MrAndrewBradley

With the Bradley Lodge getting nearly five inches of snow on Thursday, we were not sure what to expect for the weekend, especially since we needed to finish raking pine needles and clearing our property to make it fire safe.  Luckily by Friday when we arrived we only had small patches of snow and when we started to work on Saturday everything had melted, it was just soaking wet.  Since it was so wet we could not bring out our inner pyro like last time, we actually had to take it to the yard waste disposal site and pay $5 per cubic yard of pine needles and tree branches.  After about $50 spent our property was clear and it was time to have fun with my cousins and family for the rest of the weekend.  We got to walk around Big Trees State Park (without snow ) and then headed down to Murphys for some wine tasting .  Next up ... heading to Portland, OR for a wedding.

Over the last few months I have continued to use multiple methods while searching for my new "dream job." Beyond the traditional search (looking at Craigslist.org , the Capitol Morning Report , Monster.com , CareerBuilder.com , Indeed.com ) and attending Bayside Church's " Career Coaching ," I have used social media sites to expand my reach and my networking, making lots of great connections and meeting leaders throughout the Sacramento PR and business community.  My search started off by expanding my social media network, I added new LinkedIn connections , started to follow additional people on Twitter and went through my address book (Google contacts to be exact, I currently have more than 1400), researched industries and companies and began my "search." Although I haven't landed my job yet, I have used my "sabbatical" to learn new things by participating in Webinars, many hosted for free by companies like Careerealism and CirclePo

After two years of taking our pine needles to a green waste disposal/recycling site near the Bradley Lodge , Calavaras County decided not to fund the subsidy that allowed us to do that for free, so we decided that instead of paying $50+ to haul all of our pine needles there we would try burning them for free (with a CDF permit of course). So on Saturday we not only raked about 3/4 (Sunday we did the other 1/4) of our property and hauled the pine needles into massive piles near our fire pit, we burnt lots of them too.  Over the next few weeks we will finish the project and then decide what to do next year ... do we haul the pine needles or do we continue to burn? I will admit burning was/is kinda fun (and looks cool too).

Granted I should have taken these pictures last week or the week before (there has been lots of rain and wind since then), I wanted to share with everyone that my backyard has done a pretty well in surviving its first year.  Only four plants succumbed to poor soil conditions and freezing temperatures, the rest are growing up nicely and many have already produced some really cool looking flowers (my parents neighbor did the design, so for the most part I had no clue what most would look like in bloom).  May 19th marks the end of my first year of home ownership , thank you to all who helped me move in, paint, decorate and whatever else it was you may have done. For other posts about "Fort Bradley" click here .

Bayside and Thriving Churches International's " Thrive 2010 " was another amazing conference, full of fun, learning, insight, growth, fellowship and discussion. Due to limited space (and because I know most of you don't like to read long posts ... well okay I don't like to read them when other people write them) I am going to try to be quick and to the point. First I'm not going to talk about what all of the speakers said, if you want that, CDs are available of each general session, not sure about breakout sessions. Second, these are the books I purchased (i.e. speakers I really liked and wanted to read more about what they had to say): " The Me I Want to Be: Becoming God's Best Version of You " by John Ortberg , " Scouting the Divine: My Search for God in Wine, Wool, and Wild Honey " by Margaret Feinberg , " Everyone Communicates, Few Connect: What the Most Effective People Do Differently " by John Maxwell , and finally