Gearin' it up...

I have to tell you about a funny I did this morning. I'm driving Little Jimmy, my pickup, to work this morning. I get to about Howe. For those of you not familiar with the area, that's about four exits from my house. I'm be-boppin' along when I see that the gear shift is leaning closer to the seat. I thought "How did that get down there?" Then I realized that I had been driving 65+ in 4th gear!!!!!!!!!!! I am so sure! I then shifted into 5th gear and continued on my way. It immediately sounded and felt a lot better. I am such a dork sometimes. Little Jimmy doesn't have a tachometer so who knows if it would have been in the red that whole time. Sheesh. The pick up takes a beatin' but it sure keeps on tickin'. Nevermind that I've hd the thing for probably three years now and I've never changed the oil!!!! Granted, I don't really drive it alot but I'm sure it's probably time for a lube job nonetheless!


Paiute #10 update:

I spent last night painting two rooms. I finally decided that I would go ahead and use the 5 gallons of paint that I had purchased. Initially, I had brought it home but was very concerned about the color. I didn't want my tenants to feel like they were living in a cave. After much debate and HELP! calls to Mom Turner, we all decided that I would just paint and get it done with. I LOVE IT!!!! I should have never doubted myself. Well done John Turner because in the end the color turned out F-A-B-U-L-O-U-S! Pictures will be up soon...when I have time. At this juncture, I have 2 1/2 rooms to paint, bathroom gussied up, and a butt load of little things like outlets, and such left to deal with. It's getting there, people!!!

Memories...light the corners of my mind!!!

Here are the directions:

1. As a comment on my blog, leave one memory that you and I had together. It doesn't matter if you knew me a little or a lot, anything you remember!

2. Next, re-post these instructions on your blog and see how many people leave a memory about you. It's actually pretty funny to see the responses. If you leave a memory about me, I'll assume you're playing the game and I'll come to your blog and leave one about you. If you don't want to play on your blog, or if you don't have a blog, I'll leave my memory of you in my comments.

4th of July Camping Trip

The family and a few close friends went camping at Olema Ranch Campground, a place the family has been going to for at least 15 years. It's near Point Reyes with a much cooler climate than that of Sacramento. There ended up being about 35 of us within five camp sites. May the people who reserved their campsite in the middle of our group learn a valuable lesson! Never reserve OUR campsites! As you can see, we have the site starting from the tip of the truck seen on the very left to the gold minivan on the right. The one campsite with the white Honda Pilot is not ours. They somehow infitrated themselves amongst our sites.

Here's Kebs, Madeline, and Morgan in his new ride, a John Deere dump truck. He LOVED it!

Here's Grant and John F squishing berries for the ice cream. Yes, we make ice cream while camping.

Game anyone? Scrabble? Phase 10? Parcheesi?

One of our many feasts...

This is Tammy's bed. In our camping, we bring the indoors outdoors!

Penny, Buffy and I walked the earthquake trail at the Bear Valley visitor's center.
We came across this huge intruiging tree.

Here are some other views I captured on the trail...

Here are two very strange things I happened to stumble upon in the camp site...Mom and Dad with they're new found glasses, complete with wipers and lights!

Can you hear me now? FYI - Sprint is useless in the Point Reyes vicinity. Verizon is touch and go (as you can see here) and ATT rocked and rocked it hard!

Madeline and Madison at Stinson.

Additional photos from the trip can be viewed on http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnryan1978.

AberWHA????

Check it - we were playing with our cameras at an activity we had with Sac 4th. I know, I know. Janice Dickinson doesn't know what she's missing!!! And I'll have you know that I did not pay money for the shirt I am wearing. Somebody gave it me.

From L to R - Ariane, JT, WooWoo, TL

Provident Living

Not sure if ya'll are aware of the variety of natural disasters that have been occurring nationwide, if not worldwide, recently:

Tornadoes in Colorado
Flooding in Ohio
Wildfires in California

It seems like they are happening more and more frequently these days. I can't help but to think that the last days really are here. As we've been encouraged by our church leaders, I'm beginning to realize the importance of having a food storage.

On Saturday, the American River Branch had an activity at the local cannery. We were able to can our own food to our individual orders. In less than two hours, we canned enough to fill the orders of eight people. It went quicked than I had ever anticipated. With the exception of three additional cases of wheat, I have my year supply of grains for one person. It feels so good to have that done. Now I just have to find a place for it all.

Here are pictures of the food storage:

For your information, the church's website, http://www.providentliving.org/, has a lot of information on what should be included in a food storage. There is also a calulcator for your use to calculate the amount of essentials needed for a specified amount of time.

More Paiute #10

We've all been busy with Paiute #10, including Mom, Dad, Grant & Loren. Mark, the painter, starts painting the exterior on Monday. I've been working like crazy to get everything done he asked that I get done so that he can start. Wednesday I was over there until about 7:00, Thursday until 9:00 and Friday I left work at 11:30 because there was still so much needing to be done. Grant met me at the house on Friday with my $50 piece of redwood for the joist up at the top of the roof. Apparently there was a little bit of dry rot in the old one that needed to be repaired. Unfortunately, 2x8s produced today are NOT the same size as they were back in the day. The old was 1 7/8 x 7 1/2, whereas the new ones are typically 1 1/2 x 7 1/4. I had to make some phone calls but found a home building supply place that had what I needed. I had Grant go retrieve the 16ft piece with the truck. As you can see, it has been installed.



Here are pictures of the new siding on the back of both #10 and 12 (that's me!). As you will see, I have mitered the corners of the new window trim this time around.

As long as I was in the mode, I felt like I needed to redo the window trim on my side as well. You can see by what looks like two different colors in the paint where the old trim used to be compared to where the new trim is:

At the same time, I've been trying to get stuff done on the inside as well. Mom and Dad came over last Saturday to help with the kitchen. Here are the little darlings hard at work:




Apparently it was nap time...on the stove!



First I wasn't going to repaint the cabinets. Once the doors came off and the hinges removed, you could see where the hinges had been and that the new hinges were not going to cover those areas. At this point I was concerned that I'd have to repaint everything:

I put a few coats of paint on the cabinets just to see how it would look. Once I washed all of the doors, they looked great...enough!


For additional pictures, go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnryan1978/.

San Luis Obispo

A few weeks ago, my cousin Lynzy graduated from Arroyo Grand High School in "Arroyo Grungey" as the locals like to call it. Mom, Dad, TL (the adopted son and nephew) and myself drove on down to San Luis Obispo. We left Wednesday night after work. At approximately 7:25, yours truly got pulled over by some young punk cop. He claims I had fractured the speed limit by 30 mph (whatever) and that I might have been tailgating. I'm not normally a big tailgater so I'm still not sure what he's talking about. It looks like I'll be making a trip to Los Banos to defend myself and attempt to decrease the severity of this thing. All I can think about is how much my insurance is going to go up.

Thursday was the day of the actual graduation. Here's Lynzy and Penny...Ms. Hollywood on her phone!

Here we sit in the stands waiting for Lynzy to walk. Don't worry though, we only had to listen to one ENTIRE speech in frikkin Spanish!

KEN LEE is something we found on YouTube. Lynzy liked it so much that I told her we'd represent at her graduation. We yelled "KEN LEE" a few times throughout the ceremony for her benefit. If you're wondering what "KEN LEE" is, take a look at this, you're going to DIE!:

Here is Mom Turner, PDizzle, and Cindi:

Friday we went to Montana de Oro, which is a CA state park. It was lovely there...until I lost my sunglasses (yes, on top of my ticket, I lost my VERY nice sunglasses).

This is a cave up in the rocks there where I did a little climbing action. I believe this to be the place at which my sunglasses and I said our goodbyes:

We then headed on over to Morro Bay (aka Moron Bay) and had lunch at Rosie's which was fantastic! $5.99 fish tacos that were teriffic!

Friday night we had dinner at the Madonna Inn to celebrate Dad's 55th birthday. If you are not familiar with this place, check out the website and be sure to check out their rooms, http://madonnainn.com/tour/index.asp! Each room is of a different theme. The entire place is pretty wild.

We had dinner in this dining room:

Yes, there really is that much pink all up in that room!

If you're a boy, you get to pee in the rock waterfall and then use the shell sinks!

The place is pretty wild.

Where do I start?!?!

We'll start out with the house. Escrow closed at the end of May. We had to file for an extension but still managed to miss the deadline. What can ya do?! The end result is that it's finally mine! Paiute Place is all mine!

The past few weeks, my peeps and I have been working like bees on Paiute #10. We started with the replacement of the siding as some of it had termite damage. The good news is that not a single termite was to be found! Whew! Here are a few pictures of the siding project so far so you can get an idea. More pictures can be found here, http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnryan1978/

More pictures will be posted later.

Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives in Sacramento!

Some of you may have heard of Guy Fieri of the Food Network's "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives" (aka. Triple D). May 30, 6:30 PST on the the Food Network in the episode titled "Burgers", he visits The Squeeze Inn here in Sacramento. The funny thing is that Judi, Davonna and I recently had lunch at this place and it was fantastic! It's located near Fruitridge and Power-Inn (7918 Fruitridge Rd). There's not much room in the joint but the burgers are fantastic.

Tune in to the episode to find out more! It's "out of bounds"!

Mom's New Floors

Mom Turner will be moving her craft room from their master suite to one of the smaller bedrooms. First, she wanted new floors installed. Dad, Grunt and I layed the new laminate on Saturday.

And here's Kebs on the floor. Grant was on the floor trying to take care of the bottom of the door frame. Kebs wanted to help too:

Happy Birthday JD!

Thursday night we went to Claim Jumpers for Jenn's birthday celebration. Everyone seemed to thoroughly enjoy themselves. Here are a few pics from the occasion.

Here is the birthday girl, Jenn, with Lo(ren) gettin' her rib on:




Here I am with Jenn and Glorianna (She's one of the marrieds now):



Here's my WooWoo with her PooPoo:

Disney's creativeness still in a slump...

SERIOUSLY????????

I think the creativity of Hollywood in general has reached an all time low. Do we really need to remake The Hulk? Do we really need three more Terminator movies? I know Disney is more capable than a third installment to the Little Mermaid series! LAME!!!!!

FOR THE LOVE!

Paiute Place News

As some of you may know, I recently had the opportunity to acquire the other half of Paiute Place. It's been in escrow for the past month. Close of Escrow is scheduled for Friday, May 23. We just had to file for an extension. Hopefully we we won't need it but in order to avoid penalties, we were able to do so. The lender is waiting for account verification from Golden 1. The request was submitted last Tuesday and we've yet to hear back. They are losers!!! Anywho, Tim Clark, my mortgage person, is diligently working to get what we need from that stupid credit union of mine so that we can get this closed by Friday. I'm REALLY looking to close this week so that I can utilize this three day weekend to get started on the work needed to be done.

While there is no longer any active termite infestation, there is damage that requires reparation. Paiute Place will be undergoing a facelift. Much of the siding will need to be replaced. While doing so, I'm going to replace some of the siding on my side as well. The exterior will then be repainted. The color of choice at this time is Rosemary Sprig, but we'll see. New gutters will be installed.

The interior will also get a fresh coat of paint. Additionally, the ceilings will be relieved of their tacky cottage cheese finish. The kitchen cabinets have already been repainted, which is fine for now. They're still the same useless layout of what mine used to be before my glorious kitchen remodel but it will have to work with a new set of door knobs.

Let's hope that this thing goes through this week!

T-Rod OUT!