Wish Us Luck!

Tomorrow morning at 8am the phone lines open at the Mt Whitney Permit Office and there are about 8 overnight permits currently for July. So the question is can one of us be one of the first ones to reach the people at the office. According to Dave if we get a busy signal then there are at least 50 people ahead of us! We'll see what happens. But I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we snag a couple of permits.

Weekend Updates

Gee, its been a while since I've posted anything! We've been quite busy lately.

The other week we had a last minute trip to Maryland for almost an entire week. While we were there we did some fun stuff..baseball game, Baltimore aquarium, Smithsonian, etc... It was good to go back there for a little bit. And we'll be back in about 4 weeks!

Then when we got back we had a couple of days until a friend from Maryland came out to visit. She arrived on Wednesday. I had to work on Thursday, but left early on Friday to spend the afternoon with her. We ended up going out to the poppy reserve. It was a great afternoon for it. Hardly any wind and it was warm. Then we drove down to Hollywood to see some of the touristy stuff there before picking Dave up at work. Then it was off to the Stinking Rose in Beverly Hills for dinner. We had some time to kill before picking up her husband at the airport, so we went to Santa Monica and walked on the pier. However the rides were all closed to the public due to a private event. So we just wandered. Then we picked up Mark and drove to San Diego! We spent Saturday at Wild Animal Park and wine tasting nearby. Then went for dinner and drinks in the Gaslamp district. On Sunday we drove to La Jolla to see the seals. Then it was back to LAX to drop them off. I'll post some photos soon

Oh I almost forgot! Check out the new website design for my photography stuff. www.micheleschankerphotography.com

Not a big fan of spring!

For one it means ski season is pretty much over, unless you like skiing in mush. Secondly our lawn always looks so bad! This is two weekends in a row we have spent time working on the lawn. This weekend was cutting and fertilizing. We have so many weeds. It's uncontrollable. Our front area looks awful. We used to have plants but they all died in the cold weather last winter, now we just have weeds. So we've decided that its to much of for us to take care of, so we are going to look into getting a front patio put on. It won't be covered or anything, but some decorative concrete. Besides our front walkway is all torn up from ice too. So that needs to be repaired or replaced anyway. Ahh...the joys of home ownership!

So while Dave was enjoying an intermission during his hockey game today, I dragged him outside to practice a few headshot type things for a few minutes. Not the best background...its our driveway, but it was just practice stuff. Here's one of them.

Coming soon to a computer near you...my new photography website. It's going to be in flash and its pretty sweet. I'm very exited. But its still in the works, as I'm mostly trying to figure out what images to use. But it will still be at www.micheleschankerphotograhy.com

Gotta love it when...

..Brightroom comes to a race I'm running! I never really like photos of myself (I'd much rather be behind the camera) but I especially don't like most photos of me while I'm running. Not exactly the most flattering. Most of the time I have some painful look on my face. I guess this one isn't so bad. I've seen worse.

Santa Anita 5K Race

This past weekend was the Santa Anita 5K run. We do this every year. It’s a tougher course because there are some gradual uphills plus you run the last quarter of a mile or so on the dirt horse training track. I finished with a pretty average time for myself…24:31. Funny thing was the night before Dave and I were predicting our times and I said 24:31!
This is a big race with about 2000 people. I came in 7th in my age group and 44th overall female! Not bad since there were about 1000 females entered! Yipee! Dave ran the race to and maintained about the same time as previous years. I was really proud of him though because he ran about 1.5 miles straight and no walking!

Home Improvement

Yeah, so I have no other rooms to paint in this house! I have now painted our laundry room! But boy do I love the wall color and the curtains. We got brown curtains with blue and green circles! So cool! Now we just have to get the tile put down thats been sitting in the closet for a year now! And hopefully relocate the litter box to the garage in the near future, with a cat door installed of course!


Oh and I also love my fisheye lens on the canon 5D!

The Disappointment Grows!

So after getting our permit status in the mail, I figured we would at least be able to get a permit for the middle of the week. The availability calendar was posted yesterday and absolutely nothing is available for overnight hiking from mid June to the end of Sept! We could go in early June but I'm to scared of that. June can mean cold temps at night and still lots of snow pack up top.

I am so incredibly disappointed. I was so looking forward to doing this hike this summer. It was something I really wanted to accomplish before having kids. There are plenty of weekday Day Hike permits available, even some on July 4th! But I don't know anyone that would be willing to do 21 miles and an elevation change of ~6000 feet as a day hike with me. I just feel so awfully disappointed right now. This was something I was reallllyyyyy looking forward to.

I guess we could change our focus completely and go hike the grand canyon or something this summer. That would be cool. But the highest point in the lower 48 is so awesome. All I know is I will do it. Maybe not this summer, but I will at some point. Even if we have to have our parents come out and watch a kid one summer. I'm soooo determined to get up there.