X X X

Triple-X. In the bowling world, that means one thing - a turkey. Three strikes in a row.

Kathy - your average 20-something has now entered the elite league of bowlers. That's right--my company has a bowling league and I am officially a member. You can see me sporting my team shirt in the photo below. I even have a bowling nickname: K-ESPN (catch the play on our last name?).

Well, I'm starting to get pretty good. Ok that's a lie, but I'm bowling with a greater frequency which increases the probability that something cool will happen, and it did last week. I bowled my first TURKEY! I was on fire that night. 3 strikes in a row--frames 4, 5 and 6, then I hit another strike in the 10th frame and thought about going for another turkey, but decided to take it easy instead and only knocked over 3 more pins. I broke my lifetime record with a new high score: 136. I was feelin' pretty good!

We won't focus much on the next game I played, which was possibly my lifetime low. What's important is that I bowled a turkey!

These are some of my work bowling buddies.

California Wildfire

I woke up this morning thinking it was like any other day. It had been windy during the night, but the weather seemed fine this morning. As I drove closer and closer to work, the sky got darker and darker. Soon I could see gray clouds on the horizon and got the first whif of smoke on the air. Apparently during the day yesterday and last night, several wildfires sprang up all along southern California. The pictures below are taken from the parking lot at work.

This is the same spot about 50 minutes later.

Santa Ana winds just fan these flames and make a bad situation worse.

This is the view outside my cubicle window!

They let us leave work around noon today. I got home and had to take a shower because I smelled like I'd been camping all weekend. I'm going to have to send my slacks to the cleaner now :(. Even my car has made the garage smell like smoke. Ash was raining on it while it was parked at work. Our office building smelled like smoke throughout. We're hoping it clears up enough that by tomorrow the smell won't be as bad. 10 miles up the road at Doug's office building they were experiencing brief power outages but not as much smoke.

But do not worry - we're all safe. So far no one has been killed, and they've kept the residential areas well protected. The fires are still about 30 miles from our house, and I doubt they will get any closer. A nice clear day turned in to a hazy one.

About Us

The pressure of the first post. It's like that first scratch in your brand new car. My dad always said you should just bring it home from the lot and whack it with a hammer to get it over with. Here's to Dad.

I thought we'd start things off with a brief snapshot introduction of us:

Doug and I met and courted in Washington DC. Doug was going to school and I was working on Capitol Hill. We met on a group date, though we were on dates with different people, not each other. The "spark" was definitely between us, though and I even felt a little guilty for ignoring my own date and paying so much attention to Doug ;). We were married in the Salt Lake temple in December 2005. There was no snow in Utah that week and the weather was unseasonably warm. It was a gorgeous December wedding. It's hard to believe we're coming up on our 2 year anniversary!


Several months after we were married, Doug finished school, and we moved to California to take a job. I was also able to find a new job a few months later, and though it's nothing like being on Capitol Hill, I'm enjoying it quite a bit. It's still pretty strange to us to be real "grown-ups." We're liking things here and are slowly acclimating to California. It was a pretty big change for us from the east coast, or even from the smaller western towns where we were raised. But we're enjoying ourselves and hope you'll enjoy checking in with us once in a while. Welcome to our blog!

Welcome to the Espenschied Experience

You all know how this works. We post unnecessarily-detailed descriptions of everyday events, random thoughts, travel logs, and occasional nonsense. You chip in your two cents whenever you feel like it. We hope you enjoy these peeks into our experience.