Day at Sea World

It's been awhile since we last posted. I checked the date of the last post and it was my birthday. Well with the power outage I got the day off of work paid...pretty good present don't you think?! I had a great birthday...I turned 30 yikes! My mom watched Connor while Peter and I went out to dinner. It was a great birthday and it made it a three day weekend for us yay!!

Peter made this cake for me

I like to feed myself

Yesterday was General Atomics Day at Sea World. So of course we went. Our tickets were$17 each and we each received a $15 voucher for food. For dinner we had a full rack of ribs, fries, veggies and a Mediterranean salad. We received 94 cents back from our vouchers. We also upgraded to a year pass for $40 each. That is my kind of deal!

Here I am touching these strange creatures

The seals were fun too

Watching the turtles

Inside one of the aquariums
The Shamu show changes every now and then...the big obvious change is the trainers no longer go in the water with the whales, which is a bummer, but we all understand. Here's a video of the four performers. (Gotta love the conversation Peter and I have. And in case you miss it there's four whales because of the baby.)

Here's the baby whale showing off his tricks.

We had a fun day at Sea World. Connor had a blast! We will be going back soon.

Major Power Outage!

Did you hear the news? San Diego, part of Orange County and down to Mexico was without power yesterday. I was in a meeting when everything turned off. We thought one of the fuses blew, but when we realized the AC was out too, we knew we were experiencing a black out. People got on their cell phones and checked the news to find out everyone in San Diego was without power. At that point we decided it was time to go home.

Now with all the mess of the power outage it took Peter 1 1/2 hours to get to my parents house from his work. This usually takes about 10-15 minutes. It took me 45 minutes to get home (normally 15 min.) and I had three stoplights that were actually working.

My parents were already having an eventful day when in the morning my brother shows up in my parents room with a towel on saying that he just took an ice cold shower and the water won't turn off. Luckily the neighbor is a handyman, so he came over and turned the water off to the whole house early and then came over a bit later and fixed the problem. Then a couple hours after the power went out he fired up his spare generator and came over asking if we wanted to plug my brother's 210 gallon salt water fish tank into the generator to keep the fish alive. He did that and we thought it was quite thoughtful of him to think of my brother's fish. He came over a little later and said, "Hey do you want to plug your refrigerator in too?" My mom eagerly took him up on the offer, so none of her food went bad. My neighbor is such a nice guy.

We were prepared! We got home and it was a bit dark. We found our LED lights (most ingenious devices). We had three, Connor liked them and played with them until he broke one. We didn't let him play with them after that. Then I went and found our emergency kit. It had three glow sticks that said they were good for two years. We popped one open and it's light was pathetic. Clearly they had been in the kit for longer than two years. Then I remembered I had newer glow sticks upstairs. I had 10 of them and they were awesome! We snapped two of them and they really lit up the house. Connor liked playing with them too.

Here's a fun video of Connor playing in the dark

We put Connor to bed around 8:30 or 9 (he had a late afternoon nap 5-6) so we let him stay up past his normal bedtime. Then it was just the two of us...So what do we do? We decide to play cards in the dark. We had three fake candles which gave off very little light, one glow stick and one LED light and we played cards. We pulled up our vacuum and opened the front compartment that holds all the head tools and hung the glow stick to that and then put the LED light in facing down. It was a pretty awesome plan and gave us a lot of light to play with.
(In this picture the LED light is on the ground...we came up with the plan to put it up later and got a ton more light out of it.)
Around 8:45 I got a text message from my boss saying school was cancelled for today.
By 10 we went to bed. Around 1:30 the power came back on and we were woken up by a loud high pitched beeping noise. The stupid fire alarm needed to be reset (luckily it was just a beep and not the actual alarm to all the units). I got another text message from my boss saying that school might be in session, she wasn't sure yet, so be prepared. By 3:30 the beeping noise was still going on....so annoying! At 5:30 I got another text saying that school would still be cancelled for the day! Happy Birthday to me! And by 5:30 the beeping noise had finally stopped.

I'm really glad we had the good glow sticks. Totally worth the purchase! We also had a battery operated radio which if we held just perfectly we could listen to.

Festival of Sail

Cannons ready to be fired at oncoming ships.

Saturday we went to the Festival of Sail with Chris, Mary, their kiddos, Diana and my dad. We picked my dad up and then met up with everyone at Chris and Mary's place. Then we hopped on the trolley, made one immediate trolley switch and then we were there. We watched some cannon battles, explored many of the boats and both of the submarines. For each vessel we boarded we got a stamp in our ticket booklet. We went on: Bill of Rights (they revved up the engine and nearly took out the boarding walkway-was a bit funny.), Exy Johnson, Jada, Curlew, Californian, Irving Johnson, HMS Surprise, Star of India, Berkeley, Medea, Pilot and the two submarines: USS Dolphin and B-39. We only missed out on five of them and the one that is currently being built. Peter plans on going back tomorrow morning to see the one being built with Chris.

Connor sails the Californian

Treasure Seeker-we missed going on this boat-it was doing pirate cruises.

When we were getting in line to go on the B-39 there was a mandatory hole that everyone had to go through to prove that they fit. I swear it was bigger than the four water tight seals that we went through while on the inside.

Definitely smaller than the hole we had to fit through outside!

The torpedo room (Peter has informed me that this picture is sideways, but really does it matter?-there are tubes in a row. Tip head to left to see proper view if it matters to you.)

Here's the USS Dolphin and the Berkeley in the background
Connor enjoyed the petting zoo area-the duck was his favorite.

They also had an angora goat, rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens and chicks.

On our way back home we skipped going on the "special" trolley-There was an announcement that the trolley was only heading to Qualcomm Stadium, so we waited for the next trolley to arrive. We got off at IKEA and went to get dinner. IKEA has a great restaurant with really cheap food. Then we walked back to the trolley and again skipped the trolley heading only to Qualcomm. While waiting for a regular trolley to arrive we all came to the conclusion that the "special" trolley would have to turn into a regular trolley after leaving Qualcomm since they can't turn around on the track or switch tracks at that point. We should have all taken the special trolley and then just stayed on it until it came to our destination. Oh well, next time we'll try it out. When a regular trolley arrived we hopped on to find three police officers writing someone up for not having a ticket on the trolley. That's the first time I've ever seen people get checked for having a ticket.

As we dropped my dad off at home we thought a sit in a warm spa sounded like the perfect thing for our aching feet...and it was. We had a great day!

Today Peter, Connor and I met up with Chris and his girls and we went to see San Salvador (the boat being built). This would've been really cool had there been people working on it. However those in the area that want to see it for free...it's totally visible from the I-8, or you can park at Spanish Landing and walk on a path and peer over/through the chain link fence and see it.