Phoenix Botanical Gardens

I was supposed to write this post a few weeks ago when my sister was here and we went to visit the Botanical Gardens.

There is not a lot you can do in the summer in Arizona, we were pretty bored after 5 days of shopping so we decided to go and see the famous garden. It was very nice with a lot of cactuses and other fauna. There were some other attractions too but everything was out of season.

We arived at 11 am and it was already 106 F (41-42C) and there was almost no one there. We were brave so we walked around for an hour but had to leave before all of us got heat strocks. AJ was quiet in his stoller and just turned red.

Hans and I are going back to the garden for a wedding in few weeks, so hopefully we will see more.

Things....

I have been thinking to go private on this blog. Not that something happened probably just a paranoia but it has been lately on my mind and I have decided to do it at least for a few weeks/months.

It will be available just for our family and close friends. I want to apologize to the rest of you but it feels like the right thing at the moment.

I also created a new blog that is about all the things I like and I'm interested in. Mostly interior design, of course hair stuff, TV shows, books and etc...

I will try to updated it regularly.

I have been tagged again, so the next post will be about that or about someone who has a b-day this week;)

P.S. I'm going private Oct 1. Mark your calendars.

I'm back :)

Hi everyone!

Today I finished the last book of the Twilight series. I became obsessed (as most who read the books) since last Monday, when a friend of mine let me borrow the first book.

For those that are not familiar with Stephenie Meyer's work - it is a well written story about humans, vampires, werewolves, love and action.

I just can't stop reading it. Hans had to make a late run on Tuesday night to get the rest of the books. It became little an obsession of mine but I was able to remember to feed A.J...sometimes :)

Now it's over and I was pretty sad but I just found out that there is one more book in the process of writing from the other main character's point of view. You see I'm so good and I try to not spoil the story for the one's that haven't read the books yet.

Now I'm waiting for the movie in November...

P.S. Suzy, to answer your question, I think it's a little bit too much the forth book for 12-14 year olds, even parts from the first one. But "our" kids probably don't see it the way we do...I'm just glad that it happened after the main characters got married, some good values there...

P.P.S. Hans, thanks for our date. It was fun to be out again just the two of us and to have a good time no matter what we do.

Stephanie Meyers, can you tell me where my wife is?

Everyone that we know that is female recently has talked about the vampire books. It was debated at the family reunion and on the blogs. This last Monday, a friend finally let Iva borrow the first book. It is now Thursday night and she only has a few pages left in the second book. In her second language. Pretty impressive. I once read the Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe in Bulgarian and it took me a quite a while. She is killing these books.

Of course I am happy for her and happy to see she is having a good time. There's nothing like finding a book that you can't put down. I remember when the sixth Harry Potter came out and I had a flight that day. As I entered the plane and walked down the aisle, over half of the passengers were reading the same book. I had a tough time not reading the last book when it first came out because it was only four days before two bar exams. Back to my point, I am glad she is having fun and I am sure that she looks forward to discussing the details with the female readers of this blog.

Anniversary Update - Warning: May contain reference to spicy food

If you had the chance to read our last post about out anniversary, you would know that it was a rough day. Fortunately we did have a chance to go out last Friday while Dari watched AJ for us.

I had been telling Iva about this Mexican restaurant that I have gone to with colleagues from work and we never really made the effort to go there. It is seriously the best Mexican food that I've had. So I took Iva there for dinner and afterwords, she told me that it was the best she'd had as well.


The restaurant is called Guadalajara's and is located in the ghetto part of Phoenix, but when you go inside the atmosphere is not too bad. It's nothing fancy, but when everyone inside is Mexican, you know that it is pretty authentic. It's on Central Ave. and I-10.

After eating dinner, we went to get ice cream from Sonic and went up to one of the lower hills on South Mountain to look at the city lights. At some of the picnic tables, a live mariachi(?) band was performing for a large family so we enjoyed the music while watching the the sunset. Iva noticed that all the Mexican men were wearing cowboy hats and thought it was pretty funny.


We had a good time. It was the first time that we've both been away from AJ like that since he was a newborn so it was strange, but we had a great time that made up for the lame day on the 27th.

6th Anniversary

Wednesday was our 6th Anniversary of our first/communist marriage. Iva's sister is in town and offered to watch AJ so we could go out and do something fun. It was not, to say the least, a good day.



I was already covering one colleague at work as he was out on vacation. On top of that, my boss took an emergency day off and had to cover for her. Finally, my assistant took the day off so I had triple the work. It was one of those days where I had a case that went bad and a client was upset at us (not my fault). Iva was tired from AJ as he was starting to get sick again.


That afternoon, I finally left but pretty stressed out due to the escalated case load at work. We decided that we would all go out, I would drop Iva and Dari off at Target while I took AJ to an urgent care pediatrician. It took three hours to see a doctor. At 10:30 AJ was diagnosed with two ear infections and bordeline strep. I don't recommend Good Night Pediatrician to anyone. It was so late that Iva and Dari were waiting outside a dark Target and all pharmacies were closed.

Fortunately we went out Friday night and had a good time, but Wednesday was a pretty rough day for everyone.

(Special shout out to the Turkish Fly on Iva's left shoulder in the first picture. Though your life was short, oh four winged one, you have joined the halls of immortality which many of your colleagues have never achieved. If we had photoshop, you would probably be forgotten).

Family Reunion

This is Hans covering for Iva again. She is not feeling well and neither am I, but we just got back from our family reunion in Island Park, Idaho and I wanted to post a few pix. Below is a pic of the Tetons that I took while driving from Jackson, WY to Island Park while returning from Denver (long story). We spent a day in Yellowstone and saw the major attractions: My grandpa was a land developer at Henry's Lake near West Yellowstone. While he sold our family cabin some years ago, we have a family tradition of carving our names into trees up in the mountains that only our family knows how to reach. We found family names in the aspen trees all the way back to 1977 and all family members carved their names once again: We also had a family night around the fire where my brother and sister decided to be funny and sing the blues.



Here are some other family pix: