Sunday, September 14, 2008

Some unexpected organization...

Saturday Jeff and I got busy in the garage. When we woke up that morning we had no intentions of spending 4+ hours building shelves in our garage, but that's what we did.

We keep our garage relatively organized thanks to the ceiling shelves we put in a few months ago. But we have always had an eye sore in the corner of our garage because of the deep alcove under our stairs, leading up to the second floor.

The master plan all started over breakfast at our favorite pancake house, here in town. We started strategizing over how exactly we would construct the shelves. For the past month we have had the idea in the back of our minds that "one day" we would build these shelves, but after breakfast we were sure we had a final design and we wanted to implement it right away, so we jumped in the car and headed to Lowes.

Here was the problem area...

Lowe's here we come!


Jeff got handy with his new hand saw.


First we built the shelving support.

Here they are all finished. The bottom shelf is 8 ft deep and the top shelf is almost 6'.

And here they are being put to use.
I'm so happy with the outcome and we can sure shove a lot of stuff back in there. Currently we have all of Jeff's drums on the second shelf, and we designed the bottom for our snowboards. I have a feeling we will be building more shelves in our garage now that we know we can do it ourselves.

Friday, September 5, 2008

Camping in Mammoth


Was it a blast or a bust?

I would label it a bust, but not because we didn't have fun. We did. At times.

Jeff and I drove up Friday night and we got the camp site at 11:30pm. Most of our friends took Friday off and drove up in the moring, so when we got there everyone was already tucked in bed. The night was rough because the bed we were sleeping on was totally tilted. We both kept rolling to the outside of the camper, which wasn't very comfortable. The weekend forcast called for 75 mph winds and below 50 degrees. I was a little worried but I knew we would have a good time. Because that is what we do!

Brrrr...



Sat. we took the car and drove around to view the mountain without snow. What a crazy sight.

Jeff had never seen Mammoth without snow, and I think he would have been happy keeping it that way. It was kind of depressing to see the mountain so naked. We'll be back up there in 3 months for a week long snowboarding trip and there better be snow by then.




Sat. night the wind hadn't picked up yet, so we were able to have a fire. I had my three s'mores then went to bed. Oh, the reason our bed was so tilted was because my mom hadn't put in the two braces under our bed. So we fixed it and leveled the camper out, I'm not sure it did too much good. Jeff and I still woke up sore from trying to fight the leaning bed. I was just glad we weren't sleeping on the ground.



My mom on the left, my nephew Jordan (9), me with my nephew Nicholas (16 mo.)

Sunday, my mom and I took the kids hiking around some of the lakes. By this time the wind had considerably picked up and most of the lakes had white caps. Sunday night Jeff and I met up wtih my dad, who rode his Harley from Norther California to Mammoth wich is about a 3 hr ride. He checked into a hotel, so Jeff and I took full advantage of his shower, since the one at the camp ground was $4.00!!


Monday we took off for home. We fed the kids and loaded up the car. We stopped off to say good bye to my dad and Jordan, my nephew, used his shower. How do boys get to dirty? This kid had dirt in every crevas of his body. I'm sure he still had dirt behind his ears.



The drive home wasn't bad, and we didn't hit any traffic. We met my sister in Corona and dropped the kids off with her. It was nice to have a quite rest of the drive home. Nicholas my youngest newphew decided he wanted to scream his head off for the last 45 min. I thought Jeff was going to leave him on the side of the road (don't worry Gayla I wouldn't have let him).


At the end of the tirp I asked Jeff if he thought there would be a pop-up tent trailer in our future. He kinda chuckled and said "no-way".