desert camping

last year my sunset magazine had this article about camping in the desert near san diego and getting a tour of the night sky.. 4th of july weekend seemed like a great idea (because of the 3 day weekend), but 117 degrees.. well, that was pretty extreme.



i went with a friend from work -- we drove to the desert, met the tour group and set off in our indiana jones army bus and got a tour of the desert. . learned about different plants and homesteaders that settled the area.


the night didn't cool down.. it was sort of humid. as for the stars, we saw the international space station traverse the sky, we saw the summer triangle and a lot of constellations, the rings of saturn, and a number of nebulae star clusters. the guest astronomer was Dennis Mammana

The next morning was still humid, it started sprinkling and there were swarms of bees, and the light was really eerie. the indiana jones bus got rolling to scare off the bees and we all made a run for it and headed out.

i would definitely do this again, but maybe in the spring or fall. the company was California Overland Tours.

meetup

so there's this newish community called "meetup" where you find different groups of people in whatever area/zip code doing all sorts of things. i signed up for a few of the groups.. a silkscreen one.. a crafty one.. and a bookclub. so far, i've only done screenprinting.

pretty great, right?

Kitchen Finale

Here's the kitchen! I realized we haven't updated the blog with pictures since we painted the walls and oven and finished the redo.

Last night we installed this awesome floor. It's just bright, glossy white -- long, rectangle sheets of laminate flooring. It was an awesome affordable solution to the dirty linoleum.

Love it.