$1.50 Cheesecake

Here's the email:

"On Wednesday, July 30, Cheesecake Factory restaurants nationwide will offer every delicious slice of our more than 30 varieties of cheesecake for $1.50 per slice - just like we did when we opened our first restaurant back in 1978! It's no coincidence that Wednesday, July 30, also happens to be National Cheesecake Day. After all, what better time to enjoy the cheesecake you absolutely love! As you know, sharing is part of the fun at The Cheesecake Factory so feel free to share the news about this special offer with your friends."

I checked their website just in case. I did notice it's for dine-in only.

www.cheesecakefactory.com

Flower finally!

We have flowers on our tomato plants! We will finally have tomatoes soon! The pictures are blurry though; I haven't figured out how to get my camera to not focus on stuff behind what I want to take a photo of, we held a piece of paper behind the flower, but it didn't help.

Space bags are rad!

Yes, I said RAD!! I've been wanting to get Space Bags for a while, well I finally did yesterday. Here are my before and after photos. I want to put everything in Space Bags!!

Strike 2

We didn't get that house either. After the seller sat on our offer for a week, they finally decided to go with another. Now we are going to try for the house I posted first. They recently dropped the price $20k. We'll see how it goes. Here's the next house we'll try:

In Mourning

Hi everyone,
I lost a great friend and co-worker today and it has been a very difficult day. His name is Kevin, 49 years old, and worked out of our Fresno office, he suffered a fatal heart attack when he arrived to work this morning. He was such a hard worker and a great friend to anyone and everyone. Although I never met him, I felt very close with him. It’s a tragedy that the world lost such a great man. He could put a smile on his face during the worst of days or help someone smile who needed it. My co-workers and I, in the Sacramento office, have shared many laughs with Kevin, even teased him that we had cameras planted in his office so we could watch him all day; we would tell him we liked his shirt, or he looked tired, or random things just to have fun with him.

It’s hard to think he’s gone and work just won’t be the same without him. I also realize how much is taken for granted. Make sure those close to you know how important they are to you, loved ones should know they are loved, friends should be cherished, kind words should be spoken because you don’t know when they, or you, will be called away. Kevin was a great example to me and I’m a better person for having him as a friend in my life.

Thanks for everything my “Fresno Friend”, you’ll never be forgotten!

With much love and friendship to all of you!


I recevied this email yesterday from Tammy and thought I would share it...we need to stress less and love and befriend each other more.

Stress and a Glass of Water

A lecturer, when explaining stress management to an audience, raised aglass of water and asked, "How heavy is this glass of water?

Answers called out ranged from 20g. to 500g.

The lecturer replied, "The absolute weight doesn't matter.It depends on how long you try to hold it. If I hold it for a minute, that's not a problem.If I hold it for an hour, I'll have an ache in my right arm.If I hold it for a day, you'll have to call an ambulance. In each case, it's the same weight, but the longer I hold it, theheavier it becomes."

He continued,"And that's the way it is with stress management.If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later,as the burden becomes increasingly heavy,we won't be able to carry on. "

"As with the glass of water,you have to put it down for a while and rest before holding it again. When we're refreshed, we can carry on with the burden."

"So, before you return home tonight, put the burden of work down.Don't carry it home.You can pick it up tomorrow.Whatever burdens you're carrying now,Don't pick it up again until after you've rested a while."

Here are some great ways of dealing with the burdens of life:

* Accept that some days you're the pigeon, and some days you're thestatue
* Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eatthem.
* Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in themiddle of it.
* Drive carefully. It's not only cars that can be recalled by theirMaker.
* If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.
* If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it wasprobably worth it.
* It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply be kind to others.
* Never put both feet in your mouth at the same time, because then youwon't have a leg to stand on.
* The second mouse gets the cheese.
* When everything's coming your way,you're in the wrong lane.
* Birthdays are good for you.The more you have, the longer you live.
* You may be only one person in the world, but you may also be the worldto one person.
* Some mistakes are too much fun to only make once.
* We could learn a lot from crayons... Some are sharp, some are prettyand some are dull. Some have weird names and all are different colors,but they all have to live in the same box.
*A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.

Trying an offer on this house...

We'll keep you posted how it goes with this house. I'm not a fan of the rock on the outside, but it has some pretty great features inside. It has sliding drawers in the kitchen so Doug won't have to crawl on the ground to get something out, it has 2 sinks in the kitchen - one is in the island, and there are dimmer lights throughout the home as well as an intercom system; oh and there is storage everywhere including a crawl space under the stairs. The grass is pretty much dead, so we would have that to work on as well as repaint the inside (it looks like it was freshly painted by someone with REALLY bad vision), but it seems like a great house.

Vacation

We stayed home for most of our time off. Doug was just happy to be off work and we were both happy to spend time together and not have work to rush off to. Although I felt more busy being on vacation than going to work each day. We got a ton of phone calls and kept running around. Some of the phone calls were regarding the offer we put in on the house in the previous post. I told Doug, the next time we take time off we are hiding from everyone.


We did spend a couple nights in Angel's Camp. It's a really cute town known for frog jumping, but I really think they need more frogs around because we were killing flies the whole time - I even had a dead one in my food.

We couldn't change the reservations at the timeshare from Doug's parent's name to ours, so Doug's dad drove down to check us in - we are so grateful he was willing to do that for us. We decided to make a day of it since Sheri and her family were in town. 8 of us headed to the Big Tree Forest and had lunch and walked around for a little bit. Some of the pictures I posted a short while ago are from that trip as well. It was really smoky and about 104 degrees while we were there, so we didn't get out much. We did walk through the town of Murphy. It's a cute little town that charges way too much for ice cream. Really though, that's not a joke. We got a single scoop of ice cream on a simply little cone and for 2 of them it was $6.50.

That's a big tree alright!
And an even bigger stump.
These dressed up frogs where all over the town. This one is a chef. A restaurant we ate in. We really thought the railing was neat; it's made from axe handles.

A knight frog.
Almost missed this one while driving by. It's a fireman frog.
This is how thick the smoke was looking outside our window at the timeshare.

I didn't post the pictures of the flies because I couldn't get them in focus. However, here is Doug killing another fly. These flies would wake us up so early in the morning buzzing around.

Pictures with the new camera...

After complaining about my current camera and how slow it was taking pictures on the 4th of July, Doug got me a great camera that take awesome pictures.
Okay, you had to know they were coming....

Click on the moon and you can see the craters!

A mom and her babies. It's tongue is sticking out - cute!

Doug feeding a bird. I'm shocked this picture came out because the bird was so fast.

Click on the flower, it's so pretty!

1st Anniversary!!

How exciting! I can't believe a whole year has gone by though. We went to Black Angus for dinner and Doug had a steak and I had shrimp. It was really yummy!!
Doug got me a new camera for our anniversary. I love it, but will probably need some help learning how to use all the features in it. We've been taking pictures of everything to learn new things about the camera.
I got Doug a new electric shaver and an anti-fog mirror for the shower so he can shave there too. One of the heads on his current razor doesn't work and it's just old, so it was time for a new one. The big selling point for this razor was it came with a car charger, which is really helpful for Doug.

We are very thankful to my mom for the gift card she gave us for our anniversary. We aren't sure what to get with it yet. We will probably end up saving it for a house; we'll probably need to buy a refrigerator and washer/dryer, so it will come in handy along with Doug's discount. I was hoping we could have used it for the bedroom furniture we just bought, but the cards can't be used on prior purchases - bummer because we haven't received the last of the pieces yet, not that we have room for the last piece anyways. :-)

Tree & Fruit Update

Believe it or not, there is yet ANOTHER oak tree growing. However, one avocado tree went off to a new home; still 2 left. The orange tree has new, bright green leaves on it. The tomato plants are as tall as I am, so we had to wire 2 tomato cages together. And the last picture is just a Hummingbird that was hanging out outside our door. We put up new food for it, but it didn't drink any, it just sat in the tree for a long time.

We got big buckets to repot the trees into, which freed up bigger pots to put the avocado trees in.

I've got new fruit seeds in the refrigerator, so we'll see what ends up in the 2 empty pots from the avocado trees! Don't hold your breath though; the seeds could take a 6 week period in the refrigerator and then planting, so it will be a while before they make it to the blog.

4th of July Fireworks

To kick off our vacation, we walked over to watch fireworks.

The 4th of July is a special day for us. Our first kiss was this day a couple years ago. We watched fireworks and then smooched....awwwww. Anyways, here we are a couple years later and have watched fireworks for the 3rd year in a row. We even went to see them before we got married last year. Anyways, here are some pictures of the fireworks.

Offer on home - didn't get it

We put an offer on the house in this picture, but didn't get it. It's a beautiful home, but didn't work out; it's for the best though. They sent us a counter offer and because we wouldn't give our deposit straight to the seller after a 10 day contingency period they wouldn't take the deal. The normal contingency period is 17 days, which isn't unreasonable for a home that's being flipped by the seller. If the loan were to take 11 days in underwriting he could walk away with our money. Not worth risking it at all!

Jamba Deal!

It's buy one get one free Jamba time again!

Go to the link below to get your coupon:

http://jambacentral.com/therealdeal/?utm_source=site&utm_medium=cpn-pg&utm_campaign=realdeal

Happy 4th of July!!

We hope everyone has a safe and fun 4th of July.

By the way...VACATION STARTS TODAY!!!

Doug has one more shift though.

We are celebrating our 1 year anniversary on Monday!!