My other best friend came to visit me for a few weeks - JJ. She moved away from San Francisco, had a fun cross country drive by her lonesome, spent most of the summer in North Carolina, and then stayed with Erik & me for a few weeks before heading up to Boston University for Grad School. I am still kicking myself for not taking that cross country drive with her….although we may never have made it North Carolina. Knowing us, we would of ended up in some desert and never left. Ahhhh….the desert. We share a deep love of the barren desert. Anyway, we had so much fun while she was here catching up on CSI and Bones (my new favorite show) not to mention our weekly Trader Joe’s visits.

Then we took a day trip to NYC. One of my favorite cities. We did some touristy things…I have been there so many times, but I never before saw the Dakota, or Strawberry Fields (my parents weren’t Beatles fans..for shame! although JJ grew up thinking that the Beatles songs her father played on the guitar and sang along to were written by dear old dad) so that was our first stop!

Then we were off to the Empire State Building:

Here is the view from the top:

Little Italy:

The rest are random images, starting with my favorite from the day, taken in a subway station. Enjoy!

For those of you who don’t know, I am a bit of a “gamer”. I LOVE video games, and I married the biggest gamer I know. I play on XBox 360 and Playstation 2, and used to play games on my computer (my computer is now solely dedicated to photography related things - Photoshop itself is a huge memory hog!). Anyway, I have been going, and going for the past couple of weeks, and Erik gently requested I “relax” last night. I took the night to myself and played one of my favorite de-stressing games, Astropop! Astropop is made by Popcap games, as they say themselves “creators of Bejeweled, Bookworm and other addictive free online games”. Addictive it is! I have been playing this game on XBox for the past 1 1/2 years and have yet to get sick of it.

In any case, I am constantly trying to beat my former score, and I did it in a BIG way last night! I reached #53 on the leaderboards at XBox Live - there are literally THOUSANDS of people on the leaderboards, for those who don’t know. Yes, I know, I am a huge dork ; ) But it feels good to be #53!!!

Here is a screenshot of the game…and if you have an XBox, you should try to beat my score!! It is oddly calming to blow up bricks ; )

My husband turned 34 years old! For those of you that don’t know, he doesn’t like when I point the camera at him. So, I will only post one, out-of-focus image of him blowing out his candles. That’s how much I love him ; )

My super cute nephew, Baby L, was not having a good time…he had some teeth growing in - 6 in total I think!

After we ate birthday cake I got sidetracked by this weird looking “thing”…someone thought it may be a hummingbird…i don’t know what the heck it is, but check out its SNOUT!

and the last butterfly of the summer….