Almeida Adventures: Our Busy Month of August 2015

August was filled with a D.I.Y. project, celebrating Joey’s 7th birthday, visiting friends down south, and attending Woofstock.

RIVER ROCK BEDS

We started off the month by laying 2 river rock “river” beds in our front yard. We are very pleased the way they turned out. We used the gazillion rocks we have on the side of our house that we want GONE! The rocks are very expensive if we were to buy them, so it was a free project that only took us a few days to complete.

Here are the rocks we have on the side of the house that we used. There are still over 50-60% left to use on the backyard landscaping and we are sharing them with our neighbor as well.

The next photo is to the left of our house in front. We first created the shape of the river by removing the bark and a small portion of dirt.

Then we added large rocks along the edge and inside the river and it started to take shape.

The next step was to add smaller rocks to cover the ground.

We then put on 3 more layers of rocks and in each layer the rocks got smaller to contribute to the character of the river.

Here’s the final product.

This is to the right of our house which we share with our neighbor Leo & Leah. We created this river design together and it is much larger than the one on the left. With 3 of us working on it each morning (before the intense heat), it only took us 4 days to complete it. We used the same process as before and it turned out great. We started off on our property line and ran it down both sides of our properties.

Joey’s 7th Birthday

The party theme was “outer space” and Jessica (the Mom) made Joey a darling cake complete with rocks and a space ship (all eatable of course).

Joey ate the space ship even before the cake was served!

Jimmy (the Dad) got super creative and made a system that shoots rockets really high! He made it out of PVC and used a tire pump to increase the pressure to launch the rocket. The kids made their own rockets and decorated them as they liked. They were just made out of paper and covered with decorative duct tape. The kids LOVED the activity and kept them busy for a long time. Needless to say Jimmy got really tired pumping up the rockets and the line of kids was never ending. The only thing that ended the line was food!!

Swimming is always a big hit with the kids and the only thing that could get them out of the pool was CAKE!!

We headed down to visit George & Carol in Atascadero. We were there for several days and enjoyed site seeing, wine tasting, golf, and browsing around all the little interesting towns.

Here are our crazy friends. We gave them a house warming gift and a couple bottles of wine and this is what they did with the décor from the gift bag. This was the first night and we just kept partying for the next 4 days.

We went wine tasting 3 out of 4 days and this one winery, Sculpterra, was very interesting to say the least. They had a great tasting room, along with healthy amounts of wine tasting (compared to all the others). They had these very unique sculptures throughout their gardens and they were big!

This was a HUGE wind chime. Look how small I look compared to this thing. It was loud too. I can’t imagine listening to that in a wind storm!

We went golfing 2 days

Here we are at Morro Bay and that rock in the background is HUGE!!

Beautiful scenery at the wineries

Check out the photo bomber in the back (he gets it from our son-in-law Mike)… so we’ll blame Mike.

We blinked and were through this tiny town; population 18, but they actually have a winery with a large tasting room… go figure.

Here’s some misc. stuff

We were golfing recently at Turkey Creek and noticed this big rock that looks like a kitty cat. We thought it was pretty cool looking so I snapped a photo.

More Wine Tasting
Every 3 months our neighborhood has a wine tasting party and the we rotate the host house. There are usually around 50 attendees. As if we didn’t have enough wine tasting with George & Carol. Two days after we returned home we attended this wine party. You can see in the 2nd picture that Hank is having a good time!

Woofstock
We just attended the annual “Woofstock” festival (which is a spin off from Woodstock) and we love going to this event every year. People wear tie-died clothing and bring their dogs for the obstacle course, wiener dog races, 60's costume contest, K9 demo’s and more. There were 130 vendors, entertainment, and 20+ dog rescue groups. You will see all kinds of breeds and one dog could weight 2 pounds next to a dog that weights 150 pounds. A lot of them are dressed up in tutu’s, tie-died shirts, hats, etc. It’s certainly a fun event for adults and children.