We just got back this morning (well 12:30am) from a three day trip to Tahoe, CA with the Folks.

We left on Friday morning, to make the 250 mile trip into the mountains, and the rain was heavy as we left Los Gatos.  This was snow in the mountains, and it is believed that 2ft dropped over night the night before we set off.  This was 100% believable – it took us 10.5 hours to make that trip (including 2 hours of stop off for lunch and refuelling etc.

Tahoe is a beautiful place that we are very fortunate to have seen this weekend, even more so that we were able to stay in Jason’s parents place that is right on the lake – in fact their back garden reaches down to a small beach on the shore of the lake.

En-route, we witnessed these massive machines that simply ran along the sides of the road with huge screw like teeth on the front that simply ATE their way into the banks of snow and then blew it out of the way.  These beasts would leave a 6 to 10 foot wall of snow down the side of the carriageway where they had cut into the bank.  There were some homes along the roads that quite simply were inaccessible to their owners since there would be a sizable wall of snow in their driveway.  It was actually such that when driving through the towns, you could actually NOT see the shops from the road since the wall of snow prevented visibility of the stores.

We will post some photos as soon as we get them off the cameras.

Roy and Daisy’s garden (Jason’s parents) back garden was so full of snow that the ground floor bedroom that we stayed in was actually UNDER the level of the snow – i.e. open the curtains and we just started at a 9ft snow drift !!!!

Jason (with a little help from Simon) dug out a 3foot wide and 4 / 5 foot deep track down the garden so that the kids could sledge down the small slope in the garden.  We have some video footage that we will post as Oliver LOVED sledging – to the point that he screamed when he stopped moving on the disks.

We really would like to head back when the boys are a little older so we can all learn to ski / snow board.

We came back early (we were due to stay all day today as well) because on Saturday night, the boys got about 3 hours sleep – Elliot was panicked about something and Olly just wouldn’t sleep.  Thankfully the both got a good sleep last night and will doubtlessly be getting an early night tonight as well.

This week, the sunshine has come back again, with the temperature surging to almost 28 degrees C on Saturday and Sunday 🙂

We have been spending a significant portion of time over the last week looking for a potential new home for the next 12 months from April onwards.  We have found that unless we go to $5,000 per month, we are unable to find the sort of place that we would like in an area that we are comfortable with 🙁

So, we are presently thinking that we will be staying in the house that we are in already, even though it does not have a garden for the boys to play in.

One of the Media Center PC’s has failed this week 🙁 It just simply fails to switch on.  Simon called Lenovo for support, expecting to have to send the machine back in at our expense for repair. To his surprise, it seems that the device came with 9 months onsite warranty service, so we are now awaiting a call from a local engineer who will schedule some time to come around to the house to fix it – YAY!!!

We experienced our first SuperBowl this weekend, and we did so at Roy and Daisy’s amazing pad in Saratoga.  Olly just wanted to check out their pool, adding weight to the decision that we will NOT look for a house with a pool (assuming that we do continue to search for a house of course).  Elly on the other hand actually wanted to go out into the garden to play football – well football with a ball shaped like a rugby ball 🙂

We have also decided to buy an XBOX 360 with the Kinect technology – that way we can all join in family games but we can also get exercise games etc as well – should be fun….

Simon heads to the UK for 4 days on Sunday, so a short weekend is coming up.

Simon was supposed to be in New York from Wednesday night for two days.  The snow in New York (3 feet in 6 hours!!) was causing flights into and out of New York airports to be cancelled.  Simon’s flight was the last on of the day from San Francisco (10:35pm) and 5 flights of the day had already been cancelled.  However the 1:15pm flight did manage to get away by 9:35pm… so things were looking good.  Simon was waiting for the flight (which was by now 45 minutes late) and was due to board at 11pm, at which point the announcement came over the tannoy – Flight 34 to New York’s JFK has been cancelled….

So, Simon did not get to New York.  Elliot was pleased to see Daddy the following evening – a surprise since Elliot was not expecting to see Daddy until the weekend.

The weather has changed significantly towards the end of the week, with the sun having gone inside for a while and the temperature has dropped significantly since Wednesday.

Today, we went in to Elliot’s school to find out their feedback on how  he is getting along.

We came back not really knowing what to think – is he doing well, is he doing less well – it is all a little unclear.

It seems that he excels in some aspects of their analysis (counting, eye to hand co-ordination) and yet has quite the opposite in others – such as copying shapes with a pencil and his social skills.

It is strange as there are also areas such as if he is showing signs of being a leader – really – he is four years old… Leadership skills…… really… ??

One thing is for sure, we have not spent enough time with him learning his alphabet and doing things such as collecting 9 cars together.

Funny, we knew he needs more work on his social skills but I think we are still feeling totally unsure of the importance of the rest.  At 4 years old, surely he should be focusing on making friends and building up the social skills that he will use for the rest of his life… ???

We went out on Saturday with the folks and had a great day out at the Happy Hollow Park in San Jose.

Then on the way home, Elliot “NEEDED” some Fruity Pebbles breakfast cereal.  So as Vicky got out of the car at Safeway near the house, somehow her purse fell to the floor outside of the car as she got out, but she didn’t notice.  Then of course found that her purse was missing (her new monogrammed LV item that she got from the boys for Christmas 🙁 ) when trying to pay for said Fruity Pebbles.  Nobody had handed it in, nor seen it….. So we left our number just in case and went home to cancel the cards.

Stress kicked in as we realized driving licenses, Costco cards, Doctor cards and all our debit and credit cards as well as all manner of other important items were in said purse.

Amy and Jason came around for tea, and kindly brought some flowers to help brighten Vicky’s spirits.

Today, Vicky printed some reward posters to pop in the Safeway store on the off chance that someone had indeed picked it up and kept to give back to the owner at a later date.  Incredibly the customer services people had a phone message from a lady who had indeed picked up the purse and had kept hold of it for fear of it going missing once she had left it in Safeway’s “safe” custody.

So, we arranged to pick it up today and indeed it was safe and in one piece with nothing missing at all – Vicky has had s VERY lucky day today.  The lady had tried calling all the telephone numbers on the back of all the cards in an attempt to figure out where to find the owner. The people of Los Gatos are simply incredible people – honesty is in the job description 🙂

We then took Elliot and Olly for their first bike ride on their own bikes. See the photo attached….

We have enjoyed 2 wonderful days in great sunshine and temperatures that would be great for a UK summer day – 21 degrees Celcius – just awesome 🙂