Erin and I were lucky enough to receive an invite from Ann and Trevor to stay with them at Ann’s family cabin in Arnold, CA over New Years. We drove up Wednesday evening and enjoyed a mellow New Years Eve at the house with Ann and Trevor, enjoying growlers of beer from Snowshoe Brewing Company. Thursday morning Ann, Erin and I drove up to Bear Valley Ski resort (about a 45 minute drive up the mountain) for a day of skiing while Trevor worked on finishing a deliverable for work (bummer!). We had a great day of skiing.

Friday was a stormy day. Ann and Trevor stayed at the cabin, recovering from colds. Erin and I drove back up the mountain with our snowshoes for a trek into the National forest to test out my new Ruger MKIII .22LR pistol that I bought back in October. It was our first opportunity to fire the gun and it was accurate and fun. We shot 140 rounds into a dead tree/cardboard box. FUN!
After our trek, we called Ani’s brother Rafi and got directions to his cabin. He built the cabin a couple summers ago on 1.1 acres near Bear Valley while working on his PhD dissertation. Similar to how I do things, Rafi found that buildings under 120sqft don’t require a permit in the area. The cabin is exactly 120 comfortable sqft. Because it was built without a permit and is therefore not “inhabitable,” he can’t get electricity or water connected. A small solar panel and melted snow solve that problem!

He was up for the week and met us out by the road. The roads back to the cabin aren’t plowed so we put our snowshoes back on and hiked in with him, where we enjoyed a couple good beers and checked the place out.

Well, I never finished putting the honeymoon pictures up. Here’s one from a fun day of dune-buggying in the mountains near Puerto Vallarta. The buggy was in horrible condition, with manual, back brakes only and no synros left in the transmission. It was very exhausting to drive for 4 hours, but fun and dirty.

In the midst of the recent $300 Billion bailout of Citi Corp, I really started to wonder why the government would possibly bail out these institutions who had made so many obviously poor decisions. Here’s what I came up with. The government backs depositor accounts through the FDIC. My guess is that the FDIC realized it couldn’t possibly make good on the depositor accounts if the major banks fell, and decided that a bailout would cost less, have a good chance of working, they could afford it, and they could save face by not telling the public that their assets were not really safe. That knowledge would lead to mass hysteria.

Yup, 31 years old and I’ve moved in with my mother-in-law. Is life over or just beginning?

Taken with a shutter speed of 4 sec, f/8, 800 ISO, 105mm focal length, Pentax *ist DL

Erin’s company flew us down to Orange county this weekend for their annual holiday party. We left Friday afternoon and enjoyed a nice evening at the Orange Hill Restaurant. Saturday morning we drove up to Anaheim for some good clean Disneyland fun. Wildfires in the area made breathing slightly hard, but it also made for short lines. We didn’t have to wait more than 15 minutes for any ride.

We didn’t fly back to the East Bay until 7pm, so we decided to drive down to the beach for a few hours later in the afternoon. We drove down to Newport Beach and had burgers on the pier at the famous Ruby’s burger. We caught the sunset before heading to the airport for our flight home.

Our pictures are in, but I’ll wait for permission from Erin before I post them online. Here’s a little sample:

Erin and I drove the Westy up to Yosemite this weekend for a early winter camping trip. Friday was a beautiful day and the weather was great. We brought the heater and had to use it to keep toasty through the night. Saturday afternoon it started raining and it continued throughout the night. There were a lot of people camping in tents that were really wet Sunday morning! We had one small drip in the skylight that was cured temporarily with old fashioned duct tape.