Name that celebrity

Anyone? Anyone? It's Marie Osmond! A couple weeks ago one of our corporate liaison's at work asked if I wanted to go to the California Central Valley Women's conference. Considering it was a $90 ticket for free and more importantly that I would get out of work and still get paid I jumped at the chance! It turned out to be pretty cool and I got a lot of free stuff from the vendors there. There were tons of booths set up and I got some real treasures like chip clips, a cup, a cutting board, more chip clips, etc. And man did those chip clips come right in time since we just broke our last little one. Anyways, they also had several different sessions you could attend. I went to one put on by Macy's where they talked about being a fashionista this fall. I'm pretty sure I can't afford to be a fashionista their way though since their models shoes alone were like $300. It was fun to go to though. Marie Osmond comes in to play as the keynote speaker at lunch. She did a good job, quite entertaining if I do say so myself. I guess I never realized how crazy her life has been. Anyway, she talked about being an empowered woman and what not. It was a women's conference after all. She mentioned a lot about her faith in God which I thought was really cool and brave considering so many people these days apparently hate when people "force" their religion on them. I was going to go to more of the sessions but I ended up sitting with my work friends at their booth and people watching. Man, what a rough day at work!

Oh how we love visitors

We had a great time last weekend having JR's mom, step dad and niece come to visit us from Arizona. We are so thankful when family or friends come to visit us because although we've been in Fresno for over a year now we still need some good family bonding and it's so great see old familiar faces.
We hope that our visitors had a good time. We definitely kept them running. They drove in Thursday night and we hurried them out the door to take them to John's Incredible Pizza. We thought it might be a fun place to go with the little one. JR's niece Larissa is 4 and had been couped up in the car for the past couple days so it was nice to let her loose for a bit. And JR and I got a real kick out of putting his mom and Buddy up against each other in a game or two. Look at the intensity going on here:

By the way, JR's mom thrashed Buddy. He didn't stand a chance!
Larissa living it up:

Friday we actually piled everyone up in the car again and headed to the Coast. JR and I thought it would be fun to go somewhere new so we decided upon Santa Cruz because we thought the boardwalk would be a fun thing. We pricelined a hotel again and ended up with a room with 1 King Bed for 5 of us. JR really enjoyed sleeping on the chair with the ottoman. His back didn't hurt at all the next day and he felt so refreshed. JR's mom and Buddy also enjoyed being kicked in the face all night by Larissa. After a wonderful nights sleep we headed to a neighboring town called Capitola where they just happened to be holding their annual Begonia festival. We were able to walk along the beach and see a sandcastle building competition in progress. They also had a nice little river walk where people were putting float boats together with Begonia's to float in the parade the next day. It was pretty fun to see all that was going on. I'm only posting some of the better sand castle's but there were really a lot of people who had entered...some better than others.

Get it? It's the sea god sticking his triton into the company BP for the oil spill. This next one with the rose was so impressive, the details were amazing.

The start of one of the floats:

Begonia's:
A cool windmill house:



When we were done at Capitola we headed over to the boardwalk at Santa Cruz and walked around and enjoyed some beach time. I thought the boardwalk was really great. We weren't sure what to expect because we had heard that there were a lot of homeless people around and carnival type settings do tend to attract a special crowd, but it was all around fun. We did see an episode between a group of security guards and a man covered in tatoo's who they didn't want to let him into the boardwalk because his tatoo's were gang affiliated. We thought for a second that we might see s real life shooting but we decided not to stick around to see how it ended up.

Larissa walked into one of the arcades, was given 2 tokens and hit the jackpot winning about 1100 tickets. Way to go girl!

What is a carnival without deep fried twinkie's and oreo's? This was actually our first experience with deep fried junk foods and I think we decided that we'd definitely do it again. We love clogged arteries.

We headed back to Fresno after the beach and everyone left us Sunday morning but we sure are glad we got to hang out with the fam for a couple of days. Thanks Nancy, Buddy and Larissa for a great visit!