Warmth

I've been totally distracted lately by the idea of traveling to somewhere warm and tropical. I know, I know - I spent all last year moaning and bitching about the beautiful weather down here - "Why doesn't it ever rain? I could really use a good rain...blah, blah, blah". And now it's raining and all I can think about is getting to somewhere warmer. Maybe that's part of the joy of the rain, is the dream of a tropical vacation? I never dream of going to Hawaii in the summertime...

I've lived in places with rainy, drippy, cloudy, foggy, damp winters my whole life and never, ever have I been interested in traveling to Mexico until this year, for some reason. I'm not sure why Mexico has never interested me - I've always just felt that I would rather go to Hawaii or the Carribean or Tahiti or something if I was going to a beach-place. I feel almost desperate to get to a beach. The last few days I've spent endlessly searching the internet, browsing through sun-drenched locations in Hawaii, the Carribean and I finally even started to dream about Mexico, because of the lower airfares. Alas, no one is willing to sell me a $50 airline ticket to anywhere and no one is willing to let me stay free in their all-inclusive paradise hotel. And I've resigned myself to the fact that the only beach in my future is going to be somewhere along the coast of Northern California. Where I will be bundled up in a parka and long underwear. *Sigh*

Neil finally returned to school a couple of weeks ago and we've been getting slowly getting back into the normal routine. I've added a few things to my routine in a nod to the whole New year resolution thing. I've started an exercise regimen called P90X which has been pretty hard core so far, but has made me feel REALLY good. It feels good to treat my body right again. And I have two "business" ventures in the works. I use the term business very very loosely, but my goal is to have enough pieces of jewelry in inventory by March/April to set up an Etsy site and start selling them. I am also planning to do the same thing with my knitting. I'm going to focus on knitting dog sweaters because good, cute ones are kind of hard to find and in my browsing through Etsy, it seems that this is kind of an undiscovered niche. Maybe there's a reason for that, we'll see. I have one finished that fit Swarley perfectly (he hated it of course) and I'm in the process of making one that will fit Lola (so slightly bigger size small). There will be pictures to come, of course. I think I will stick to small sizes, however, because people usually don't dress their Labs and Mastiffs up in sweaters. It's more of a small dog kind of thing. And I just don't have the patience to knit each sweater in a full range of sizes. I get bored doing the same pattern over and over. So this takes up most of my evenings now, and it doesn't seem to bother me quite as much that Neil isn't coming home until late again.

Speaking of the dogs, they are doing well - losing more weight every day. In fact, I think Lola is the slimmest she has been since we got her. Unfortunately, the other night, she took a huge step back on the weight-loss when she and Swarley got into a container of chocolate chip cookies. They ate the whole thing and there was probably a good 9-12 cookies in there. She was HUGE!! I walked in the apartment without knowing what happened and the first thing I asked Neil was, "Why is she so fat?" Our little binge-eater. She was a lot closer to looking like this after the cookies:

We are planning a trip down to Big Sur over President's Day weekend to visit Hearst Castle. The one perk of working at the CA State Parks Foundation - free passes into the Castle!! We're planning on camping so keep your fingers crossed that weather will hold. February last year was warm and sunny so I figured it would be safe to consider camping, but the rain has been non-stop this year. I have us booked in a hotel and campground, just to be safe, and we can cancel whichever one we don't need. I would prefer to camp, because this is the campground:

Yes, that is indeed right on a cliff overlooking the beautiful Pacific Ocean. We drove through this campground last February (and it was beautiful and sunny of course) and have been meaning to come back and actually camp here ever since then.

Not quite the beach I had in mind, but it is going to have to do.