Rearranging

We'll be doing some rearranging of the furniture in the casa tomorrow.  I'm not going to explain why, but we have too much furniture for this place and much of it is too big.  There are several other homeowners in the same situation so selling it is a long shot.  Our main problem is that there's not enough room in the living room.  We have a gigantic armoire housing our TV which is not gigantic.  After much deliberation (which for D and I means about 15 minutes total), we've decided on the following moves:

• Move one of the armoires from the lower bedroom into the upper bedroom.  This will put two identical armoires side-by-side in the upper bedroom.  A little kooky looking, but not too bad. One will house the TV up there, the other will have a hanging rack in the top of it. 
• Move the armoire in the living room into the lower bedroom.  This armoire will be converted from a TV armoire to a clothing armoire. 
• Move the bookcase from the upper bedroom to the living room.  The TV will sit on the top of the bookcase; the DVD players will go on the top shelf; DVDs, books, and knick knacks will go on the other two shelves. 

This should free up a bit of space in the living room, as well as free up the closet in the upstairs bedroom since we'll have two armoires in that room - one for the TV and one for clothing. 

This morning I used those as-seen-on-TV storage vacuum bags to seal up the excessive linens we have for the casa. Again, I'm not going to explain why because it's boring, but we have many, many sets of sheets and mattress pads and blankets down here. They were taking up all the spaces in the armoire drawers.  So I decided to leave out an extra set of sheets for each bed, then seal up the rest and store it away in the closet. I borrowed our neighbor's vacuum and sweated my way through the process, but it's done.  We now have drawers, people, drawers!

After the great linen storage program of '11 was completed, we headed over to use the pool in our friends' casa. They have a swanky custom with a private pool.  It's a small, but deep pool. Their grandkids - close in age to Avery - have all learned to swim quickly in the pool because the width is relatively small, so it's less intimidating to kids.  Avery's making good progress. 

Let's see, what other news do we have? Well, there are now enough restaurants and businesses within walking distance of our casa to avoid renting a car when down here!  Next time we'll depend on friends or taxis to get to and fro the airport, and maybe a trip or two into town, but skip the car rental. D and I have decided it's our duty to support the walking-distance restaurants by not cooking.  Plus, it's probably cheaper since we often have to restock basic staples that then go bad before our next visit.  

What else? Oh! There's another airline out of Canada that's going to start flying in soon.  This will put pressure on Alaska Airlines to cut the cost of it's seats.  It also means the Canadians won't have to spend the night in LA to get down here.  Apparently the LAX - LTO route is one of Alaska Airlines most profitable routes.  They flights are always full to the brim, they fly on the cheapest type of aircraft to fly, and they have little competition (I would say none, but technically there are now flights coming in from Cabo and some other Mexican city). So this is excellent news.  

Avery and napping down here rocks.  She asks to go to quiet time and puts herself to bed and goes to sleep for 2 hours.  Bedtime is similar. I think it's all the work of swimming in the pool and the heat and the sun.  Whatever it is, I'll take it. 

Oh, I forgot to blog about yesterday.  We booked a boat and took it over to Carmen Island. On the way, we found a school of maybe 200 dolphins.  They swam right next to our boat for a good 15 minutes, jumping close enough that it was as if I could reach out and touch them.  Anyone who can kill a dolphin is not human.  That's all I have to say about that. We boated part way into a cave, then headed over to a white sand beach (even more private than the white sand beach we visited before, fellow girls' weekenders). This beach wasn't as good in that it's rockier, but I liked it better because it was totally private and secluded.  We didn't see a single boat there.  Plus, the snorkeling in the little inlet was amazing.  D and I have never been impressed with our snorkeling adventures, but this one was great. We saw huge schools of all kinds of fish. I think I'll try scuba diving next time we're down. The tour guide we used is a dive master, so we'll be able to use him again.  His English was excellent and he was very knowledgable and cool.  In case you're wondering, we took turns snorkeling.  One of us snorkeled while they other stayed with Avery on the beach collecting "crystals."