A Little Too Close for Comfort

This past weekend a string of fires broke out in Southern California.

Early Saturday morning we saw smoke rising from the fire in Yorba Linda (less than 10 miles from us). When we arrived home in the afternoon, we learned that the fire had jumped the freeway and was also in Anaheim Hills. We live on the other side of the hill from Anaheim Hills! That's when it started getting pretty scary. Down the hill from us is lots of brush, so if any embers flew our way and hit that, then we'd have a fire on our hands also. Luckily (for us), the wind was blowing away from us.

We were glued to the news trying to figure out exactly where the fire was. We saw TONS of people fleeing the Anaheim Hills area in their cars. It was like a massive exodus.

We heard that it was right behind the Costco we go to and actually burned a building in the same shopping center.

There were so many huge million dollar houses that were damaged or destroyed. It was really unbelievable!

Cuong's parents were supposed to come over and have dinner with us on Saturday night. Apparently they had put a police officer at the bottom of our major street who was turning people away. It took them about 1 1/2 hours to move just 200 yards.

I walked down to the corner to see if I could see what was going on. I brought the camera along:

This was when I was on the corner of our street looking up towards the Anaheim Hills/Yorba Linda area.

This is our house, along with LOTS of smoke!

Next I walked down to the major street that Cuong's parents were trying to get up. On a clear day, you can get a glimpse of the ocean, but today it was all smoke. I think it will be a while until there is any views of the ocean.

From the major street corner looking back up towards Anaheim Hills/Yorba Linda. That's our house on the right.

Since it was getting pretty close and embers were flying all over the place, I started making up an "Evacuation Packing List". I even started putting all of my scrapbooking stuff my the door. These are my albums and pictures....it looks like so much more stuff once I pulled it out of the cabinets.

Phew!

Can I just say how happy I have to finally have ZERO new items in my Google Reader. It's official, I subscribe to way too many blogs. I even went through my subscriptions to try and decide who I could delete, but I didn't have the heart to delete anyone.
The other day I had over 500 new posts to read. UGH!
And you would think that with me being at home that I would have plenty of time to post to my blog! For some reason, I feel like I'm super busy now. Now my days are mostly filled with exercise, running errands, some tv, and chores.

Scrapbooking!

Back in late October I participated in the Survivor Crop that Ever After scrapbook store put on in Oceanside. It was their 7th annual event. You basically are srapbooking for 24 hours straight with 150+ of your closest scrappers. hehe

There were about 20 tables and each table had a team. Our team was the 'Monster Croppers 4 the Cure'! We were lucky enough to have some Monster Energy stuff donated to us to use. We had stickers, bracelets, lanyards, temporary tattoos, etc. It was so cool!

This was my first time at the event and I wasn't sure what to expect. I wasn't even sure if I could stay up for 24 hours...but I did it!

On Friday afternoon, I headed down to Oceanside to get ready and spend the night at Connie's house. I got my t-shirt iron on done, and Connie taught me the dance that we need to incorporate with our song. Each team needed to have a song and dance to perform.

We had so much fun!

Here are a few of the projects I worked on:

Towards the early morning, I had run out of things to do..and out of adhesive! Luckily Ever After had a little mini store set up. I was able to pick up some paper and adhesive right there!
Luckily I had brought pictures from the Fraternity days, so I made a little mini album. Here are a few pages:

Anniversary Weekend

This weekend we celebrated our 2nd wedding anniversary. My how time flies!!

Our actual anniversary was on the 21st, but that weekend didn't work for us to go on a little get away.

It was my turn to plan our anniversary get away this year. I had been debating about where to go for a few months. I finally picked the Hyatt in Long Beach. It's right across the street from the harbor and has a great view of Shoreline Village and the Queen Mary. We actually looked into getting married at this Hyatt!

We arrived on Saturday afternoon to check in. Since our room wasn't ready yet, we checked our luggage and then headed across the street to the extended Shoreline Village. They have tons of newer restaurants & shops, and plus the aquarium at the end.

We headed out onto a little pier to take in the scenery along with taking a few pictures.

About a minute after we took this last picture, the sky opened up and poured on us! We ran for cover and hid out under some thick trees until it reduced down to a sprinkle.

From there we headed back to the hotel bar to catch most of the USC game. They kicked butt of course.

A little while later we headed up to our room, which had an awesome view of the harbor. I couldn't have asked for a better view. I was nervous about the quality of room we would get since there were two different functions going on at the convention center. Phew!

After settling into our room, we got ready to head to dinner. Since we both love Bubba Gump's Shrimp Co, we ditched the fancy, romantic anniversary dinner and went for some yummy shrimp. I got a Lt. Dan's Pomegranate Punch and Cuong got some sort of limey margarita. Delicious!