San Diego Vacation Part 2

My wife had bought some 3 for 1 passes at Costco that got us into any of the San Diego Zoo, the Wild Animal Park, and Sea World for 5 consecutive days. We decided that our schedule would be Monday - Zoo. Tuesday - Sea World. Wednesday - Rest and do whatever we felt like. Thursday - Wild Animal Park. Friday - Return to our favorite park.

We were trying to keep the kids on our MDT schedule while visiting the PDT time zone. This made for a few nights of putting the kids to bed at 6:30 California time (to match their normal school schedule bed time of 7:30). It also made for a few days of the kids waking up at 5:15 California time (I think they were excited). My dad says that 4:00 comes early in the morning, and I can attest that 5:15 feels awfully early too. As the week went on, they tended to go to bed later and get up later, but it seemed to help them when we returned to go to bed at close to the normal time.

Monday, we made our way to the "World Famous San Diego Zoo", as the GPS called it. We arrived to find that it was field trip day for about a thousand elementary school kids. We were afraid that it was going to be very crowded, and the whole point of going when we did was to avoid crowds. Our first stops (after the gift shop to buy my son a San Diego Zoo hat for his birthday, which you'll see in some pictures, and which he promptly managed to lose on Wednesday) were the flamingos and the reptile house, right inside the entrance. They were very crowded, so we made our way off to the side to an area designed for young children that the school kids seemed to be ignoring. From that point on, we seemed to do pretty well at being near a fair amount of people without feeling crowded.

Here are some pictures of some of the things we did. We didn't get pictures of everything we did at the zoo, but we got some of the human animals and some of the non-human animals. The kids seemed to feel that the highlights of the day were the "Skyfari" sky tram ride and the bus tour that allowed us to see far more of the zoo than we would have had energy to walk through. For my wife and I, the highlights were the fact that we were only 2 miles from the resort so we could go back for lunch and a short nap, and the fact that the churro vendor that we were going to buy some snacks from near closing time had already closed his shop and so gave us 6 churros and a pretzel for free, plus the fact that the 3 for one passes allowed us free rides on the sky ride and the bus tour.


This bench was at the entrance to the kids area of the zoo.


There was a petting zoo in the kids area. My son really knows how to pet animals carefully, don't you think?



There were lots of interactive things to play on and around throughout the zoo. These were in the kids area.


As fans of the Disney Channel show "Kim Possible", we had to get a picture of the naked mole rats. Rufus!


There were some bear statues near the polar bear exhibit that the kids thought would be fun to sit on. An interesting thing about the polar bear exhibit is that we didn't get to see the polar bear because it had been taken off exhibit. We heard that it was because one of the small deer-like animals from across the way had gotten into the polar bear exhibit. The story goes that they weren't afraid of the deer getting caught by the polar bear, but rather that the deer would fall into the very deep and steep pool at the front of the exhibit and drown. Supposedly, the polar bear was taken off exhibit to allow the zookeepers to rescue the deer. Sadly for us, we didn't get to see polar bear, deer, or zookeeper in the exhibit, and we ran out of patience waiting for any of them to appear. That happens pretty fast with small children.


I found that gibbons like this move the way that I usually think of monkeys moving - swinging from branch to branch, using vines, and so forth. They don't have tails, though, so that part is out. This one seemed to find us as fascinating as we found her.


My boy really knows how to enjoy a churro to the fullest.



This wallaby and koala were in the same exhibit. The koala was asleep and therefore not shy, but the wallaby didn't want to look at us. Or it just happened to be facing the other way when the picture was taken. They look a lot like small kangaroos when you can see more than their backside. I kind of think the backside looks like a huge rat in this picture.


Pandas are sensitive to noise, so we had to be quiet near them. When the bus tour went by, the guide told us we had to be quiet and he didn't say anything until we had passed the exhibit. We went back to see them since the exhibit was fenced from the road. They looked to be pretty pleased with their arrangement - all the food they could eat, relative quiet compared to the rest of the zoo, and comfortable surroundings. People even hope for them to reproduce the way an older couple "encourages" their adult children to get married and give them grandchildren! Sounds like a great gig if you can get it! *grin*


The gorillas were the penultimate exhibit we visited. They were kind of hard to get pictures of, but these statues held still much better, so we got pictures of them instead.


Last, we returned to the reptile house to see the huge yellow boa constrictor. Unfortunately, the picture got cut off just below the very tip of the mouth, so it looks like we took a picture of another tourist taking a picture of something with a yellow snout. The snake snout is at the bottom left.

More to come later.

San Diego Vacation Part 1

As many of you may know, we just returned from a long vacation to San Diego. This was our first long vacation with just our family (meaning, we were on vacation with just us, not visiting other family for a long time, etc). It was an amazing experience, and I think that the kids have made some memories that will last a very long time too. A HUGE THANK YOU goes to my wife for putting it all together, my father-in-law for allowing us to use his vacation timeshare credits for lodging, to my wife's aunt and uncle for hosting us in Las Vegas on the way down and back, and to everyone else who helped make this possible!

Our camera's batteries were running low during the middle of the week so we didn't get any pictures of the beach or the Wild Animal Park, but we did get some fun pictures at the zoo and Sea World (we went there on two different days).

For starters, though, here are some memories from the trip down to San Diego, with a night's stay in Las Vegas.

Friday and Saturday:
My little girl had some MAJOR nose bleeds on the way from Utah to Las Vegas. I wonder if it was the AC running or changing environments, but we're talking major gushers! We pulled over to the side of the road for about 10 minutes to help out, stopped at a gas station for another break, and tried to keep ice packs on her neck the rest of the way to Vegas. Luckily, she didn't have any further problems for the rest of the trip. No pictures of this. You can thank me later. *grin*

My wife's aunt and uncle are getting up in age, but they LOVE our family, even if we are a handful! They have a pet rabbit (named Trouble, but the kids have, for some reason, dubbed it Strappy) that gets terrorized each time we stop by.



Here it is, facing the other direction but just as red-eyed.


We only permanently broke one thing that I know of. Here's something that was fixable.


Here we are enjoying the backyard before continuing on to San Diego.



I just missed the frisbee here, in case you are wondering why my arm looks so odd.





Other interesting tidbits about the journey included seeing a road in the desert part of California called Zzyzx Road (of particular interest to fans of "Kyle XY", though that Zzyzx was in a Washington state forest, not a desert), the GPS knowing where lots of things are, and also where lots of things used to be but aren't any more (paying $70 for a map update sure hasn't helped us at all, as we tried for about half an hour after arriving in San Diego to find a grocery store and a pizza place), and an eating establishment / playground / history center called "Peggy Sue's 50's Diner" in Yermo (near Barstow). The food was average, but the environment, from the 50's memorabilia to the "Diner Saur Park" in the rear, made for a fun family stopping point. Here are some of our pictures from there.


Part of the inside.


Part of the outside.

We were blessed to have the person behind us in line at the grocery store we eventually found let us use their loyalty card, thus saving us over $50 in groceries (about 25% of our bill otherwise). That was just one in a string of things that we felt were blessings from the Lord during our vacation.

On Sunday, we mostly rested at the resort, but we also looked up the meeting time for church nearby. It was scheduled to start at 11:00 AM, but when we arrived at that time, we found that it was a Stake Conference that was halfway over. We ended up sitting in the foyer for the last hour and then beating the traffic out of there and going to take a look at the San Diego Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. All of the temples are beautiful, but that one, in our minds, is especially so. Too bad we didn't take a picture though.

More to come later.

14 April 2009 Workout

Time: 6:30 AM
Weight beforehand: 347.3 lbs
Length: 15 minutes
Program: TPRU Twist
Elliptical Reported Calories Burned: 304
Rating: It's been quite a while. We've been sick, tired, busy, and otherwise caught up in various springtime activity. I'm happy that I worked out this morning and a little disappointed that I didn't return to workouts a few days ago when I could have. The big thing, though, is to work out again tomorrow if I'm able.

Sadness Part 5

The divorce of my in-laws became final sometime in October 2008 I believe. My father in law has moved to another state and is working at a job that he doesn't much like. He's looking for another job, and he seems to be feeling the pain and trying to turn to God for help from the little we hear. It's still hard to find the right level of involvement with his personal life because he still spends a lot of time dealing with and thinking about his ex-wife.

We've heard rumors that my wife's mother was getting married, and we heard from her father today that it has happened. Again, we're trying to find the right balance of maintaining a relationship and not getting too involved. In the past few months, things became so difficult with her that we had to call a break to all contact with her while we recovered and worked to know what kind of a relationship might be possible in the future.

At this point, my wife wants nothing to do with her mother, as, in addition to the existing problems they had, she feels that her mother was AT LEAST having an "emotional affair" with the man she has married for over a year now, if not a physical one, and this sort of "falling in love with another man" has happened more than once in the past. She is willing to consider that, maybe, some day, she will want to have some contact with her mother, but she has no idea if she will ever feel that way.

We have been reading a book called "How to Hug a Porcupine", and we've tried to be sensitive to the things that we do that make us porcupine-like. Even so, the descriptions given in the first part of what a porcupine-like person does has sounded very familiar to how we have been treated by my mother-in-law. Hopefully we can learn to not be that way ourselves, and maybe even be able to deal with people who are that way.

This is the most closely I have ever been involved with a divorce, even though I've had siblings go through divorce in the past. I appreciate the support from those who know what we're feeling, and as bad as this is, I know it could always be worse. I'm glad it's not. We'll start working on building the relationship with her father again for now, and we'll depend on the Lord to help us going forward.

Tag

My sister tagged me in a simple game, and since the picture that came up was so cute, I decided to play along.

Rules:
Go to your picture files. Open the 6th folder, and the 6th picture. Post it on your blog and tell the story of the picture. Then tag 6 people.
Here is my photo:



This is my youngest child. He is at a friend's house. This particular friend is a photographer, and my wife was having some family pictures taken. She wanted to get our son in the Eeyore costume before he completely grew out of it. Oddly, we have a photo of our second oldest in the same costume, and it's kind of hard to tell the two apart, as our youngest has a strong resemblance to our second oldest. I'll see if I can find that picture too.



OK, so it's my two oldest, about 4.5 years earlier, but you get the idea.

I'm not going to tag anyone, but if you do decide to do something similar due to what you saw here, please feel free to drop a comment with a link to your offering. I'd be interested to see what turns up!

4 March 2009 Workout

Time: 6:30 AM
Weight beforehand: 348 lbs
Length: 15 minutes
Program: TPRU Twist
Elliptical Reported Calories Burned: 308
Rating: I'm glad I worked out again. I sure felt the burn in my lungs today due to the long time between workouts.

I Got Better...

It's been a while since I posted an update, and that's in large part because I haven't worked out in a while. The reason for that is because my family and I have been experiencing various illnesses recently. In fact, over one recent 8 day period, my wife made 4 trips to a doctor's office for various family members.

Someone told me recently that mid-February to mid-March in Utah is the time of year when doctors see the most patients for various colds and illnesses. I guess it's like the holiday season for retailers - busy, busy, busy, and possibly a large part of their yearly income? Anyway...

Some of us are better now. Some of us aren't. I did work out today though, so that's why you get to find out what's been going on. Hopefully I'll work out some more soon.