
We are celebrating the 4th Mexican style! Yun and I headed up to Phoenix last night to spend the night with Pioli and Rosie. We went to a Cirque du Soleil show, Kazoo. It was awesome.


We are celebrating the 4th Mexican style! Yun and I headed up to Phoenix last night to spend the night with Pioli and Rosie. We went to a Cirque du Soleil show, Kazoo. It was awesome.


Matt and Dana joined us for dinner at El Sinaloense tonight.

According to the back:
– Colorful and trendy
– Lightweight and comfortable for longer use
– Fashionable design
– Stereo quality
– Standard 3.5mm Plug
– Perfect cable length to minimize cable tangles
My analysis:
– They’re white, so referring to them as colorful is confusing. Sure, white is a color, but having one color doesn’t make something “colorful”. They’re identical to every other set of headphones I’ve ever seen, so if conformity is the trend, they are certainly trendy.
– They are definitely not heavy and are relatively comfortable.
– If they’re trendy, then they’re by definition fashionable. I suppose they could have added a number of other synonyms to increase the size of their list.
– Stereo quality? Doesn’t that just mean that the sound comes from 2 or more speakers? Yes, it definitely has that.
– Standard plug. Very helpful. No adapters needed.
– The cable is about 3 feet long. This is more than adequate.
Overall opinion:
The sound quality is utter garbage. That sort of steals the thunder of the wonderful features listed above. But hey, they were only 99 cents, so no loss on my end. It amazes me that things like this can still be produced for under a dollar. Well, at least that’s possible in China where these came from.
Tonight we are on the eve of a dental hygiene revolution in our house. Our new Phillips Sonicare toothbrushes are charging as I write this. In exchange for $120, we have been promised whiter, healthier teeth. Actually, we made the purchase because our dentists (and friends) Fabiola and Joel tell us these brushes are really the way to go. We’ll see what happens.
So Matt and Dana arrived in Tucson a couple weeks ago. Unloading their truck didn’t take too long. The highlight of the day was Matt’s attempt to ride his bike out of the truck. As his friend, it was my job to film his effort.

The garden we started earlier this year has not been so successful. I planted 6 different types of peppers, 3 types of corn, and an armenian cucumber. Total start up cost was approximately 50 dollars. Sadly, all but one pepper plant seems to be making it. So today I tried a few new things. I planted two cantaloupe and one honey dew. These seem to be working in other peoples gardens. Time will tell.
Yun and I are at Gabriel’s house in Hermosillo for the weekend. It is brutally hot. It was somewhere between 110 and 115 yesterday. Fortunately he keeps his house comfortably cold.
It’s nice to get out of town for the weekend. We don’t do it enough due to having so many things to do at home. I recorded the drive using a gps tracker app and found the trip took about 4 hours total from Tucson. Not too bad. Our average moving speed was only 55mph, mostly due to the number of towns we have to drive through and the poor road conditions on the way here.
Hermosillo is a great city for good food. We went out for carne asada yesterday. It was incredible.
I watched a great movie tonight called Lbs. In a way, it reminded me of Krakauer’s book Into the Wild.
The story is of a New York fat guy that has a heart attack due to his weight. He tries to lose weight to improve his health, but the environment he finds himself in prohibits success. On impulse, he leaves the city to purchase a trailer and some land. He lives in the trailer, struggling intensely, for what seems like a year or more. He suffers miserably, but with time, lots of hiking, biking, and little money for food, he transforms into a healthy guy.
He then returns to the city and to reunite with his family. He looks great. But it doesn’t take long for him to resume his former lifestyle. The movie ends with him regaining the weight that he had at the beginning.
Depressing movie to be sure, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. It was a clever analogy, perhaps unintentionally, of the destructive, yet seemingly magnetic, cycles experienced in life.
Our house is slowing coming to completion. It’s been no small task to be sure. The exterior was finally painted a couple of weeks ago. Not-so-easy when it has been in the 100s. However, I bought a high powered paint sprayer when we were painting the interior that made all the difference.
Paint can be expensive. Five gallons of exterior paint runs about $130 for decent paint. But Yun, being the crafty Mexicana that she is, found a place in Phoenix (from craigslist) that sells the leftover paint from commercial projects. We ended up buying around 50 gallons for $125. Not bad for Sherwin-Williams paint (a high-rated interior and exterior paint). 50 gallons in the store would have run about $1250. That was a savings of $1125. I love craigslist.
I think our inspiration for using it comes mostly from Jeff and Beth. They have made some killer purchases that have prompted us to attempt the same. We bought a ~$1200 stainless refrigerator for $200, a ~$500 dishwasher for $200, and our favorite purchase was the oven.
It was sitting on a pallet and didn’t turn on when we went to see it. We took a risk and negotiated to a price of $400. That may seem like a lot, but it retails for over $2000. When we got it home, I took the front electrical grid a part. Did some research online. Took a guess that it was the button console, so purchased one for $75. Received it a couple days later and the oven has worked brilliantly since. It’s a great oven and we love cooking with gas.
Those craigslist purchases listed above have saved us nearly $2000 all-together.
Yun and I spent last weekend at Abe’s house in Guaymas. We left far too late on Friday night. We were pretty exhausted from a rough week, so it made for a fairly difficult trip.
Even so, I love getting there Friday night to get a great night’s rest and to wake early to the sound of the waves crashing on the beach. Scout and I get up before anyone else and head to the beach. He loves to swim. We spend hours throwing his ball as far as we can out-to-sea and he never really seems too tired to stop.
We spent all day Saturday on the beach. Later, we decided to take a nap around 8pm to help better prepare us for a long evening. It wasn’t until 3am when I realized our nap had run a little long, so scrapped the idea of going out and went back to bed. The excessive amount of sleep was much needed.
Sunday and Monday were mostly a repeat of Saturday. I brought a long a book I had been looking forward to reading.
Eric Metaxas’ book on Bonhoeffer. Luke had recommended it months ago. I was never really a fan of Bonhoeffer. I read his Ethics years ago and was not impressed. However, after reading this book, I must say, I really enjoy his story and would probably have a far greater appreciation for his writings now. Understanding the context in which they were written would certainly help. Despite being nearly 600 pages, it was well written and went quick. I too would recommend the book.