Pining for the Fjords

As you've probably seen on Facebook, we're now officially residents of Long Beach, California!  We got the keys to the new digs on Friday, 7/22, and we've been doing tons of work in the house before the movers came this past Thursday, the 28th, to cart all of our crap in a southwesterly direction from the rental house in Glendora.  We've now spent two nights in the house; slowly, the boxes are dwindling away, and things are starting to look like a home. The front of the house. We knew it was the one for us when we saw the palo verde trees in the front yard. Yes, we are keeping the red door. We found the house about six weeks ago on Zillow by searching through properties with open houses coming up that particular weekend, and we knew we wanted to make an offer by the time we wandered back out the front door.  The house is around 1400 square feet - 3 bedrooms and 2 baths - with a good sized kitchen/living area and a great backyard space (it needs some work to

Okay, so you guys totally deserve better than this, but given everything that's been going on lately, both good and sad, I'm punting the blog post this week while we go down and paint the new house in Long Beach.  Instead!  Please re-enjoy this blog from almost exactly one year about Her Bella-ness.  It seems appropriate. Oh, and here's another picture I love of her - whenever we'd clean the house, we'd end up with a big pile of dog beds all in one spot, and she was always the dog who would scale the pile - no matter how tall - and fall fast asleep, happy and obviously, comfy.  We miss you, munchkin. All of your dog bed belong to me.

Hey everybody!  Okay, time for a blog...what to write about...let's see, we sold the Peoria house and closed on July 1st, which was magical, as we had a full price offer 2 days after putting it on the market (priced to sell, indeed).  We're currently about to close on a house in Long Beach, and we're just waiting for the Escrow Gods to shine their beaming light down upon us, which hopefully will happen by the end of next week (please all cross your collective fingers).  I'll share more on that later, including pictures of the new abode once we actually have keys to get inside (important, that). In the meantime, here's a placeholder blog about our recent Fourth of July shenanigans!  Hooray, America! Due to our theme of our 2014 Ragnar McDowell Mountain escapades, we already had plenty of red, white, and blue running gear, and I figured a Fourth of July 5K was a great way to kick off our day of ingesting way more calories than we would burn running 3.11 miles (

As all of you certainly know by now, Chris and I are beer aficionados.  Light beer, dark beer, sour beer, fruity beer, toasty beer, roasty beer, it doesn't really matter - we enjoy almost all of it.  For the past few years, we've had a marvelous time enjoying Arizona Beer Week which occurs each February, so we were excited to find out that L.A. also had a Beer Week, running in mid-June.  We tracked down a few fun activities and decided to venture out to explore our new area! Ta daaaaa! Although we technically didn't know it at the time, we started celebrating Beer Week with a jaunt to old town Pasadena on opening day, Saturday, 6/18 (for clarity's sake, we knew we were in Pasadena - we just didn't know it was Beer Week until afterward.  Given my historical issues with lack of direction, several of my family members may indeed need this reassurance).  A few weeks prior, we'd visited a bar named Verdugo in downtown LA, and while we didn't love it, t

As mentioned in a previous blog, we're renting a house out here in northern Los Angeles while we find a place to buy.  Since we knew we'd need a place that allowed big dogs and we only wanted a short term lease, we realized that our rental options might be somewhat limited, and indeed, Chris found himself scrambling until the week before he was scheduled to move to secure a location.  Accordingly, our standards were set on the lower side for the rental house: it had to have at least 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, it had to be safe, and it had to have a gated/fenced backyard for the munchkins.  That was pretty much it. Enter our new abode on Forestdale Avenue: It's a cute little house, and it is serving our needs perfectly well.  It has the 3 bedrooms and 2 baths we asked for, plus the gated/fenced/walled backyard, and it's within a short distance of many things we're enjoying - remember Flappy Jack's ?  Also, it's .3 miles to the LA Fitness, several ot