Victorville Apartments

My wife and I are visiting her sister and husband this weekend. Its our nephew's birthday and we've been having fun spending time with the family. They live in an apartment here in Victorville and I must say I'm really impressed.
Despite the fact that Victorville is up in the middle of nowhere I must say I think I could be happy living here. Its easy to get to LA and Vegas and surprisingly easy to travel up into CA's central valley. Oh yeah, and rent is awesome!
Anyway, I've decided that a three year old boy is a lot of fun and its crazy to think that Samuel will be that old one day. It was a fun birthday party and its amazing that our nephew, Mathew is growing up so fast.

Trip To Arizona Wine Country

My last post I highlighted my trip to Auberry to see my dad’s new church, the Auberry Nazarene Fellowship and to the USBC Nationals and how I unfortunately had to go it alone as my lovely wife was not able to get away. Last weekend however I was finally able to take some time with my favorite lady on a little weekend getaway of our own. We drove out to Phoenix to see my uncle get married and then to head off to Arizona wine country down in Senoita, AZ for some wine tasting and sightseeing. The goal of course was to sample never before tasted wine from Southern Arizona and to see my old stomping grounds from high school which I hadn’t been back to for at least 10 years… and Flor had never seen.

The trip was definitely a ton of fun and we even got to spend some time with my cousin Eric who I also hadn’t seen in a very long time. He introduced us to his two kids and his long-time girlfriend and we got to see his awesome house which he just picked up off the foreclosure market. Man, if anything would make you want to move to Phoenix this would be it; the price of real estate. :) But then again, it’s nice being a few miles from the ocean so I think we’re doing OK.

The highlight of the trip was of course the nuptials which Flor and I took a few pictures of. My sister was even caught in this awesome dress with ruffles. We all loved it.

Early Sunday morning Flor and I headed out of Phoenix area to go rough it at the Xanadu Hybrid Bed & Breakfast Horse Motel down in Senoita, AZ.

Yeah, I know, the name sounds crazy but seriously the place was fantastic. It was our first experience staying in a B&B and definitely our first experience staying at a horse motel. :) Obviously we had some fun visiting with the horses on the ranch and kicked back for a perfect Monday evening watching the sun go down over a bottle of wine from the Kief-Joshua Vineyards.

Anyway, I am really excited about the vineyards we visited especially since they are all so new. Only a handful of the 10 active vineyards in the area are producing wine from their own fruit yet and only one, the Rancho Rossa Vineyard, is producing it completely from their own fruit. Interestingly enough most of the wines we tasted from Rancho Rosa were our favorites, which is nice because it was the local fruit. They all tasted very earthy.

Rancho Rosa also featured an awesome couple of Basset Hounds that really brought fond memories back of my dog Snick. One of their Bassets was named Shadow and they named their dessert wine after him. Of course we took some pictures.

Anyway; I’m really looking forward to going back and trying out these vineyards again, especially in a few more years when their blends will be packed with more local fruit and the accommodations of the town expand to accommodate more tourists. For now there’s not much in the town but man, it sure is relaxing. I definitely recommend anyone who likes wine or the country to head out to Xanadu Ranch, the best Senoita bed and breakfast that I’ve ever stayed in.

Anyway, we ended up the trip by swinging through Sierra Vista and seeing my old high school and taking a tour through Tombstone, home of many dead cowboys and outlaws, and spending some time Tuesday morning at Lake Pategonia, whicj I didn't even know existed until this past weekend.  Maybe next time we'll jump on a boat and go fishing.  I can't wait, I'm always thinking about the next vacation. :)

A toast: Here’s to vacationing with the wife! It sure beats hitting up Reno by myself.  Enjoy a few more pics.

Trip To Auberry And USBC Nationals In Reno

It's definitely been a while since I posted here in this blog; I've been spending a lot more of my time lately over on Facebook and on other blogging projects around the web lately. Most notably I've been working on my bowling blog a lot as I've neglected it a ton since setting it up last year.

If you recall I decided to separate my bowling blog posts from this blog and put them on a site dedicated strictly to my bowling related activities. Of course this was simpler said than done as I can't have duplicated posts on both this site and that one and neither can I just delete posts here as many of my old bowling posts touched on things that had nothing to do with bowling.

Anyway, recently I took a trip to Reno, NV for another attempt at the USBC Nationals. If you've made it over to Mounts Bowling you might have been following along already however most of you probably haven't. My latest post over there however is my tournament recap for the event and an index of all posts related to the bowling trip. Check it out if you have the time; there's plenty of video and pictures available for your pleasure: USBC Nationals 2010 Recap.

In addition to hitting up the tournament in Reno I also took some time to stop by my dad's Nazarene church in Auberry which I posted on in December. He's been there for roughly 3 months now and things are getting settled. I met a couple people in the church and took a look at there new logo and sign which is being unveiled in the next few weeks. The church will now be known as the Auberry Nazarene Fellowship.

It looks like I have a new project to start on in the coming weeks too as I'll be whipping up a website for the church and their daycare. I'll be sure to link to it later on to get feedback from everybody.

Anyway, to quickly summarize the trip; I had a great time but I ended up spending about 24 hours in the car over 5 days by myself. Unfortunately Flor was not able to get away from the hospital as she's deeply entrenched in surgery rotations at the hospital. I forgot what it was like to vacation without her and I look forward to her being able to join me again. Next year she better be there! :)

Photos Of My Dad’s New Church

Please Forgive the Quality I’m Not a Photographer

So October and November have come and gone and I haven’t updated this site in a while. I guess now is an excellent time to do so though because I have great news from the family.

My father who’s been looking to take on another church for a while now was just installed as the new head pastor at the Auberry Church of the Nazarene in Auberry California on Sunday. Flor and I had a great time visiting with her family and my family for Thanksgiving last week and then we were treated with a nice surprise by being able to witness the installation of my dad as the pastor on Sunday.

Mel Rich, the Nazarene central district’s superintendent, and his wife showed up for the occasion and installed my dad during the service. Though I’ve grown up as a pastor’s kid my whole life I cannot for the life of me remember watching this ceremony happen before. Sure there was little pomp and circumstance but the formality was there and it was a nice time.

Seeing as though my old roommate and San Diego photographer Aaron wasn’t able to attend Flor and I were left to our own devices in capturing the event on film.

I remembered to bring my old digital camera to take some photos but unfortunately the camera is starting to suck battery life out of the device while it’s not being used so the following pictures were taken between our respective cell phones. Regardless you should get the idea here about the church.

It’s up in the mountains of the central valley; it’s a small congregation with very friendly people. The building is a little dated but looks nice and the property is huge and beautiful. I look forward to returning once the dust settles and my dad gets things rolling in the new church.

I don’t have too much else to say but I wanted to publish these photos for the few people out there desperately looking for them. :) Don’t you all go and jam the servers OK. :) The following photo slideshow includes pictures of the church, inside and out, the pastoral installation ceremony, and the grounds including parsonage. Enjoy!

And next time you’re heading up to Shaver Lake, stop by Auberry and worship with everyone there at the Mountain Gathering Place, Church of the Nazarene.

Auberry Nazarene Church Photographs

Click to Play

Not into the slideshow thing: Check out the individual Auberry Church of the Nazarene pictures.

Disneyland Family Pictures

A couple months back Flor and I met the rest of my family for an old fashioned family trip to Disneyland. We had a great time and the family outing reminded me of being a kid again. Ohh the good old days. Anyway, Kathleen made it abundantly clear a few weeks back that she was disappointed that I hadn't posted pictures from our trip so this post is for her. For related reading this is my previous post on our time at Disneyland.

Atlantic and Pacific Blue Tangs

Today, Flor and I finally ridded ourselves of our "starter fish" and upgraded to some more interesting fish. This whole process began last weekend when we were unfortunate enough to think that we could introduce a Tang into our small saltwater tank with our four Damselfishes. This did not work out as the Damselfishes decided to torment the Tang to death.

After days of trying to rid our tank of the Damselfishes we finally caught them and returned them to the store. These little buggers were incredibly difficult right up until then end as we were not able to catch them until we pulled all of our live rock from the tank.

Anyway, after the ordeal was over, and after the fish store exchange today, we now have two new fish who are non-aggressive herbivores. We picked up two small Tang's, an Atlantic Blue Tang and a Pacific Blue Tang. The Atlantic Tang is yellow while still young and will eventually turn blue as they get bigger and older. We'll look forward to that happening as our family grows up. For visual stimulation please enjoy these stock photos of our two Tangs:

The Atlantic Blue Tang (blue is old yellow is young.)


The Pacific Blue Tang


Next time you stop by the house make sure to say hi to our newest additions!

Shipwrecked In Disneyland

Last weekend on Saturday after Flor finished up with her 2nd year of med school, we had the pleasure of heading up to LA to meet my family for a rousing day at Disneyland. We had a fantastic time taking in all the sights and riding all the rides while enjoying short lines on a Memorial Day weekend. In fact I can't even remember the last time that my family got together for something like this... maybe last Fall when we hit up the Charger's Chiefs football game but that just seems somewhat different in my opinion. The last family vacation like this was probably back before I moved out of the house if you take weddings and the like out of the equation. Anyway, Jim was there to join us as was my sister Kathleen. For around three years now the family outings have been lacking Kathleen because she was living in Boston so it's been great to have her around again.

Anyway, I'm not going to say too much about Disneyland because we all know about the place but I will say that while we were there we were treated to an exceptionally long ride on the Pirate Ship. It's not really a pirate ship though, it's actually a replica of the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe. The replica now circles the pond/river there at Disneyland every day while guests take rides like they would a roller coaster. Well, we were no different than any other group of riders except that on our ride the motor on our boat went out and we were stranded about 15 feet from the shoreline for about an hour and half on this boat. We ended up having to be rescued one by one down a ladder onto the Mark Twain River Raft. Keep in mind this ship supposedly circumnavigated the globe... I guess they worked better before they threw motors into them. Apparently the Disneyland model doesn't have sails.

Eventually of course we got off and they treated us to some fine bottled waters on the house as well as some complimentary front of the line passes for our troubles. Lets just say I'm glad none of us had to go to the bathroom while we were on the boat; that would have been some significant trouble. It's hard to complain though because we got to do pretty much everything we wanted to do on the day despite the lost 90 minutes. I will also say I had so much fun spending time with my dad on roller coasters; I honestly can't remember riding a roller coaster with him for some reason. It makes me smile thinking of it.




I took a lot of pictures during the day and I thought I'd share a few of them here. Note the awesome picture of my uncle Jim squealing like a five year old girl at the fake elephant behind him on the Jungle Cruise. Hehe, I love it!



On a side note, Flor and I hit up Loma Linda the following day and saw Carolyn Sharpe and her family on Sunday. She just graduated Medical School and is now a doctor! Congratulations Carolyn!

Stratosphere Thrill Rides - Video

It’s been over two months now I know but Flor and I enjoyed our time in Las Vegas at the USBC Nationals both on and off the lanes. Of course I put on a show of inconsistent achievement during the tournament and she showed me how to bowl after I purchased her her very own bowling ball and bag… but when we weren’t in a bowling center we had some fun seeing the sights.

We actually didn’t venture very far from our Hotel but we did walk around the Freemont Street Experience a little bit and we decided to hit up the Stratosphere. The sole reason for this visit was because neither Flor nor I had ever been inside the hotel let alone gone to the top of the needle. Anyway, long story short we rode up the elevator and took a gander at the strip from some 1000 feet in the sky. It was very beautiful up there but unfortunately for us the bar was closed and the rides were just too scary to consider enjoying. Yes, I know. We are chickens. Here’s the video:

The Top of the Stratosphere

My Disease Is Spreading

Last month while Flor and I were in Vegas for the USBC Open Championships we decided on the way out of town on Monday to visit the Orleans in an attempt to find some good Noodles... unfortunately we didn't notice the Japanese Noodle Bar in the casino until after we settled for the cafe. Grrr! Anyway, instead of just taking off we decided to join the Casino Club (or whatever it's called) and use the free game of bowling they provided for signing for some casual entertainment that afternoon. Of course we are nerds and decided to visit the pro shop upon entering the center and... well, the rest is history. We bought her a ball and a bag to complement the bowling shoes we bought for her last year. I'm pleased to announce, Flor is now officially a bowler. Here's the proof.

Crazy Flying Cat

In case some of you haven't had the pleasure of meeting the newest little kitty in the Mounts household I present you this little taste of Fred at his best. This guy is quite shy but he's a sucker for his mouse toy... and others too, but especialy his mouse toy. Check out the height he gets! Crazy flying cat!


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The Family Feed

I thought I'd put together a mashup of all the applicable feeds (those that I know of at least) associated with the whole Mounts family including the extended Mounts family.

I realized a couple days ago after talking to my sister that we often don't know what's going on in everybody's lives simply because we don't know where to look online and/or we aren't on the phone with each other every day. So you'll find below a rundown of all the random stuff going on in everybody's lives as posted publicly by themselves. Hope this helps the family keep in touch!

Those included in this feed are listed at the bottom of this post. If you have a feed that is not included that you'd like to be included shoot me an email or leave a comment... or call or write or knock on my door. :)

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The Above Feed Mashup Includes:

• Brian Mounts - Blog, Twitter, Picasa, YouTube, & Vimeo
• Flor Mounts - Picasa
• Brian & Flor - Wedding Blog
• Steve Mounts - Blog
• Jessica Hammond - Picasa
  
• Josh Camberlain - Blog, Twitter, Flickr, & YouTube
• Ken Chamberlain - Blog

I will update this list as new feeds are created or deleted. Hope to have the rest of the family on this list soon! Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. :)

Expanded Cat-Fetch Coverage

Here's a sweet video my wife took a back in the end of April of Esther first playing fetch with a pen. At this time we didn't know that she would play fetch but it has fast become one of her favorite games. Flor asked me to make sure this gets online because my first video on the subject was too short... not to mention Esther is smaller in this video and is therefore cuter. One one question however begs to be asked; How does Flor get any studying done in this atmosphere?


This is How My Wife Studies - She Plays Fetch With Esther from Brian Mounts on Vimeo.

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For other videos you can check out my entire Video Collection and for more photos you can check out my Photo Collection over at Picasa Web Albums.

Family Website Projects Are Fun

I've been really enjoying myself lately as I've been learning a lot of CSS and HTML web design skills. If any of my routine readers have taken note of this site's re-design over the last few weeks you can obviously see what I'm talking about. It's almost hard to beleive that this site is hosted from Blogger for no money whatsoever as it looks nothing like blogger at all. It's funny, I have a domain name brianmounts.com but I haven't associated it with this site because it's actually registered to my good friend and wedding photographer Aaron Riveroll. Maybe one day we'll transfer the domain to my name and then maybe I'll use it for this site.

Anyhow, the purpose of this post is just to make mention of a project that I started casually working on last fall, in which I have since re-worked it over the past few weeks and am so pleased with overall. My dad, as many close readers know, is a pastor in the Nazarene Church and he has been dabbling with starting a website for a while now as an additional outlet for his ministry. Funny thing is that my dad is still learning to use the computer so I've been handling the setup of the site and the design aspects of it. My dad puts the content together like nobody else could and I make it look good. Obviously my goal is to slowly and continuously teach my dad how to make the site look good himself so that I personally have less editing to do but for now I'm perfectly happy helping him out any way I can.

If you wanted to head over and check out my Dad's prayer blog and marvel at my site design abilities (which by the way was really just a modification of someone else's site design) then I'd appreciate your thoughts in return. I'm sure my dad would appreciate some feedback on his content as well as this is a new medium for him and he's still learning how to keep a blog.

Coincidentally, I just learned that my cousin Jess is learning a little web design for a class she's taking so I'm interested in taking a look at her creations when they go live.

Father's Day 2008

A couple weeks back was Father's day. Flor and I drove up to Los Angeles and met her family and mine at Barbara & Carlos' new house. Newlyweds, Ada & George also came along with George's family. We had a good time spending the day together eating, playing games, and generally hanging out. It was really cool having all those families together at the same time. Here's a little video from the day followed by a few pictures.






For other videos you can check out my Video Collection and for more photos you can check out my Photo Collection over at Picasa Web Albums.

To Recap The Honeymoon: Part 1

Our honeymoon was a lot of fun to say the least. I wrote up a quick little write-up on it over at FlorAndBrian dot com. Check it out. It only covers day 1 so there's a lot more to come. In case you don't want to read much then you can just watch the day 1 video. Enjoy.


Honeymoon Cruise Video - Day 1 from Brian Mounts on Vimeo.

For recaps of other wedding topics check out the bachelor party recap and the wedding rehearsal day recap.

To Recap The Wedding: Part 2

So I just posted a lengthy post on the subject of The Wedding Rehearsal Day over at http://www.florandbrian.com/ so I'd encourage anyone checking out my blog here to go read that over there. To summarize however, I will say that the day was very long and very busy. I was stressed but not quite stressed out for most of the day and I lost my appetite by dinner because I was so tired. I LOVED spending time with family by the way; it was incredible to see so many people from my extended family sitting with me and Flor for dinner in San Diego. These are people that flew thousands of miles just to support Flor and myself in our marriage and that is a powerful statement that didn't go unrecognized. I love you all and I'm thrilled that you all were a part of our wedding.

Now, in the interest in making pretty posts I'm going to attach the following pretty picture from the day. Now go check out my more "enhanced" post on this same subject over at the wedding site blog. Here's the direct link.



In case you missed it, here's the link to Part 1

I'm Honing My Video Editing Skills

So as I've got a lot of video footage from our Honeymoon that I've got to make into a cool video I decided to do a test run and reacquaint myself with my video editing software. I put together this little ditty last night after doing laundry and making dinner and I'm pleased with it. It's a little footage from our New Years trip to see Flor's family over Monday and Tuesday of this week. We had some good times and we watched a lot of TV. Enjoy.

Living Like Christ Everyday

My dad has been blogging for a few months now and I must say it's probably really good for him as it's getting him used to using the computer on a regular basis. I helped him put together the basic framework of his blog back in June and in August he started writing in it most every day. I have found it very nice to read what he has to post as he has such a rich volume of religious writings floating around in his head that it's always rewarding to read what is "speaking to him". If you're interested I would encourage you to check out my dad's prayer blog. He writes a lot of commentary on the topic of devotionals, theologians, and encouragement.

Anyway, with my wedding fast approaching I've been a little behind in reading my blogs and news feeds so today I came across my dad's post back on November 22 regarding Oswald Chambers' The Shallow and The Profound. It's been about 3 weeks but I'm finally getting to read it and I find something that really spoke to me too. Oswald says (to paraphrase) to place some solid emphasis on living like Christ in everything mundane in your life. This of course means that you should live like Christ while you drive to work, cook dinner, do house chores, email coworkers, etc. instead of trying to be like Christ only in the Profound moments of your life.

The point is there are not enough Profound moments of one's life to make up for the mundane so it's best to live like Christ in the mundane because it speaks more about Christ to others. After all, Christ participated in all the mundane aspects of life as he once was a living man and he did indeed act like Christ in those times just as much as he did while preaching and teaching others.

Anyway, for some great words of wisdom on a nearly daily basis I recommend checking out my dad's blog and subscribing to the feed.

In other news it dawned on me that I forgot to post the pictures from the 5th annual Thanksgiving at Abby and Kathleen's. There's not too many but here they are:


I gotta say it was great to see friends that I haven't seen in ages, namely Kelli, Evan, and Judi.

Happy December 13th everybody! Just 4 more days to go!

Thanksgiving with the Rodriguez's

A couple weeks ago now Flor and I spent our second Thanksgiving together, the first of our engaged lives though so it was a bit more meaningful as we now know that this is just one Thanksgiving of many to come. Of course no holiday is complete without a little illness and this was no exception. By the end of the night I started feeling under weather and by Saturday both Flor and I were on medication and eventually antibiotics. Pictures luckily were taken when we were still feeling good. Take a look:



Later that weekend, despite the illnesses, Flor and I experienced our very own wedding shower hosted by Flor's family at their church in LA. My mom made the day trip down for the event and we had a nice time. Many gifts were given to us which was very kind and unexpected. I don't know why but I just didn't expect gifts to be given. Anyway, later that night we traveled up to Fresno to get my dad sick and see him for the first time for the holidays. We did church and lunch on Sunday and then eventually started the long trip back to San Diego.

Crazy but we didn't get any pictures of the Shower, though Flor's LA Pastor did and we hope to get copies from him, and we didn't get any pics of Fresno with my family. I think we were just feeling lucky so we didn't think to capture the moment. :)

Anyway, that's that!

A Summary Of Recent Festivities

I haven't really been writing too much here in this blog over the past few weeks and I've gotten behind in all my pictures. The highlighted picture was a funny sign I saw at the Hillcrest Street Fair, which Flor, Rich, Nicole, and I went to a couple weeks ago. I thought it particularly funny because Aaron likes funny signs and it made me think of him. There you go Aaron, enjoy.

2007 - Hillcrest Street Fair

Last weekend Flor and I spent some QT with Rob and Michele. I scored awesome nosebleed tickets to the Padres game for a dollar off the ticket price through my work so the four of us hit the game full force. We started the day off with some Kebabs from The Kebab Shop, which is awesome by the way, and then hit the game for the afternoon. The Padres won off the strength of Greg Maddox's pitching... and hitting and it was a fine afternoon spent. We finally finished off the day sitting pool side at their place. Fun times and here are some of the pictures.

2007 - Padres Day With Rob & Michele

Later that night the folks came to town and we had some dinner. It's always nice when parents come to visit, at least in my world. I even took Monday off of work to spend the day with them. I didn't really get many pictures but I caught this one of them both outside of the Urban Grind right after lunch.

Anyway, I'm back at work now, on my lunch break, and I figure I'd share my little project that has kept me from writing more often these past few weeks. Monday evening Aaron joined me and my parents to photograph my dad. We took some corporate style shots that will be used for his new website. That's right I've been putting together the shell of my dad's very own dot com that he will be able to use for his ministry. If you are interested in visiting the site it is: http://www.stevemounts.com/. The site is still a work in progress but it's coming together quite nicely. Now it's just a matter of getting my dad more computer savvy and get his typing skills up to par. :) Hehe, he looks funny on a computer.