immediately afterwards my bed shook once from the left side to right. David thought that something heavy brushed up against the house, but I thought it was more like an airplane crash that hit our street and vibrated the ground. Then my thoughts stirred even more and I was petrified to think that our country had been hit by a war missile. I am eased to learn from http://quake.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Maps/117-33.html that it was just a quake and nothing else.

There was one great lesson I learned though in this mini event. I need to prepare my family with natural disaster emergency drills, evacuation items, and stock-up for a few days of possible famine. Currently we've done nothing to ready ourselves for any event.

Anyways, I got scared enough to reread sections of the book of Revelations. How near the end times seems.

Gym Zombees?

There is a feeling so strange yet gratifying when I work out at the gym. David and I go almost every weeknight and see the same people at the same time. I could differentiate the focused singletons with their iPods and constrained smiles versus the group exercisers that huddle around the same workout machine chatting, laughing and taking turns. As a one-year old newbie to health and fitness, I can't help but wonder what the motives of these other people around me are every time we show up. It feels so strange to have eye contact with any of them and to leave the gym with only a "hello". Is the gym a place just to have surface friends or am I just too timid to go beyond my comfort zone and make new friends? I see these people all the time, but will a conversation be encroaching on their personal time and space? I admit that I am a very shy person and can come across as being a snob. I just don't know what to say usually. I wonder if this will change.

Ear Boogers - what a charming delight!

Breanna's ear check up went well today. The doctor pulled out a chestnut color wax globule from her right ear the size of a caper - eeeewe. I wonder if I have any wax monsters in my ears? Breanna's next hearing test will be in January and I hope she'll cooperate well this time.