Monkey!

Okay before I forget here's Dublin at 3 months. Sorry it's kind of blurry, he wasn't as good at sitting still back then. Plus he really wanted to eat the monkey.

Laminating, hard stuff

Today I walked past the mail room in the office to see 4 grown men, one of which is an engineer huddled around the laminator. I chuckled to myself when I overheard, "No, no we have to laminate both sides, right?" The others just stared at him with confused faces. After a pause, "I think we can just do one side." I continued to smirk as I thought about my own laminating experience I had yesterday. It was pretty uneventful.

I went into the mail room with the paper that need to be sealed in a thick (govenment plastic?) clear covering so as to immortalize it for generations of machine operators to come. I turned on the lamintaor, waited for the word "ready" to appear on the screen and slipped my page into the 5 mm (10 mm was overkill) thick plastic shell and sent it happily through the laminator. It came out on the otherside looking like a little laminated masterpiece.

As you notice, this recounting of my experience yesterday involved only me, not three of my closest friends to hold my hand through the process. There was no debate about having to laminate both sides(If I'm laminating in the first place, shouldn't I protect both sides?). I didn't even have to use my lifeline to pick what speed to laminate my paper at - I used the table conveniently located on the laminator.

I guess I really have my mother to thank for my successful laminating experience yesterday. Many hours of my youth were spent at Alphabet Station watching things get laminated. I took some pretty sweet notes on all of the little details required for successful laminating while playing with the blocks in the corner. Good thing I don't believe in throwing out notes - I could have been laminating through dinner time.

When I walked past about 20 minutes later the four of them were still in the mail room. If they're still there tomorrow, maybe I'll pitch in.

Spoiled

I’m really spoiled. There are a lot of reasons why. The one that comes to mind today is getting breakfast at work. I order the same thing every morning so when the cafeteria people see my beautiful smiling face I don’t have to say a word, they make my breakfast exactly the way I want it. The bad thing is, the cafeteria has a pretty regular turn over. So about once a month, I get to retrain the cafeteria people on how to make me breakfast. Today was one of those mornings. It’s never a good week when my quesadilla has too much cheese and too little egg evenly distributed throughout the tortilla. See? Spoiled. Even a not quite right quesadilla is better than eating at home. Look at what I have to look at when I eat breakfast at home.
I know! It’s so hard to look at those eyes and not share my Captain Crunch.

We managed to have a pretty quiet weekend. Friday night I got stuck at work late. When I got home Shad told me our friend Jen was coming over to see if she could decipher anything edible in the jungle that is our garden. The results – not good so Shad spent the rest of the weekend weeding that part of the garden and covering it with ground cover so as to prevent the jungle from returning. We went to dinner with Jen and by the time we got home, I was ready for bed.

Saturday I had an appointment with the lovely Marci for a cut and color, unfortunately she was ill that day so I didn’t get to see her. I still went down to SLC though, to bring my dad his Father’s day gift and do some shopping. I went to Pottery Barn to use a gift card we had. Why is everything there so nautical themed? I used the gift card (thanks to the ocean themed guest room) but seriously. I was annoyed. I like Pottery Barn, but not everyone thinks the thing their living room is missing is the “antique” 1880 boat mast to prop up in the corner. I mean I like imagining I’m summering in the Hamptons as much as the next person but do they have to make it so literal?

After that I stopped off at the craft store to pick up fabric to make pillows for the family room couch. I was reminded why I don’t go to the craft store on Saturdays (not that we have a good craft store in Ogden for me to visit anyway). The craft ladies were in full crazy mode. Someone butted in front of me in the line to get your fabric cut. Did you really need those 4 ¾ yards of icky purple cotton that badly? If I had known it was Survivor craft store, I would have come with more than my Iphone and a Dr. Pepper.

It was then on to my parents to drop off said present and chit chat for awhile. Hopefully they are coming up for dinner on July 3rd which should be fun.

I drove home in the rain (is it done yet?) and made some delicious Asian Beef for dinner. Shad then tried to convince me to watch The One (some lame martial arts movie) because it was on. I made the mistake of telling him I didn’t care what we watched when we sat down. I quickly retracted that statement to the movies we had Tivoed. Good move on my part.
Sunday Shad got up and went to the airport to spend this week in North Carolina. I got up and went to church, where I received my award from camp (I wasn’t there for the award night). Drum roll please…

“Most likely to be on American Idol” thanks for the award girls! It’s on our fridge.

Here are a few other pictures from the past few weeks. Dublin loves our new patio furniture…especially when I make him sit in it.

Also here’s a picture of him with my monkey. I took one of him at 3 months that I don’t have with me to upload right now. It’s hard for me to see how much he’s grown. I’m glad I took these; he’s 6 months in this picture.

Girls Camp

I am going to preface this post with the statement, I’m sure my camp experience could have been much worse. With that said, let’s dive in. Monday morning we met in the church parking lot to pack up our cars and head up to camp. I of course was the first leader there (along with 10 of the girls) so we were left waiting quite awhile for the other leaders to show up. Once they finally got there, we had the girls eat the lunches they brought and started off with a devotional from our youth camp leaders. Now when our ward went to girls camp, we tended to pack the night before (smart) and leave really early (not so smart). Because it was so early, we usually said a prayer and were off. It took a bit of time to get the trucks loaded and then we spent 20 minutes on the devotional.

When we left the church, it was a beautiful sunny 70 degree day. I got some of the older girls in my car so we listened to some sweet tunes on our way up and sang at the top of our lungs. The camp we were going to was about an hour and a half away past Hyrum near Porcupine Dam. The unfortunate part of the trip was how after Hyrum, we had a once dirt road now mud puddle due to the continuous rain fall we’d received over the last week. Rex handled it like a champ (for those of you that don’t know – that’s the name of our Forester) but some of the other leaders could have used a course on mud road driving. Winter wasn’t that long ago – mud is a lot like snow, I didn’t see the issue.

Because of the mud it took us about 45 minutes longer to get up there than originally planned. We found our camp site, and got out of the cars to stretch. Not 5 minutes after getting out of the car, it started sprinkling for about 30 seconds, then it morphed into a torrential downpour and didn’t stop for the next 3 hours. We managed to get a canopy set up for the girls to stand underneath but the genius that packed the trailer had put all the tents in the back. This meant we had to assemble a huge canopy to put all of the trailer stuff under so we could get to the tents and get them set up. For some reason the responsibility of assembling said large sans assembly instructions canopy fell on the resident engineer. Now I will admit, I love putting together furniture but I’m successful at putting together furniture because I’m excellent at following directions to a T. This is why when we were assembling our dining room chairs none of mine ended up broken and Shad’s did. We finally got it put together and started unloading the stuff.

As you can imagine, the campsite was already pretty muddy. Add a good hour of constant downpour and we were downright sinking. Setting up tents was another great challenge – at least the girls were responsible to set up their own, I was too busy trying to figure out how to put the leaders tents together (also sans instructions – tents come with instructions for a reason!!). The whole time I was thinking, I’m probably not even going to sleep in this stupid tent, I should be helping the girls but after 2 hours the leader tents were successfully up.

This is the mud on day 2 after being in the sun for 8 hours...

At this point it finally stopped raining which meant it was time to attempt a fire, with the sopping wet wood and no tinder to be found anywhere. Somehow the fire became my responsibility to, I’ve never actually lit a fire by myself before let alone a soggy gross one. 2 hours later after scrounging for anything that would burn remotely well so the wood could dry out, we had a fire.

We made our hobo dinners (I enjoyed getting the 411 on the 9th grade drama going on from the Miamaids) for the evening and sat down for FHE (It was Monday night!). FHE went well, instead of singing a hymn though, the leaders insisted on singing the song I wrote for camp (that’s another post). The girls didn’t seem to like the song (I don’t either so I could relate) so I felt so bad making them sing it every time we were supposed to be singing a song – I’m going to assume this trend continued after I left camp since I had to record the song for them to sing along with after I left. The girls went on their snipe hunt and went to bed, while the leaders insisted we all stay up and talk around the campfire. At midnight I finally convinced them I could go to bed. I put my stuff in the tent with the quiet leaders and was out. I managed to stay warm thanks to my -5 degree rated sleeping bag, the others weren’t so lucky (suckers).

The girls got up and made their breakfast burritos then it was off to certification – for the ENTIRE day. Instead of splitting the girls up into their perspective years to do just what was required of them for certification, everyone did all of the certification. It was awful. We did manage to finish early though, probably because after repeating our certification parts a 4th time we managed to make them really short. Because we finished early, the camp lady thought it would be great to do the service project we had missed the day before because of the rain. We hiked down to another camp site to pick weeds out of the field. Since we were in the wild, I wasn’t sure why they considered some plants weeds and some not. I did finally get my camera out to take pictures though. After the service project, I weighed the benefits of staying up at camp for dinner. There were none so I went home. One of the leaders started to cry when I told her I was leaving – no joke. Apparently I was very helpful while I was at camp.

Service!

I came home with a raging headache and the simple statement, “I hate girls camp.” I’m starting on my excuses for next year now…

Focus

I’m pretty sure I said it a month ago but the statement still stands, I hate the cold gross weather. I have Girls Camp on Monday and I think it’s going to rain the entire time. I’m really glad I only have to go up for one night. Girls Camp was a total blast when I was a girl. When it rained, we could lay around in our tents all day and play games while our leaders tried to figure out what we were going to do. Now I get to be the leader. It sounds much less appealing.

Not that I would want to get to stay in a tent all day with my fellow leaders, someone might die. I yelled at out last camp meeting. They insisted I stay after the activity on Tuesday night for the camp meeting they forgot to tell me about. I really wish I had some excuse since the last after activity camp meeting turned into a 4 hour disorganized ordeal. I was already tired and short on patience but I stayed anyway. At least this time the other young newly married leader stayed with me. She isn’t even an engineer and she was just as annoyed. That made me feel better it wasn’t just my type A stay on task personality.

At 9:30 I had finally had it. I was sitting on the floor stabbing my paper with my pen when one of the leaders asked if I was okay. This was after I drew a picture of a guy in a tree throwing an apple (which looked more like a bomb) on another guy’s head that I proudly showed my neighbor. I was done so I said, “No, I’m not okay. We’ve been here for a two hours trying to get through the schedule and we’re still on Monday morning. If we were all engineers, we would have wasted thousands of dollars by now. Stay on task.” Most of them replied with things like, I’m a mom we haven’t wasted any money. After my little outburst, I just kept on saying focus really loudly when an off topic comment came out. It’s a good thing I’ve forgotten when presidency meeting is because me and the other ladies in a meeting are not a good combo. The 9 year olds we taught in primary had more focus than them.

On to last week, last Friday night Shad’s younger brother Caleb graduated from Cyprus High School (it’s in Magna). They held it up at the U in the Huntsman Center. Since Cottonwood always does theirs in the auditorium I was interested to see what a high school graduation was like in a big stadium with everyone under the sun there. I think I can sum up the evening in one statement, I felt like I was at Walmart. And not even a Walmart in the good part of town. I felt like I was at the really scary, really trashy Walmart in Harrisville. There were screaming babies, wife beaters and a lot of cleavage-you know the, oh my, advert your eyes, that is not attractive kind. On the plus side about 60% of Caleb’s original class dropped out so we only had to sit through about 350 names. I feel like it was a successful night and congrats Caleb!

Saturday night we had the joy of attending a baby shower/house warming BBQ at my co-worker Danielle’s. The baby shower part was for our other co-workers John and Melissa that are expecting a baby girl in a month. It was an absolute blast and I was reminded how much I love my co-workers because in any situation, they figure out a way to laugh. It was also nice to finally see Danielle’s house. It’s so cute, she did a great job decorating it. I’m glad to see someone else that grew up in Utah that isn’t into the whole country chic motif you see in the Quilted Bear. She added beautiful modern touches and great pops of color. The baby shower portion was good too. Melissa destroyed the piñata in one hit. We decided it was unsafe to blindfold an 8 month pregnant woman and the only thing we had to hit it with was the metal bat we found in our backyard. Put those things together with a thin homemade piñata and it’s bound to die quickly. On the bright side, Danielle brought in the candy today to work. It was delicious. I wish I had pictures of the event, but I left my camera in the car.

Now on to the creepy part of my week, Tuesday some water managed to work its way into a transformer (electrical not the robot kind) and caused a power outage on the manufacturing floor. The operators were locked into conference rooms while the problem was fixed because they couldn’t go out on the floor. The engineers on the other hand were allowed out, as long as we didn’t get into a machine since the safety system wasn’t working. I needed to check on a few things on the machine that’s being installed on the floor so I headed out with my hard hat and trusty flashlight. There were a few emergency lights lit on the floor so it wasn’t pitch black but because where I was headed is under construction, there weren’t any lights there. I went over and checked out my modules and turned to leave. When I turned around, there was the really creepy maintenance guy just standing there staring at me. Why is he creepy you might ask? I’ve never seen him smile or talk. He never has any expression on his face – ever. Needless to say when I turned around and just saw him standing there staring, it scared the crap out of me. Before I had gone out, I had joked to Jen that if I didn’t come back, I was probably bleeding to death somewhere out on the floor. With that thought I turned around and walked fast (running is dangerous) and got back to our nice warm (the AC was out) lit office. Beware the floor when it’s dark.

Those are my stories for the week. Wish me luck at Girls Camp on Monday. We might all make it out alive. I know I will, I’ve already practiced my survival skills for the week-walk quickly away to a nice safe place surounded by witnesses.

Can you hear me now?

Have you ever noticed how some people always whisper when they talk? There’s a guy at work that whispers almost everything he says, but he’s not really a soft talker. I’ve seen him conduct meetings and there’s no volume problem there. I think he does it for emphasis, to try and manipulate people into thinking he’s telling them exclusive top secret things. It would be okay if this guy only walked past my cube whispering a few times a day but he has to talk to the people that sit across from me ALL DAY.
In any case, it’s annoying, maybe even more annoying than the loud talker I sit next to. At least when he talks I know what he’s saying. Like after overhearing his conversation today– It was more shouted directly into my ear but whatever – I think he’s moving back to Wisconsin. I’m not sure but I’m a little torn if he is for two reasons.
1) He’s the only other person working on the project I got dumped in my lap on Monday. If he leaves, it will be Allyson vs. the CEO guys. I can take them I’m sure, but I was hoping for my teammate to explain things so loudly, they would get headaches and realize it’s a pointless project.
2) When he’s at his desk and talking he drowns out the incessant whispering from across the aisle. I can’t help but try to listen to the conversation and it gets super frustrating after about 30 seconds of not being able to make out the mumbles. I can’t help but wonder if they’re conspiring against me. I have some pretty sweet things on my desk I’m sure they covet every day. If my can of lime green Play-doh goes missing, I know who’s desk I’m searching first.
I guess I’ll survive if he does leave. Maybe the ringing in my ears will finally subside. It was really peaceful at my desk last week while he was gone. But what if his replacement is even louder? Or is a chronic whisperer as well? The guy before him was great, he barely made any noises and would IM me if he wanted to talk. I actually felt guilty if I was chewing gum sometimes because I thought I was making too much noise.

Lazy...

Holidays make me a slacker. Sorry for no update last week. I guess it will just make this one longer.

Where to begin? We’ve had a pretty quite few weeks after coming home from vacation, it’s been nice. I guess I should say home has been quite. Work has been ridiculous, and I just got another huge big profile project dropped on me this morning. This could be interesting. It probably involves a presentation to CEO level people in 2 weeks. I better get working.

After coming home from vacation, I had the chance to tutor one of our young women in math. She missed a few weeks of school this year due to her appendix so she had a bunch of makeup work she didn’t understand to get done before school was over. We got through it all in a few hours and she told me on Sunday she got an 85 on the makeup test. I was super proud of her and hope she’ll come to me for help next year if she needs it.

Saturday the Sweater Friends originally had 2 shows scheduled for Saturday, one in Ogden and one in Provo. A little crazy on our part but we’re always up for an adventure. Luckily though the Provo show was cancelled the day before so we only ended up doing one – the one that was close for me. Yay!

The show was a blast, it was for the grand opening of a community garden behind the Grounds for Coffee on 30th in Ogden. I thought it was a really cool idea and was super excited to get to participate in it. That’s one of the things I love about Ogden, there’s a laid back urban vibe in that part of the town and it’s only a 15 minute drive from our suburban kingdom. Ideal.

For Memorial Day, Jen and I had planned to do craft day. We’re trying to do it once a month, we’re two for two so far. We’ll see if we can keep it up over the summer. We had planned to make a piñata for the baby shower we were helping do in a few weeks for our cute co-worker Melissa. Jen wanted to make a baby shaped piñata, I didn’t think people would want to be hitting a baby at a baby shower so I opted for a baby bottle instead. Does it look like a bottle to you? I was pretty impressed with my balloon skills to finally get that shape.

That evening Shad, Dublin and I drove down to Salt Lake for a barbeque with my family. It was a beautiful evening and we had a blast. Shad and Scott played keep away with Dublin for about an hour. He was exhausted for the ride home. He didn’t even open his eyes until we turned into our neighborhood and I woke him up.
Tuesday the dog trainer stopped by before heading over to Jen’s house to help her with her dogs. Dublin had freaked out and bit Shad pretty bad the week before when he was trying to get his leash on him. He hadn’t freaked out since them but he still wasn’t really responding to the training like he should. Ryan brought up a training collar for us to try, it was like Dublin was a new dog after he put it on him. We went out and bought him one the second Ryan left. Since then, he has been the sweetest calmest dog, just like the first day we got him. I’m a serious believer in the collar.

Friday night Shad got to go camping with the 11 year old scouts so I had a night at home with the puppy. We finished planting the wildflowers in the backyard and watched some So You Think You Can Dance. It might just be Dublin’s new favorite show.

Saturday morning I got up and went to tutoring then went down to Salt Lake to get errands done before Shannon’s shower. I got them done and hung out at my parents for about an hour then went to the shower.

The shower was absolutely fantastic. My girlfriends are so on the ball and know how to throw a rockin’ shower. Since this is only my second friend to have a baby, Ash and I still said it felt weird to not be playing the fun wedding shower games, those always involved much more embarrassment for the guest of honor. It was also weird to see the group overrun with children. I did get to see my good friend Mel and her adorable daughter Lindsay, I haven’t seen them since we got married so I think I spent most of my time talking to them. I’m Lindsay’s new favorite incase you were wondering, I think playing with my iphone might have helped.

Sunday we went down to Shad’s parents for dinner since the Swine Flu results for his brother’s came back negative. We didn’t stay for very long though because Caleb had Seminary graduation.

It’s been a good past few weeks and I’m excited Summer is finally here!