Life At Villa Boswell

These past two weekends have provided the best of California "Indian Summer," with temperatures at the beach reaching into the mid and upper-70’s, something you’ll almost never see in the middle of July.  To add to the benefits of great beach weather, the fall season also offers fewer tourists, even though now is the best time to explore northern California beaches. Chris and I have taken Buck with us to the beach this weekend and last, spending a lovely afternoon driving up Highway One and exploring some hidden beaches.  (It’s kept us from unraveling under the stress of the El Granada Project.)  You can view the shots below in the embedded Web Album, or click on the web album title on the lower left to view it large size.

To add even more fun to this venture, I’ve been able to try out my new digital camera:  it’s a point-and-shoot Canon Powershot 650 IS.  And it cost me nothing!  I use our citicard mastercard to buy everything and pay it off at the end of the month, mainly to make financial tracking easier.  But, I signed up for "thank you" reward points, so along the way I’ve accumulated quite a few points.  All I had to do was to ask for the digital camera I wanted, and the representative told me how many points would be deducted from my account, and a week later it was in my hands!

(more…)

Well, it’s finally here! I’m making this post my “launch post” after too many weekends spent poking around finding the right blog software and template for my blog. I have had this problem whenever I approached something with deeper knowledge… getting started is harder because of the “I can do this better” or “I can do this myself” syndrome. Since I knit, I would often put off buying a sweater in a store, since I knew I could knit it, and when I used to throw pottery, I would admire a fine piece of work and add it to my list of project “to dos” instead of simply buying the dang thing. Same deal with necklaces and earrings (although I’ve made some pretty cool pieces for myself).

So, why should it be different with creating a blog? I work at Google, so of course the first stop should be Blogger, and I tried it out. (I’ll probably see if I can port my two previous posts over to this blog.) Blogger was fine for basic needs, but Word Press just has such amazingly cool features and all that great open-development collective love. I need it: geek love, that is. So, that choice finally made, I went on to explore the WP templates. (The rest of this post is mostly geeky ponderings, so click the More link and be warned!) (more…)