new year UPDATE.

Wow. Has my life changed a LOT in the past 2 1/2 months.

For one--- as of today, I'm an official condo renter. First time EVER!! Yep, I move into the condo on the Carlsbad lagoon bright and early tomorrow morning! No more house or apartment hopping. I will have my OWN bed and living space with 3 kicka$$ people - Virginia, Sarah & Matt. The only downfall...rent every month? Iiiick. But it will be sooooo worth it. Attached is a picture of our patio, firepit & dock :)

Second of all, seeing as how I've planted a root in a living location, I am finally apart of a new gym! 24 hour fitness has great locations all over southern california and I'm so StoKed to get back to pumping the iron and working my way towards training for a full marathon.

Third of all, I am officially now a FULL TIME EMPLOYEE of LIQUID FORCE WAKEBOARDING. BOOWEM. I first became temporarily hired while one of our Customer Service reps blew out his back and is on disability leave. About a week and a half later, while I was on my way from Vail to Denver to fly home to Geebs, the VP of Sales gave me a ring, offereing me a full time position with Liquid Force saying they wanted me to be apart of their team full time. SCOREEEEE!!!! So today was my first day back on the job from a nice, lengthy Christmas vacation home & I'm learning the computer system where we enter dealer orders in. I'll still be doing social networking and marketing, along with sprayin' a little graphic design into my free time but for the most part, while Zimm is out, I'll be focusing on Customer Service and learning the industry. Everyone has to start somewhere right?!

So---from the looks of things, I'm growing some roots in Cali and am here to stay for a while. I'm still planning on working at D Street for a while, good money and great people! We'll see where life and the new year takes me! So excited for this independent chapter in my life! Life truly does begin at the end of your comfort zone. Go do something that seems out-of-the-ordinary or scary and unheard of...you'll never know how God may surprise you or bless you :)

ski patrol REsCue.

Vail, CO - DAY 1
December 18, 2010

The morning started off with an egg sandwich and Drew, Amy, Wes & I gearin' up for the 11,570 feet slopes of Vail.  A few hours of the Back Bowl and we headed in for lunch. Now, what we thought would be a short, 2 hour post-lunch quick mountain ski, turned into a scary ending. Amy and I sent the boys out to do their own thing, while we did ours - they weren't into terrorizing the double black diamonds that were closed off and being B/A like us. We studied the trail map on the way up 'perfecting a plan' to stay towards the right of the mountain, closest to Vail Cascade...Well, let's just say that when we got up to the mountain and headed down our planned trail, we saw a few black diamonds that weren't closed off and got a little lost.

Black diamond to black diamond led us to either going up hill to the left or up hill to the right - our only downhill choice was two double black diamonds:::that may have been closed off? We can't remember. And umm...closed off for good reason, possibly. Funny enough, the trail was named "BEEN THERE, DONE THAT". ha. Amy led, acting like she knew where she was going and we finally hit a point where there was nowhere to go and all we heard was water. We saw a chair lift to our left, but it was wayyyy too far away. And we saw a run to our right, but that was also far away and we'd have to cross the creek. Not to mention, it was 3:45 PM, the lifts and the mountain closes at 4:30 and that's just about the time it gets dark out too. NOT GOOD.

Thank goodness I had my cell phone. Ski Patrol needed to be notified and come find us. We waited for them for about a half hour - 2 guys and 1 girl followed our tracks from the directions we told them. It was a scary ride out of there. It was getting dark, we were riding along a ledge where there was a creek below us and we got to a point where we had to get some speed and hop the creek. Creek hoppin' & ski boot climbin' led us onto the main trail.

We could've gotten arrested or a huge fine, but the ski patrol was very generous and saved our butts from some tickets and only ended up rackin' up a little bar tab at VENDETTA'S (a local ski patrol hang out). The end of the night turned into history......

Airport chillin'...

I’ve slacked, yet again. I’ve been busy, have had a life? It’s Christmas time. I think that’s how everyone feels. I’ll spare you the details.  Well it’s been a good two weeks since my last blog. I’ve explored a few secret spots of Southern California – some being:

 • Secret way to get to Black’s Beach in La Jolla: sketchy trails in the middle of canyons and big houses to make my way down to the beach [balancing over one piece of plywood from canyon to canyon, crawling down in between tiny ridges and seeing a beautiful out of the ordinary view of the beach at sunset and listening to the dolphins talk]

• 710 in Pacific Beach: Friday Night Trivia with the girls has become a favorite of mine.

• Ramona, CA – Ramona Waterfall Hike: has hit the #1 hike I’ve done thus far. My first view was dessert. Complete dessert. I was a little nervous on how I was going to find a waterfall in the dessert-like scenery? Well as we kept walking, we ended up being on the top of a few mountains and canyons and looking down onto long valleys full of fall colors – red, yellow, and orange trees. There were beautiful rocks and rugged terrain all over. As we made our way down to the valley, we heard water. I’m not going to lie---we got lost. Well, we didn’t get lost. We just…umm…took the path on the left rather than the path in the middle, which led us an hour and a half out of our way. We found a fun little fire spot and decided to go a little deeper off the trail & we found water, LOUD water. As we went through some long, tall grass, we found that we were at the TOP of the waterfall – literally the top. We were standing right where the water was trickling down. We made our way down to the bottom, which led to a few battle bounds for me but we made it! We saw 3 guys rock climbing which was soooooooo flippin’ cool. Needless to say there was a cliff high enough and water (kinda—meaning 6 feet) deep enough to jump off of it, so we did.

As of right now, I’m on my journey home – with a pit stop in VAIL, CO to hit some double black diamonds and sip hot chocolate with good company before venturing back home to WiscO ☺
-::-::-::-Brain detOuR. I got side tracked and found some OLD OLD OLD pictures on my computer….they brought back soooo many awesome memories. From high school dances, Mr. BPH, Graduation, random nights during senior year (including Mike Englebert getting the worst wedgie EVERRRR---courtesy of me,  pictures of when my bedroom walls were still

bright yellow and blue, when Jack was not even 1 year old yet, all the fun Soccer/Cross Country team dinners and meets and times with family on Christmas Eve with all of the girl cousins...me getting mad when Krista got the Barbie I wanted hahaha) I have some kick butt friends and family and am sooo thankful for them. I was all fine until I stumbled upon one of Dootsie and I from my graduation - that made me ball like a little baby in the airport. Looking back at how cute and little she was and how grown up she is now, made me cry!!! Dang it! Okay – enough airport sobbing.

This is the point where I’m signing off…and am going to jam to some badass tunes to get me pumped for the slopes of Vail. Waiting for Drew Drew, Amy, Wes, JJ, Tris & Fish to get me outta this small pit of memories---gunna be a rockin’ time!!!