Griffin and I took off for a long weekend trip to New York to visit one of Griffin’s high school/college friends and his girlfriend who are now living in Manhattan. They took us ALL over the city, and I mean all over, we walked over 25 miles the 3.5 days we were there. Since we saw so much it’s impossible to write about it all so I’m resorting to a list (I have a thing for lists, you know.) It was lots of fun to see the city decorated for the holidays including Rockefeller center and the tree. However, it was freezing cold while we were there, the high on Saturday was 20 F. Brrrr.

• Times Square

• Grand Central Station

• Dunkin’ Donuts – These things are allllll over the city and have very tasty hot chocolate that tastes phenomenal in subfreezing temperatures. Our first day in New York we stopped here for breakfast and before I even could order my food and coffee from the grouchy cashier a little old lady cut in front of me in line and a homeless dude demanded that I buy him breakfast. Welcome to New York.
• MOMA – Visited the Tim Burton exhibit, very cool.
• Rockefeller Center – Decorated for the holidays with Christmas tree and ice skating rink. No, we didn’t skate, there was a huge line. Also saw the Today show studio and Radio City Music Hall.

• St. Peters Cathedral – Absolutely beautiful inside.

• Rode in a cab but it was nothing like people say it is, very tame.
• Saw lots of different neighborhoods – Soho, Chelsea, Lower East Side, Chinatown, West Village, Greenwich Village
• Statue of Liberty – Only saw it from Battery Park. I’d like to see it closer someday but I’ve heard that actually visiting the statue itself is overrate. Ellis Island looks interesting though.
• Wall Street and the bull statue

• World Trade Center
• Little Italy – Had some tasty Italian food on a very, very cold night. Also, they do not fool around with Christmas decorations here, every storefront was thoroughly decorated.
• Ate some authentic New York pizza. Very tasty, the crust does seem different.
• THE Macy’s

• Union Square
• Bryant Park
• Magnolia Bakery – Famous bakery features in Sex and City.Enjoyed a mini pumpkin cheesecake with a gingerbread crust. Yum.
• High Line – Old elevated railroad tracks in the Meatpacking district that have been turned into a pedestrian walk way with great views of the city and the Hudson river.
• Battery Park – View of the Statue of Liberty. The park is full of people selling knock-off purses!
• Rode on the subway several times. It’s exactly like it is in movies!
• Central Park and Columbus Circle- Visited Central Park in the pouring rain because it was our last day in the city and we wanted to see it. It was very pretty in the rain. I’d love to see more of it sans-rain.

• FAO Schwartz and The Big Piano

We had wonderful hosts and owe them big time for such a wonderful trip. We certainly wouldn’t have been able to see half of what we saw without them!

Griffin and I are getting the amazing opportunity to travel to Europe next summer and are starting to think about what we want to do and want to have to make our trip amazing. There’s just one problem, neither of us are very experienced travelers. This will be both of our first times to Europe. We are planning on taking a 7-day Mediterranean cruise with some of Griffin’s family and then hopefully spending a week or two visiting Italy. The cruise departs from and returns to Rome and stops in Sicily, Turkey, Athens and Crete.

One purchase we plan on making in preparation for our trip is a nice digital camera to capture all the beautiful sights. We currently have a very adequate point-and-shoot digital for everyday events. It’s compact and easy to use. However, I’ve seen the difference that a larger dSLR can make in landscape photos and think I want in on the action. But here’s the other problem, I don’t know much about camera technology. I’ve been doing some research and any advice from those camera-gurus out there is much appreciated.

What we’re looking for…. We are not photographers but I do appreciate the art of photography and enjoy dabbling in composition from time to time, we would do this even more if we had a nice camera. We are techies. We are not rich but want to make a good investment that we will be happy with for years to come. We want good value. We are weight lifters but want something suitable for traveling. We are not looking to own a dozen lenses, probably only one. We probably want to frame a few of our pictures (8×10 max) but most of them will be shared digitally.

My current criteria for choosing a camera is as follows (highest to lowest):

• Price
• Picture Quality (resolution?)
• Size/Weight

So here’s what I’m wondering:

• Are there other factors I’m not taking into account when purchasing a dSLR?
• I’ve heard Nikon and Canon dominate the market. Should I only look at their cameras?
• How much resolution do I really need? I’ve heard 6-8 megapixels would be adequate for us, is this true?
• I care about end picture quality, is the resolution the main thing I should be worried about?
• What’s a reasonable price range for our criteria? $600? $500? $400? Less? More?
• What type of a lens do I want? Do I purchase it with the camera or separately?

Griffin and I are headed to New York City this weekend to visit some friends. Neither of us have been to New York before and we are especially excited to see the city at Christmas time.We are visiting one of Griffin’s friends from high school and college.

I’m posting this from a Virgin America plane 35,154 ft above Iowa as they have WiFi on all their planes and Google is sponsoring free wifi through the holidays. Normally it would cost $13. I think I would pay for it on a long flight such as this one in the future. It’s not breaking any speed records but is certainly sufficient for general internet browsing. I’ve been catching up on Reader items, Facebook, and researching New York.

Had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend in San Luis Obispo with Griffin and my parents. We had a great time cooking a big Thanksgiving meal, touring around he SLO area and relaxing. November in coastal California is decidedly warmer than Colorado this time of year.

Griffin went to town in the kitchen the entire weekend, especially on Thanksgiving. Our delicious meal:

• 2 roast turkey breasts, brined
• garlic mashed potatoes from Julia Child’s cookbook (these included mixing in 2 heads of blanched garlic that had been pureed with a stick of butter)
• bacon apple stuffing
• gravy
• cranberry sauce – Ocean Spray – straight out of the can with the ridges still on it (my favorite)
• broccoli and cauliflower gratin
• pumpkin pie

We had a lot of fun cooking all day with my Mom trying to keep up with Griffin’s mess. There are two types of people in the kitchen: those that clean up as they go and those that leave the mess until they are finished.

The rest of the weekend we did a fair amount of relaxing and seeing SLO. On Saturday we took a short trip to see a Monach butterfly grove at Pismo Beach and Port San Luis. The Monach butterflies migrate south for the winter and many of them stop along the California coast. There is a large eycalyptus grove just southwest of SLO where many of them reside during the winter. You can see hundreds of them hanging in the trees.

Port San Luis has a small pier with some entertaining seal lions and nice views.

Helped my parents move into their new house (!!!) in San Luis Obispo, CA (!!!) this weekend. The house is very nice and will be perfect for them. Very excited to have them closer!

Me in an empty PODS container. We unloaded 3.

The PODS system is really neat. They drop off an empty container at your house and you pack it, taking as long as you like. Then they come pick it back up and will either move it for you or store it. Then when you’re ready to unload the POD they’ll come drop it off where ever you want it. They have a really cool machine called a Podzilla that lifts the PODS off and on the truck and parks them where ever you want it. My dorky engineering side really enjoyed watching.

First CWO concert of our 25th Anniversary season is this Sunday, November 8th. 4:30 pm at Lake Merritt. We have some really neat pieces on the program and seeing all the kids enjoy the music is always fun. Plus, there will be a “special guest photographer” who will be taking pictures of the group for our new website! *wink, wink*

I’m now officially a wannabe web designer! Over the past few weeks I have spent many, many hours creating two websites. One for my Mom’s new tutoring business and redesigning my orchestra’s website. I knew nothing about web design when I started and I’m not sure how much more I know now other than trail and error will always get you to the correct answer.

Before starting these tasks this simple WordPress.com blog has been my only web publishing experience. I found creating “real” websites and learning more about coding very interesting. My Mom and I used WordPress.com to create a website for her tutoring business: Learning Rx Tutoring at learningrxtutoring.com. I think she’s pleased with the result and it will work great for her business.

The harder task was venturing into unknown territory with WordPress.org to create a more detailed site for my orchestra, Community Women’s Orchestra. I’ve always been impressed with WordPress.com but had never used WordPress.org. We wanted to use WordPress to build the website for ease of accessibility. Since one doesn’t really need to know anything about web design or coding or have any special software to edit the content of the website this was a good choice for our organization. We have multiple board members, conductors, and involved members who have input to the site. Before we were relying solely on one or two people to make changes and when they were busy the changes couldn’t be made.

WordPress.org really is a neat service. It’s almost identical to WordPress.com but has way more customizable features. This forced me to learn more about coding and CSS formating but I still don’t know much. my approach to the CSS was change one thing at a time, see if it did what you wanted (not likely) or broke something else (likely), revert the change, and repeat with a new item. I’m pretty proud of how the site turned out given my inexperience and the orchestra seems to like it too.

Both of these endeavors would not have been possible at all without the patient help of my college friend Andrew. Andrew, you’re the best!

After nearly 10 months of non-operation the Integra is back!

Our 1997 Acura Integra GSR had been having some serious oil burning issues (I blogged about it here) that we finally got fixed with an engine rebuild. It has been burning oil for years but finally got to the point where we were putting in a a quart every 100-200 miles and it was obviously smoking. We stopped driving it regularly back in February and spent a few months debating what to do with it.

We originally ended up deciding we would sell it and listed it on Craigslist. We got a few responses and then started researching what selling a car in California entitled. That’s when we found out couldn’t legally sell it with out a valid smog test certificate. Since the car was obviously smoking this was definitely out of the question. Sure, there are people that would still buy the car from you “as-is,” fix it, then smog it, then register it. The problem is you are still liable for the car and it is still registered under your name for that period. Plus, the buyer could come back to you looking for their money back at any time since the sale wasn’t legal. Any documents you have the buyer sign saying the car is being sold “as-is” without a smog certificate won’t hold up in small claims court. This is obviously a worse case scenario but it wasn’t a risk we felt comfortable taking. We could have sold the car as “parts-only” but then the title would get a salvage stamp and the buyer would have to go through the process of returning the car to normal status. Since we already weren’t thrilled about selling the car we decided to go back to the drawing board.

The second option was to have the car fixed. Since the suspected culprit for the burning oil was the piston rings this was a major undertaking. We could have replaced the engine but “in-kind” engines (B18C1) are very expensive (this is a rare version of the Integra) and there are no guareentees that the new engine (usually low milage Japanese motors) wouldn’t have the same issues. We decided to go the route of having the engine rebuilt.

We got a few quotes from some tuner shops in the Bay Area but they either seemed disorganized, uninterested in our business, or had terrible reviews online. People at work recommended I talk to one of my co-workers, Cliff, that works on peoples cars on the side. Practically everyone in my work group has had some part of their car serviced by Cliff and he is very reasonably priced. I think he does this for fun and a little extra income. The bad part is he’s a one man operation so it took awhile for him to have time in his schedule to take on our rather large project. Since we don’t “need” the car on a daily basis I was happy to wait my turn in his schedule to have someone who I felt would car about my car and the outcome of the work fix it.

He took the car in mid-September and finished it last weekend, working on it bit by bit on the weekends and after work. We also had him replace the clutch (it really needed a new one too, it was a “snails butt” away from the rivets according to Cliff), timing belt and water pump (when in Rome) and any other gaskets, fluids, etc that might be needed since everything was going to be apart anyways. He pulled the engine apart and apparently there was oil everywhere. It looks like the piston rings in cylinders 2 and 4 had failed and the exhaust valve guides in cylinder 4 were leaking. Luckily the cylinder walls were still in good shape so they were only lightly honed. We got new exhaust valve guides on all four cylinders, new piston rings, and a new head gasket. All said and done: $2,300. Great deal.

I took the car in to get smog tested on Friday as it is due for registration next month and it barely passed. It looks like we still have a problem with some aspect of the exhaust system (catalytic converter?, oxygen sensors?) or timing/fuel mixture as we had high tailpipe hydrocarbons. However, our NOx went down from last time which points away from a problem with the catalytic converter.  Here’s our emmission at 15 mph and 25 mph the past two times the car has been smog tested (2009 and 2007). In 2007 the car was burning some oil, but not smoking. The 2009 test is post-rebuild. What’s going on here?

	Limits		2009 Test		2007 Test
	15 mph	25 mph	15 mph	25 mph	15 mph	25 mph
CO2	-	-	14.0%	13.8%	14.6%	14.6%
O2	-	-	0.7%	0.7%	0.0%	0.0%
Hydrocarbon	61 ppm	45 ppm	61 ppm	42 ppm	60 ppm	34 ppm
CO	0.54%	0.53%	0.17%	0.25%	0.21%	0.19%
NO	467 ppm	754 ppm	54 ppm	21 ppm	104 ppm	118 ppm

Griffin and I finally made a trip to visit Nan and Juan in their new home: Dallas, Texas. We were lucky to have Leah and Brad there at the same time. It was a blast. I’ve never been to Texas before so it was great to see part of the state.

The weather was cold and cloudy for most of the trip so we didn’t “get to” experience much of the legendary heat and humidity but I got enough of a taste of it to know that I can’t imagine what living here is like during the summer. Just stepping outside was like walking into a wall of moisture. My hair was out of control with the high humidity.

In addition to seeing Nan and Juan’s lovely home we also visited the 6th Floor Museum in Dallas (chronicles the assassination and legacy of JFK, located on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository), the Texas State Fair, and the historic Fort Worth Stockyards.

Griffin with Boxster and Cooper

The Texas State Fair is FULL of fried foods. Anything you could imagine. We saw fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, fried jellybeans, fried bacon, fried butter, fried peaches and cream, fried pecan pie, fried ice cream, fried Coke, fried Snickers bars, fried Oreos, fried cookie dough, fried banana split, and of course, fried Twinkies.I think most of the items are frozen before they are dipped in batter and fried to prevent them from totally disintegrating in the hot oil.

We sampled a few things including a corn dog, fried Oreos and a fried Twinkie. The fried Oreos were by far my favorite.

Fried Oreos

Fried Twinkie

One of the main attractions at the fair is “Big Tex” a giant animatronic cowboy that has been greeting fair-goers since the 50’s. Every half hour he starts talking in a very loud, very deep voice with a healthy drawl. He talks about the fair and then concludes with “Big Tex says Hoooooowwwdddyyy” in the most comical way. Blogging does not do it justice, you’ll have to take my word for it…

We also visited the historic Stockyards in Forth Worth which was a major hub for the sale and slaughter of cattle starting in the mid 1800’s and continuing to the 1960’s. It’s now a historic district with a twice daily “Stampede,” weekly rodeos, and tourist shops.

Fort Worth "Stampede" (AKA walking some big longhorns down the street.)

Leah and Nan enjoying an authentic horseback ride in Fort Worth

We had a great time visiting with everyone and hope to make another trip again soon!

Brad and Juan hunting a skunk in the backyard from the upstairs balconey with a pot of water. (They never found the skunk, only smelled him.)

One of

ddsafdfaasdfthe main attractions at the fair is “Big Tex” a giant anamatronic cowboy that has been greeting fair-goers since the 50’s. Every half hour he starts talking in a very loud, very deep voice with a healthy drawl. He talks about the fair and then concludes with “Big Tex says Hoooooowwwdddyyy” in the most comical way. Blogging does not do it justice, you’ll have to take my word for it…

I’m getting to be a pro at putting in eye drops… I went back in for my follow-up with the eye doctor after three weeks and she said two more weeks of drops and no contacts. Ugh.

The good news is that I got new glasses to replace my old ones with the horribly out of date prescription so I can see again! Can’t wait to have my contacts back though.