A breakdown of the Pellegrini family’s Spring Break 2022 road trip to San Diego. We had a blast visiting family, going to beaches, and visiting the SD Zoo!
After spending several days with Auntie Dana and Uncle Brad at their beautiful home in Fallbrook, California, we recently returned home to Henderson. The occasion was Spring Break, and this was our first time leaving Clark County since moving here last June! Before I get into the trip’s details, I want to thank Dana and Brad so much for their hospitality. They took terrific care of us, and we had the best time seeing them, their house, and reconnecting with Southern California.
Driving to San Diego
The trip began for us on Friday evening. After picking the kids up from school, we packed our final few things in the van and hit the road. Traffic wasn’t an issue for us because not many people are leaving Las Vegas on a Friday evening, but the traffic heading to Las Vegas from California was awful. I highly recommend not driving to Las Vegas from Southern California on a Friday afternoon or evening.
We made great time, and even though we stopped twice, it still took less than 5 hours to get to their house in Fallbrook. If you’re unfamiliar with Fallbrook, it’s in North County, just a bit east of Carlsbad and Oceanside. It has a small-town feel, even though it’s only 45 minutes from the beach. I actually bought a car once in Fallbrook, back when I was first living in Las Vegas. I’ve always loved how it’s known as “The Avocado Capital of the World.”
It used to take us about 5.5 hours to drive from our house in San Diego to my Mom’s house in Las Vegas, but we were much further south. Driving to North County is a lot easier, and even the kids agreed that the drive was no big deal. They’re road trip pros at this point.
Beach Day in Carlsbad
We knew from the weather forecast that Saturday, which was our first full day in town, would have the warmest weather of our trip. Based on this, we decided to make Saturday our beach day. Of course, we would still visit other beaches during the trip, but this was the only day where we would change into swimsuits and play in the water.
Although the water was cold, it was still so much fun splashing around and playing in the sand. It feels weird to say this, but the kids had never been to a sandy beach before. Technically, Ava did when she was a baby, but that’s it. They always loved going to beaches in Washington, but there’s nothing but rocky shores unless you’re going out to the coast (which they were not).
Seeing the kids having a blast at the beach gave Jessica and me a lot of joy. We moved from Seattle to San Diego almost exactly 12 years ago, and we were essentially starting from scratch. There weren’t many extra luxuries in our lives at that time, but one thing we always had was the beach. Going to the beach in San Diego was a huge part of our lives during our first couple of years of marriage, so this experience with the kids felt like we had come full circle.
Getting to experience all of this with Dana and Brad made it that much more special too. I got some great footage of Enzo and Brad playing catch on the beach, and Dana was super helpful with the kids, filming, and keeping everything in order. On our way home to Nevada, we talked about our favorite days of the trip. Although the girls chose the zoo day, Enzo and I both said the day at the beach in Carlsbad was our favorite.
In my opinion, nothing else could replicate the pure sense of joy everyone had during that first beach day. I think you can clearly see it in our video, but I also love this group photo. The funny thing about this photo was that I was doing all the manual settings on the camera to get the exact exposure I wanted, then I had to arrange everyone. Once the whole thing was set up, we posed for the photos on 10-second timers. I took a couple of pictures and thought we were done, only to realize that I had accidentally been recording video the whole time and had taken zero pictures. So then we got to do the entire thing over again.
Elise, Enzo, Ava, Brad, Dana, Jessica, & Michael (L to R, front then back)
Visiting Pacific Beach and Mission Beach
Dana and Brad decided to lay low at home on Sunday, so the 5 of us headed down to Pacific Beach to see our old stomping grounds. First, we rolled through La Jolla and showed the kids the famous cove on the way there. Then, we cruised through Bird Rock on our way toward Pacific Beach, and it was at this point, Elise declared how much she loved beach houses. Although, I think her opinion changed a bit after seeing the type of beach house we used to live in. Let’s just say it was nothing like what she had just seen in those posh little neighborhoods.
Luckily our favorite old pizza spot, Woodstock’s Pizza, was not only still there but open for lunch. So we took the kids there, and most of us really enjoyed our pizza. Unfortunately for Enzo, he accidentally received some type of sweet dough for his pizza, although he didn’t say anything until it was nearly gone, so we didn’t feel like we could ask for another.
Getting ready for Woodstock’s Pizza!
After finishing our lunches, we stumbled upon a cool-looking hat store as we walked toward the beach. Jessica and I have a bit of history purchasing hats on vacation, and the trend continued with this trip. Ava got a pair of sunglasses, but the rest of us walked out with new hats on our heads.
Family photo with our new digs
Feeling extra stylish, we walked down the Pacific Beach boardwalk as it turned into Mission Beach, then eventually turned around and made our way back to the van. During the walk, Ava kept commenting on how many people seemed to be showing off for my camera. It’s funny how people react in the presence of a video camera; some try to do something silly or funny, some try to show off, and some try to hide their faces. Ava is very aware of how people react when they see me filming, and the stuff she says in the video cracks me up.
Ava, Enzo, and Elise on the Pacific Beach boardwalk
Taking the kids to Coronado Island
We weren’t ready to call it a day after our boardwalk stroll, so we drove out to Coronado Island and showed the kids the hotel we stayed in on our honeymoon. If you’re not arriving by boat, visiting Coronado Island involves driving over a tall bridge. Think the West Seattle bridge times three. Once you get there, it feels like you’re on a movie set. The neighborhood streets are the most picturesque thing you’ve ever seen.
On the beach at Coronado Island
We watched the sunset while the kids played on the beach, then made our way back north to have dinner with Dana and Brad.
A change of plans on Monday
Monday was originally going to be our Zoo day, but unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. Instead, I woke up in the middle of the night was a splitting migraine headache. Migraines have become more common for me over the past few years, and I was prepared for this. I took migraine medicine right away, but it didn’t work, and I couldn’t go back to sleep.
By the time everyone else was getting up for the day, I was a wreck. I couldn’t make it to the zoo, so Dana and Brad took the kids out for the day while Jessica stayed home with me. I was really bummed out about messing up our plans, but we were able to shift some things around and do the zoo on Tuesday instead.
Visiting the San Diego Zoo
Tuesday was our last full day of the trip, and we made the most of it. We spent the whole day at the San Diego Zoo, and as previously mentioned, it was Ava, Elise, and Jessica’s favorite day of the trip. As expected, we saw a wide variety of animals throughout the day. The monkeys were wildly entertaining, although I liked watching the flamingos as well. In addition, we saw a peacock on the roof, but oddly enough, I’ve seen this before when visiting the zoo in Seattle.
The most memorable part of the day came near the end inside one of the aviary exhibits. I was zooming in on a peacock when I heard Jessica yell out that she had just been pooped on! The same thing had recently happened to my Mom while holding parrots with Ava at Pirate Fest. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there and couldn’t capture that incident on video, but not this time.
I was rolling video the whole time during Jessica’s incident and found it pretty hilarious. It soon became clear that the birds were aiming at us because poop was coming down everywhere. We had to regroup under a small covered area and then make a run for the door. Jessica got hit again as we ran, and I couldn’t stop laughing. For once, it felt like I was filming at the perfect time.
I accidentally used the wrong camera setting here, putting myself in focus and everyone behind me out of focus. I still like the photo though. Sorry family.Elise bought a lion’s mane headband with her own moneyAva looking cool at the zoo with her new shadesEnzo looking as colorful as everEnzo and Dad taking a selfie break
Back to Henderson
Driving back to Henderson, or “Hendo” as we call it, was just as easy as our drive on Friday night. Again, we picked the right time and benefitted from the fact that not many people are driving to Las Vegas on a Wednesday afternoon. Like our drive on Friday night, we stopped twice yet still made it in less than five hours.
Our cats were as excited to see us as we were of them. I need to give my Mom a big shout-out for coming to our house twice while we were gone to check on them. As always, it’s good to come home, but this was our first time coming home to our house in Henderson. As I said earlier, we hadn’t left the county since moving here last June, but one of the things we liked about moving here was that it was a central location for road trips.
There are so many more places we want to drive to, but it felt fitting for our first road trip since moving here would be to San Diego. Obviously, our family has a history there, and introducing our kids to the area was special for us. I hope it won’t be long before our next road trip, but this is one we’ll never forget. Check out the video above to see more of the trip, plus here are a few more photos.
Jessica after the bird poop incidentBack on the boardwalk after all these years!Grabbing a coffee at Better BuzzElise loving the first beach dayAva on the beach at Coronado IslandOne last little walk in Fallbrook before heading home
A quick update on kids activities, Jessica’s job, and staying busy with Vegas Showbiz.
Hello and welcome to another monthly installment of PellegriniPage.com! It seems like all we do is create content these days, but more on that in a bit. What’s been on my mind the most lately is the fact that it has been exactly a year since my trip to visit my Mom in Las Vegas.
During that trip, I “realized” we should be living down here, then started working on how I was going to phrase that to my wife. I remember being nervous when bringing it up, mainly because we had talked about it years earlier, and she was against it. I don’t know what’s more surprising – her saying yes or how quickly we sold our house and moved. It may have been a year ago that this idea came to life, but we’ve already been in southern Nevada for nine months!
Time has flown by since finding our home in Henderson, but I can say with all honesty that we all love it here. The kids have made many friends, they love all the time they spend with Nana, and we’re constantly going out to do fun new things! Sometimes the heat can be a little extreme but having the option to go out back and jump in the pool is pretty nice. I’ve been cleaning and maintaining it all winter, so I’m looking forward to reopening it for the season in about a month.
Jessica’s new job
Jessica has been working at her new job for over a month and loves it. It was a little bit of an adjustment for everyone but nothing major. We have a nice weekday routine going where we’re all together for a bit in the morning, then Jessica heads to work 15 minutes before I walk the kids to school.
I leave the house at 3:00 pm to pick them up from school each day, and by the time we get home Jessica is already there. Time flies by each day, and before I know it, the house is full of commotion again. In between, it’s just the cats and me.
Most importantly, of course, Jessica is enjoying her new job. She cares deeply about these kids, and the role has given her a new sense of satisfaction.
Solar panels installed
It may have taken longer than we were led to believe, but our roof repairs are complete, our solar panels have been fully installed, and we are now producing our very own energy! It’s been a process, but I’m glad to have all the roof repairs taken care of because a complete roof inspection was not conducted when we purchased the house. As it turned out, it needed some love up there, so it was nice to get everything taken care of at once.
These days I enjoy geeking out on all of our solar energy stats. In the two weeks since it started running, we have saved over 1,500 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions and reached an equivalent of 11.5 trees planted! In just two weeks!
I love seeing what positive changes/impacts we’re making, mainly because I think it’s common as an individual to doubt your ability to make a difference in a global problem. Our energy generation is only going up too. As I wrote this on March 21, this was our highest energy production date yet.
Softball and Swimming
The kids have been staying busy in their activities. At first, all three of them were doing swimming lessons on Saturday mornings; then Ava wrapped things up with swimming so she could join her first softball team. Elise and Enzo continue to take “stroke school” lessons, which I always enjoy watching, and Ava loves softball so far.
The weather has been getting nice here for the past month, and it’s just now getting to be perfect baseball weather. I’m looking forward to watching Ava’s games this season and hoping she enjoys herself. We landed on a tournament hockey team this year, and it was way too intense for her. So far, softball looks a lot more laid back but hopefully just as much fun as we’ve had in previous years of hockey. Once the next hockey season comes around, we can look at some house teams and see what she wants to do.
I’m hoping that Enzo and Elise will stick with swimming, at least for a little while. It’s excellent exercise and activity for them, plus it’s an important life skill. I could see them working as a lifeguard during their teenage years, but I don’t want to force it on them. I can tell they’re a little intimidated by some of the other kids at the pool, but I keep telling them to focus on enjoying themselves and doing their best for that day. They’re progressing nicely, so hopefully, we’ll just keep going.
Vegas Showbiz is keeping us busy!
It’s been fun and interesting seeing how this business concept has evolved over the past couple of months. The original concept was much more rooted in search and ticket sales, but I soon realized that I wouldn’t be able to scale the business to where it would need to be on my own.
One of my core tenets when deciding to start a “side hustle” was that it needed to be something I could run entirely independently. Certainly, I would accept help when it was available, but I was not interested in hiring employees, and it needed to be something that I could do entirely online.
After researching how I could get an online business like this going without selling any products or services, I landed on content creation. I soon realized that I’d been a content creator my whole life; I just never thought of it in the terms we do now.
For example, blogging on PellegriniPage.com for the past 11 years is content creation, and so is all the music recording I’ve been doing for half my life. Likewise, doing different forms of acting before that (stage, camera) was related to the content creation stuff I’m doing now. So I feel like it all ties together nicely, and consequently, we’re having a blast doing all these fun new things.
Sometimes it feels like work, but it’s enjoyable work, so it’s never that bad. I really enjoy making videos for the Vegas Showbiz YouTube channel, mainly because it satisfies the same creative aspirations that I always used to tackle with music. It’s a chance to make something out of nothing and put your own creative stamp on it. Like anything else, the more you do it, the better you become.
The blogging aspect is a little less enjoyable, in all honesty, because blogging as a business isn’t as creative and freeing as blogging on a personal website like this. When you’re blogging as a business, you have to do a lot of keyword research and SEO (search engine optimization) analysis of your content. It’s not like PellegriniPage.com where I can write whatever comes to mind without preparation. This type of blogging requires more research, but I’ve found some AI tools like Grammarly and WordHero to help speed things up.
All that said, I still firmly believe that you won’t catch on as a content creator unless people become attracted, for lack of a better term, to you as a person. You can read AI-generated content all day, but you will care more if you like me or my style as a writer/YouTuber. So you’ve got to find a way to add your personality and style to your content. One recent article like this that comes to mind is about Enzo and I having a big night out on the Las Vegas strip.
The goal, for now, is to create as much content as possible over the next six months, then see where we are. I hope to have 35 YouTube videos and 100 blog articles by then, but we’ll see. The silver lining for all of this is that even if it never goes anywhere, we’re still having so much fun doing these new things. No one can take away the memories we’re making as a family, and having it all documented is great. You just have to be willing to put the work in, and at this point, it’s become such a lifestyle thing for us that I couldn’t see us stopping anytime soon.
Based on that, I will skip photos this month and instead direct you to some of our recent videos on the Vegas Showbiz YouTube channel. So please subscribe to our channel and watch our content if you want to support us. The other big thing you can do to help us out is to read our blog articles on VegasShow.biz. Jessica and I regularly write articles about Las Vegas shows, hotels, concerts, and restaurants for the Vegas Showbiz blog. The more traffic we get on the site, the better we do.
One last thing before I sign off – although we’re going to be creating content on other platforms more than PellegriniPage, I’m still committed to writing a monthly update here. This website is an important part of our family history, and I’m not going to ignore it just because there are other articles to write for my business. This site will always be #1!
We hope you enjoy the videos. Feel free to leave comments too!
Family review of the Bellagio Spring 2022 display
Family review of the Bellagio Lunar New Year display
In case you didn’t already know, today is 2’s day. It’s not just your regular Tuesday, but a special day most certainly being celebrated by numerologists the world over. It’s Tuesday, 02/22/2022. That’s a lot of 2’s, and therefore apparently worthy of a post in the ol’ family blog!
February has been, as usual for us, a busy month. It goes further this month for us though, primarily because last week Jessica started her new job at Vanderberg Elementary! We’re equally proud and excited for her, and the kids are adjusting nicely to her being gone more. They have definitely started realizing how much Mom normally does for them, but I’m proud of them regarding the adjustment. It’s different not having Jessica there when we walk to and from school, and I miss having her around the house during the weekdays, but so far so good.
Jessica is now in her second week on the job and is really loving it. I think she deserves a lot of credit too because she didn’t have to go out and do this. She could have stayed home to focus on other things, but she wanted to make a positive impact on these kids’ lives. Obviously, that’s going to be a two-way street, and it’s crazy how quickly it all came together, but she’s so happy and it’s been fun watching this all come together for her.
The kids are continuing to stay busy with school and activities. They’re now in a new level of swimming lessons called “Stroke School”. Here they focus on building solid fundamentals for each of the major swimming strokes. They’re each loving it but it looks like Ava will soon be pausing on the swimming lessons because she’s getting started on a softball team. She’s been into baseball lately and we’ve been going to fields to practice a bit. Last week she went to a tryout session and soon we will be finding out which team she’s on.
My world has been heavily consumed by Vegas Showbiz lately, but I love the work I’m doing so it often doesn’t feel like work. One of the big recent changes to the website is the addition of a blog, which is located at: https://vegasshow.biz/blog
We’re seeing right away that site traffic is increasing due to the addition of these articles, so you can expect to see a lot more coming soon. I’ve been learning a lot about blogging as a business lately, and am trying to incorporate those learnings on the Vegas Showbiz blog. It’s a lot different from the personal blogging I’ve been doing here on PellegriniPage for the past decade+, mostly because here I just have a conversation with myself and write whatever comes to mind. Blogging as a business involves a lot more research and scrutiny of the content.
The other area that has been taking off for Vegas Showbiz is the YouTube videos. We’ve been having fun making video reviews of different Las Vegas attractions, and so far the response has been positive. I really enjoy the whole process of making the videos, and recently started taking an online course on cinematography. The videos are time-consuming, but if the response to them continues to be good, and I get better with each video, then there’s a good chance of this continuing.
I think the reality for my business is that the entertainment search aspect, which was what got this whole thing going, probably isn’t going to be the most popular/consumed part of the site. I’m not getting rid of it, and am still quite proud of the work that went into setting it all up, but clearly, if I want to drive traffic to my site I’m going to need to add regular content, in the form of blog articles, about my niche. At this point, Vegas Showbiz is becoming more of a Las Vegas lifestyle brand, and I will soon be starting my “cold outreach program” regarding asking for comped tickets or rooms in exchange for us doing a written and video review.
The goal is to build a lot of traffic on the website (mainly via blog articles) and get a lot of traffic on YouTube. The more traffic you get, the more profitable your brand becomes. I’m currently expanding the affiliate relationships for Vegas Showbiz, so you’re going to start seeing more links and product promotions. I’ll just say right now that it’s perfectly fine if you’re a reader of this blog (or the Vegas Showbiz blog for that matter) and never click on a link. No problem whatsoever. If you do, however, see something you’re interested in purchasing, and you end up clicking our link to get there, we would appreciate it. There you go, that’s my entire pitch 🙂
I’m keeping it relatively short today, and instead of doing recent photos, I wanted to showcase the first two videos by Vegas Showbiz. Both of them feature our family, and honestly, the kids are the stars of the show. I won’t be able to include them in every video but plan to as much as possible. They love doing it and they bring a type of energy and exuberance that I could never come close to replicating. If you want to do us a solid, spread the word about our blog and YouTube channel. We’re hoping to start building momentum and get a following, but that all starts with your nucleus.
There’s so many exciting new things going on for our family that I almost don’t even know where to start. Well, that’s not entirely true, because obviously I’m going to start with Mr Enzo’s birthday! That said, we do have quite a few exciting things going on, so let’s get to it.
Today is Enzo’s birthday, but it’s a Friday and they had some fun activities planned for the 100th day of school, so Enzo and his sisters went to school just like any other day. Before that he was up early to open presents, but after that it’s been a pretty normal day. He’s really happy with all the various cars, magic sets, and toys he received, but there’s more to look forward to.
Tomorrow afternoon we will be holding Enzo’s birthday party at our house. Over the past couple months our family has gotten really into the TV show ‘Survivor’, so based on his request, that will be the theme for Enzo’s party. There’s going to be various challenges for the kids to take part in before getting into cake and treats. Jessica has been doing an awesome job preparing activities, decorations, and challenges for the party. I, on the other hand, am looking forward to doing lots of filming for the kids’ YouTube channel, and working on my best Jeff Probst impressions.
In addition to the party tomorrow, we’ve got one more related activity to look forward to. A week from tonight the 5 of us are going to see the Jabbawockeez show at MGM Grand. I’ve read it’s one of the most popular Vegas shows for families, plus I have some friends who went with their kids and said it was awesome. All of the kids are excited to go, but Jessica and I are as well, so it should be a fun night. If you’re not familiar with Jabbawockeez, they will be performing at halftime of the NFL Pro Bowl, which is happening here in Las Vegas just a couple days after we’ll be seeing them.
Speaking of Vegas shows, we all had an amazing time going to our first shows earlier this month. Jessica had the pleasure of taking Elise and Ava to see Katy Perry at the new Resorts World Theatre. As expected, the show was amazing and they had the best time ever. It’s the biggest stage in Las Vegas and the production was over the top. The girls were screaming, singing, and dancing the night away. They will always remember this as their first concert and I’m so glad it turned out the way it did.
Things didn’t quite go as planned for Enzo and I, but we still had a great night as well. The plan was for me to take him to see David Copperfield that same night that the girls were seeing Katy Perry, and I was really happy with the seats we got, but unfortunately the show was canceled at the last minute. I’m still not sure why it was canceled but these days you almost have to assume it’s Covid-related.
Enzo was really bummed but I promised him we would see David Copperfield another time. So, we ended up going to see The Mentalist instead, which is a mind reading show by Gerry McCambridge. It wasn’t a big production show like Copperfield but it was still very entertaining and exciting. We ended up making a full night of it by leaving the house early that day, walking around on the strip for a while, then having dinner at Nacho Daddy. After dinner we walked over to Bellagio to watch the fountain show, then we went inside and walked through their whole shopping and dining area. The show was across the street in the Miracle Mile shops at Planet Hollywood, so we walked all through there as well. We definitely got our steps in that night, and stopping for ice cream was a must. Leaving the house that day Enzo couldn’t help but express concern because he was sad about our show being canceled. However, by the time we were heading home he was calling it the best day of his life and couldn’t stop thanking me. If only he understood how happy it made me to see him living his best life.
Okay, more big news to share… Jessica just got a job working at a nearby school! She’s been wanting to find something since moving to Henderson, but it had to make sense and work with our family’s schedule. Also, for the first time since before Ava was born, Jessica and I will once again be working the same hours. Obviously this was never the case when she was working nights in a restaurant and I was working days at Microsoft / Amazon. I’ve definitely gotten used to being home with her everyday over the past couple years, so it’s going to be an adjustment for all of us having her gone more, but we’re really happy for her, and she’s so excited about the opportunity.
The way this all came together is really interesting; it basically traces back to Ava’s dyslexia diagnosis from a couple years ago. It was that diagnosis that set Jessica off onto a journey of learning and self exploration. If you ask her, she’ll tell you that she also has dyslexia, although she was never tested or officially diagnosed. It’s been this journey to learn more about Ava and how we can teach her that has led to so much self discovery for Jessica over the past couple years.
Getting involved with teaching the Barton program to our kids to help with reading was a major step in this direction. Then taking on the huge task of homeschooling our girls for the entire school year last year was also very much related. Jessica is a natural teacher and great with kids, especially the young ones. She’s going to be working as an assistant in a special education classroom at Vanderberg Elementary School, which is less than 10 minutes from our school. It’s such a perfect fit; they even teach the same Barton reading program that Jessica has been using with our kids for the past couple years.
The plan is for all 3 of our kids to switch schools in the Fall and go to Vanderberg for the remainder of their elementary school years. This isn’t the easiest decision to make, mostly because we feel a lot of guilt for them switching schools so many times over the past few years. Some of it was out of our control, like when we got re-zoned by the Everett school district, or that whole pandemic thing which caused everyone to stay home for a year, but regardless the reality is that Ava hasn’t had (and won’t have) two consecutive years at the same elementary school since Kindergarten and first grade.
This isn’t something that we take lightly, but as a parent you have to make decisions, and of course we’re going to do whatever we feel is best for our children. Initially we were really excited about them going to school at Glen Taylor Elementary, but unfortunately some things haven’t gone the way we hoped. I don’t want to get into all of the details on it, but again as parents we have to do our best to make the right decisions for our kids, and there’s no doubt in our mind that Vanderberg will be a better fit. We just feel bad about them having to leave their friends, but they all live nearby and most likely will be rejoining in middle school anyway.
For now the plan is for Jessica to start work in February, but the kids will be finishing the year at Glen Taylor, then transitioning to Vanderberg next school year. I’m sure we’ll have a lot more updates about this in the future, but for now we’re just really happy for Jessica. It’s been great watching this all unfold for her and she’s so excited for this new chapter in our lives. We keep joking about how much we always seem to have going on. It’s always something with us but we keep it interesting.
Another big thing for us this month was the installation of our solar energy system! There’s now over 40 solar panels on the roof of our house, and we’ve got the final inspection coming up next week. I had been thinking about going solar since buying the house, and after learning more about it, I felt like it was an easy decision. You can think of it like renting a house versus owning a house; when you get your electricity from the power company (like I have my entire life until now), you’re just renting energy from them, and you pay whatever they charge. On average the cost of electricity goes up 4% per year too.
On the other hand, by purchasing your own solar system you’re no longer renting your electricity. You’re the owner of a system that produces its own electricity, meaning you’re no longer subject to variable costs from month to month, and the overall annual cost increases. Based on the weather here, and the size of our house, the electric bill used to vary drastically, which was a little shocking in the Summer. Now, however, the only thing we pay to the power company is the $12.50 per month fee to connect to their grid. We bought a solar system big enough to produce 112% of the normal usage of this house, based on historical records. We went with a larger system so we have room to grow. Someday there will be an electric vehicle in the garage, and this larger system will be enough to charge that as well.
Based on the net metering laws in Nevada, we don’t need a big Tesla wall (or equivalent battery) on premises because NV Energy is required to store our unused energy for us. Basically for every kilowatt of unused energy we produce, we get 0.75 kilowatts in credit. 75% is the current rate based on the net metering laws in Nevada, and it’s going down over time. Had we bought this system a couple years ago, hypothetically speaking, we would have gotten somewhere in the 90% credit range. Whatever percent you get when you purchase the system is the amount that you’re grandfathered in at, so even though it’s going to continue dropping, our house will always get 75% credit.
Since we got the system installed in January, we have several months ahead of us where we can build up extra credits for unused energy. Once the Summer comes around and you’re consuming more energy than you’re producing, those extra credits will cover you and keep you from having a separate bill from NV Energy. From a cost perspective, if you’re staying put long-term it’s a no-brainer to go solar here. Although I don’t love taking on debt, the reality is that I’m going to be making a monthly payment either way, and at least now I know exactly how much it will be, plus the solar system is a huge investment in the house. Our neighborhood is 20 years old now and lots of people are making upgrades to their houses. Adding a nice solar system is the single biggest thing you can do in our area to modernize your house, and it’s one of the most impactful things you can do for the good of the planet, so we’re all for it!
In other family news, the kids have been taking swimming lessons through the city of Henderson and they’re loving it. Water safety is very important to our family for obvious reasons, but it looks like Elise and Enzo really want to stick with swimming and eventually get onto a swim team. They’re taking lessons on Saturday mornings and each month they move onto something new.
Unfortunately Ava has decided to take a break from hockey, but I really don’t blame her. I didn’t realize how early the season started here, so by the time I tried to register her the only option was to get on a tournament team. They combined the 10u’s and 12u’s for practice, and the coach was really intense. She played D1 hockey for the University of Minnesota, which is the hockey mecca of the United States, and it was all just too much for Ava. She simply doesn’t take it as seriously as some of the other kids do, and it got to a point where she was dreading it.
I definitely feel responsible for this, and I can’t help but wonder if she’d still be playing had we not left Washington. There’s no way of knowing for sure, and it’s quite possible that she will join a co-ed house team in the Fall, but we’ll have to wait and see. For now we’ve got her signed up to play Softball in the Spring and she’s really excited about that. Once hockey season comes back around we’ll have to make a decision, but we’ll support her regardless. Our only requirement is that each of the kids has some type of athletic activity to be involved in. We don’t care how good they are, or if they decide to try other things, they just have to do something.
Last but not least, I’ve been busier than ever lately because I decided to officially start my own business. I’m not quitting my job or anything like that, but I am working constantly between the two. The name of the business is Vegas Showbiz and earlier this month I filed Vegas Showbiz, LLC with the state of Nevada. The concept and strategy for the business has grown recently, and I’ll get to that shortly, but the original idea that sparked it came right after moving here.
After arriving in Las Vegas Jessica and I found ourselves in a position where we suddenly had so much help with the kids. My Mom wanted as much time with them as possible, and we were eager to explore Las Vegas together, so we started going out more. I’d be looking for things to do on my phone, but found it surprisingly difficult to get an accurate idea of what the options were. You could find various event calendars, but it required a lot of jumping around from site to site. Some of these sites are slow, or don’t work well on phones, and overall I found the experience to be surprisingly poor.
Since I tend to think in terms of websites and databases, the wheels started turning on how I could create my own site and database dedicated to the entire Las Vegas entertainment and nightlife scene. I had designs on becoming that 3rd party source of truth that seemed to be missing. I was aware of sites live vegas.com and visitlasvegas.com, but those felt so much broader to me. They’re trying to sell you on everything from renting a hotel to getting married, and everything in between. That’s all fine and good, but I’m not trying to be that. I want to make a site that a local would want to use. One that doesn’t feel so marketing-heavy; it just gets you the information you want without having to jump around. It’s fast, super clean looking, and works well on any device. That was my goal.
I started coding the week before Thanksgiving and I’ve probably only had 2 or 3 days since then where I wasn’t working on the computer, either for my day job or VegasShow.biz (usually both). It’s been fun, exciting, and fast-paced. What started back in November as just an idea is now live to the world, as of last weekend, at https://vegasshow.biz
The work is nowhere near done, I just felt like the site had reached a level where it made sense to expose it to the world. It’s barely getting any traffic at the moment, but it’s more than ready when the time comes. I’ve never built something so heavy duty for a personal project before, but the exercise of doing so entirely on my own has been an incredible learning opportunity.
Every day there’s something new and exciting going on. Earlier this week my company was accepted into the StubHub affiliate program. This allowed me to start posting links to buy tickets to different events on StubHub. If someone clicks through my link and makes a purchase, my company earns a commission. This is standard affiliate marketing practice and just one example of the things I’ll be doing on the site. The plan is to get hooked up with a couple more ticket companies and put links for all of them on my event pages. This would allow my users to price shop all from one location, and I get credit regardless of which one they choose.
I recently had a logo design competition going on via a website called DesignHill.com. Designers from around the world read my briefing and submitted logo design ideas for Vegas Showbiz. I chose my top 10, then conducted a poll on the site, asking friends and family to vote on their favorite designs. 30 people ended up voting, which I appreciate so much, and it was a very tight race between two logos. The one I ultimately chose was the winner of the poll, but it was in 2nd place all the way until the last vote of the poll, which pushed it into first. I didn’t select it because it won the poll, but it was funny the way that worked out in the end.
This week I made what appears to be an important connection earlier this week with a VIP host at the Hakkasan Group, which is the largest nightclub group in Las Vegas. They run all the big clubs like Zouk, Omnia, Hakkasan, and more. I found him on Twitter, introduced my company/website, and asked if I could help him promote his events on my site. A lot of conversation followed and by the time I went to bed that night I had added all of his events to the site and started featuring one of them on the home page. Now I’m taking it a step further by building a guest list form on the site. When someone comes to the event page for one of our events (of which there are many), they can fill out a form to get on the club’s guest list for that night. This means I’m going to start collecting a database of users, which will be valuable, and I can’t believe that in less than a week since going live, I’m already working with a group like this. It’s really exciting.
I’ve also been fortunate enough to start getting a lot of support from my sister Dana regarding company vision and strategy. As I said before, I tend to think a little more on the technical side of things, mainly because I’m 100% responsible for keeping the site running, so having Dana onboard has really helped me expand the vision for the human side of the business. Jessica and my Mom have also been very vocal in this area. I need more than just a Las Vegas search engine. That alone will certainly draw people to the site, but adding fresh relevant content via blog posts and videos is a great way to build up your search engine optimization and get people on your site. It also keeps people on the site for longer, which is an important metric. Since I’m already hooked up with various affiliate relationships, these blog posts and videos can become a great place to drop some ads. Don’t be surprised if you start seeing them here on PellegriniPage too. I’ve always been happy to pay the hosting costs to keep this site running, but if I could recoup those costs simply by adding a couple advertisements to the site, it almost seems silly not to. I’ve just never really been clued into that world because it wasn’t something we ever did at work.
I’m thinking the Jabbawockeez show next week will be the first thing I review for VegasShowbiz. I’m hoping to start doing them regularly so that will be the first one. It’s going to take a lot of marketing to get this business off the ground, and I have to be willing to put myself out there much more than ever before. Honestly that’s a little bit daunting, but I feel like I have a lot of inspiration, a vision of what it can be, and a unique combination of skills to be able to run it as a sole proprietor. If you haven’t yet checked it out, please have a look at https://vegasshow.biz and help me spread the word. It’s constantly growing and I look forward to adding the blog and vlog sections soon. As is, I’m hooked up with the Ticketmaster API and am pulling 95% of my event data from them. On any given day my custom Las Vegas events database contains over 10,000 records, yet you can search/filter them in milliseconds. There is not another site in this market that can truthfully say that. I’m extremely proud of what’s been done so far, and how quickly it’s gone from idea to reality, but the hard work has only just begun. I expect this to be a fun journey, but we’ll see how it turns out. I’m certainly not going to make any rash major changes in my life, but I’m putting everything I have into this. It’s already been a learning experience and it’s barely even begun.
That’s it for now. Once again, wishing my favorite little boy in the whole world a very happy 7th birthday! I love you beyond words and could not be more proud to be your Dad. Here’s some recent pics.
Enzo meeting The Mentalist, Gerry McCambridge, after the showElise or Hippo, who wore it best?Ava carries Peach while riding Enzo’s hoverboard near furniture. Don’t try this at home.Ready for a big night out with my little manThe girls had a fun night with Mom before the show, including dinner at one of our favorite Las Vegas hangouts, The PeppermillAva and Elise are ready to rock!Happy Birthday buddy
Yesterday we celebrated our first Christmas in our new home, but this whole month has been full of holiday activities for our family. Although the weather here in Southern Nevada may not align with traditional views of the holiday season, there’s still a lot of activities to do and plenty of Christmas spirit all around. Most importantly, we’ve been lucky enough to spend time with several family members (some of whom don’t live here) this holiday season, so things don’t feel too different after all.
I know I talked about it in my last post, but having Kristy, Beto, and Madi here for Thanksgiving and Ava’s 10th birthday was a great way to kick off the holiday season. We did a lot of fun and memorable stuff that weekend, then a week or so later Grandma Amy and Grandpa Tom made a bit of a surprise visit. Tom surprised Amy for her birthday by taking her to a couple shows in Vegas, so we met up with them one night and had an excellent dinner at Border Grill in Mandalay Bay. Jessica and I were excited to eat there because we’re big Top Chef nerds and the two chefs who created that restaurant were on multiple seasons of Top Chef Masters. The food was excellent and luckily for Jessica and I they had a Vegan Relleno on the menu so we didn’t even have to cheat. Elise then knocked it out of the park by ordering dessert for the table to share.
Another fun activity for us this month was our visit to Enchant at Las Vegas Ballpark. We actually had the pleasure of visiting Enchant in Seattle a few years ago, so we knew what to expect, but it was still really fun. We brought my Mom along and enjoyed checking out all the lights, displays, and finding all of Santa’s reindeer. Oddly enough we ran into our neighbors there, and they’re one of the families we’ve become closest with since moving, so that was a nice unexpected surprise.
Speaking of neighbors, there have been a couple of neighborhood gatherings this month and we continue to feel so lucky to have landed in such an awesome neighborhood! There’s so many friendly people around, the kids have made friends, and overall the little community we landed in is great. You never know how that’s going to turn out as a home buyer, so it’s a bit of a gamble, but things have worked out better than we ever expected.
Devin has also hosted a couple get-togethers this month, and luckily his brother Brian, along with his new fiance Jane, were able to come out here from Europe for a visit. They’ve been living in Berlin for several years but are currently in the process of moving to England, so it’s been cool to catch up and hear about that whole process. We’re planning on hosting a dinner at our house before they take off in January.
Last weekend Jessica and Elise ran the Henderson Holiday 5k race. They had been training for it by running in the neighborhood, and the rest of us came to watch and cheer them on. It was really fun and Elise was so proud of herself; she carried her medal around the entire next week.
The kids had a holiday fundraiser event at their school this month, which they enjoyed very much. I wasn’t able to make it but Jessica took them and of course ran into so many other families from the neighborhood. Apparently Enzo didn’t stop dancing the whole time, and he’s got his little red leather jacket on so he looks like Michael Jackson. I wish I could have seen it but Jessica said it was amazing. We’re trying to get him to check out a dance class and he’s not sure but I think he’s willing to try at least once. Hopefully soon…
The kids have been enjoying their 17 day break from school via various activities. Yesterday for Christmas Ava received a softball glove, bat, and ball, so we went out to the park in the middle of the day as a family to play catch and practice hitting. Ava actually commented at one point, gesturing up towards the beautiful sunny blue sky, saying “can you believe this is Christmas Dad?” There was a foot of snow at our old house in Snohomish, so 60 degrees and sunny is a pretty big change for us.
Earlier this week we took the kids to see “Sing 2” in the theater, which was our first family trip to the movie theater in about 2 years. Then on Christmas Eve we went over to my Mom’s house for dinner, presents, and a movie. She surprised us by having Chef Kenny’s delivered for dinner, which was amazing, but there was so much food that I literally haven’t had a non Chef Kenny’s meal since then. It’s really nice to be able to regularly spend holidays with Nana again so hopefully Christmas Eve at her house can be a tradition.
Christmas morning started early for us – the kids rudely awakened us at 6:30am and the madness ensued moments later. As they get older it becomes more difficult to shop for them, but I think they were all happy with how Christmas turned out. Some of the bigger presents include:
A new mountain bike for Elise
A hoverboard for Enzo
A new bed for Ava – she will get to pick it out
Additionally, we finally got to break the news to the kids about some shows they will be going to in a couple weeks. Before even moving to Nevada, we found out about Katy Perry’s upcoming Las Vegas residency at Resorts World, and Jessica was able to get tickets. We’ve been holding onto them for 6 months now, but Saturday January 8 is the day. The theater at Resorts World just opened a month ago and it’s the biggest stage in Las Vegas. It’s supposed to be an amazing show and I’m so excited for Jessica to be able to take Ava and Elise to see it. Talk about a memorable first concert!
Since the girls already had plans for Saturday, January 8, I figured Enzo and I could go out and do something fun that same night. There’s obviously no shortage of options here, and he said he wanted to see a magic show, so I got tickets to David Copperfield. It’s the biggest magic show in Vegas, and I still have great memories of my Mom taking me to see Copperfield at the Paramount Theater in Seattle when I was a kid. I feel like it’s coming full circle now with me taking Enzo to see him.
We’re looking forward to the shows big time, but before that (actually in the next hour or so), our niece and nephew Anna and Kallan are coming for a short visit. They were in Southern California for Christmas visiting with Dana and Brad, but wanted to make the drive over to Vegas for a couple days. Anna turned 21 this month so it makes sense that they would want to come check things out. Kallan just made his first trip ever to Las Vegas about 4 months ago, so it’s nice to have him back so quickly.
I’m working on heating up the swimming pool so we can all do a little Christmas swim. I figure if I’m going to maintain the pool all year long, then I might as well heat it up a couple times in the off season. As long as you’re in the water you’re fine, it just takes forever to get it warm enough. It’s fairly chilly here right now, but when I look at weather around most of the rest of the country it puts things in perspective.
Although the kids are missing snow a bit, it’s still been a great holiday season, and the first of many in our new home. We’re really thankful for how things have turned out in our lives this year and looking forward to seeing what 2022 has in store. Wishing all of our friends and family a very happy holiday season and new year! Here’s some recent pics.
Visiting Santa at the school’s holiday eventPosing with our first ever fake Christmas tree! Get used to it…The star wouldn’t actually stick on top of the tree, but Elise still insisted on posing for the photo.Staying warm with Nana at EnchantOur little holiday racers!Enzo’s face is healing nicely after his latest accident. His smile still kills me.From our visit to the Santa ExperienceMerry Christmas, 2021
Celebrating Ava’s 10th birthday, Thanksgiving, and a visit from family.
On Thursday the awesome Miss Ava turned 10 years old! This was the first time in her lifetime that her birthday fell on Thanksgiving day, and considering that it was also our first Thanksgiving in our new house, plus the fact that we had family visiting us, made everything really special and memorable. Normally I would write a birthday post about the kids on their actual birthday, but I elected to wait until the end of the weekend this year because Kristy, Tito, and Madi were out visiting us for the past several days and we’ve been keeping busy each day with fun activities. As I write this on Sunday afternoon we’re all basically crashed out after going pretty much non stop for the entire holiday weekend.
Before I get into the details on Ava’s birthday I’ll just mention that Halloween turned out awesome. We had my Mom, Terry, and Bob over to hang out during the day, then that evening the trick or treating in our neighborhood was amazing. I’ve never seen a neighborhood quite like it. Our friends Tiko, Tina, Helen, and Beatrice came over to join us as we bounced around from house to house.
There was one neighbor who built their own haunted house and allowed groups of 3 at a time to go through. Elise didn’t want to go so I took Ava and Enzo through it. They had never done anything like this before so they were pretty freaked out. Then there was another house who not only had a light show synchronized to music, but they were out there in their driveway making cotton candy to order for each kid that came up. It was unbelievable.
Earlier that week Jessica and I were able to hang out with our new neighbors quite a bit. It really was that week where everything changed for us in the neighborhood because before then we basically didn’t know anyone, and after that we started making a bunch of friends. Since then there’s been a couple families who we’ve become closer with, and the kids are making so many friends. We really got lucky with this neighborhood.
As far as this week goes, on Wednesday morning my Mom came to the house and we all went to the Henderson Parks and Rec center to participate in their Charlie Brown Escape Room. It was a racket ball court that they converted into an escape room; you have to use the clues they give you to solve problems until eventually you solve the whole thing. It was a good time for all and we’re already planning on returning for their Polar Express themed escape room in December.
Later that afternoon I headed to the airport to pick up Kristy, Tito and Madi. I knew Madi was excited to check out some vegan restaurants so after coming to the house to drop off bags and do a quick tour, we headed down to the Arts district in downtown Las Vegas and had dinner at Tacotarian, which is our favorite plant-based Mexican restaurant. This was the first time for all 3 of them eating at a Vegan restaurant so it was great to see them really enjoying everything.
Thursday was Ava’s birthday and we were all up early. She did presents that morning, talked to a few people on the phone, then we hung out and watched the Thanksgiving Day parade on TV while food was being prepared. I made guacamole, fruit salad, and vegan crab cakes to snack on throughout the day, plus we ended up getting a real turkey and a plant-based turkey in order to keep everyone happy. There were lots of other snacks available all day as well, plus my Mom made stuffing, Bob made creamed peas, and I made roasted garlic mashed potatoes. Dessert was a big hit as well because we got this huge cinnamon roll covered in icing and fresh fruit from a place called Cinnaholic. We’d had it once before and everyone loved it, plus it’s all vegan, so everyone was able to enjoy.
I kept waiting for some Thanksgiving catastrophe to take place, which is entirely based on the various issues we’ve had in years past, but it never ended up happening. Nothing was forgotten, no delivery was missed, and the turkey looked beautiful. I guess the joke was on me with that part because I was up early to make sure it was in the oven before 8:00am and it looked like the best turkey I’ve ever made, but I wouldn’t know because I didn’t eat any of it. Oh well, everyone else said it was good.
On Friday we pretended to be tourists and spent the day checking out various attractions on the strip. We started off at Bellagio, where we enjoyed seeing their new holiday decorations. They always do an amazing job decorating at Bellagio so we figured everyone would enjoy checking it out. Later after lunch we made our way down to M&M World where everyone had fun shopping. Enzo is so into rainbow tie dye these days that he ended up getting a hat and a backpack in those colors. Combine that with the tie dye pants and hoodie he was already wearing, and what you end up with is something resembling rainbow vomit.
Since Hershey’s Chocolate World was right across the street we decided to check that out as well. All I can say is I’ve never seen so much chocolate in one room in my life. They sell these 3 pound chocolate bars where you can customize the wrapper. They had the famous green tea Kit Kat bars (which I first saw a couple years ago in Japan), plus so many other treats. By the time we got home that day everyone was exhausted but Kristy and Tito had tickets to see O that evening at Bellagio, so after a short rest they were back out on the town. Meanwhile Jessica and I were happy to stay home with Madi and the kids for movies and snacks.
Saturday was probably my favorite day of their visit. We spent the day shopping at vintage clothing and antique stores in the Arts district downtown. I think everyone in our group got at least one thing while out shopping that day. We stumbled upon a nice pizzeria that offered vegan pizzas, then took everyone out for ice cream. On the way home we stopped by the Pinball Hall of Fame and played games for about an hour.
After going home to rest for a bit we headed back out and ended up having dinner at Chef Kenny’s Vegan Dim Sum, which is easily our favorite Asian restaurant in Las Vegas. This was actually the second consecutive Saturday that Enzo, Jessica, and I had dinner there, and it was the consensus best meal of the visit. We ordered more food than ever yet practically nothing went to waste. The various sushi rolls, rainbow shrimp, walnut shrimp, orange chicken, spicy crispy beef, pot stickers, pork buns, and more, were all a hit. No one can believe it’s all plant-based and I love seeing people’s reactions when trying this stuff for the first time.
Since it was Saturday night and it was their final night in town, we felt like we had to hit up the strip one more time. With the windows down and the moon roof open, we tested out the van’s sound system at levels previously thought unattainable. We were all dancing in our seats, singing along (or in some cases screaming) to the music – it was like our own little minivan party bus. Of all the new memories made during the week, this one will definitely stand out.
This morning we went back out to see the 7 Magic Mountains art installation one more time before it’s removed next month. After that we had one more vegan meal in store: sandwiches from No Butcher. We ended up going to a park and having a picnic lunch, then letting the kids play for a bit before heading to the airport. It feels a little weird being able to do that sort of thing at the end of November, but it’s sunny and 70 degrees, so why not?
Overall it was a great week, a great visit, and several great meals. We really appreciate Kristy, Tito, and Madi coming down here to spend time with us and look forward to doing it again. We’re also planning on heading up to Seattle for a visit this Summer so at the latest we will see them again then.
Before wrapping it up I just want to focus on Ava a bit. It’s hard to believe she’s 10 now, and I can’t believe how much she’s growing up. She’s so much more mature now, and I’ve been impressed with how busy she’s been keeping herself. It used to be just school and hockey, but now she’s involved in multiple school activities as well; she recently finished up robotics club, and she’s now doing Wednesday morning flag football before school.
One of Ava’s greatest qualities is how considerate she is of her siblings. Whenever she’s about to get something special her first thought is how she can share it with Elise and Enzo. They may fight about the silliest little things, but they’re always thinking about each other and as the oldest sibling, Ava is very protective of them.
I remember thinking to myself when Ava was born “I wonder what our lives will be like when she’s 10…”. I never could have predicted all the adventures that would ensue but it’s been quite a ride already and we couldn’t be more proud or in love with the young lady she’s become. Ava is a really unique kid, and I mean that as a compliment. She knows who she is and she loves her family deeply. She gave us the gift of becoming parents and I’ve always said the successes we’ve experienced over the past decade never would have happened if it weren’t for her and her siblings. There simply wouldn’t have been as much motivation if it weren’t for them.
I know we flipped their world upside down this year but I’m so impressed with how each of them has adapted. The new lives we’ve built for ourselves this year have been overwhelming at times, but I feel like Ava is growing and thriving more than ever. I hope it was a special birthday for her and that she always looks back fondly on turning 10.
Elise checking out the 7 Magic MountainsElise helped us solving clues in the Charlie Brown escape roomEnzo ran into a wall at school and got 3 stitches in his face. It’s healing well and he’s fine. He’s a tough little dude. Enzo really loves Vegas. Here he is posing with Liberace’s Rolls Royce.And finally here he is living his brightest / best life at M&M WorldOur first visit to 7 Magic Mountains with NanaHalloween 2021 was unforgettableHappy Birthday sweet Ava, we love you SO MUCH!
Getting into the Fall spirit, making friends, meeting neighbors, and getting settled.
October has already been a great month for us, on multiple levels, and we haven’t even gotten to Halloween yet. Halloween is big for us this year; it’s my Mom’s birthday, and the first one since we moved here. Plus our neighborhood goes big for Halloween with tons of decorations. Apparently we can expect hundreds of kids roaming our streets, meaning we need to make sure someone is always at our door to hand out candy, even if the rest of us are out trick or treating.
We’re turning this into a family event by having my Mom, Bob, Sandy and Terry out to the house to hang out that afternoon for dinner before we hit the streets. Then afterwards we can have birthday cake with Nana. Luckily all of our local friends are able to come over and join us for trick or treating as well. We’re going to have a big group and I’m expecting a fun night. My Mom will be staying a night with us for the first time as well, so we get to host her for her birthday. Looking forward to sharing more about it next month.
In the meantime the kids have been staying busy, mostly with Nana, doing all kinds of Halloween activities. There’s been a variety of Halloween-themed attractions they’ve been going to on the weekends. Last Sunday we picked them up early from Nana’s and met our friends at Gilcrease Orchard. We got a box of donuts, picked out our perfect pumpkins in the patch, made our way through a corn maze, and got to check out some live animals.
We’ve also got a couple neighborhood Halloween events coming up this week. There’s going to be an outdoor movie night with drinks and snacks, which is for the whole family. Then on Friday night Jessica and I were invited to the adults only neighborhood Halloween party. We thought that would be a fun way to get to know our neighbors a bit more so the kids will be with Nana that night.
Now that the weather has cooled down we’re seeing people out so much more in the neighborhood, and suddenly the kids find themselves with way more kids to play with than we ever had at our last house. There’s definitely no replacing our good friend Avery from Washington, but there’s about a dozen kids near us that are frequently outside now. I always expected it would be in Fall that we would start meeting a lot more neighbors because people aren’t out and about here in the Summer. Fall here is like Summer in Seattle – sunny everyday with temperatures in the 70’s and 80’s.
Once Halloween is behind us we’ve got a lot to look forward to in November. For the first time in her life, Ava’s birthday falls on Thanksgiving Day, and it just so happens to be her 10th birthday, so it’s a big one. Luckily we’ve got Kristy, Beto, and Madi coming out to spend the long holiday weekend with us! We’re really looking forward to having them out and still finalizing plans on how to coordinate birthday and holiday celebrations.
Speaking of family visitors, we just had our first visitors staying at our house. Dana and Brad did a road trip from their place in Fallbrook, CA to come and see us. It was only a 24 hour visit because they had plans for their anniversary, but we packed a lot in while they were here and it was a blast. It was so nice seeing them and we look forward to paying the visit back on the CA side via a road trip of our own sometime soon.
One thing that’s really cool about living in the Las Vegas / Henderson area is that you never know who it’s going to be, but there’s pretty much always someone in town. It was never like that in Seattle but Vegas is so much more of a travel destination. Last weekend, for example, we were out Friday night for dinner with my good friend Shawn, whom I became friends with 20 years ago when we were busboys at El Gaucho, and stayed close with ever since. He and his wife live in Nashville but came to Vegas for his birthday weekend. Then the very next night on Saturday we met up with Jessica’s good friend Summer, whom she met 20 years ago working in a restaurant in Cedar Rapids. She was in town with family celebrating a 21st birthday. Strange coincidence that they were both friends of ours made in restaurants 20 years ago, who both happened to be in Vegas for a birthday on the same weekend, but the point remains, someone is always in Vegas for the weekend. The best part to go along with that is suddenly now we have a full-time babysitter! It’s been really cool catching up with friends from all over the place, and you never know who’s going to be next.
Beyond all the Halloween stuff everything has been great. School is going well for the kids, and they recently started riding bikes to school. It’s not a daily thing, and Jessica or myself needs to be with them, but we’ve started doing that a bit and they love it. We’ve been doing regular family bike rides on various trails near the house, and getting out for some hiking in nearby desert mountains. These are the kinds of activities we were looking forward to doing once it cooled down.
Ava was able to join the 4th grade robotics club and has been attending those sessions before school on Tuesdays. She is also playing hockey twice a week after school, so she is definitely the most busy of the kids at the moment. She also lost a tooth this week, which hasn’t happened in a long time for her, so that was exciting. Elise and Enzo are both doing great. We’re working on getting activities sorted out for them, and not surprisingly, there are so many options here. I’ve been meaning to take Enzo to the BMX track here in Henderson but we haven’t made it happen quite yet. Elise has made a good friend in our new neighborhood so they have been spending a lot of time together.
Now that we’re totally settled into the new house Jessica is focusing on her next step. She’s considering a job but also considering starting her own business, so it will be fun to see how it turns out.
Railing update
I feel like until this project is 100% done I need to give updates on it. It’s been in progress since July, so I can barely imagine what life will be like once the railing project is no longer a part of it. Since my last post I finished installing all the iron bars below the railing, stained the rail, and finished it with a heavy gloss. We’re really happy with how it looks, and it means our project is down to the painting work that needs to be done on the exposed wood parts. Here’s a recent pic:
I was supposed to have a painter out this past week to estimate on it, but he no-showed twice, so it’s back to square one. We’ve thought about doing the painting but considering this is the main entry of our house, we want it to look as good as possible. I’m planning on doing another video tour of the house but I’m not doing it until this paint work is complete. Hopefully we can wrap it up soon.
That’s about it for now. We’ve got a lot of new photos to share. Happy Halloween!
The coolest thing about losing this tooth is the fact that she pulled it herself in the school bathroom!Elise & Spencer getting some quality outdoor timeHis teacher says he’ll do anything for a laugh
Referring to any recent time period as the “best ever” feels a little weird, mostly because that pandemic thing is still, well, a thing. However, I think it’s warranted for me to call Summer 2021 as the best Summer of my life. Before this I definitely would have called Summer 2001 as the best ever because that’s when my Mom took me on a 3 week trip to Europe, which included a visit with our relatives in Italy, followed by a trip with her and Uncle Bob to Las Vegas for my 21st birthday. That will always be a really special memory for me, but everything that went down this Summer is much bigger than me and I still can’t believe how it has all worked out.
Obviously buying our new house was the biggest individual thing that happened this Summer, but some other things that really stand out to me include:
My Mom and the kids so much regular time together
Jessica and I having the most free time together since becoming parents
New school for the kids
More time hanging out with friends
Swimming, swimming, swimming!
Home improvement projects
It’s been such an incredible, life changing year, and it all came together so quickly. It was only 6 months ago that the idea of us moving to Nevada even became a thing, and as I write this, we’ve already been here for 3 months. It’s been a whirlwind but I’m proud of us for sticking with the plan and following through.
School update
As expected the kids are making friends at school, and some of them have turned out to be our neighbors, so we’re starting to meet more people. Now that the 100+ degree days are behind us, people are starting to get outside more and more. It’s weird to think of Summer as the season where you stay inside, but the rules are a bit skewed here in the desert.
Each of the kids really likes their teacher and classroom, but when I ask them about their day, they tend to respond about lunch, recess, and P.E. more than anything else. Regardless, we’ve been impressed with the school and it’s obvious that our kids are enjoying being around other kids again.
Visitors
One of the cool things about living in the Vegas area is that people are always coming here for quick vacations, so you never know who you’re going to get as a visitor. Just recently we’ve started getting visitors regularly; I had dinner last weekend with a friend from Microsoft and his wife, then Kallan made his first visit to Las Vegas with friends that weekend, so he came to the house on Monday and spent the day with us. This weekend Jessica has several friends in town for a birthday celebration, so she’s been out spending time with them, and we just found out we’re getting a visit from Grandma and Grandpa Martin next week. Hopefully we can get some more visits on the calendar soon.
Railing update
Now that our family room is complete, the railing project is the only one remaining. At this point the sanding is done (we finished that part a couple weeks ago), and we’re focused on installing all the metal bars. We started upstairs at the end next to our bedroom and worked down towards the entry of the house. There were 52 posts in the railing needing to be replaced, and as of today we are down to 13. The process became more complicated today though, because I’ve reached the section where the staircase begins to curve, and the downward angle of the railing becomes more severe.
The metal shoes that go at each end of the bar normally just need to be glued with epoxy, but now in addition to fabrication work on the bar to get it exactly the right length, I also have fabrication work needed on the top shoe. I’m basically boring the shoe out from the inside to give the bar some more room to maneuver. This makes it easier to align the shoe with the railing while still keeping the bar vertically straight.
Once these next 13 bars are done we can start focusing on what we’re going to do with staining and painting. Here’s a pic of how it was looking today.
MP Work Update
Back on August 30th I started working with my new team at Microsoft, which is the Teams Experimentation team. I’ve now survived three full weeks on the team and I’m really enjoying it. It’s also been challenging because it’s an area of software engineering that I’m not as familiar with. My background has always been based on web development, but the work I’m doing now is all about big data analysis, statistics, and machine learning.
There have been times where it’s felt overwhelming because there’s so much new stuff to learn, but I’m still glad I made the switch and feel like it’s definitely a better fit for me at this point in my career. This is a rapidly growing space in the tech industry so it’s a good area to build expertise, and I’m humbled to be a part of Teams development.
Coming soon
The kids are very excited to see Grandma and Grandpa next week, and overall we’re always happy to get visitors. We’ve got room so please, if you’re thinking about coming for a visit, do so. In the meantime, we’re very excited for Halloween, and already even have our costumes ready to go (thank you Nana). Ava’s 10th birthday is on Thanksgiving this year so it’s definitely a big one for our family. Hopefully I don’t screw anything up for Thanksgiving dinner…
On Friday Ava, Elise, and Enzo finished their first week at their new school in Henderson. It was a big deal for us because not only was this a brand new school for them, but it was their first time being back in a traditional classroom setting in 18 months, or in Enzo’s case, ever. He was in pre-school when the pandemic began and did his entire Kindergarten year at home. Now we have Enzo in first grade, Elise in third, and Ava in fourth. We had a chance to visit the school and meet the teachers a few days before school began and everything seemed great.
As can be expected, it wasn’t easy getting back into the school routine, and there were definitely some emotions involved throughout the week, but Jessica and I couldn’t be more proud of how they handled everything. They’re already making friends and their teachers really like them. We haven’t met many of our neighbors yet but we’ve seen several other families from the neighborhood walking to and from school each day, so this will most likely be how we start getting to know some new people.
One of the many things that attracted us to the house we ended up buying was the fact that it was within the best school district in Nevada, and we’re already feeling the benefits of that. The school has been so welcoming and responsive to our needs. While we may not all be the most traditional learners, there’s no doubt we’re in the right place and setting the kids up for success at school.
The other nice thing is how close we are to their school. Jessica walks the kids to school each morning and I often help with pickup in the afternoon, but we don’t always walk home simply because it’s still so hot right now when school gets out. As the crow flies, school is probably only a quarter mile from our house, but based on the way we have to walk it’s closer to a half mile. It’s still not bad at all, but when you’re dealing with triple digit heat and they’re already tired from a full day, walking home in their uniform can be a bit too hard on them, so we just deal with the traffic and bring the van to pick them up.
Overall we’re happy with the start we’ve gotten off to and are excited to see what this year will bring. We celebrated our first week by having a family swim party on Friday evening, then we picked up ice cream and watched the first Harry Potter movie at home. Yesterday we took the kids over to Nana’s house for a sleepover. She ended up taking them to a ranch today where they were able to ride horses, feed animals, and explore everything. It was hot and they were all beet red when they got home, but everyone had fun. Having my mom so close continues to be amazing and I’m not really sure who it benefits the most, but everyone is very happy.
Although Jessica no longer has to worry about being Mom and teacher combined, she is taking on a very serious role with the kids’ schooling again this year. She’s already so dedicated to working with them everyday on homework and other forms of tutoring. Her patience and dedication is awe inspiring and someday the kids will really begin to understand exactly how lucky they are to have a Mom like her who is so deeply involved and invested in their education. She is also weighing her options regarding ways to spend some of her free time during the weekdays, but for the moment there’s still enough for us to focus on here at the house, so there hasn’t been much downtime at all.
We’ve been staying very busy working on projects at the house, and it goes into overdrive whenever the kids go to Nana’s house. Jessica did a great job painting our kitchen nook and our new entertainment center area. That was a big project because we had to have the old built-in entertainment center removed, and we had to have a fireplace removed. This left a big opening in the wall, and even an entire whole through our house where the little gas chimney used to be. I ended up learning how to do the stucco repair to patch up the outside hole, but we had to hire a drywall specialist to come out and fix the wall inside the house. Once that was done we were unblocked on doing all the interior painting, which Jessica took care of this weekend. Both areas look great, and now the only other project we want to do in the family room is replace the carpet.
The other major project that I continue to work on in literally all of my spare time is our staircase railing. It’s all blond oak with a thick coat of clear varnish and wood posts, but what we want it to be is a dark stained railing with iron bars and a glossy white base under the bars. In order to get there you first need to remove the clear varnish from every square inch of the railing and the base. To do that you need to use a drill with different types of wire brushes attached. It’s very slow, tedious work and it’s hard on your body because you’re sitting or standing in all these weird positions trying to get every last bit of varnish scraped off.
One of the difficult things about this project is that scraping the varnish off isn’t enough to get things ready for staining and painting. The wire brushes work well, but they leave noticeable scrape lines in the wood, so you have to go back over everything with different types of sandpaper to smooth it out. You need at least 2 different grits of sandpaper (and in some cases 3) to get it ready, so this means you’re covering every square inch 3 or 4 times with different tools. It’s easily the most hands-on work I’ve ever put into a project and there’s still a lot left to do. I literally work on this every night after work, and most of the day on the weekends, but it’s still likely to be another week or two before we’re even ready to begin staining and replacing the bars. We’re leaning towards hiring a painter to handle painting the base, but again it’s going to be a while before we’re ready for that step. I look forward to sharing photos once it’s done, and I know it’s going to look amazing, but right now it’s prohibiting me from doing much of anything else (including jiu-jitsu) because it’s taking up so much time.
Once this project is done we’re definitely taking a break from home projects. At that point I’m planning on making another video giving a tour of the house because we will have completed everything we initially planned on doing when buying the house, and all of our new furniture will be in here. We’re so happy with everything we bought so I look forward to showing how it all came together, but it could easily be at least another month before we’re ready for that.
One other notable thing going on in my world involves another change at work. Back in March I moved from the Azure.com team, which I’d been on for 6 years, to the Treasury Engineering team. Before making that change, however, I had been interviewing with Microsoft Teams in hopes of landing a role on their Instrumentation team. Unfortunately that role didn’t work out, but the manager liked me and said she would stay in touch if something else came up in the future.
Shortly afterwards the Treasury team reached out to me and I ended up joining them a little while later. I was surprised when the manager from Teams reached out to me last month about a new open role on their Experimentation team. If you’re not familiar with Microsoft Teams, it’s the fastest growing platform at Microsoft. We use it for every meeting we hold, but in addition to being an excellent audio/video platform for meetings, it’s also what we use for person-to-person instant messaging, and team-wide communications. It was already growing fast but once the pandemic hit last year it’s growth skyrocketed.
The role on the Experimentation team was one that they hand-picked me for. Once an opening became available they reached out to me to see if I’d be interested. Part of the reason they did this was based on all my previous experience doing experimentation on azure.com. The main idea behind doing experimentation on websites and applications is that when you’re getting ready to roll out a big change, you wouldn’t just make the change for everyone to start using and hope for the best. You would run an experiment where only a certain percentage of your users are exposed to this new variation and you collect analytics on their usage to see if the variation performs better than the old version did. Once you can prove via the analytics that the new variation is an improvement, you start progressively rolling it out to more and more of your users. We’re all constantly included in these types of experiments on all the major sites we use without knowing it, and tons of data is collected on how we interact with the sites. Anytime you go to a site like Amazon or Facebook and see that a button has moved, or a new feature is available, it’s almost guaranteed that you’re part of an experiment on the site.
Based on all of my experience running these types of experiments on azure.com, the Teams Experimentation team was very interested in bringing me onboard. After I had a chance to talk with them I felt like this would be a better fit for me than my current role working in the treasury. I didn’t like the idea of leaving my new team after only 5 months, but I spent 6 years on the team before that, so I know I’m quite capable of showing loyalty and sticking it out long-term on a single team.
On Thursday I received the official offer to join Teams, and considering that this was my original goal, I decided to accept it. I had a nice talk with my manager in the treasury and he totally understood, so hopefully in the next couple weeks I’ll be making that transition. It’s a huge opportunity that I simply couldn’t pass up, so I can’t wait to get things going. Considering all the other major changes going on in our lives, the timing for this made a lot of sense to me.
I guess that’s about it for now. There’s certainly no shortage of exciting new things going on for us, and honestly I still can’t believe how everything has worked out. When I look back to our original conversations in March about moving to Nevada, it all made sense theoretically, but to actually make it happen and follow through with everything is a completely different story. I’m still amazed at how well everything has worked out, and although I really miss our family and friends in Washington, I have to be honest that I’m in love with how our lives have turned out in Nevada. I never expected to live in a house like this, and although I appreciate all the nice words we’ve received about working hard and doing everything right, it still never felt like the culmination of all that would lead to this. Maybe that’s because this wouldn’t even be a possibility in Washington. We keep having to pinch ourselves, but each day it feels a little more like home.
Each time we complete a project, get something organized, or get a piece of furniture delivered it becomes that much more of a home. Not just any home either but our home, and it’s going to be that way for a long time. We seriously busted our asses moving down here and we’re never doing it again. We could have coughed up about ten grand and hired movers, but we decided to save the money and invest it in the new house rather than give it to a moving company. Jessica has already said she plans on dying here and has instructed me to spread her ashes in our beautiful backyard. All kidding aside, we’re never going to outgrow this house and we love everything about it so much that I expect us to be here for a very long time to come. Our guest room is already fully furnished so I hope it starts getting occupied with visitors very soon! Here’s a few recent pics
Ava enjoying the splash pad at the baseball gameElise doing some LV Aviators hat modelingEnzo checking out one of the local BMX tracksFamily fun at the baseball gameGetting our storage unit emptied was a momentous occasionShowing off our floatiesThey made me a birthday cake. Enzo’s expression kills me.Last weekend we had our friends over for our first pool party. Thanks Devin for taking the pic!Ava’s first day of 4th gradeElise’s first day of 3rd gradeEnzo’s first day of 1st gradeThey each brought an apple for their teacher 🙂
Today our sweet Elise turned 8 years old, and she was lucky enough to have two birthday celebrations this year. On Sunday we went to our friends Tiko and Tina’s house to have a dual birthday party for their daughter Beatrix (aka Bea or BB), who was turning 3, as well as for Elise.
Our whole family, including Nana, plus our friends Devin and Bridgette, as well as a few others, were there for the party. They had a bouncy house in the backyard, and Jessica couldn’t help herself with the treats – she got a doubled layered bundt cake plus a box of vegan doughnuts from Pinkbox that spelled out “Happy Birthday”. It was a nice time hanging out with friends, and even Mom and I took a few turns jumping in the bouncy house with the kids. It was extremely hot that day though, so a couple minutes at a time was about all we could handle.
Today was Elise’s actual birthday and we celebrated by taking her to Omega Mart at Area 15. It’s pretty tough to describe this place but I’ll do my best. You enter through a fake grocery store called Omega Mart, which is full of funny fake products. You have a card that you can swipe at various locations to get clues about stuff, and as you explore you will eventually find yourself going into the back of the store, which turns into this sci-fi neon filled warehouse full of rooms to explore, slides to go down, and musical gizmos to play. “Star Wars on drugs” is about the best way I can describe it.
Most people in there are trying to find all the clues and figure out the purpose behind the whole thing, but for us it was enough of a challenge just to keep all 6 of us (Nana was with us) in the same place at the same time. It was a crazy and memorable experience, but Elise had fun, which is all that mattered. There are lots of other things to do at Area 15 so I’m sure we’ll be back someday.
After that we went to lunch, then back to Nana’s house for cake. This was a special cake because Elise and Jessica made it together the day before. It was a confetti cake with Fruity Pebbles sprinkled on top as a garnish and it turned out great.
Once we were finished with cake we decided to let Nana take a break, so we took the kids to our new house to hang out and go swimming, then have a sleepover. We closed on the house on Monday and got the keys that day, which is incredible considering it was a 15 day close after our offer was accepted. It’s even more crazy to think that we left Washington on June 16, arrived in Las Vegas on June 18, and got the keys to our house on July 12! Talk about a quick turnaround.
Jessica and I have been making trips in our cars between the storage unit and the house all week, and we’re making good progress. There’s boxes everywhere, but we’re getting things unpacked and put away as quickly as possible. Saturday we’re renting a moving truck to get all the bigger things that won’t fit in our cars. At that point all of our stuff will be in the new house, but we’ll still have these construction projects to take care of before everything can be put away.
The biggest project is the new flooring upstairs, and the demo stage is beginning tomorrow. We’re tearing out all the carpet on the stairs and everywhere upstairs, and replacing it with a really nice waterproof laminate floor. We decided to pay it forward by going with a premium floor that we really loved because we’re going to be here forever and we felt like this house deserved it.
On Monday my Uncle Terry is beginning a project to replace each of the wood posts on our staircase railing with iron posts. He’s also going to stain the railing so it’s dark brown, and paint the base of it white, where the rails connect at the bottom. I’ll share pictures in a future post once everything is done.
The other project we’re hoping to get done next week is in our family room. We want to remove the built in entertainment center, as well as the fireplace next to it, and knock out part of a wall insert. This will open things up even more in that room and leave space for the new TV and entertainment center that are on the way. There’s already a fireplace in the living room, so we’re replacing the one in the family room with one of those cool new electric fireplaces, which will be in the base of the new entertainment center. Once again, I’ll post photos once everything is done.
We may take on more projects in the near future but that’s it for now. Other than that we’re just focused on getting settled in the new house and getting the kids ready for school, which begins on August 9th. They got shorted on their Summer a bit this year, but it’s been very special staying with Nana, and they’re going back to her house tomorrow for a few more days. In addition, Grandma and Grandpa Rudd are coming for a visit next week, so they’ll get plenty of time with them, including a night or two at the hotel.
I think my first realization after moving into our house this week is that maintaining an outdoor pool is a lot of work! Even though we currently have a pool guy coming once a week, you still have the daily maintenance of brushing it and skimming it with a net. Eventually I plan on letting the pool guy go and doing all the maintenance myself, but I need to learn more about the chemistry aspect first. I realized yesterday while cleaning the pool that I’m going to spend more time cleaning it than actually swimming in it, but it’s worth it each time we jump in! Seeing the kids swimming out there this afternoon brought the biggest smiles to our faces.
Overall things are slowly starting to sink in that we live in Henderson and this is our new house, but it’s still crazy. I think Enzo put it best when he said “How were we able to trade our old house for this new house? Our old house wasn’t special, but this house is special.” It was difficult to explain, and I still don’t think he gets it, but I’m just so grateful that things have worked out the way they have.
That’s pretty much it for now. I definitely plan on sharing more photos once the projects are complete and things are all put away. I’ll probably even do another video walk through at some point, but I want to wait for our new couch to arrive, which will be at least two more months. One thing I wanted to call out, and I’m upset with myself for forgetting to do so in my last post, was that it was my Mom who found this house for us. She found it while searching online, on the same day it was posted, and we were there checking it out the very next day. While it’s possible that we would have found it, or our real estate agent would have, the reality is that Nana found it, and that makes it even more special! We can’t wait to start having her over for regular sleepovers.
Before I go I just want to say Happy Birthday to Elise one last time. We love you so much and hope you’re happy with this new life we’ve just landed in. Thank you for being such a sweet and caring daughter and sister. We’re all so lucky to have you in our lives.
Elise displaying the cake she baked with MomVegan doughnuts from Pinkbox!This stuffie named Rainbow was one of her favorite gifts this yearHaving fun with Bea and her big sister Helen at their houseUnwrapping presents this morningOutside at Area 15Also outside of Area 15Inside the back part of Omega MartRight after getting the keys to our house
