this place often has the steepest gas prices in town but it was about $4.00 for premium at other gas stations around town

flower patch in Old Town San Diego

we might move again. all along it has been the plan. we never intended to stay in San Diego long-term but we did stay here one year longer than planned. landscape architecture as a whole is getting hurt by the state of the economy right now. it makes sense i guess; why would one invest in landscaping when they can't afford their mortgage.
its not that we are exactly suffering or anything but it is time to move on with our intended plans of moving to Minnesota where we do plan to live for the rest of our lives. buy a home. have children. live the dream. and hopefully work hard and save big so that we can retire early. well, so Carl can retire early. i honestly don't mind working a little longer, especially if i take some time off from a paid position to raise our family. i do want to vacation though but perhaps i will have a flexible job by that point. that would be ideal so we could explore the world from time to time but wouldn't necessarily be around each other all the time. that would be hard on my nerves, although i love carl dearly, because i just NEED alone time so that i appreciate our time together so much more, and i have something to talk about.

I had a hard time getting rid of my last name. it was something i was so proud of growing up. Everyone knew who the Medinas were, even if they didn't quite know who i was specifically, people knew of me because they knew my brothers.
When i got married i didn't want to give up the last name so i hyphenated it and dropped my middle name instead. it was too much anyway and my mom was the only one who used my middle name, when she wanted to make me mad.
Medina, MN is about 45 minutes outside of Minneapolis and i just had to go see it when we moved to Minneapolis. There isn't much to it. i can remember a bowling alley, a motel, and two water towers. Not much to mean much to me about the town but the surname means a lot to me and although I have four brothers to carry on the family name, I just couldn't let go.

looking back at my childhood. this is a photo of my brothers and i in front of the house in Grace, Idaho. i am guessing i was about 6 years old making noe 5, esau 7, abe 9, and junior 11. i am just guessing though.

one

as you can see in the photo there is only one baby. Maybe i am not seeing things clearly but I don't think there are two babies anymore. It might have been eaten by that crow we saw lurking around the nest a few times, or perhaps it didn't hatch, or something else. whatever the case its sad to us that we are only seeing one when we earlier saw two. it also makes me wonder why the beak doesn't look hummingbird like. is this even a hummingbird? i will keep my eyes on it.

carl and i started running again. i don't want to run more than 3 miles at a time this time around, at least until i resolve the issue with my knees. they use to hurt all the time just from standing all day but the pain has decreased dramatically. i have been taking glucosamine and it seems to have helped because my knees no longer hurt, even when i wear crappy flip flops instead of shoes with cushion and support. my right knee still makes some squishy sound that worries me a bit but i rarely notice except when doing lunges or other exercises focusing on the knee.

It was my mother-in-laws birthday today. we called her earlier today. well carl did and i just yelled from a distance but than i had to brush my teeth and couldn't talk.

My day...

It's my dad's birthday today. He's 54 today. Is that right? He was born in 1954. I believe its right. I called him earlier but he wasn't answering his cell. Maybe I should try again. this day was full of photo opportunities. i started my day by volunteering at an MSWalk as a cheerer at the start/finish line. I just had to shout, 'Hurray, good job' for an hour and a half. it was more fun than i thought it would be but i didn't get a free pass into legoland like i kind of hoped i would. From there i took the long way home along the 101 and stopped at various spots to look around. the first photo was at a campsite in carlsbad, the second at the beach in Del Mar, and the last one was at a site in La Jolla where paragliders take off. That was fun to watch. one paraglider didn't look like he was going to make it and just as he took his last step off the cliff and started going down his parachute did its job and he started climbing into the sky.