Mini Takes the States!
I’m so ready for this year! They’re doing a whole weekend thing in several cities and one is LA (August 1-3), so I’m all about it. It’s going to be at the Pasadena Rose Bowl. They have a huge festival goin on there and there will be a Mini Rally Saturday morning. I can’t wait. They even have a small track set up to test drive Minis for the “future Mini owners”.
Other fun stuff:
- MINI Parking Corral at festival grounds
- MINI-Autocross Test Drive
- Live festival entertainment
- Headliner band Saturday night
- The “Bootload of Fun Zone” with activities for all ages
- MINI Vendor Village
- An official MTTS Welcome Kit for each paid attendee
- Friday night Meet & Greet (MINI Owners only)
- Rise and Shine Saturday Rally (MINI Owners only)
Josh is in (mostly for the test drive I think)! Who else is in??
New Years Resolution Update…
So my New Year’s resolution was to try to be more green. I think I’m doing pretty good. We’ve been recycling EVERYTHING. Even the gross food containers of spoiled food, I plug my nose and clean them out for recycling. We recycle junk mail and the newspaper ads we get.
I looked into replacing our bulbs in the house with energy-efficient bulbs. I found big lots of them on eBay which is probably the way we’ll go… but maybe next month because we have a lot of wedding gifts to buy!
I did pick up some sweet reusable bags from baggubag.com. Josh is embarassed to be seen with me because everytime we’re at a checkout at like Target or Albertsons and even Macy’s this weekend I pulled out a bag from my purse and said “Don’t worry about it, I have my own bag.” Btw, they don’t make it easy to use your own bags at the self checkout counters… “unexpected item in bagging area, please wait for assistance”… ugh. And they’re afraid to touch your bags at the grocery stores and department stores they just hand you all the stuff to bag it yourself
I also use a lot less paper towels now and I’ve been cleaning windows in the house with a squegee and water instead of paper towels and windex. I am feeling very good about my newly green ways 
It reduces all the plastic bag clutter we usually have under our sink and we have way less garbage on garbage day too!
Another tip… you can recycle all those plastic bags at local Ralph’s stores or Smart & Final stores! That’s where I took a whole bunch of our bags.
ipod touch!
Josh and I were at an Apple store on Sunday and checking out the ipod touch that I’ve been pining for as well as the macbook air… not so much pining for that one. So we went to a few websites with safari, checked out the mail and music … and it was pretty sweet. Typing on it was easier than I thought. Some people prefer tactile response with real buttons.. but I gotta say the touch screen was pretty impressive. Spur of the moment Josh bought it for me I still need to get a case to protect it. I’m still in that common new-ipod-fear-of-dropping-it stage because it’s so dang slippery! It’s a lot thinner than I thought too, especially for 32GB.
I think the biggest draw back for people that prefer the iphone is that it’s only wifi not like the iphone that can use GSM networks for web access. So I started a list of places that have wifi in my town and there’s quite a few.. every Panera bread has free wifi, a few hotels nearby, almost every coffee shop that’s NOT starbucks or coffee bean/tea leaf has free wifi (Peet’s coffee, Java ‘n Jazz, etc.). Even the golf clubs in town have free wifi. Who knew?!
An iphone was just not for me because I spend way too much time on my iPod and usually kill the battery pretty quickly.. so with all the features on the iPhone that can kill the battery even faster i’d be phone-less quite a bit. iPhones cell phone plans also start at $59.99… which is far far more than I can afford or would like to even spend on a cell phone bill… (I’m at $25/month right now and doing just fine).
Overall I’m very impressed with the iPod touch on day 2 of owning it… Google maps is my favorite application. I’m a little bummed that all the free 3rd party webapps require internet connection. For those that don’t require internet, you will need to “jailbreak” your ipod, which would void the warranty and could have unexpected results… which is too much of a risk for me after all the money that was spent on it!
Visits!
Mom and Dad left on Friday night and Tracey and Christine arrived on Friday night. We had a lot of fun. Went to melrose shopping and found some cool stuff. Then found rockstar parking right on the corner of Hollywood Blvd and Orange Drive afterwards. Christine wanted to get LA souvenirs. When we rounded the corner we saw that the new H&M grand opening was at noon and it was 1:30! It wasn’t crowded at all. The fitting rooms and checkout had no lines. I found sooo many clothes, it was great. That never happens to me! As a bonus the first 100 customers got a free bag. It’s a really nice carryon bag I can totally use on flights or for gym stuff. Later we tried to play tennis and fly kites but that just wasn’t happening apparantly everyone else in Valencia wanted to play tennis as well.. there were lines at every court. So we ended up going for a short walk to enjoy the nice weather. It was a short visit they had to leave Sunday afternoon. We went to the Valencia farmer’s market Sunday morning and then ran a few errands before going to the Flyaway terminal. It was really great seeing them! Hope they can come back again soon maybe in the summer time, but Tracey doesn’t have a lot of vacation time.
I had fun with my parents too. We celebrated Easter a week late. We made pierogi, placzek, braided easter bread and more! I’ll see them again in Buffalo next month for a short time when I go for Josh’s sister’s weddng.
