Shoetopia: Adventures in Gardening (and other Summer adventures)

Despite living in one of the most temperate climates in the world with a growing season of nearly 365 days of the year, we managed to bungle our garden this summer. The harvest has been anything but plentiful, as you can see by the stunted yellow pepper and cucumber in the photo above. We had the best intentions of eating organic and saving the world and money one home-grown vegetable at a time. I figure if we had to recover the costs of our garden, we'd have to charge about $100/lb for our produce. Luckily, our neighbor, whose tomatoes plants are a few feet from ours, takes pity on us every once in a while and brings us the vegetables they can't eat.

When we haven't been gardening which, truthfully, is almost all the time, we've been enjoying the summer. Ryan and I celebrated our 10th anniversary by redeeming 10-years worth of frequent flyer miles for a trip to the Big Island of Hawaii--without the kids. I only regret that the next time we'll probably have another vacation like that is in another ten years. The highlight was definitely all the snorkeling--with a reef shark, a giant manta ray (in Ryan's case), an eel, and tons of tropical fish. Here's some of my favorite photos:

We'll definitely also miss not seeing our family as much as we have this summer. Our only hope is that they'll want to come visit us (or Disneyland) this winter. Some photos: