What you should read today - A Mishmash post

First of all, what you should not read:


-The front page of ANY major newssite, as they will spoil your gymnastics viewing for tonight with an unavoidable spoiler photo and headline.




What you should read instead:


1. My shout out to Sue Wong! Thank you so much for the encouragement - it's cool to know that I'm reaching friends of family and friends!




2. http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/from-riches-to-rags-in/content?oid=6951274




I happened upon this article when I picked up the SN&R (Sacramento News and Review) at Campelli's Pizza yesterday -this is an awesome article by Corbyn Hightower, who is a local Roseville resident that has also been published in Huffington Post and the NY Times Motherlode Blog.  Until I saw this article, I had no idea she lived in Roseville.

I love her description of our Old Town/Downtown Roseville neighborhood. Read it!






3. http://envisioningtech.com/envisioningtech.pdf - This is a cool infographic I found on Fast Company predicting when we will actually get different technologies (organ printing in 2015?)  Plus it's very pretty - if you click the link you will get a much larger view that is actually readable.

That is all I got for now.

Campelli's Pizza

We went to Campelli's Pizza today for lunch. In the interest of full disclosure, I hadn't had time to eat breakfast and was ravenously hungry by the time we sat down there, so my opinion of the pizza may have been slightly elevated about normal due to that.  The pepperoni pizza was great - it was thicker crust (and I'm usually a thin crust girl) but it was worth the carbs with a perfectly chewy texture finished with a crisp bottom.  


One cool thing for people with kids - they have a shelf full of kids' games like Candyland available for customers.

Sorry for the glare. Good to know for local Rosevillians - anytime you order over $50 worth
they will donate 20% back to your choice.

Good idea - Gargoyles to guard the pizza

Pizza makes everything better - even the Mona Lisa

Our pesto crispers appetizer

The pepperoni pizza

Successful pizza transport

Our adorable pizza server

Campelli's is at 7480 Foothills Blvd Roseville, CA 94747.  

Blogger's Block

This photo of Arabella climbing has nothing to do with this post but I like it.

I haven't posted for a week and now I am having major blogger's block.  My goal for this month is a  post (or more) a day in August.  So I'm just going to treat this like my own personal journal for right now. We are going to our first Los Cerritos Neighborhood Association meeting tomorrow at the Fairgrounds. I know a Neighborhood Association meeting is a weird thing to be excited about, but I'm psyched!  With luck, it will be as eventful as a Star's Hollow Town Meeting run by Miss Patty and Taylor - ok, I'm about 99.5% sure it won't be, but I still can't wait to meet my neighbors (yes, I've lived in this house for 4.5 years and I only know our immediate neighbors on our block - no I don't have a good excuse why).  So I'm glad that the go-getters out there have fired the Neighborhood Association back up and hope they inspire other slackers like me to show up.

New Adventure! With dragons and dinosaurs!

Once upon a time, Kristena ate an apple. But it wasn't just an ordinary apple. The next day, something WEIRD happened.  She turned into a frog!  Then she turned into a dragon. But Kristena wasn't the only one that ate the apple: Arabella and Paul did too. Arabella turned into a princess and Paul turned into a fox!  

The dragon, fox and princess flew on the dragon's back to gymnastics class. They all did "apart, together".  After that, they all went on the zipline until the owner of the zipline kicked them off.

  

So instead of going on the zipline, they went to the dinosaur museum and there was a real life triceratops dinosaur there.  

It said "Rawr" and I (Arabella the princess) scared the dinosaur away by flying by herself. Then Paul the fox and Kristena the dragon saved Arabella the princess.  

Arabella riding the Dragon (Kristena) away from the dinosaur

Then Arabella flew by herself and ate another apple that turned her back into regular Arabella and then a princess again. And then she flew away with Diego! Kristena ate Paul the fox and then sneezed him back out her nose. Kristena said she was sorry.

To be continued....

So...What do you think will happen next? Leave a comment and maybe the authors will be inspired to write you in to the end of the story!


p.s. While Kristena and Paul were still here on Friday, we baked zucchini bread together, and took tons of photos for our first cooking blog post. But I still need to organize and sort those photos so it may be up to a week before I can post it but here's one sneak peek photo (cored zucchini doubles nicely as an eyepiece)

   

We had WHAT for Breakfast!?! - A Crowdsourced Story

Once in the morning, there were three kids named Arabella, Kristena, and Paul. The kids were waiting for a shipment of donuts to arrive. Before the shipment arrived, something terrible happened. Keith got the wrong donuts! In the box instead of donuts, there was a frog. The frog jumped out and went in the goose's mouth. The goose ate him. Him rolled and rolled inside the goose and then him jump, jump, jumped! Then the goose flew out the window the way it came in. Then Arabella ran out the door and tried to catch the goose. She flied, flied, flied up in the air to catch the goose! She caught it and held it in her hand. Arabella reached in the goose's mouth and got him (the frog) out! Frog said "I want to go this way!" Arabella walked with him in her hand and walked over there (the way the frog wanted to go). 


 Continuation of this story was interrupted by the arrival of the shipment of donuts as scheduled.

Thanks to Kristena, Paul and Arabella for the story, and thanks to Keith for being a reliable donut shipper.

This blog is like a box of chocolates.....

you never know what you are going to get.  I was going to insert a photo of a box of chocolates here, but I couldn't find any cute enough non-copyrighted ones online, so here's a random photo I took myself:

This is my State of the Blog post now that it's been up a little over a month. When I started this blog a little over a month ago, I didn't know how to do anything.  Luckily, Blogger makes it pretty simple but there was still a learning curve. Picking the name "what arabella did" alone took hours!  I now know how to add videos, I added a badge and have listed my blog in Technorati, Sacramentobloggers.com and BlogCatalog.  Things I hope to improve in the next month or so: Posting more writing, improving the layout of the blog and adding more local Roseville features here. 


I know there are organized people out there that have multiple blogs for different topics but I don't see myself having the discipline and time to do that. So be forewarned -this blog may include but will not be limited to the following: 


parenting / Arabella stories, photos and photojournaling of what we did / thoughts about being a work-at-home mom / Keith's thoughts about being a stay-at-home dad (still twisting his arm for a blog post) / my zany plans to lose weight / my zany plans to improve productivity at work / what I'm doing to make my blog pretty and get people to read it / general self improvement / crafts / cooking / life in Roseville / book reviews / news items I found interesting / tech gadgets / rants / unsolicited relationship advice / how-to tutorials / podcasts I like / digital scrapbooking / self-improvement / home decorating / arts & crafts / a lot more I can't think of right now.  


Thanks for checking in with Arabella and me here at our corner of the blogosphere!!  We love to hear from everyone that is reading the blog so please leave us comments. 

Arabella before & after with Pixlr -o- matic

I love Pixlr-O-Matic - I know everyone else in the world uses Instagram, but I needed something I can use on the desktop computer too and it only works on phones. So I was searching apps in the Chrome Web Store and came across Pixlr-O-Matic which is super simple and easy to use even for me - it's the antiPhotoshop.  

Here's a pic of Arabella that I am particularly in love with: 

Before

After