Aquarium of the Pacific

Monday was a student free day so I took the kids to Long Beach where we spent the day at the Aquarium of the Pacific & surrounding area.

It was a great day to visit as it was uncrowded and cool on such a warm day. We were able to plan our schedule and see some of the programs like the otter presentation and penguin meet and greet.

This aquarium is not too huge so we could spend some time viewing the exhibits then we  walked to the Pike for lunch then head back to the aquarium to cool off.

The kids and I had so much fun and it was a nice way to spend their free day. :)


You can check out the Flickr photo set.  It looks like Flickr is updating their site and I can't seem to find out how to post photos right now but you can go and look at the set.

Sneak Peek

Here is a portion of Josh's Halloween costume.



I am trying to incorporate his Link costume from last year and maybe use parts of it to make a Viking costume. Okay, I really just wanted an excuse to knit the Viking Hat. I don't think Josh fully appreciates the EPICNESS of this hat but at least he has a new hat. :)



I still need to add another piece to this and it will take me some time so stay tuned for that!!



He will the cutest Viking ever!!

Florida Bound

Okay, only a week at home then we are off to Orlando....

This time we flew on JetBlue out of Long Beach which is a huge difference than LAX, a welcome one for sure. We had a stop in Austin and had two large groups of girls travelling with us. One group was a soccer team from SoCal and the other was a field hockey group from Austin. The flight was uneventful but when we tried to leave Austin, we were delayed for about an hour because some panel screws came loose duting the flight and had to be replaced.

So by the time we arrive in Orlando at our hotel it was around 9 pm so we were pretty tired from travelling all day. The kids & I did perk up for a bit because we got a Cube for our rental car. The kids always get a kick out of seeing one and they don't remember that we first saw a Cube in Tokyo in 2005 and it took it a couple of years before it made its way to the USA. :)




Our hotel the Caribe Royale Hotel was really nice. The pool area is great. We planned to stay for 3 nights then head over to the Parc Soleil. More on that later....






Our first day, we didn't plan on doing too much but Hector & I signed up for a timeshare presentation for the Sheraton to get a discount on Disney tickets. First off, its not referred to as a timeshare but fractional ownership (like that makes a difference).

In a nutshell, these kind of offers will give you nice perks in exchange for their 90 minute presentation so have your watch handy. They say they don't work on commission and get paid plenty just to present the information. Blah blah...

Our time went way over the 90 minutes, Hector pointed that out and she kept saying she had 15 more minutes. She went from our best friend to our mortal enemy in that span. Okay it wasn't that bad, but she definitely gave us the cold shoulder at the end. ;)

Hey, its a good thing you get paid for just presenting the info...

As a result of the almost 2 hour torture chamber, we came away with Disney tickets for 4 days plus water park and saved about $800 that we used to eat etc.

Stay tuned for the next installment...

Double Whammy

or a twofer.

August flew by in a blur mostly because we planned two separate vacations! It sound super cool and fun which it was but that was lot of travelling & planning.

First up we have a Kauai trip that the kids & I took along with my mom. It didn't start off very smooth (travel day) but soon we all found out how to work together and really had a nice relaxing time.

Waiting for our rental car.  For the record, it was a brown VW.

Actually I did find out what kind of car we had and it was this sporty sedan. It looks nice enough but the head clearance getting into the darn thing was low. I'm 5'5" and had to tweak my head/neck every time getting in. Both Tyler and I ended up whacking our heads. Plus the car had some big blind spots but it served us well in Kauai so I can't complain too much. It was stylish and we could spot it among all the other rental cars.



We had a nice, fairly spacious room overlooking the pool and ocean. The grounds are very pretty with lots of birds & chickens running around.


I loved sitting on the balcony watching the ocean and seeing the sunrise every morning.




Lots of pools to choose from...





Kauai is very lush and tropical. Not much has changed since I visited over 15+ years ago and I definitely appreciate it more now when I needed to relax/recharge desperately.



My mom seemed to enjoy herself too.



The resort was not very crowded which was a very nice problem to have. :)

We didn't do a lot of sightseeing but we did manage to see a couple of things.

Wailua Falls

Spouting Horn

Plus a beautiful beach to walk on at low tide.

Stay tuned for our August 2nd vacation.....

August

I took a little bit of a break for multiple reasons and all is well. I have a close cousin who is getting married next month so my mom and I went to the shower. We had a short impromptu photo session in my car before we left and I thought we would take more at the shower but no, these are the ones of my and my mom.



We both look good and clean up pretty well. Too bad that the sunlight was really strong next to my mom but I like them.



It's the last month of summer before school and our big plans are finally here so I will have fresh new photos and blogginess to share next month...

San Diego Comic-Con 2013

You may remember we had a very limited experience with Comic-Con last year when we went to the Legend of Zelda symphony. It was overwhelming and traffic was a PITA bad but the kids really liked looking around and getting streetpasses on their Nintendo 3DSs.

During the time after that, I was trying to plan to get tickets which is not easy at all. The online system was awful and to sum up, I couldn't get tickets. Apparently a lot of other people had issues with system freezes etc and just a bad time. I did get an email for future one day sales which was fine but my priority is to find lodging. Hotels in the downtown area skyrocket and we searched for a place not too far or expensive. Hector found a reasonably priced Quality Inn off Miramar/I-15. We figured if we couldn't get SDCC tickets we can always cancel the hotel if we decided not to go.

Single day tickets sales came and went and I had my own online issues with that too but it worked out okay in the end. To cut down on transportation headaches, we drove to Qualcomm stadium and caught the trolley to the convention center. It took about 45 minutes but it was really easy.

We drove down to San Diego Thursday morning and I chose the I-15 which was nice and traffic free. We tried to drop off our luggage at the hotel but no little extra room to store it and no clean rooms yet. I understood the clean room situation but no storage space?

For Thursday, I was only able to get a badge for myself but Josh could tag along with a paid adult. I think Tyler felt a little left out when we went to check out the exhibit floor but we left him in an extremely entertaining area at the Marriott called the Nintendo Lounge. Nice big area with a couple of areas with beanbags and 3DS chargers along with lots of demos, picture areas and lots of fellow gamers. I don't think he missed us at all. When we came back, he was loaded down with all sorts of goodies...meanwhile, Josh & I wandered only a small area of the exhibit floor that I thought was crowded but I was wrong. When we went back inside on Sunday, that was CROWDED. There was staff trying to direct the flow and keep it moving.
I ended up holding Josh's hand practically the entire time so he wouldn't get swept away...

The area outside the convention center was probably more entertaining for us because the crowds were not so tight and wait times were not too bad. The con has grown larger than life and there is no possible way to see/experience everything but the things/events that we managed to see, we were really happy with them so to sum up, Comic-con is what you make of it.

Photoset from Comic-Con 2013

We stayed an extra night after the whole Comic-con was over to hopefully beat the traffic ( still had traffic) but we made a side trip to La Jolla before heading home.

The water and weather were gorgeous. Over the weekend we had some overcast, cooler temperatures which was nice when dealing with masses of people but we got to have the pretty, stereotypical California weather too. :)








My silly boys.



With views like this, who can be sad???



Seriously, everything was postcard perfect.



The water really was this blue...

The beautiful end to our fun filled long weekend. :)

ipod help

All my music in the entire world is on my iPod. My computer crashed a few years back leaving me with just one device holding my entire CD collection and purchases. I couldn't figure out where/how/what to do so fast forward to now and I decide to google my dilemma since someone surely has figured out the answer and posted it on youtube. Well, I was right and I'm following along so far so good.

And this is what happened to my older ipod...




It was acting up lately not charging in my alarm clock/player, the click wheel was frozen so I could operate it but the function buttons on my clock could at least get it to play. But then I noticed the corner popped off and it's not working. It served me well for about 10 years which is pretty darn good. :)

Still copying all my music to a folder so stay tuned...


OMG, it worked!! My entire library that was on that ipod is now transferred successfully to my computer. So happy now....

Here is Youtube link.