AlishaV's Blog

Growing up on southern California, I have never spent much time in snow. It did fall a couple of times near my house, but that melted before it even touched the ground. When I moved to the Sacramento area I thought here was my chance to enjoy some real winter weather. It wasn't that far to ski resorts and snowshoeing paths and it seemed like it would be simple to figure out what these things were about. Then life happened and I very rarely had time to drive up the mountain and no time to attempt these things. Now, I live in Reno. Reno's elevation is 4,400 feet above sea level, so it's considered high desert. It gets cold here and I'm still not used to that, but what I do find exciting (for now) is that it snows here! This seems amazing to me. Actual pieces of frozen material fall down on me when I go outside! I know, all of you who have lived where it snows are making fun of me. Everyone tells me I'll grow to hate the snow. I know I probably will. I've already r...

As some of you may know, I just moved to Reno from the Sacramento area. My new apartment is sort of cute, but better yet, it's cheap. It's right across the river from the downtown casinos and is more importantly, near the main library. It is interesting, I've never lived right in the middle of a city. I'm pretty much a country girl at heart and love living on lots of land with space for all my animals. It is nice to be close to stuff though. When I post on Craigslist and Freecycle there are people actually located close to me! (-: I'll also be right near Street Vibrations and Hot August Nights when they go on. Yeah! There are a couple of things that are bugging me about the new place though. One is that it is an apartment and an old one at that. It lets every sound in and every sound out. You can even hear the people below me talking and when someone knocks on someone else's door, I can't tell if it's mine or the neig hbor's. I can be quiet when I ne...

I've been really busy lately. Ever since I went to Gem-O-Rama in 2007 and came back with some great mineral specimens, I've been having a problem. Everyone wanted in on the whole Gem-O-Rama thing! They wanted to know all about what it was, where it was, and how they could do it. So, I had to keep telling people how to go and do it and sending people my photographs so they could see what it was like. That just didn't seem like enough to give people an idea of what it was really like though. Then, this last September I found a site that let me describe how to do Gem-O-Rama to everyone in the world that was interested. So, I wrote an article. Then it seemed like that wasn't enough, so I wrote another one, and another. Now, I've got a bunch of articles on how to do Gem-O-Rama as well as several other topics. Check them out here: http://www.ehow.com/members/AlishaV-articles.html . I've gotten addicted to article writing and so have been doing it constantly lately. T...