November = Turkey Day and Mel and Brian's and Disneyland!

We've been making the trip to Victorville every November for Thanksgiving at Melanie and Brian's home since we moved to Arizona, since we're so close, and we were invited. It's turned into a mini family reunion every year which I love, love, love.

Last year was lots of crazy family and fun. The group was expanded by more of the Marnette family--Uncle Joey, my mom, Vikki and Trish--and other descendants as well as Brian's family.

We included Disneyland in the itinerary too, something we try to do every couple of years--this time there were 3 or 4 generations of us gallivanting about the enchanted kingdom for about 18 hours. Gotta love it.

We also all met up at Aunty Mary's to create some heirloom keepsake pieces from a couple pieces of Gramma Helen's jewelry. We took two necklaces and combined the bits with new beads and findings to make many bracelets and necklaces--all with a little bit of Gramma's legacy.

Uncle Don, Alec and Devin took the little boys out for a walk with the dogs while the gals all played with the sparklies. Check out the photos:

Disneyland

Turkey Day

Making jewelry

More hard work

Now, more on catching up. Last I posted about the house remodeling we were pulling up carpet and baring the concrete floors. Well, there was more of that to do and it required pulling up small glazed tiles that were apparently cemented to the cement. Argh.

The darn tiles were super slippery and not level. They were a type of saltillo but had a thick glaze on top.

It took a jack hammer and a whole lot of grunting, swearing and other  assorted sound effects to get it all up. They were clay based tiles too so red dust was everywhere and EVERYTHING was red when we were finished and stayed that way for a LONG time.

Ugh.

Click here to see more: Bare Floors and Red Dust

Late Desert Monsoon

Hmm, today is 9/11 and last time I posted it was July something... and that's how well the once a week thing is going. Oh well. Onward.

We had a hellatious storm last night and I got some pretty cool photos. To keep the blog performance up, I'm going to start including links to photos which are uploaded to Picasa. And maybe one photo just to pique your interest. :)

You can see the rest here: Photos