Travels and Visitors

We've been busy the last couple of weekends! Gretchen and Kirk invited us to join them in Solvang as they celebrated their 30 year anniversary, so we went up last Friday and they met us there on Saturday. The weather was kind of cold but pretty and there were lots of wildflowers, plus the hills were green, green, green! I just love all that beauty! We stopped at Olson's Bakery, one of our favorite places. On the way up we took the back way, past Lake Cachuma, and stopped for lunch at the old stagecoach stop, Cold Springs Tavern. It was a very good lunch in an interesting old building. The lake is very full and a beautiful blue and we saw that they have 3 yurts available for rent right on the lake, so that would be fun sometime.

This week I had the fun of a quick visit from Heather and the kids! They came by my office and sat in my chair. Espen's hair still showed a tiny bit of the green color he had done, probably for St. Patrick's Day. Abel kept his hand on the mouse but didn't really do anything to mess with my work, and Mairead is now talking a lot! On Wednesday Steve and Jan, Matthew and Carissa arrived to stay with us until Monday morning. They're here for a family gathering with her side of the family and it's great to see them! We gave them the house to themselves Thursday and Friday nights while we went to Bolsa Chica in our trailer. We had fun on Friday going to Babette's Feast in Long Beach in the morning, Laguna for lunch and a stroll on the beach, and Wahoo's for salad in the evening! We had a bike ride this morning before we came home.

I've been working like mad on Erin's website and the numbers of visitors, both new and repeat, keep climbing! This week (the week will be over tonight) we have had 586 unique visitors, 336 of whom are new. Last week we had 477 unique visitors and the week before we had 458, 259 of whom were new.) We have lots more plans. I'm starting an article on how to do a cooking day, which will be a big help to people, and I want to do some weekly menus with a grocery list. We plan to come out with more new stuff in the fall, so we're working towards that now. The most amazing thing concerns my computer problems. I still haven't been able to use any of the tips on how to get onto Microsoft Office Live from my Mac because it's one year too old for that, so I've been doing all I could at home, then staying late using my work computer or working on it at lunch or whatever I could. Chris had a great idea to ask IT if they could set me up with a remote connection so I could access my work computer from home, but I hadn't asked them yet, and Thursday we got a memo saying they are setting up a VPN- a virtual private network for all staff and faculty so they can have access to their office computers at home! This will allow people to make use of all that is available on the university computers! I'm so blessed by this. They will provide the software free to download at home to make it work and we just have to agree to their very reasonable agreement. I'm thankful to the Lord for his help and also to my employer!