Ramblings of a Crazy Woman

....It's new car day! Good bye lemon and hello HONDA INSIGHT. May you treat us better than that crappy made in Mexico Volkswagon Jetta. The hub and I have a new lease on life and a new car payment. Thank goodness our bus riding, carpooling long days are behind us! Now we are going to try and better to the environment with this hybrid. It gets like 43 miles to the gallon. How sweet is that??

Happy Halloween everyone!!! Moses wanted to say hi and show everyone his costume. He is momma's cute little pumpkin head everyday of the year but today he has a costume to prove it! Thanks MoMo for being a good sport!

I am really thankful that we have almost made it through this month! It was long and exhausting with all the various mishaps that have happened. The thing that has been roughest is having the hub's car break down. We have been doing a combo of driving and taking the bus and its not only exhausting on hubby but me too. You really never know how thankful u r to have two cars until one is taken away. Having only one car really takes a lot of time out of both of our days. Throw a dog who needs to be walked twice a day in and suddenly you find yourself spending your entire day walking the dog, driving or on the bus, working, then driving or on the bus, walking the dog, and making dinner. By the time we get settled on the couch its pretty late and we are too tired to do chores or run errands so we had to save those for the weekends. I am sure by now you understand we were running all over the place every minute of everyday non-stop. Suffice to say, I am really looking forwar...

So we have been car shopping all month long. We are almost to the end of the month and we HAVE to buy a car even if it's just for our own sanity!! Well, really, we waited because we were told the best time to buy a car is at the end of the month (there aer supposedly better deals). So we are testing that theory out inthe meantime, it's nothing but a carpool and bus life for the hub and I. The hub has test driven a few cars and we have narrowed it down to the below choices. Please let us know what you think our next car should be. We really wanted to consider a Chevy, since my brother works for GMAC and can get us a discount but all the dealerships we went to didn't seem to have any cars for under $28K. Cash for clunkers seemed to have cleaned them out. Hum? Dodge - Charger Honda - The Insight Honda - Fit So which one do you think we should get?

What the freak did I mess around with in feng shui that we are gettin' nothing but broken stuff this month? It's so bad I find myself with a list of broken crap and a pocketbook that needs a rest! Here's a list of my troubles this month. 1. Dryer didn't have heat (luckily the hub fixed) FIXED 2. Our Apple Computer wouldn't turn on (luckily we had the Apple Care Warranty and got a new power supply. Note to self, good job on the purchase of the warranty it was like the first time a warranty ever worked, see below Volkswagon) FIXED 3. The Hub's car overheated (or rather it broke real bad for the 40 millionth time and we decided it wasn't worth fixing.... so we are looking for a new car and hope to purchase a new one by the end of the month. Note to self, never ever, ever buy Volkswagon again! Friggin Jettas and their stupid warranties that they don't honor!) DEAD/NEED TO BUY NEW CAR 4. I washed the hub's phone (he's back to using an old pho...

Daniel Langdon, Age 36 Gosh, it sure seems like a lot of people have died this year. Of course there were all the high profile celebrities but I swear I am always reading about people who have died and people going to funerals. I realize people pass all the time but this year in particular it seems like the Lord has called a lot of people home. Does 2009 have some death connotation to it? Well, unfortunately this past weekend, I was shocked to learn that one of my classmates in high school lost her husband very suddenly. Her and her husband were high school sweethearts and had 3 young children together. I have been reconnecting with classmates on Facebook so that is how I learned of his passing. I can't even imagine what she is going through! Death is hard enough but to lose your husband so young must be a nightmare. I wouldn't even want to think about life without my hubby. It would seem just impossible. Daniel Langdon was running in the Detroit Marathon this ...

When I was going to Michigan State University, my friends and I would always go to BW3's for hot wings. They always had a variety of flavored wings from Honey BBQ to steaming hot, hot, death wings. Wings and a beer were just the thing to satisfy a busy student's appetite. When we frequented BW3's it was a dive bar but by the time my brother graduated from MSU they swapped locations for a building across the street and turned the name to Buffalo Wild Wings and the restaurant became more like a chain thing. Well, color me shocked the other day when we went to the movies and I saw a Buffalo Wild Wings being built in the AMC Burbank 16 complex. Apparently, after looking on their website they are one of the fastest top 10 chains in the US. So of course I had to introduce the hubby to one of my favorite college treats. I don't think he is so much a fan of chicken wings so we got boneless chicken wings a.k.a. tasty little chicken chunks in two of the flavored sauc...

We having been meeting up with some friends at their Hollywood Hills home to walk our dogs in Runyon Canyon which is a park located off Mulholland Drive. We will usually go early in the morning for a few hour hike and end up at their own house which is in the Hollywood Hills and have breakfast. Their neighbor can you believe it is Ryan Seacreast. I am waiting to run into him and his dogs someday. hehe The view from the park is really beautiful. YOu can see the entire city from the trails we hike. Not only is it fun for humans but for our furry pets. We usually let Mo off leash so he is able to wander free. It's good for his socializing. Yesterday one of my co-workers came with us with her dog, Winston. Mo and Winston had a ton of fun running around chasing each other. Because the park is so close to the Hollywood Hills another bonus of the park besides the exercise is that we often see celebrities walking their dogs. Yesterday when we walked we saw and talked to...

The Art Director in me is constantly wanting to make my site look better and better but the technology part of me doesn't know how the heck to get what I want. I can't read code and I barely figured out how to write enough to link my blog up to other blogs I read. So bare with me people. I am testing out layouts. Trying to figure out how this blogger design works. Perhaps one day I will be satisfied with the layout.

It's funny. You live in a big city like LA and it hard to see your friends. Not sure if that is in part to our friends being spread all over the place or if its part of getting older and having more responsibilities aka being busier. Anyhow, in order to spend some quality time with good friends we had to schedule an outing. Yes, we had to get out of LA in order to spend quality time with our friends. Yes, its weird but then again so is living in kooky LA. Below are some of weekend highlights courtesy of Mike Jung.

California is funny and so are the seasons. Unlike most of the US which can count Fall, Winter and Spring as seasons, California has other kinds of seasons. We have The Rainy Season, The Fire Season, The Mudslide Season and The Earthquake Season or I guess you could say we have natural disaster seasons. I guess, bad traffic and weirdo seasons are the price we have to pay the weather gods for not having Fall, Winter and Spring. I am not complaining. I quite like having varying degrees of summer through out the year but it's way funny when the weather changes drastically in one day because everybody goes ballistic. I am pretty sure the folks in Wisconsin don't call for a weather watch when fall hits their state. But here in kooky LA people freak out at the slightest change. People on Facebook yelling its too hot, its too cold or something to the effect that the weather sucks. I really want to shout out "Chill Out Stupids! You live in friggin CA not Kansas. If you do...

So our dog Moses has sure gotten around a lot lately. And by gotten around I mean traveling. First Big Bear and this past weekend, Palm Springs. This opportunity for travel came about because one of Brian's buddies wanted to spend his birthday in Palm Springs with his pals. So the boys of 81st Street minus Toby and plus the wives, rented a house with a pool and BBQ and luckily, for an additional pet fee, MoMo could relax by the pool and sip margaritas. Okay...so, Mommy sat by the pool and drank margaritas and MoMo had fun checking out what everyone in the house was doing. The boys liked to play video games while the girls liked to swim in the pool and sun themselves. The weather all weekend was beautiful and just perfect for hanging out. Palm Springs didn't seem to be as pet friendly as Big Bear but that didn' stop us from taking him everywhere. Once again he was a rock star. Getting all the oohs and aahs from the passer bys when we took him to town. He even ...

This past weekend we went to Big Bear for the first time. Our dog, Moses, who hates water, suddenly found himself in love with water when he chased a flock of ducks into the water. We laughed and said Mo was baptised in Big Bear Lake. Here are some pictures of Mo from our trip. I have to say, I was very impressed at how dog friendly Big Bear was. They even had several restaurants you could take your furry friends to.

So the hub and I went out looking for cars today. We drove to Glendale row where all the dealerships display their shiny new cars. It must have been a hard year cause we discovered that the GM lot we went to was closed and so was the Chrystler/Jeep lot. Both replaced by used car lots. Then we went to the Chevy Dealership and all they had were a lot full of $40,000 Camero's and $30,000 Traverse's and oh yeah a ton of SUV's that get 12 miles to the gallon. I was really disappointed. The Chevy website advertises a ton of cars from the $10K spectrum to the $90K spectrum and I only saw three cars on this lot. Ummm how yah suppose to sell cars?? We were very disappointed we couldn't even look at the cars we were interested in. I also forgot how annoying car salesmen can be. I absolutely hate it when you go in a store and a salesperson buzzes around you. So imagine my disgust when car salesmen started to approach us. The hub decided to take a reverse approach ...

Back in 2004 I went on vacation and came home and my hubby who wasn't my hubby at the time bought a car. He bought a Volkswagon Jetta. He was very excited about it cause it was cool, slick, hipster and did I say cool? Unfortunately, that gleam in his eye went away fast. A year or two later a head gasket blew costing a ton of money and we hadn't even paid off the car. Then the warranty people refused to honor their warranty (wish I knew a lawyer cause this fits the definition of lemon). And oh every other month something falls off or breaks. In all my car driving and owning years I have never known a bigger piece of crap than this car. Besides being the spawn of hell because surely this car was driven to hell and its angry about something that stupid car a major pain in our pain in our ass. Not only does the stupid car break all the time and is costly to repair it always seems to wait until the most inopportune time to breakdown and make us worry about money. Well no...

Was it me or did September fly by? I can't believe it's the beginning of October already. You know what that means, the holidays are coming. Normally this is a fun and exciting thing but in this economy it's a real bummer to a lot of people. I really wanted to have a Halloween party this year but I feel like it's not something I should really be spending a ton of money on. That is what this economy has come down to.. the way you think and the way you spend. There were some layoffs at work yesterday and I have it in the back of my mind...what would I do if I were laid off? When you have a house it kinda freaks you out that maybe one day you couldn't afford to live there. I probably shouldn't have watched that 60 Minutes story on this couple who was kicked out their home and living in camp site. But that is the reality of our economy. People are loosing their houses. These economic hard times suck because you are constantly asking yourself if you should rea...