Well...nobody stopped me... (see previous post)

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As I mentioned earlier, my sister was just down for a few days to visit us.  We had a few adventures and I thought I'd share some pictures.  Because life is fun like that.

Our first stop after the airport to pick Alicia up was San Francisco.  We stayed overnight and spent the next day sight-seeing.  Here we are in front of the "Painted Ladies."  Full House, anyone?

This is me and Nathan in the town hall.  It was beautiful and elaborate and...wow.  Impressive.

After walking a couple miles in the rain, we were cold and wet and hopped on a cable car.  This is a picture of Lombard street (image google it for a better picture).  We only saw it from the top, but didn't really feel like walking all the way down...we just looked at brochure pictures and figured it looked better on the sunny day when the picture was taken than it would have looked this day anyway.

The streets were STEEP.  We walked up and down some of them and my calves felt it the next day.  Tip: Don't drive a standard in San Francisco unless you are VERY confident.  Let me modify that statement: Don't drive in San Francisco with any car, no matter how confident you are.

(You can see a three cable cars in this picture...one at the bottom of the hill and two on the top of it)

We were cold.  Can you tell?  That is Alcatraz behind us.  Beautiful.  Check.  Let's keep walking!

Alicia and I being happy adventurers out on the docks.  Really, we were happy.  Just cold and wet too.  Brr...we were completely soaked all the way through.

We decided to ride on the outside part of the cable car on the way back.  You could see so much better, but the wind was chilly.  By the way, it is the wind that is helping Alicia's hair to stand up at that angle...she didn't style it like that in the morning.

Now for some warmer pictures...we went out the next day in search of a project to do together.  We saw some canvases and paint at Michaels and thought painting would be fun.  We got ourselves all set up (we're Buhlers, so we didn't need any newspaper or plastic between the carpet and our canvases...we're that good) and painted on and off the rest of the visit.  This painting is now hanging on our living room wall.

Beautiful, no?  Nathan felt a bit left out, so we bought some more canvases and did a set of three very colorful paintings for the bathroom.  We DID put newspaper between the canvases and carpet when Nathan was painting with us...

We had one warm, sunny day while Alicia was out, so here we are picking some oranges off the tree here on campus.  Alicia was pretty excited...

She picked too many to carry...I laughed at her...tourist...

At least she put the oranges to good use (see the full bowl in the background?).  She made orange juice and later we made an orange cake with orange glaze.  Yummy.

Another truly Californian experience is eating at In-n-Out burger.  It's quite the experience (at least if you know about the "ecretsay enumay").  It was pretty good...

Someone back home had recommended that Alicia get the Double Burger Animal Style.  It was HUGE.  Apparently not as big as they come, but this one was almost as big as Alicia's head.  haha.  But she says it was good, so that's all that matters, right?

And that was Alicia's visit!  So fun.  It was nice to have some family see where we live.  In some ways it made it feel so much more like home to have my sister see where we live and to experience our life with us for a few days.  Thanks for coming, Alicia!  I can't wait for my trip out to see you in a couple months!

For more pictures and my sister's side of the trip, click HERE.

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Oh yeah, be sure to check out the afghan on the couch behind me in the first few haircut pictures.  Pretty granny-like, eh?  I just finished it two days ago and it's going to my Etsy shop any day now!  I just love the colors!