Vacation...All We Ever Wanted

Happy birthday America! A day to celebrate our freedom. It's just past 11 p.m. here and I can still hear fireworks going. The "official" shows began just after 9 p.m., synchronized to music and all that...I think what I'm hearing now are fire crackers that people can buy from those road side booths being set off. I remember in Hawaii people could buy large boxes of fireworks -- and that was for New Years celebrations; there are also road side booths in LA. That really surprises me because wouldn't that be a fire hazard? Oh well, it's a free country, right.

Anyways, today was a vacation day from our recent vacation. Wow, this is the first time I ever wanted/needed a vacation day from any vacation! Going home was fun, but I'm sure we crammed everything we missed in the past six months into two weeks. I know in two weeks I ate everything I missed in the past six months...and now I have to really buckle down and diet and exercise...

Here we are with my cousin J after having yummy Vietnamese food -- which I think is sorely lacking in the Central Coast!




Getting back to some regular routines: grocery shopping, laundry, watching TV -- I hardly watched tv in 2 weeks. I miss Ellen! I miss General Hospital! Other than that, thankfully there isn't much to watch this summer. We did fine an interesting new series on USA. I think it's called "Burn Notice." Thursday nights at 10. I'm going to have to talk to my friend Jerry about it. Also, we watched "Music and Lyrics." It's not a deep film and not even the best romantic comedy I've ever seen, but now I'm telling everyone to watch it, because it was so surprisingly funny -- and filled with 80's parody -- another thing to talk to Jerry about! The boys and their cousins loved it too. It seems like we saw the movie 6 times in 2 days -- but mostly certain scenes.

So we started our vacation with visiting Magic Mountain and ended it by stumbling on a Disney liquidation outlet store; very cool. We were thinking of taking the boys to Downtown Disney, but this store was much better. Any kind of outlet is good in my book.

Here's Noah on his new favorite ride:

and here's Jonah's favorite ride: