Emily and Mitchell in the USA

 After dropping my parents off at their seaside hotel for the week, we came home and relaxed in all the sudden space. We'd gathered a lot of leftovers during the week including some ham which we weren't going to eat being vegetarian, so we went to go and find the cat that lives outside. We saw that someone else had given him a little bowl of water (in the shape of a tiny toilet) and he seemed to enjoy the ham. We'd picked up some cat treats at Trader Joe's, but we waited until we were out of ham first.  This week, we also met a new group of people on an app called "meet-up". They do all sorts of fun things in the community and we went to a trivia night held in a food market. It was Marvel and DC themed, so Mitchell did very well with his comic book knowledge and our group actually won! We met lots of people and the group organiser is actually married to another British guy! So we had a lot to talk about. We went for another meet-up a few days later at the food...

It's me I'm back! Like my mum said, on Saturday we were off to San Diego to see the city.  We started out early and went straight to La Jolla to see the sealions. It was quite cloudy when we arrived, but we saw them out on the rocks, and a rock full of seals too, which we haven't seen too many of before.  Some of these brown lumps are noisy sealions This is how I lose them We walked along the seashore and looked at some of the little market stalls before heading a little way inland in search of coffee and pastries. We walked past some very busy shops, but just around the corner, was a little coffee shop which had very nice fresh croissants and pumpkin spice coffees.  To get back to the car, we walked back along the coast. There's not really a beach and you're not allowed on a lot of the rocks to protect the sealions in pup season (which it was) but we did hop down onto one section to see a rock which been carved by the sea into a little arch and overlooked the ocean...

We had our third set of visitors come to visit (now that the worst of summer is over), my parents! They arrived on Friday evening and I picked them up after work. California was having a heat wave this week, so badly that we'd had alerts about how much power everyone was using to stay cool, and warnings that it might cause blackouts. Half the county was also on fire (one of my libraries had to close for the week) because it was so hot and dry. When I picked up this pair however, they brought with them a tropical storm, and some of the heaviest rain we'd had since Christmas.  We came home and had a little dinner while they settled in, and then an early night for the travelling pair.  For their first day in California, we did a little tour of Riverside. After making a big breakfast, we went to the farmer's market and looked in some shops, found some art murals, and bought tamales from the Tamale Guy stall. It was hot and humid and we were soon very hot and sweaty. We came hom...