San Diego

Before you assume that this trip was all fun I should mention there was a definite work component involved. I'm off to write my book report for work right after this blog entry. This report is purely the non-work portion of my trip. The mapping technology that I use is owned by GE and they had their annual conference in San Diego this year. I had asked a while ago and it didn't look like I'd be able to go as there was co-worker who had a better case but he ended up being sent to Serbia on the same week and I was next in line.

The conference started early Monday so I had to fly in on Sunday. I took the earliest flight so that I'd have a bit of time to go sight seeing. Last time I was here I went to the zoo and the aquarium. I only had time for one this time and the zoo is first class. Highlights included the sky tram,  the pandas, the elephants and of course the monkey on the hippo. The San Diego Zoo has some great exhibits and I like when they mix up the animals. (When I say great, I mean if you can get over the fact that they are caged animals. Many are in the name of conservation but I don't think they all are.)

I only found out that I'd be able to go about a week in advance so by the time I tried to get a room at the main hotel it was already booked for some of the nights. My amazing travel agent, Kerry, managed to get me into the hotel across the street. It's a turn of the century mansion with a lot of history. It was also close. So close that I was technically closer to the conference area than much of the main hotel was. The place was called the Glorietta Bay Inn and with few rooms and friendly staff it had a great ambience.

The main hotel had a lot of history as well. It was called the Hotel Del Coronado and it was built in 1888. It seems that many great hotels of that era never made it past the 60's and 70's so it's in a class of it's own. I'm fairly certain that many areas of Disneyland were modelled after this hotel. The shops on main street, the layout of the Disneyland Hotel and even the fonts on the signs all looked like they were inspired by the Del. The hotel itself was where the 'Wizard of Oz' was written and it was the backdrop for Maralyn Monroe's movie 'Some Like It Hot'.

The beach was definitely the highlight of the area. The sand was like talcum powder and I saw several sand sculptures get created while I was there, including a near full size Audi for a convention of top sellers that was taking place at the same time as our convention. On the Tuesday night we had dinner on the beach and I started every morning with a walk in the sand. (And a bunch of work stuff happened. Let's not forget the work stuff.)

Happy Birthday Carter

Technically I was in San Diego for Carter's birthday but more on that in a future blog. Carter has lot's of friends at preschool that we hear about all the time but because Kerry tends to drop the kids off later and pick them up earlier than most parents she doesn't get to meet many of them and at Carter's age you're really inviting the parents. As such we had mainly a friends and family evening with pizza, burgers and cake. This was our first store bought cake for a kids party which may be an ongoing theme for Carter. It's so soon into the school year we haven't settled enough to put a lot of time into homemade cakes.

After Callie's marathon of gifts and parties including her real birthday in Disneyland, Carter was very excited that this day was going to be about him. Callie helped with much of the planning and made sure that the traditional 'present opening chair' was in it's usual spot. When it came time to open gifts he seemed surprised that all the presents were for him. He seems to have very low expectations so I get the sense we've got to make more effort to even up the amount of attention we're paying to each kids party.

Lego was a constant them for presents which suits me fine. Once they are opened, built once and destroyed they go into the general lego collection and don't take up much room. Once we start to give away the little kid toys we should finally be able to reclaim our home. The weather, food, friends and family were all great. (Except for that minor food poisoning incident with the beef from Costco. We got a phone call the very next day from Costco indicating a bad batch and it seems more than one of our guests were impacted. Our apologies.)

The Death of Summer

Summer comes to a very abrupt end in our household. Not only does Callie have to go back to school, Carter goes back to daycare and Kerry goes back to work. We did a good job of going out with a bang though. My mom came down and we managed to go to the aquarium and the zoo and had a thoroughly enjoyable final weekend. For the first day of school I took the day off so that I could help Callie with the change. She was excited to go back but very apprehensive as well and I knew it was going to be a tough morning.

We had a few things prepped to help. Barb had ordered her new backpack from the Disney store in Edmonton. (The store in Vancouver had sold out.) It was surprisingly cheap. Lesson learned to buy school supplies before the last week of school. I had also planned a trip to Ricky's for breakfast. We did this when she started kindergarten and she still remembered. Things went well until Callie discovered that we weren't going to breakfast till after school. (School was only from 10:00a to 11:00a) It took about 30 minutes of convincing but I finally managed to get her there on time.

Carter was much easier. At least for Carter. Much tougher on Kerry of course. He took his new cars lunch kit that he got from Kerry's friend Melissa and had no problems at drop off time. He has a friend named Taven and as soon as they saw each other it was like they hadn't been apart for the last two months. He only had a half day as we picked him up for breakfast too. When I went to pick him up he turned to his friends and said "My Daddy is taking me to breakfast!" and then ran to get his coat. Nice that the simple things seem to go so far.