Shad and Ally

Ally's Update

2011-09-16T09:41:00.001-07:00

I know you have all been waiting on the edge of your seat to hear what I've been up to all summer. Especially since I was so busy I couldn't find the time to even update our blog.

As you all know my summer started off with more broken puppy fun. Namely having Dublin tethered to one of us at all times. That alone pretty much accounts for May and June. We kept things very quiet around the house to help Dublin stay calm and rest up.

In July I got to go to Girls Camp. This year was Stake Girls Camp and I wish it was Stake camp every year. (I know words I never thought I would say...) But it was great. We went up to Lava Hot Springs this year and honestly the odds were already stacked against camp being good before it even started. I had my reasons, don't worry. You know like the last (and only other time I've been to lava), or my general disdain for Girls Camp, also the fact our campsite had no running water and porta-potties seemed to allude to a horrible week.

Because I'm only slightly committed to my calling (kidding), I only sacrificed 2 1/2 vacation days to attend camp(when you only get 10 days a year, that's kind of a big deal). This meant I got up to camp late on the first day which honestly isn't a bad way to go. With camp all set up by then all I had to do was plop my camp chair down and enjoy the evening. All in all, it turned out to be a great week. The stake leaders had put together workshops for the girls, we went on our hike (really a stroll down the road), we spent an afternoon at the ideal pool (seriously, it's great) which meant we got showers and our girls were absolutely fabulous the whole time. This one is for the record books, I actually enjoyed Girls Camp this year.

Shad already told you about our trip down to his Grandma's ranch so I won't rehash those details. Just share a picture of us on the side by side.

At the end of August it was finally time for Woman Cave up at Beak Lake. Once again this year I had a blast with my friends from work, Jen and Gina. We went up Friday afternoon and went swimming in the lake, had some delicious pizza and saw the show at the Pickleville Playhouse.
Saturday we played on the 4 wheelers and took a drive to Bloomington Lake to go play there. Unfortunately the road to the lake was less than ideal and we didn't make it there. Instead we stopped to play in the freezing cold mountain stream. Just as good as the lake if you ask me.
Saturday night we made our usual bacon wrapped-cheese stuffed hot dogs and then cressant rolls over the fire. So good.

I also got to work lots and lots of coverage and backs this summer. At the beginning of the summer I was given 2 new projects out of the blue. One project meant coverage (in my case backs because I'm nice) just about every other week. I'm pretty sure that's just one reason the summer flew by. I think sleeping all day tends to do that to you.

September meant it was time for my birthday and it was very uneventful, just the way I like it. We just ordered pizza and caught up on some Netflix. Nice and relaxing.

For the last part of my update I saved my big news. I start a new job on Monday!!! I couldn't be more excited. I am super sad to be leaving so many great people that I worked with at K-C but my new job has set hours (that's right no more backs...ever), lots of vacation and I get to learn something new. This also means I have a lack of vacation right now which means our big trip to Japan that was planned for October is getting pushed back a year but it's totally worth it for a new job. My goodbye/birthday cake. So good.

Shad's Update

2011-09-12T08:17:00.000-07:00

So Allyson asked that I send her a bit to add to the blog about my summer. To be honest I kinda like reading about my own family and experiences in a blog without having to write it, but I guess I should give Allyson the same privilege today. Here goes:

My summer started a bit earlier than it did for Dubin, really with scout camp. We went up to camp Aspen Ridge on the Utah/Idaho border. Had 1 dad get called away on a business trip at the last minute, so we had to shuffle some adults' schedules around to make sure we had 2 adults there the entire week. The week went smoothly, no one was lost, and the biggest injuries were taken care of with a band aid or two. So I got to stay out of the newspapers.

The best part was the camp is like a boy scout all inclusive resort- activities, facilities, and food provided. We were there the opening week for the summer so the hot water heater for the showers didn't work just yet. Other than that the boys had a good time, earned a bunch of merit badges and taught me how to mountain board. Mountain board is basically a long board with large rubber tires and (gratefully) a rear brake.

In July Dublin being able to walk longer distances and start to run has helped me get outside and get a bit of exercise. Before that I wasn't nearly as consistent, and got in trouble with the animals in the neighborhood for coming by without Dublin. A neighbors pit bull ran across the street barking at me one day and shocked the owners. The owner apologized saying "she never does that, I don't know what is wrong." I knew, I didn't have Dublin with me. A yearling horse that lives in a pasture on the side of a trail I run by on used to look for the dog, but started to shun me (literally) as I came past. And finally one ornery dog who lives close to a school playground we run to stopped barking at me when I ran past, and started whining to express his displeasure. So with Dublin back out and moving hopefully my standing in the animal kingdom in the neighborhood will improve.

On Bracken family trip I got to learn that my mid-life crisis won't include the purchase of an ATV, ORV, or any other abbreviation that means getting motion sick while driving down a trail. This lesson came courtesy of a trip my parents planned down to Grandma's ranch where they rented a pair of Razors. Daniel and Monica (my brother and his wife) were more aggressive and left me trying to chase them and balance my desires of not losing them or the big breakfast they cooked for us before we left.

The other trip to talk about was a backpacking trip with my brother Luke. With Unitas and just about every other mountain range in Utah still being covered with snow in July we took some advice from a coworker of Allyson's and headed to the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho. He advised we hike above Red Fish Lake, and I tried to find a map on-line, but I couldn't find an electronic one without requiring one of those subscriptions so I used Google Maps and decided we'd just buy one at the visitors center when we got there to keep us from getting lost. The lakes above Red Fish Lake didn't look that far on Google- maybe 3~4 miles out. I learned not to trust google for the back-country. The nearest lake was 11 miles, and there wasn't really a flat spot to put up a tent before that if we wanted to stop. It was a ridiculous climb to do in an afternoon. And I'm no longer in shape to make up for poor judgment. It was an amazing place, and a blast once the initial climb was done.

So back to home and the last thing I think I should report on- our garden. Allyson started nearly every plant on the windowsill in the kitchen in the spring to give the plants a head start. Our strawberries were awesome this year, we have a healthy pumpkin, tomato, and pepper crop this year. This years casualties included carrots, lettuce, peas, and green beans. Not sure what happened to the carrots and lettuce this year, and the peas and green beans fell to the poor soil (it's more like sand really) that they were growing in.

So to wrap up my summer- I didn't get famous for losing a scout, eliminated one mid-life crisis, am no longer shunned by the animal community, learned I'm not invincible, and had a bit of success as farmer Shad & Allyson.

The Dog Days of Summer

2011-08-29T11:39:00.000-07:00

Since it’s been such a long time since I’ve posted here, I thought I would break up the updates by members of our family. First up, Dublin.

After being cleared from his last surgery in July, Dublin plunged into summer and took advantage of the warm weather while it lasted. Shad and I weren’t too surprised once the initial excitement of being free was over, Dublin went back to being a pretty lazy puppy. I think two metal legs later, our dog has learned that going crazy and full out 90% of the time is maybe not a good idea. We can get him to chase his ball in the backyard about 3 times before he lays down in the grass and refuses to get up. Even though when he finally does get up he doesn’t appear to be in any pain. Maybe by next summer he’ll be back to the same wild puppy.

Other than being lazy Dublin has once again enjoyed playing in his pool, stealing flip flops (mostly mine) and missing his Mom and Dad while we’ve been gone for various church activities and while we took a quick trip down to Shad’s Grandma’s ranch. He’s definitely realized the three of us are his pack and when someone is missing he is determined to find them or wait for them to get home. He’s such a sweet puppy.

One thing he’s really missed this summer is the lack of grasshoppers in our yard to squish. We have a few snakes living in the garden (thank goodness he hasn’t come across one of those yet!), so Dublin hasn’t had near the number of bugs to chase like he usually does.

In the past few weeks Dublin has also started getting back to running every day. He loves it when Shad takes him running in the morning when it’s nice and cool and is not so much a fan when it’s hot outside.

This summer to help with my allergies, we also acquired a robot vacuum (yes you may think I’m lazy, but it’s been a dream). This robot appears to be Dublin’s arch enemy. The other day while I was gone he started barking at it when it started getting near his crate. I personally think this is a good experience for him for when we have children. I guarantee they will mess with his crate too.

Also I had to share this video of our vicious pit bull attacking a blown up water balloon. So mean...

So there you go. That’s what Dublin has been up to for the past few months.

Here we go again

2011-05-05T09:38:00.000-07:00

Does anyone want a really cute pit bull? He might be a bit broken right now, but just a little bit of $$ and patience and love, and he’ll be back to new in no time. We found out on Monday Dublin has torn his other ACL on his other side. Yep, that’s right. Another round of this
And this after his surgery next Wednesday.
I knew his chances of tearing his second ACL increased exponentially after he tore his first one. I knew this so much that the second Dublin was allowed to be off the leash in the backyard, he got his very own health insurance policy (Trupanion if you’re wondering). It really made the vet appointment on Monday much less stressful on everyone’s part. At the end of the appointment the vet turned to me and said, “This appointment pretty much went exactly how you expected it to, didn’t it?” I laughed and responded, “Unfortunately, yes.”

Because Dublin hasn’t completely torn his second ACL, he’s still in great spirits and ready to play in the backyard at any moment. Because we know he’s going to be down for the majority of the summer, we’re not hesitating at all to indulge him. Every day after work we go outside and play like our lives depend on it.

I’m sad for our sweet puppy. I really could care less about the money, it breaks my heart to think about the 4 months we all worked to get him better only to turn around a month later and have to do it again. Poor puppy, I don’t think he has any idea he gets to do round 2 next week. I guess the real bright spot is knowing this is the last time we’ll have to do this with him. And we’re super lucky this has all happened while we don’t have other priorities (kids, moving, etc.). And that we don't have any big vacations planned until the fall.

NOT MOVING

2011-04-25T14:32:00.000-07:00

So the official word on the street is that Shad and I are staying put here in Ogden. For those of you confused by that last sentence, let me explain a bit. Remember those changes I mentioned at the end of a blog post a little bit ago. Did you think when I posted about the end of the Sweater Friends that was the change? If you did, you were wrong.

You see, there was a sneakier reason for Shad and I randomly flying down to Las Vegas a bit ago. We both had job interviews down there. The company we interviewed with was kind enough to fly us down for the weekend so we could see the area, look at some houses and determine if we were willing to move to Vegas. The interviews went great and about a month later the company gave us our offers. The offers they gave us were less than convincing (less than we make now) so we countered with something we would take and they politely declined. Such is life.

I’m actually pretty relieved for a few reasons. I love our house up here and after looking at houses down there, it’s a complete mess to buy a house now. We probably would have ended up building a house because it would have been cheaper (yep – that’s how messed up the market is down there right now). I can’t imagine how long it would have taken our neurotic dog to get used to a new city and house. Seriously, we moved a couple of lawn chairs in the backyard this weekend and he freaked out. Our dog takes OCD to a new level. We would be leaving behind all of our friends and family and though Vegas isn’t that far, it’s way further than Ogden. I am a bit bummed that we don’t get to have a pool in our backyard and nice warm weather but Utah weather hasn’t killed me yet.

So what else have we been up to? Quite honestly, not much. Between working a bunch of coverage at work, planning to move and tutoring 4 students, I’ve been a bit busy.
We did make time to go down to This is the Place for the baby animal festival on Saturday. It was a lot of fun. How can you resist baby animals as cute as this little guy (or girl)? Too cute.

We also got to watch a sheep get sheared. She was too big to fit through the fence and needed some help.

A Fond Farewell

2011-03-25T07:21:00.000-07:00

So as some of you may have seen on Facebook this week, Jake and I have decided to call it quits with The Sweater Friends. We both kind of had a moment at a show we were supposed to play at on Monday night (we actually didn't end up playing) and after talking it over (more like emailing it over), it felt like we were both asking the question, why are we still doing this? I am really sad to close this chapter of our lives but I'm so glad we made the decision together instead of waiting for some sort of catastrophic falling out. Jake and I are still good friends and will remain that way for a long time. If you're interested in knowing more, head over to The Sweater Friends blog to read my last blog post there.

We will be playing our last show ever next Thursday night in Provo. Details can be found here. I can't convey how sincerely I hope anyone and everyone can come to our last show!

Vegas baby!

2011-03-18T09:54:00.001-07:00

It feels like it’s time for another blog update so here you go.

Unfortunately for Dublin, he didn’t get freedom at his last Vet appointment. It was another month on the leash tethered to one of us at all times. Luckily for everyone involved, he had his final vet appointment on Wednesday and after being put out to get his leg x-rayed (yes our dog is always way too excited at the vet’s office to really do anything that requires him to sit still), he was given a clean bill of health and is now allowed to be off leash in our house and backyard.

I think I can speak for all three of us when I say it feels GREAT to have a somewhat normal dog back. I say somewhat because he literally sprints at top speed to get from any point A to point B. Hopefully that will stop once his energy level gets back to normal. I also hope to not wince every time he takes off to run anywhere at some point too. What can I say, the dog’s leg is easily the most expensive body part in our family at the moment and I really don’t want it broken again.

In other news, Shad and I got to spend last week in Las Vegas for a short trip. We flew down Saturday morning and came back Monday night. It was delightful, so nice and sunny and warm. It was exactly what we both needed as the cold drags on up here. It was also a pretty low key vacation for us. We pretty much just went shopping, saw a movie, met up with some friends down there and enjoyed some amazing restaurants. I almost always seem to come home from vacations more exhausted than before we left but this time around I definitely came home relaxed. I would share some pictures but I didn’t take any. Not a single one. Not even one with my phone.

In other news Shad and I both have new callings. Shad is the new Deacon Scoutmaster and I’m the new 2nd counselor in YW. Not really big moves for either of us considering I’ve been in YW for the past 2 years and Shad has had the 11 year olds but I guess it’s nice to have more church duties.

Lastly Shad’s brother got married a few weeks ago and it was a great time. And the best part in my opinion, he married a cute girl I got to go to high school with. Neither one of us would have expected we would end up related when we sat next to each other in AP English but I could not be more excited about it! Welcome to the family Monika!

That’s about all I can update on though some changes might be brewing at the Bracken house. Time will only tell. 

Freedom!

2011-02-10T07:26:00.000-08:00

Next week Dublin gets to go to the vet for his 6 week post-surgery check up. We get to find out if he gets to be free at that appointment. Shad and I are pretty excited about it, Dublin cannot wait. Not only does he get to go to the vet again (THE MOST WONDERFUL PLACE IN THE WORLD) but he also might get his freedom back. He can be in the backyard unattached to one of us. He can wander the house unattended and he can go up and down stairs. This also means the MDF blocking both our staircases gets to go away too. You might wonder why we had to block the staircases when the dog was attached to one of us with a leash at all times. I would counter with you haven’t met my husband. The dog sometimes “gets the best of him” so in order to prevent the dog from re-breaking his leg if he did happen to escape, I felt blocking the stairs was necessary.

In other news, I survived the month of birthdays at work. There are a few birthdays in February one of them being my best Ogden friend, Jen. Her birthday requires more attention than most work birthdays. Of course there was a cake (cupcakes actually) and a present but this year was also her 30th. To celebrate, our friend Jared wanted to throw her a surprise party much like the one we threw him for his 30th birthday. Next time there’s the prospect of a surprise party on the table I need to dibs either being the surprised person (easiest option) or get to be the distraction person. This time around I was not that smart and ended up being the person that got to cook, clean Jen’s house for the party (because she didn’t know about it) and decorate. Next time I will be smarter. I promise.

Last weekend we finally got to go down and visit Annie, Steve and Tommy. Tommy is absolutely adorable. He looks so much like Steve right now and has a full head of dark hair. He pretty much slept the entire time we were there so for me to say he is so sweet may not be true, but I think he is so sweet. And even though being parents seems to have shocked their systems, Annie and Steve are being fabulous parents. Seriously Annicka Sue, you are doing such an amazing job as a new mother, I could not be more impressed!

I’ve also been in training at work all week this week, for 9 hours each day. I am also getting a cold and trying my hardest to fight it off before it becomes a full-fledged cold. That combo really isn’t working. By about 10:00 every day I’ve had a raging headache and the biggest urge just to put my head down. Training is a good reminder why I say I don’t ever want to go back to school. Ever. Except in work training, I can’t just go to sleep like in thermo because instead of me paying to sit in the class, someone is paying me to sit in the class so just going to sleep and figuring it out later really isn’t an option. Just two more days left. I think I can make it.

Update

2011-01-25T10:25:00.000-08:00

So I’m a little torn about apologizing to the people that actually read this blog because I haven’t posted anything recently but honestly, I’m not feeling it. We’ve been busy having fun and taking care of life so I’m not too sorry for the lack of updates.

The past two months were filled with lots of coverage at work for me and lots of good times spent with family and friends. There were also a few sad moments for us too.

This year was my family’s turn for Thanksgiving and we had a great time. My sister and her hubby came from California and we had a delicious meal and good conversation and even a couch to lay on after the feast (I dare you to spend Thanksgiving at a place with no couch to lay down on after the meal and then not count that as a very important part of your subsequent Thanksgivings).

The day after Thanksgiving my family got together for some family pictures. Stacy Marie that did our wedding and our last family pictures took them for us this time at Wheeler Farm. I have them to share at some point in time. They seriously turned out so cute.

The first week of December brought Dublin’s second birthday. Due to the extreme amount of coverage I had been working (and by coverage I really mean serving nachos until 11:00 at night for a few nights that week – I’m so glad I went to school and got a degree so I could use my mind to serve people nachos. Nachos – chemical engineering at its best.), our poor puppy only got a store bought cake but he didn’t care. One bite people, our dog ate his piece of cake in one bite. There were also no presents – I’m a bad mom.

Our December weekends were filled with dinners with family and friends. There was even a night reserved for making gingerbread houses (okay graham cracker houses) with some of my favorite Ogden friends.

By mid-December, I was done working for the year. Woot! That’s what happens when you work as much coverage as I did last year. I’m not quite sure it was worth it, I would have much rather had more time off when it was warm. Despite the cold, I got a bunch stuff done around the house that had been neglected for a ridiculous amount of time.

Christmas Eve we spent with my family having our traditional fondue dinner and watching movies and Christmas day was spent with both of our families which is always so much fun.

Speaking of the puppy, a few weeks before Christmas he managed to injure his back leg. Long story short, it ended up that he had completely torn his ACL. I guess on the bright side, he had impeccable timing since I had time off work to take care of him but really the optimal option would have been him not competely tearing his ACL.
Sad cone of shame puppy.

Gross post surgery puppy leg.
He came home from the vet new years eve so instead of going dancing like we typically do, we spent the evening on the floor in the family room keeping him calm and resting. Right now we're half way through his recovery period which basically consists of keeping our dog calm and rested. This means that whenever he's out of his crate, he's on a leash connected to one of us at all times. Needless to say, we've gotten pretty inefficient at our house lately and I can't wait until he's free again. He can't either. He has cabin fever in a bad way. Just imagine our 75 pound pit bull that used to get a run every single day to control his energy and make him a happy dog, confined to his bed in the family room for 2 months. That's what we're dealing with at our house. At least the cone of shame is off now.

So there you go. That's what we've been up to.

Dew Tour

2010-11-06T01:25:00.000-07:00

So did you notice that I managed to gloss over some pretty significant happenings in my last two blog posts? Yeah me too. Shad and I celebrated 2 years of marriage in September and Shad also celebrated his 28th birthday in September too.

So I’m going to say the fact Shad’s birthday was almost 2 months ago and that it’s 2:00 in the morning explains why I have no idea what we actually did to celebrate his birthday. I know I bought him his new Ipod since the one I got him for his birthday 2 years ago died a couple months ago. And yes I did wait until after he visited the Apple Store to see if he needed a new one before I thought about what to get him for his birthday. That’s not being a bad wife, that’s called planning people. Now not remembering what we did for his birthday that might mean I’m a bad wife.

For our anniversary we went up to Park City and did the Alpine Slide and Coaster. As we were driving up the canyon, I was shocked to find out Shad had never been to the Alpine Slide before (Seriously, what did his family do for fun?) so it was his first time and he was nervous. While we were in line for the chair lift a group of 3 guys butted in front of us in line to get on the lift, one looked like Shawn White but I wasn’t sure. When we got off and realized one of the guys was a photographer and that the Dew Tour was in town that weekend, our suspicions were confirmed. Since Shawn wanted to go down the slide with the photographer filming him, that left his friend from the Dew Tour to race little old me down the mountain. A quiet girl Mormon engineer vs. some kid from the Dew Tour, it should be no contest, right? Wrong! I kicked that kid’s butt and apologized when we got off the slide as I heard Shawn and the photographer lay into him for letting a girl beat him. After taking a ride on the Alpine Coaster, we drove into town and had dinner then stopped at the outlet stores for some quick shopping. It was a fantastic anniversary.

Then I did some coverage – my favorite type – backshifts! We took our trip to Escalante. Shad went camping with the boy scouts and Jake and I had a photoshoot for our next album. You can see the pictures from that here.

I did some more coverage. We had our Halloween party (I promise next year I will remember to take pictures). I got to do some more coverage. We finally made it down to SLC to see Annie’s new house – it’s seriously so cute! I couldn’t be more excited for them! And to make it even better they had a Halloween party of their own so we got to see so many friends I haven’t seen in the longest time. So fun!

That pretty much catches me up to this week. Whew. Maybe next time I’ll have a picture of Dublin in his Halloween costume. I made him wear it for at least 3 days straight so you would think during that time I would have thought to take a picture of him. Nope. I guess he’ll just have to wear it one more time for me. When I have kids, they’ll put their costumes on after Halloween so I can take a picture of them too, right?

Escalante

2010-10-18T12:28:00.000-07:00

I promise at some point this blog will get back to our day to day boring lives it used to be instead of a bunch of pictures of me in the wilderness without make up. Until then, here are pictures from the trip to Escalante we took over conference weekend.

You know you would have sat on the giant lizard and insisted someone take a picture of you too.

Sometimes I'm a little irresponsible when it's warm outside and I can wear flip flops. I forgot to grab my sneakers before we left on our first hike. Luckily for my hiking in flip flops is no big deal.

Cryptobiotic Soil!

Naptime.

Mmmm. Petrified wood.

Hiking to Calf Creek Falls.

Waterfall!

Shad took the effort to hike closer to the waterfall so we had to take his picture. You know, to prove that he did it.

My arm runing Jen's picture of the swirly rock.

I make that rock look good.

Jen's self portriat.

We climbed into that hole all by ourselves.

Naptime part 2.

Stream hiking - it was freezing and had fish in it. Gross!

I only got my one shoe wet once.

Hiking!

To end our trip, it decided to rain the entire night. Here we are waiting out the storm in the tent.

Sailing...takes me away

2010-09-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

I’m back to document yet another little trip we’ve taken recently. Over labor day weekend, we finally got to go sailing with our friends Jen and Jared. We’ve been waiting literally years to take this trip and have tried to plan sailing trips before but because of one reason or another were not able to follow through with actually sailing. We went on other vacations instead – see our Moab and Great Basin trips last year.

Going into this trip we all knew it was a bit risky. Jared tends to have adventures when he goes sailing. We all went fully expecting an adventure of some sort and hoping it wouldn’t be too major. It’s never a good sign when you’re driving to the airport and your soon to be captain asks if you have to be back at work Wednesday (we were scheduled to fly home Tuesday evening).

We arrived in Long Beach Friday evening and took a Taxi to the marina, got settled in for the night and went to bed early in preparation for sailing the next morning. Our initial plan was to sail Saturday morning to Avalon on Catalina island, spend Saturday evening on the island and Sunday day snorkeling and other things. Monday we were to go around to the back of the island for more ocean/beach fun then sail back to LA Monday night just incase we were delayed a bit we left plenty of buffer time to make our Tuesday evening flight.

Saturday morning the girls got to walk to the grocery store to get food and supplies. The boys needed to go to the marine store to get a few parts the boat needed. No big deal, right? For Jen and I we got to take a 3 mile walk to the store and called a Taxi to take us back to the marina since we had perishable items. The boys got to take a 6 mile run to the marine store and a 6 mile walk back. I’m so glad I’m a girl.

We got this train to honk at us while we were walking. That's worth at least 1,000,000 points more than a semi truck.

Waiting for the taxi.

Once we were back from our errands, it was time to set sail.
Jen found out on a previous boat trip that she gets sea sick, Shad also knows that he gets sea sick too. Even though they took their drugs like they were supposed to, they still got really sick. I was actually fine which surprised me – I’ve recently developed getting car sick over the past year. Why, no one knows.
Here I am enjoying a PB & J sandwich en-route to Catalina. Jen was jealous I was getting to eat so she took a picture.
We got to Catalina by 5ish and because of the holiday weekend, there were no moorings left. We opted to drop our anchor outside of the harbor and take the water taxi into the island.
After give Shad and Jen sometime to get their appetites back, we enjoyed a wonderful dinner and walked around for a bit. Then we headed back to the water taxi to take us back to the boat. That’s when things got interesting.
The water taxi took us back to the spot we had left our boat, only our boat wasn’t there. By this time it was dark outside so then Jared started explaining what kind of boat it was and the water taxi guy started thinking where he had seen boats like ours. Luckily he recalled seeing a boat like ours way out tied to a buoy with the harbor patrol next to it. He took us out there and low and behold there was our boat, tied to a buoy with a not too happy harbor patrol man next to it.

As it turns out, our anchor wasn’t exactly set properly and the boat started to drift dangerously close to some other boats near it. The other boats decided to call the harbor master to come take care of the boat that was trying to “bump and grind” (that’s a direct quote from the harbor master – our boat is dirty) against the other boats.

For some reason that still eludes me, the harbor master was not able to get our anchor up and decided to just cut it off. He then towed it to the buoy in the middle of nowhere to keep it safe. It turns out the boat didn’t have current registration stickers or proof of insurance so he suspected it was a derelict boat. Luckily though, he felt bad enough about cutting the anchor that he didn’t ticket us for the registration or insurance. He let us use an emergency mooring for the night and told us he would be back at 9:00 to check on us.

At that point it was decision time. Should we stay in Avalon for the next day or two and go snorkeling like we had planned or just go back to LA? The rest of our plans were out since we no longer had an anchor. Not wanting to tempt fate anymore, we all voted to go back to LA. Plus that meant we wouldn’t have to deal with sick Jen and Shad for the next two days.

Mmmm. Marshmallows in the morning time.

Motoring back to LA - the wind was seriously lacking.

Catalina before we left.

I'm a sailor.

Jared is too.

Naptime on the boat.

Ocean

Sometimes you have to get your foot into it.

Sea lions.

Pretty cute picture of us.

Boats at the marina.

Playing at the beach.

It's a tradition. Shad and Jared build a sand castle, Jen and I destroy it when it's done.

Jen finishing off the brownie at Yardhouse.

Us at dinner in Long Beach.

For my birthday Jen and Jared got me some bump-its (for the big hair I have always dreamed of), SPAM (because I’ve never had SPAM) and a booty pop (because I am a white girl). It was like a made for TV wonderland on the boat that night. And now I look so good all the time.

Tuesday we took the boat out one more time and sailed around the harbor for a few hours. It’s too bad we had to go back early, we were getting pretty good at sailing by Tuesday but that might have been because in the harbor it was smooth and Jen and Shad didn’t get sick. Whatever.

D to the C

2010-08-19T08:22:00.000-07:00

I can’t believe August is almost over. The kids in our neighborhood go back to school next week. Where did summer go? I’m back to share our annual trip. This year Shad and I went to Washington D.C. for vacation. Shad had never been so that alone I think was worth the trip. We spent 8 days in our nation’s capitol and had a splendid time. Here are the pictures to prove it.

The place we stayed was literally 1 block away from Capitol hill and the Library of Congress. Shad didn't believe me when I first pointed to the building across the street and told him it was the Library of Congress.

Here we are in front of the Library. I finally invested in a mini tripod for my camera so I was actually able to take a few pictures of us.

I think this was my favorite building we visited in DC. The mosaic tile work on the floor, the ornate ceilings. Just beautiful.

Here we are in the Library, I cut of Shad's head but was too lazy to try again.

Sunday morning while we were walking to the Smithsonian I made Shad walk past the capitol so I could take a few pictures without a million other tourists around.

See? It was just us.

Also while on the capitol grounds we found this weird Asian looking building with a fountain in the middle. I guessed it was build around a natural spring since there were all sorts of plants and stuff. Shad didn't believe me until I made him look on his map. Low and behold, it was a natural spring. I'm too smart for my own good.

Of course the Smithsonian was loads of fun. The Natural History Museum was first.

Then the air and space museum got boring after a bit. I do think I have what it takes to be a stewardess though.

This was in the Native American museum. I'm not sure why but that's where it was. Also as a side note, if you are eating at the Smithsonian, it's worth it to walk down to the Native American museum. The food there is delicious and way better than any of the other museums.

Here I am outside the Smithsonian waiting for Shad to bring me a drink. I'm just a little bit spoiled sometimes.

The view of DC from Arlington Cemetery. I'm really glad I suggested to Shad we visit here.

There's something about seeing all those head stones from so long ago and the recent ones as well that really put into perspective what people have sacrificed for our country.

While wandering around the Dupont Circle area, we visited Woodrow Wilson's house he moved into after he left office. I think this was one of our favorite stops. We even got to play his piano and the old man that gave us a tour was so ideal.

Here's the White House. Shad and I did get to do a tour but because our Congressman didn't warn us not to bring cameras, one of us had to wait outside with our cameras while the other went through and then switch places. Kind of dumb.

Here I am trying to entertain myself while waiting for Shad to do his tour of the White House. I was literally surrounded by 50 short Chinese people while I was taking this picture.

After the White House, it was time for the monuments.

Last time I was in DC, they were just building the WWII monument. It was nice to see the finished result.

Vietnam Memorial

Lincolin

Korean War

While sitting at the Korean War memorial, I found my dream job. So ideal. That guy gets to go play in fountains everyday and gets paid for it.

We even went back to see the monuments at night and we both got to see fireflies for the very first time. Why don't we have them in Utah? They are so cool!

At are restaurant in Chinatown. I ordered the Sweet and Sour Chicken instead.

And lastly, non-trip related picture. Before we went to DC we took the dog up to Causey Reservoir to swim. After he was done, he opted to sit on his towel instead of the rock. Is he my dog or what?!

Summer Hours

2010-07-22T11:53:00.000-07:00

I guess I unofficially took a little blog break for the month of July. We’ve continued to have a splendid summer at the Bracken house.

For the 4th of July (okay really the third) we went to the demolition derby Ogden does every year. It wasn’t as good at the one last year but there was a truck demo derby again so that made it worth it. I hope that activity becomes a tradition because I really like it. Monday the 5th we went down and had dinner at my parents for the holiday. It was delicious as always.

After dinner we took Dublin across the street to the school to play for a bit. He was finally brave enough to go down the little slides on the play ground and we even convinced him once to go down the big slide. The school’s sprinklers were on while we were playing fetch so it was really hard for us to keep him focused. He kept on dropping his ball to go bite the water from the sprinklers. I may have created a monster by teaching him water is fun to play with.

I stayed down at my parent’s house that night because the next day I got to take my mom to the hospital for a minor surgery (she’s totally fine don’t worry). I think I might have done such a good job filling out her medical history for her I won’t get to do it again. I can’t help it if I think she falls down a lot and she thinks otherwise.

Last week was pretty uneventful except for a senior leadership visit at work. My manager and team leader had me all prepped to be seriously yelled at by our leadership for one of my projects that looks very bad on our scorecard when compared to the other plants. It’s not my fault it’s so bad, the report they look at has some serious flaws. Instead of being able to point out those flaws and all the things the report mis-represents I was told I was not allowed to argue and to listen. Luckily for me the leadership could see the progress and positive movements the plant has made in the area and gave us some really nice compliments. I also got a few comments in about the blasted reporting without getting fired too so I think it was a successful visit.

For the summer my company has introduced a thing called “summer hours.” It’s ideal. Basically how it works is if you are a salary person (like myself) and you get your 40 hours in before noon of Friday, you can go home. Now this might not sound like such a treat to some of you but when you work at a company that says your core hours are from 7:30 to 4:00 and you have to be there at 6:30 every morning and you get in trouble for leaving at 4:00 every day and not staying later because you must not be contributing enough if you aren’t forced to work lots of extra hours the whole summer hours concept is revolutionary. When we first found out about it, after every meeting the engineers sounded like kids getting ready for summer vacation. We all had so many plans for our now free Friday afternoons. I’ve taken advantage of it as much as I could (getting hours in with my 9 hour minimum days has been a snap) and it’s been delightful.

Last Friday Jen and I ventured up to Logan Friday afternoon to buy milk. Now you may be thinking to yourself, why would Ally drive all the way up to Logan to buy Milk. I will tell you why. One of our fellow engineers told us about this magical place up in Logan that sells shelf stable boxes of milk (ie. Milk that doesn’t need to be refrigerated and this can be added to your food storage) that come in delicious flavors (root beer, orange, banana, strawberry, chocolate – yum). We’ve been talking about taking a milk trip to Logan for a good year and summer hours finally made it happen.

Friday night after milk trip, Shad, Jen and I went up to Weber State to see the youth spectacular. It’s basically this big show our poor youth have been forced to attend a ridiculous number of practices for in lieu of youth conference and some activities this year. I’m going to be honest, after seeing the show, I’m not sure it was worth the time that went into it. The kids did a great job with what they were given and I know everyone worked hard but there was so much chaos and confusing parts and it was really long.

Saturday we went to the drive in to see Toy Story 3 finally. We checked the schedule earlier in the week but apparently by Saturday, it wasn’t a main feature anymore. That meant we had to sit through another movie (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) to see Toy Story and we didn’t get home until 2 AM. I really liked Toy Story and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was okay.

Sunday I had the wonderful opportunity to sing in sacrament meeting after one of the older gentlemen listed all the terrible things that happened to ALL the signers of the Declaration of Independence. I think you can imagine how many passed out people I got to sing to which was a nice change of pace. And if I could just offer one suggestion to anyone that gets to sit in sacrament and listen to a musical number, if the person singing makes eye contact with you, think about smiling at them. It won’t kill you, I promise. At the very least please don’t make a face that looks like the sounds coming out of my mouth are hurting you – even if they are a neutral expression would be appreciated. I almost laughed out loud in the middle of my song when I came across a sister in our ward that made eye contact with me and seriously looked like I was jabbing an ice pick into her side. Just a thought for next time.

I hope that was a long enough update for you! I know it was for me.

Arts Festival

2010-06-28T08:15:00.000-07:00

This last week was another crazy week for us. I thought that it finally being summer meant other things would slow down. I guess not.

Monday was just a bit crazy for me – I had a training to teach at work so I worked 14hours on Monday. Not fun.

Tuesday, Shad’s little brother Seth met us for dinner after work. He just barely started a new job up in Ogden so we wanted to celebrate with him. Plus I hadn’t see him since Christmas so I was excited to catch up on what was going on in his life.

Wednesday I went down to SLC to get my beloved iphone looked at. I may have accidentally dropped it in the fire at girls camp. It actually is working just fine, there’s just a bunch of white spots that have started appearing since it almost died in a fire. Because I was smart when I got the phone, I paid the extra $60 for the apple care. I already knew I’m a little irresponsible with ipods (I think the one I have now is my 4th – yikes!) so getting a protection plan for a phone I will be using way more than an ipod just made sense.

Thursday was my last company softball game. Or it was supposed to be except I guess we have to make up the games that got cancelled due to rain. I even caught the ball this game which is way more athleticism than I ever show so props to me.

Friday night Jake and I got to play the Utah Arts Festival. I don’t think I can express how excited we were for the opportunity. We’ve tried out to play the Arts Festival for the past 3 years and this is the first time we got in. Now add to that getting a pretty awesome time at a really good stage and we couldn’t have been more pleased. The show went really well for us despite me forgetting my guitar strap, having no monitors and no one being able to hear Jake’s guitar. Here’s a picture of us (okay really you can just see me) talking to our friend Porcia (the person who was responsible for us making it into the festival) before we started playing.

Saturday afternoon Jake and I also got to play for about an hour at my work’s 25th anniversary party. It was a lot of fun and much less pressure which is always nice. Plus we could actually hear ourselves in the monitors which is always nice. Shad didn’t get to go to this show because he had a wedding down in SLC that he had to go to.

5 Tracks

2010-06-24T13:55:00.000-07:00

Check out my list of my five favorite songs right now over on The Sweater Friends blog.

Hail Campy

2010-06-21T12:08:00.000-07:00

I don’t really know how else to sum up our ward’s Girl’s Camp except by saying I survived it. That’s all I’m really asked to do, right? The camp started off great. I came up Tuesday night after work to find the girls doing crafts before dinner. They had gotten up to our campsite (one of our leader’s parents backyard – camping on grass is heaven!) set up camp and gone on their hike without any disasters. Fabulous. We made dinner without issue and then settled in around the campfire to do smores. Just as we got the smores out of the bags, it started pouring rain leaving all of us to dash into our tents and go to bed.

Day two started off without a hitch. We got the girls up to make breakfast and then tried to figure out a plan for the day. We were supposed to have the girls go horseback riding and play at the beach at pineview. The initial plan was to split the girls up into two groups and have them rotate from riding and beaching. Because we had a few less horses than we initially thought (okay a lot) and since it was cloudy and a bit cold we knew having the girls go to the lake then horseback ride would be miserable we had to come up with a backup. We ended up keeping most of the girls at camp while the first set went riding. Then dropped off the rest of the girls with the horses and took the first group to the beach. It still was cold and windy outside when we got there and by the time the second group of girls got to the beach, it was downright miserable to back to camp we went.

We had a bit more free time to bum around camp then we started dinner to get the girls fed before our speaker for the evening, Elder Marlin Jensen came to talk to us. As usual the plan didn’t exactly happen that way so we had to delay our speaker for about an hour. By that time it was raining a bit and windy so our wonderful hosts allowed us to sit in the living room to hear our speaker. After that we went back out to have our testimony meeting. It was wonderful up until the end. The second after our last leader sat down, it started hailing like you have never seen it hail before. Most of us ran for the house or our tents. I ran for our tent but unfortunately the leader before me managed to jam the zipper while trying to get into the door. She ran around to the other side to get in but me knowing that it was stuck open 3 feet and since I was the one that would get to sleep next to the puddle, I opted to untangle it and get in the tent the shut it properly. Once all of the leaders returned to our tent, there was about 2 inches of hail up against all of our tents (including the girls’ tents). Luckily our tent was build like a tank, or so we thought until I stepped on my sleeping pad to find it was soaking. A quick look around our tent with flashlights revealed several drips from above and a bunch of puddles all over our stuff.

Once again our hosts were so kind and let the girls and some of our leaders sleep inside on the floor. I opted to sleep in my car which wasn’t so bad once I got warmed up again and somewhat dry. The next morning I got up and hoped the other leaders would agree to just taking down camp and going home (yes that meant no breakfast but seriously I just wanted a warm shower). They were okay with that plan until they realized all the food would go to waste. Somehow breakfast was made and taking down camp took a good hour and a half longer than it should have. I finally made it home by 11 Thursday and I don’t think a shower has ever felt so good. Oh Girls Camp why are you always so terrible? Why? I used to think I hated camping until I experienced it outside of Girls Camp.

On to other news, Thursday afternoon Jen came over and we made hopefully our last coworker goodbye cake for the next while. We made Patrick a chocolate/yellow marble cake with chocolate ganosh in the middle and chocolate buttercream outside. Delicious.

Saturday I went down and practiced with Jake in preparation for the Arts Festival this week. So anyone looking for a fabulous date night on Friday come see Jake and I play at the Utah Arts Festival at 5:00. Seriously you won’t be disappointed. Even the trib suggested we are one of the bands you should try and see at the festival and they have to report the truth, they’re a newspaper.

Then Saturday night Jen had a little get together at her house to give her tether ball pole a party before she removes it. I’ll miss that tether ball pole.

Also Saturday night my parents and brother came up for dinner to celebrate Father’s Day. It was really nice of them to come up to us instead of us going down to SLC.

Yesterday was a pretty relaxed day, we just bummed around the house and watched movies. Ideal.

Pillow Chewer

2010-06-15T07:32:00.000-07:00

Where does the time go? Just yesterday I swear we were coming home from Capitol Reef. Oh well. We’ve done a lot since getting home from our trip.

Awhile ago my friend Jen and I started randomly talking about sleepovers from when we were kids. All the things we used to do, the food we would eat and the games we would play. Surprisingly enough slumber parties Utah and Ohio are very similar. After talking about them, we decided it would be a blast if we had one. Fast forward a few weekends and it was slumber party night. A couple of our other co workers Gina and Danielle came too to partake in the slumber party fun.
We started off the night with lots of pizza, candy necklaces and homemade cake batter ice cream (so good!). Played a game of Pictionary and then watched Wayne’s World. Because we’re still adults and kind of lame Gina and Danielle couldn’t stay the night but Jen did although I went to bed at midnight and she stayed up and watched Ellen without us. So much fun.

In other news our garden is doing super well. I’m so excited. We have one strawberry that will be red soon and a ton coming. I can’t wait! We also finally got the rest of the flower beds planted in our back yard so I can’t wait for those to start growing too. Even our roses are starting to bloom.

Last weekend was also super fun for me. I got to go up to Logan/Bear Lake to hang out with my girlfriends for the entire weekend. We had an absolute blast. I seriously love those girls so much. They have all grown up to be such amazing women. They are some of the best wives and mothers I have ever seen. There was much talking, laughing, shopping, eating and an awkward moment with a weird carved tree. Here are a few pictures I stole off of Ashlee’s blog because I’m not good at taking pictures.

When I came home yesterday both my hubby and puppy told me how much they missed me. Though since Shad then showed me a pillow Dublin managed to destroy while not being watched so I’m guessing Dublin had a very fun weekend.
This week I’m off to our ward’s girl’s camp so wish me luck. I can’t be as bad as last year was, right?

The Reef

2010-06-03T08:06:00.000-07:00

Over Memorial day weekend Shad and I headed down to Capitol Reef with our friends Jen and Jared. I'd like to think vacation explains the one real post you got last month. Really work has just been crazy. In typical vacation fashion, the rest of this post will be mostly pictures.

Here's me infront of a mountain looking really excited to be there. It's probably just the eupohira of not being at work.

Here's Shad and Jared looking not so excited to be infront of Chimney Rock in the park. They get a half star for effort.

Some pretty cactus flowers on the hike up to Hickman's Bridge. I was surprised by how many wildflowers were blooming in the park. I guess I've never been in this part of Utah in the spring time.

On our way up to Hickman's bridge.

It was just a little windy for the first few days we were there. Jen and I just figured we could pay for mircodermabrasion or go for a walk in the sand storms.

We were pretty lazy on this trip which isn't a good thing when Jared is with us - he's really high energy. While we were laying underneath the bridge he wandered off and scaled a few cliffs, using a dead tree to climb up at one point (not smart). Jared took this picture from the cliff just as we were starting to wonder why Jared had "been around the corner for an hour." Jen and I then made the executive decision to send Shad alone (because everyone knows when one member of your party is missing in the wilderness - you send another person alone to meet his fate at well) to track down Jared so we could hike down and go on another hike. After that we instituted the buddy system. Shad kept track of Jared and Jen and I kept track of each other.

Jen likes to take candid pictures of us hiking and always yells at me for waving in her pictures. I was so close to getting in a quick waving candid. Better luck next time.

See those holes in the rock behind us? The boys just had to see if they could climb out of them.

Here's Jen and I waiting for the boys to finsh attempting to get out of the holes.

These pictures aren't in order. After just getting them grouped into the sameish days, I was too lazy to reorder them. On our third day, we went out to Goblin Valley which was so much fun. So many people had their dogs which made me miss our puppy. Jen made friends with a Labrodoodle. She's so friendly.

After bumming around Goblin Valley for a few hours we decided to go hike the wild horse canyon trail just down the road.

Of course after hiking for a bit Jen and I found a nice ledge to take a nap on while the boys contiuned on to the end.

There were a few points where we had to think skinny but we all made it out okay.

Jen really likes to take pictures of the group where my face is really close to the camera and everyone else is a reasonable distance away...

Here I am getting yelled at for trying to wave in the picture.

Jen, Jared and Shad were all climbing the walls in Goblin Valley like little monkeys. I don't really have the upper arm strength to do those things. Jen helped by picking me up and placing me on a ledge awkwardly. I was lauging so hard I almost rolled right off.

Jared took this picture at our campsite and promptly said afterwards, "that was the worst picture ever, Jen looks like she's stripping and Allyson looks angry." So there you go. Worst picture ever.

On day two of our trip we went and hiked up to a lake in the mountains outside of the park. Once we got to the lake, jen and I found an ideal rock for a nap (I wasn't kidding when I said we were being lazy this trip.)

Shad and Jared joined us on the rock for a bit after they tried to catch trout in the stream with their bare hands. That was pretty entertaining to watch.

Then when we came home on Monday, Jen, Danielle and I made Danielle's goodbye cake. I talked her into letting us make her a Unicorn cake. I'm pretty impressed with the results, it actually looked like a unicorn.

Okay fine

2010-05-05T16:10:00.000-07:00

Okay, now I think I'm ready to give you a real update.

Easter for us was pretty uneventful, which really it should be when you don't have kids, right? We listened to conference then went down and had dinner with my family.

I thought conference was wonderful as usual. I especially liked Pres. Henry B. Erying's talk called Help Them on Their Way Home. How could I not when he talked about personal progress, the calling I currently hold in our ward. As I listened to his talk, I hoped just a few of the mothers and daughters of our ward heard his message and truly understand why they should be working on their personal progress. I won't lie, it took most of my self restraint not to print it out and send it out to all of my young women's parents but I figured that might offend a few people.

Over the past few weeks Shad has also made awesome progress on the garden. He laid down ground cover and covered the paths with mulch. He ordered a bunch of top soil to fill the rest of our 18 garden boxes and he fixed two surprise "water features" that popped up when the secondary water was turned on. Now if our weather would just warm up a bit, I can actually start planting the rest of our plants. I was really hoping to get stuff in before we left for Vegas but with the chance of snow while we were gone, I didn't want to chance it.

Vegas was a lot of fun. We went down Wednesday morning and went out to Lake Mead to go hiking. That was really fun until we had to turn around. It was super windy and blowing right at our faces the entire time back. We checked into our hotel and headed down for the buffet. It was pretty disappointing but after hiking in the wind we didn't want to search for food elsewhere on the strip. After dinner we went and walked to strip. Because of the wind though, nothing was working so that was kind of disappointing. The next morning we went and did some shopping along the strip (Oh H&M how I missed you!) then went back out to Lake Mead that afternoon. Because I was sore from hiking the day before, we just walked along the beach while Shad threw rocks in the lake. That night we opted to drive out to the M resort for the buffet out there. It was a little bit of a drive but so totally worth it. It was easily the best buffet I have ever had. The dessert buffet alone was worth the $20. Seriously if you are in Vegas and want a buffet, drive out there!

We drove home on Friday just in time to go out to dinner with my family for my Dad's birthday and Mother's Day since my parents will be moving my sister to California next weekend. That was good times as always and it was good to be able to see my sister again before she moves.

The rest of our weekend was pretty quiet. I cleaned the house and worked on a few projects and Shad worked in the yard.

The mass exodus out of our plant and back to Wisconsin is continuing which means that Jen and I made a cake Monday night for the latest couple moving back home. They had requested chocolate cake with ganosh. Jen and I are pretty sure they had no idea what ganosh was when they requested it, but being good friends we googled a recipe and moved forward. Not too bad if you ask me. We opted to whip part of the ganosh and use that instead of butter cream in between the layers then we also sprinkled the outside with non-whipped ganosh and crumbled Heath bars. It was delicious. On another good note, Jen and I were able to assemble this cake without any tragic cake deforming accidents. I think it can go on record as our best looking cake yet.

New post

2010-05-04T15:46:00.000-07:00

So Shad and I have been busy as usual. We even took a quick trip to Las Vegas last week. Hopefully I'll have some pictures to share. In the mean time I'm getting a new computer at work this week (Praise the LORD!) so I've been having to back up files etc. I found this adorable video of Dublin with a balloon in our basement when he was about 4 months old. So cute. Hopefully this will help tide you over until I have Vegas pictures to share.

I can't get over how little he was! I guess at least the clumsy is still there. :)

How does your garden grow?

2010-04-12T11:17:00.001-07:00

Fun things have been happening at the the Bracken house lately. A few weekends ago Jen, Danielle and I got together to make another cake for our coworker Aimee that was moving to Tennessee. She was the wonderful lady that introduced us to the marshmallow fondant and it seemed right to make her a cake to send her off. Plus we really wanted to eat some cake. As usual there were a few snags in the process. Namely me managing to mess up a white cake from the box. I don't know what happened but my 9" round cakes were about half the size of Jen's. We pressed on and the cake ended up being a bit special but still tasted delicious. I'll hopefully find the pictures I took of it to share next week.

After making the cake, I got to take some of our young women down to the conference center for the General Young Womens Meeting. The meeting was fantastic and our girls were pretty well behaved. I'm not quite sure it was worth the 2 hours of driving to sit in the 90 minute meeting but I'm sure a lot of the girls loved it. Next year I'm voting to do a PJ party at one of our houses to watch it on satellite.

The next week I was able to successfully install a new project at work and a successful install means my 5 days of coverage was cut into 4 days and a partial day. It worked out nicely since Friday Jake and I had a show down in SLC scheduled. We played at the Vertical Diner in SLC. It's a Vegetarian and Vegan restaurant. When Jake had initially booked it he told me it was a hippie restaurant which made me a little bit nervous but it's a really awesome place and we had a great time playing there. I hope we get to go back soon.

As for Shad the majority of his spare time has been spent getting our garden ready to plant in. Here's kind of what our garden looked like last year (after the random garbage left by the previous owners was removed). Just look past Jake and I.

Notice the nothingness in that nice fenced off area in our back yard? Yeah we did too, it was just low on our priority list for things to do with the house. We pretty much just planted plants in the mounds of soil left by the previous owners garden boxes and called it good. The garden last year was kind of successful. Most of the plants grew and produced fruits and veggies. Pretty much all of them except the ones that I wanted to grow and produce things. We had a couple pumpkins that got off to a good start and were then consumed by mold (which we've heard of is almost impossible but whatever). The peppers we planted didn't really get watered by the drip system so they grew maybe 5 peppers all year. The squash (gross!), peas, beans and tomatoes (double gross), all produced a lot which was a little bittersweet since I wanted nothing to do with most of them and left that responsibility up to Shad (read: we threw away a bunch of veggies last year).

This year the garden had made it up to the top of our list. So that's where Shad has been for he past few weeks. He's been building garden boxes (we figured out a way to make vinyl garden boxes for $25 each which is a total steal compared to paying $100 for one from the fence company). Digging, running sprinklers and tilling soil and putting down ground cover to keep the weeds down (we have awesome secondary water which is nice but brings all sorts of weed seeds with it.) It's pretty close to being done. My raspberry,blackberry and strawberry plants came on Saturday which means I spent a few hours planting those in the boxes that were ready to go. I can't wait to see if I can get some good things to grow that I will actually use when they're ready. Wish me luck.

We're Really All the Same

2010-03-23T14:40:00.001-07:00

So I have the pleasure of working with two lovely lady process engineers named Danielle and Jen. They're both young engineers just like me so they're the first people I turn to when I need to vent or when something frustrating happens at work. Jen is originally from Ohio and I'm sure you recognize her from a bunch of my other blogs about our trips. Danielle is from Utah I've also blogged about her a few times as well. They are easily my best friends up here in Ogden. In 2008 we even took a trip to the Grand Canyon together since none of us have been. I think that was the best organized and easiest camping trips I have ever been on. Here's a picture of us on that trip.

As you can see, we all look pretty similar. We're all younger ladies. We're all kind of tall (I'm the shortest at 5'9"). We all have brown hair and lighter colored eyes. We're all on the skinnier side. We're all white. And to top off the look alike contest, we all wear the same uniform to work everyday.

You can imagine we get mixed up at work quite often. We've finally come to the conclusion that we really are the same person to everyone else here (except our other fellow lady engineer Carolina - She also has darker hair too but she's originally from Columbia and a mechanical engineer so it's harder for her to be thrown into the mix though it does happen sometimes). We've hypothesized different ideas why it's so hard to tell us apart for our coworkers. 1) They're always just looking at our chest (ignoring the name embroidered on our uniforms) and thus can't tell the difference. 2) They never see us in the same room together since we typically are working on different things so we really might just be the same person (one amazing person at that!). 3) Remembering names are hard (especailly when said person literally wears their name around on thier shirt all day).

Regardless of why it happens, it makes for some pretty funny conversations. Like one I had this morning with a team leader. The team leader saw me walking in the hallway and stopped my by saying

"Hey, I was just bragging about you and what a good job you're doing."

Cue my first skeptical thought since I haven't talked to said team leader in a good 3 weeks but maybe I've done something for him without knowing. I respond with a,

"That's good, what did I do?"

"Oh I was just telling you manager how great it was that you went through my board (as in status board) with me and asked some good questions."

"That's great

By this time I'm certain he doesn't really mean me but after having this happen so many times, I've learned it's just easier to play along for now then relay the information back to the person that really needs it.

I figured it out a few hours later by asking both Jen and Danielle if they had talked to the team leader recently. Danielle and Carolina had last week so I relayed to good news to them. I can't help but wonder now if he thought I was Danielle or Carolina though. Good times.

It really sucks when you're sitting in a meeting and they get the name wrong. I can't count the number of times one of us has panicked when they've said Jen will be covering this trial (on a material she doesn't own) or Allyson is on backs tonight (I am, really? I better go home then...)

Good Job!

2010-03-10T05:40:00.000-08:00

You guys are great guessers. I am in Paris. See here's a picture of the tower with me in front of it.

Oh yeah. Paris, Texas! Look at me rock my uniform too. Sexy.

So I'm in Paris for 2 days this week for work. The mill here is one of two plants in the city (town?) so as you can guess it's kind of small. But the Eiffel Tower replica with a giant red cowboy hat is quite charming. Maybe today we'll go find the Jesus statue wearing cowboy boots in the cemetery because everyone knows when I picture Jesus, I picture him in cowboy boots (doesn't everyone really?).

Other than it being a small very spread out town (it has to be big, it's Texas, right?) I've felt like I'm living in an episode of King of the Hill and the majority of locals I've met all sound like Boomhauer so there's been kind of a language barrier (I should have used that as a clue yesterday!).

In prep for the trip I got myself psyched for all sorts of large amounts of meat (something I truly have to physch myself up for since I really don't like meat). None of the restaurants have disappointed. Monday night - Steakhouse. Tuesday - BBQ place for lunch, Hibachi grill for dinner. I can only dream what today will bring!

So what happened on Monday to make it the second to worst travel day I've ever had? The day started off well, we got on our flight to Phoenix, left on time and arrived on time. Loaded onto our flight to Dallas without issue then proceeded to sit on the plane on the tarmac for 3 hours (the actual flight is only an hour and a half!) because of a "sticky switch" then because we had to change out the "sticky switch" then when that didn't work they had to try "something" else. Then just as the got the problem fixed, they announced there was a huge storm in Dallas and all the flights going to Dallas were grounded until it cleared. Cue time to refuel so we could wait out the storm on the tarmac. Fast forward an hour and a half later to the storm clearing out of Dallas and us finally moving towards the runway. Then our hopes of leaving were squashed by having to wait to burn off a few HUNDRED pounds of extra fuel we were carrying because we would be too heavy to land. I know the American people are fat but really, the plane can't land when it has a few hundred extra pounds in it? Thank goodness we didn't have a few more POS (people of size) on the plane because it sounds like we could have all died in a fiery crash landing due to their extra weight. And isn't plane fuel the main reason it costs so much to fly anyway? I now understand why, we're just burning it for no reason!

After a fairly pleasant flight to Dallas, we landed and got our rental car. Because my coworker and I were starving we opted to eat somewhere in Dallas before starting our 2 1/2 hour drive to Paris. Enter the random steak house we found open at nine on a Monday night.

Where's Ally?

2010-03-09T13:30:00.000-08:00

Let's play a quick game of Where's Ally? Here are a few clues

1. The city I'm in starts with the letter P
2. The name of the city has 5 letters
3. The name of the city ends with the letter S
4. I had the second to the worst travel day ever yesterday flying here
5. I have NEVER been here before

Hopefully I'll have time tomorrow to update where I am, maybe even with pictures. Good luck guessing!

Lava...it's hot

2010-03-04T09:03:00.001-08:00

What have you been up to lately? I've been up to a lot. I know my last post really had nothing to do with our lives per say, just me blabbing about what it's like to be an engineer for me. How about I tell you what we've been up to lately?

After surviving our super bowl party, I did some coverage. Made it through New Beginnings with our Young Women (I'm the personal progress advisor so I got to talk for 20 minutes about it).

For Valentine's Day Shad surprised me with a little trip. Friday after work we headed up to Maddox for dinner then drove up to Lava Hot Springs in Idaho to spend the night. I know my hubby had really good intentions for a fun, romantic trip. Apparently Lava doesn't tend to provide those though. Let me back up a bit, before I left work on Friday my coworkers asked me what we were doing for Valentine's Day to which I had to respond, I don't know my husband insists on making it a surprise. The first words out of my coworker Dave's mouth were Lava Hot Springs. To which I quickly replied, I hoped not (famous last words). I explained I didn't want to drive that far and was really hoping for a nice night up the canyon somewhere. A few more ideas were tossed out including the Cliff Lodge at Snowbird (I had been told to pack two swimsuits) where we would swim in the pool and then have a spa day the next day (thus explaining the second swim suit). The conversation then ended with Mike saying – look Lava has live web cams so we can see you if you go there. Um good?

Unfortunately our accommodations in Lava weren't quite as nice as the Cliff Lodge. I tried to hide the terror that struck me when we drove into town and Shad explained to me we had reservations at the only motel in town that provides your own bathroom. (Excuse me? Are we staying at the dorms?). It didn't get much better after that. We walked into our smelly, gross old room and I quickly went to check out our own personal bathroom (it was after all the selling feature of the room). Did it have a toilet? Yes. Bathtub? Yes – one large enough for a party of 4 and only supplied with hot spring water and with the stains to prove it. How about a shower? Oh no, course not, we weren't at a fancy place, hot spring water is perfectly good to clean yourself and 3 of your closest friends with…at the same time. Not wanting to give up on it yet, we headed down the street to the springs. Those were actually quite delightful except the freezing cold shower – honestly a simple heat exchanger to heat up the clean water must be too much to ask. It's not like they already have hot water coming out of the ground…

After our trip to the springs we were both quite thirsty. I asked Shad if he had packed water bottles (he had packed us snacks for the drive) and he hadn't so we set off to find a gas station, because every town has a gas station, right? Wrong. No gas station in the town of Lava Hot Springs. There used to be one, it's now a Thai restaurant (yikes!). So instead we found a vending machine on the side of the road that didn't take bills so then we got to scour the car looking for $1.00 in change just for one measly bottle of water. On our way back to the hotel, we found another machine that ate our $2.00 and spit out fifty cents. Thanks for nothing.

Just before we went to sleep I told Shad I know he meant well and he tried really hard to plan a fun trip but I also asked if I could plan Valentine's day next year (Hello spa day at cliff lodge!). I also pointed out that trips like this were supposed to happen when we were newly married and dirt poor and neither of those descriptions really fit us…

You know it's been a bad night when you wake up at 6:00, see the time and say to yourself why isn't this night over? Longest night ever! Between the train every 30 minutes and the stray cats screaming outside our door (I'm not exaggerating about them SCREAMING either) I think I would have rather been at work on a back shift. Not that it was an option, I was just thinking of things I don't really like but would rather do. When 9:00 finally rolled around, I woke Shad up and asked if we could please just go home.

Now that this quick update is already super long, I think I'll leave everything else we've been up to for another time. And just so you know, the terrible weekend didn't end there. When we returned home, we found a messy house and a sick/grumpy puppy thanks to Shad's younger brothers coming up to stay with Dublin for the night. I guess it's too much to ask for common sense greater than a 2x4 sometimes…

How Do They Do That?

2010-02-16T13:18:00.001-08:00

A few thoughts about engineers for a Tuesday afternoon.

I am an engineer. My husband is an engineer. I work every day with about 40 engineers and I pretty much love every minute of it. Every once in a while I catch myself stepping back from the task at hand and thinking about the situation (not necessarily the problem) from an outsiders perspective. I can understand why people have so many stereotypes in their mind when they hear the word engineer.

I hear them often, especially when people find out I'm married to an engineer. There is almost always a question like, so when you go home at night do you just talk about work non-stop (we talk about work but not about the issues we solved that day – after all Its proprietary – but mostly we talk about a funny thing our co-worker did over the weekend or a stupid mistake a maintenance guy made that sucked up our afternoon – nothing more detailed then I would tell any other person engineer or not) or if we just have white boards all over our house so we can solve any problems that arise on the home front (because everyone knows an engineer is only able to solve issues when writing on a white board). Or how do you guys manage to put the groceries away (I'll admit my food storage definitely has some elements of lean manufacturing to it but it's a system that works so why not apply it off the operations floor?).

So on that note, here are my random thoughts about engineers:

A few weeks ago while eating breakfast at work someone was eating mandarin oranges. Now I don't know about you, but since I work in a fast paced manufacturing environment, every time I see a mandarin orange I wonder how in the world they make them and not just how they make them but what the machine that makes them look like (judging by the low price of a can of mandarin oranges one could almost assume with a surety that it's an automated fairly fast paced product). None of you will be shocked when I tell you that every other engineer sitting at the table had the same exact thought – how do they make those and what does that machine look like? Do you think things like that when you look at a simple commodity like mandarin oranges? If you do, you might be an engineer.

Today we had our engineering department meeting. While all of the engineers working at the plant squeezed into the tiny conference room they scheduled for the meeting I had a thought. If someone posed a problem to this entire group and the problem involved something we all had some knowledge on, would the entire group be able to agree on one solution? I didn't even hesitate to answer that thought, absolutely not.

In college we're trained to solve problems and given a few skills to enable that problem solving along the way. My college professors were constantly reminding us when the age old question of "when am I going to use this?" came up that they were 99% positive we were never going to solve a problem like ones we solved in class. But by going through the process of solving this difficult problem in which many things are known and arriving at a logical answer, we should be able to go out into the real world, take an issue with which we have only a few known's and an infinite amount of unknowns and come to a logical conclusion using the same process. They were explicit that it was not necessarily important that we remember how to calculate the heat transfer to a piece of aluminum in the middle of our classroom. It was important however, that we remember how to gather correct data about the situation and use a few of the skills we picked up along the way to reach a guess at what the problem could be and how to fix it. So even if the entire engineering group was given the exact same information for the known's, it's the unknowns that would allow the group to argue and speculate for days and still not emerge from the tiny conference room with one solution to the problem. But that's also the reason we get problems solved, every solution I come up with isn't going to solve the problem. Some are going to make it way worse. If everyone came up with the same solution, we would all be up a creek.

When I was an engineering ambassador at the University of Utah, one of the things we always stressed when speaking to students about what engineering is was the need for diversity amongst a group of engineers. It was hard for me to see that as easily when I was in school, we were all around the same age, mostly from the same place (Utah), mostly had the same religious beliefs, and mostly were paying our way through school by working part or full time. We were pretty much the same person and honestly any one that had a few more things different about them typically didn't make it through the program. So I would wonder, if we're all basically the same and the people that aren't don't make it through the program, is diversity really that important?

I guess in my co-ops I didn't pay enough attention to the diverse groups of engineers around me because since graduating and going to work I know by having people that are different from each other is the only way to really solve problems. Every day I get to work with engineers that are different ages, have different types of families, grew up in different places, were educated differently and have different engineering disciplines.

My one last thought about engineers. For a group of people that is typically comprised of type A personalities we learn to pick our battles very well. In college by the time we were seniors, we no longer complained about how long or how hard an assignment was, we didn't dread how bad a test would be because at some point we all just stopped caring. The energy spent worrying and stressing about those things didn't help to get the hard assignments done or make the test any easier so we all just adopted the attitude of it doesn't matter. We realized that we had done some really hard stuff and if it got worse, well so be it. Fighting it or arguing about it didn't change it so we all just bucked up and did it.

I see that at work now. With every new change – you must attend this meeting every morning, we're making this material cheaper and you have to figure out a way to run it, or we're now tracking all of our assignments on this board so everyone can know what you're working on- the decision has to be made. Is this worth my energy to fight or would my efforts be better spent getting that down machine up and running again or solving that consumer complaint issue. Instead of fighting for what we would like, you're a good engineer when you keep the big picture in mind and get down and do your work.

Bowl?

2010-02-09T13:38:00.001-08:00

Well I guess first things first. Sundance.

It was a total blast. I'm so glad we were responsible with the Orion festival to enable us to play on Park City's Main Street during the Sundance Film Festival. Unfortunately for everyone else, I didn't take any pictures or see any famous people. Your priorities are a little different when you're trying to find your venue on a long street and Google has no idea where this place is and you are 10 minutes late. There's always next year I guess. Anyway, Jake and I played at a place called the Crown on Main. I guess they do a local artist showcase every year during Sundance. It was a really cool place with a big wood fireplace and industrial fixtures. I was actually surprised at the number of people that wandered in during our performance and sat down. I mean it was only 5:00 in the evening, a little early to be bar hopping on a Thursday night, right?

Saturday night Shad and I went up to Logan for a Utah State basketball game. Shad's brother goes to school there and another brother just graduated from there. While we were down at his family's house for dinner a few weeks ago they started talking about how outrageous their student section was. Shad wanted to see it for himself so we got tickets; I took the opportunity to see our friends Ashlee and Daren that live up in Logan while we were there. I loved going to sporting events with Ash in high school and she's the one that took me to an Aggie basketball game so I knew I wanted Shad to experience it with someone that could sing the Scotsman the way it should be sung. I think Shad was super impressed with the ridiculousness of some of the things the crowd would chant or do. Go over and read Ashlee's blog on the whole experience including pictures. It was an awesome time.

Last week was my two good work friends birthdays so I had the joy of making them their birthday treats (something the female engineers do for the other female engineers because let's face it, if we made the men treats for their birthdays, they still wouldn't make us treats for ours). Danielle opted for Rice Krispie Treats with Golden Grahams. Delicious. For Jen's birthday we decided on a cake to use up the marshmallow fondant left over from a cake we made for another work lady back in November. Because Jen wanted to help Danielle and I make the cake, we made an evening of it. I (and Danielle) managed to actually take pictures of this event. Here's one for you.

This is the most complete picture of the cake I have. Here's Jen and I applying cookie cutter fondant shapes. Apparently we don't care about what the finished product looked like. For this cake we used 3 9" rounds with a layer of buttercream frosting and frozen raspberries. One cake layer was just lemon flavor and the other two were lemon with raspberries. So good.

This last weekend was also really fun and exciting. Friday night Shad, Jen and I went down to SLC with our friend Jared to get him a suit he needed this week. We had quite a good time at Banana Republic. Shad helped Jared with his suit and I dressed Jen up in Banana Republic clothes. Good times. It was like having a Barbie doll except this one talked back and had opinions about her outfits. After successfully finding him a suit, we decided to go to Café Niche for dinner. It was wonderful. Shad and I had previously tried to eat there a few months ago but it was closed when we went. This time it was open and even had a live Jazz band playing. It was a great choice.

Saturday was a busy day for my. Shad's brothers were coming up that night to stay over which meant I had to clean the house. After accomplishing that, I went down to Layton for a baby shower for one of my co-workers wives, Christi. She's such a cute pregnant lady and it was a lot of fun to see so many ladies I haven't seen in awhile. Her and Patrick are going to be such cute parents.

After the baby shower, I came home and started working on dinner for the Settlers of Cattan party we were having. Now before you judge me for being a total nerd I will say it was my brother in-law's idea. They love Settlers and Shad and I aren't willing to spend hours at his parents' house playing board games on the Sundays we come down. This was a good alternative to giving them their way without making us angry. Shad's uncle came up to join in on the fun as well. Shad's youngest brother Luke stayed the night with us since both of our families were coming up the next day for the super bowl. Shad and I almost had him convinced to come to Young Women's with me but he chickened out.

After church we got the food ready for a whole bunch of people to watch the super bowl at our house. Both of our families came up to watch and we had a blast. Dublin was even a good enough puppy to lie on his bed while we watched. Up until now, new people have just been way too exciting for him to be a good dog (shock collar and all) so I was pleased to see that at a year old, he's finally calming down.

Sundance

2010-01-28T11:49:00.000-08:00

I guess an update on this thing is long overdue. Since I left off with band info in the last post, I'll start with band info. I like it when things come full circle.

Jake and I have been pretty busy this January so far. A few months ago we were asked to play a new festival some locals were trying to put together in Park City, UT the week before Sundance. It sounded like a great opportunity to play for a very different bunch of people that might appreciate our unique sound. We were super stoked, we even practiced...twice. Which is a lot for us and a really good thing since at out first practice, we both couldn't remember how to play our newest songs.

The only downside of the festival was the time our first show was at. 11:45 PM on a Thursday night. It worked out okay for me, I was able to get coverage the Friday night after it so being out until 2 the night before was no issue. On the plus side, Thursday was the opening night so most of the festival artists were up in Park City for the opening ceremonies. In addition to the late hour, our venue was geographically undesirable, on the bottom section of Main Street that was closed for some reason. Needless to say, those that were actually in the bar (which was playing hard rock music before we started) weren't exactly interested in our sound. The sound guys liked us so that was a positive.

The worst news of the night was the notice that our second festival show on Monday night was to be rescheduled. Monday morning we found out instead of the 7:00 PM start time, we were given a 10:30 PM start time. After much band debate, Jake and I decided it was still a good opportunity to get our sound out to new people. There ended up being a bunch of people there for the band that was playing after us and some of them legitimately liked our sound.

I guess the best news out of the Orion Music Festival for us came yesterday. One of the Orion organizers asked us to play Sundance tonight. SUNDANCE! I'm trying not to get excited about it but I'm pretty stoked. We are even playing before my bedtime (5:15) at a different (read: not Siberia) venue. I'm really glad we didn't opt to burn bridges there.

On the home front things have been pretty quiet. A few weeks ago we were invited to a game night with some of the other young couples in our ward. We had a total blast with the other couples. It was funny when we realized 80% of the people there were engineers (I was the only wife engineer). Apparently our neighborhood attracts them. I'm not sure why, maybe it's symmetrical? Type A personalities like symmetry, right?

We also had our wood floors refinished this month. It looks so good. We didn't do the whole sanding move out our your house for a week process, we opted for the process that screens off the finish and puts a new shiny one on (it's called enhance through the Home Depot if you're interested). This seemed to be the best option for us. It doesn't get rid of the scratches in the wood but since the 80 pound pit bull isn't moving out anytime soon, there really no point in spending the time and money to remove the current scratches. Since the finish needed 7 days to cure (we could walk on it the night they did it with socks), Dublin went to the kennel for the week. When I dropped him off, he was so excited there were so many new people. He broke the paper tag they put around their necks 3 times before the lady went and got a stronger on. When I picked him up, all the receptionist would say is that he is adorable and very energetic. I believe it.

Dublin also decided this weekend that his bones go on the ottoman where our things go. While we were watching TV on Sunday, he picked up his bone from his bed and dropped it on the ottoman and walked away. He's done it a few more times since then. Every time I've made him pick it back up and put it on the floor. I can just imagine how frustrated he's getting with me. I'm sure he's thinking we put things up there all the time, why can't he?

Dear Abbey

2010-01-07T12:06:00.000-08:00

So in another effort to explain my blog absence, I wanted to share the latest release from my band The Sweater Friends. Jake and I have been working on this project for the past few months along side our full length album we plan to tackle this year. A big chunck of my December was devoted to this EP.

Here's a link to our bandcamp website where you can listen to all our music and download tracks from the new EP and our last full length, Everyone We Know.

thesweaterfriends.bandcamp.com

Also check out the awesome cover art our friend Nate Call put together for us.

I don't really know what else to say other than I'm in love with this set of tracks. This EP is easily the most personal set of music I've ever been involved with. I think I'll save the back stories for the songs I helped write for another time (and probably a post on the band website) but for now, please just go check it out. I would love to hear what you think.

Jake did post a few explainations for the songs on the Sweater Frends blog. Read it here.

Pictures

2010-01-06T06:53:00.000-08:00

Sorry for kind of dropping of the face of the EARTH for awhile. And while in the Czech Republic none the less. It's probably a really good thing I probably saw everyone that reads this blog over the holidays so I'm sure no one was too concerned with my absence. I did get home from the Czech Republic...eventually. I'll explain that later. I really just wanted to share pictures with you.

On December 2nd, Dublin turned 1. In true Lundberg fashion, I made him a cake for his birthday. Because our dog just tends to eat things whole, I thought giving him a few cupcakes would work a bit better.

I'm pretty proud of my skills. The original plan was to make him a cake with the left over fondent in my freezer with Jen and Danielle. Because of the Czech trip, that craft day was cancelled so this is what he got instead.

Here he is in the obligatory milestone monkey picture. I seriously can't believe how big he's gotten. Everyone that see him tells me he's huge but he's still my little puppy that used to be able to curl up in a ball on my lap and now is lucky to get his head in my lap.

Here he is eating his cupcakes. For the entire week I was gone, Shad said he would go over to the table outside and sniffed it looking for more cupcakes. Silly dog.

Now on to my Czech Republic pictures.

This was a picture of the wall to the church in the town square. I thought it was cool they had all these little niches with statues all around the church.

The town square in Hradec Kralove where I stayed for the week. I wasn't kidding when I said it was dark there.

Some closer town square lovin'. I really like the Christmas tree in this picture.

Not so much in focus but it was raining and dark so I don't blame my camera for rebelling.

Now onto Prague. So the Friday of my trip I left work at noon and took a taxi back into Prague (about 2 hours) so I could spend my last night in Prague exploring before my plane left Saturday. Such an awesome decision!

This was in republic square. From what I could tell most of these buildings are government buildings or churches.

I loved that there were trams everywhere - not that I actually figured out how to ride the trams or trusted myself not to get lost on the trams but they were still cool to see.

The Old Town section of the city all decked out for Christmas.

Pretty bulidings from the bridge.

This is the street I stayed on in Hradec Kralove.

More pretty buildings. And just so you know, my camera died in the middle of me wandering around Prague so my Iphone got to fill in. That's why these pictures are less pretty.

More pretty Christmas decorations.

This is a tower that was at the end of the walking bridge to cross the river in Prague.

I think I'm going to hang this last picture in our house for Christmas time. Gotta love the powers of Picnik. I'll update on the other goings on of our house later. For now, just enjoy the pictures.

Ice Ice Baby

2009-12-09T23:31:00.000-08:00

I almost hugged the man at the crape restaurant I ate dinner at last night when he brought me my drink with...ice. I don't understand what other countries have against ice but they seriously seem to hate it. How can you hate something so nice and refreshing?

Moving on. Nothing too exciting has happened to me. Last night when I got home from work, I thought I had been locked out of my hotel. That was interesting. The taxi driver wasn't sure where my hotel was. He got me to the main square in town which is all that he really needs to do so I had to walk a couple of blocks to the hotel. No problem - I've spent all my evenings wandering around town looking at stuff and taking really dark pictures (seriously if my camera tells me one more of my pictures is underexposed it's getting crushed. It's not like I can make light out of cobblestones and potatoes).

Anyway, so I walk up to my hotel like I have everyother night except the front door is closed. Weird, it's never been closed before. Okay, try the handle. It's not budging. Try the door that is always closed, not budging either. Try previously always open door again with all my girth because honestly, what am I going to do if I can't get into the hotel? Call them on my phone with the phone number for the hotel I don't have? Cue random man running across the street to help me. Where did you come from random man? (I can't even get strangers to smile at me on the street much less help the stupid American open a door). I look across the street and see other man with tripod set up across the street with camera pointed at the hotel. Man running to save me has tried unsuccessfully to open door.

Cue two womens voices on the other side of the door and the door shaking a little. Give strange man a face that says, I really hope you know what's going on because I just want to get inside and change out of my uniform and get some dinner. Then there was a "click" and the door open to reveal two laughing women. They leave. I say thanks (dekuji) to the man that didn't fix it but tried and probably caused the issue in the first place and moved on. Am I still wondering if the whole snafu was caught on the camera? Absolutely. Will I ever know? Nope said mysterious men with camera were gone by the time I had changed and left for dinner (5 minutes max). Good times when you only know 4 Czech words and you're in a small Czech town so they don't really care to know English like you would if there were actually tourists.

Ano?

2009-12-09T00:22:00.000-08:00

Before I begin this post just one work comment, my stupid computer makes me very inefficient. It is the slowest thing known to man. If I could, I would bring in my 4 year old Mac from home because I guarantee it would do things faster than my 2 year old PC. I think I'm just going to start emailing the IT people once a week asking for a computer upgrade. It should be time, right? I can promise at least a few people here in the Czech think I am crazy because all I do all day is tell my computer how much I hate it. I glare at, I even try talking nice to it. Does any of that change the fact I wait 15 minutes for a 1 page word file to open? No! And don't think it's because my server is half way around the world. I deal with this at home too. I came to the Czech prepared, with all the files I knew I would be using on my own hard drive to prevent the transcontinental document opening. I can only imagine the hours I could spend waiting for that. Wow. I'm done now.

On to some Czech adventures? Honestly, nothing really exciting has happened. Monday morning my Taxi to take me to the plant arrived on time and got me there on time. I met the engineer I'm supposed to be helping and gave him the slew of parts I brought. (I'm really hoping to leave some here so my luggage won't be so heavy. Dragging it up the thousand year old flight of stairs my first night in the hotel was not fun.) We started working on the machine and made some improvements, decided to let the machine run the rest of the day so I went and worked in the office until the Taxi came back to take me to the hotel.

After changing out of my uniform, I went walking around town to find a place to eat. It feels so late when I get back to the hotel even though it's only 6 at night. It's dark and none of the shops are open in the town by then (luckily the restaurants are). Hopefully I'll get back before 6 one night so I can do a little bit of shopping.

Monday night I dined at a sports bar in the main town square. I had some really good pizza. In fact, all the food I have had here has been good. I was really worried when I read online that they have a hearty diet. In my mind that means meat, meat and more meat. So far it hasn't been that bad. At the sports bar I got to watch some weird hand ball sport. It kind of reminded me of water polo but on a court instead of in a pool. Anyone know what I'm talking about? After that they changed to snowboarding so at least I could tell what was going on. I did get a lot of stares in the restaurant. I'm figuring since it's not a big town, they don't see people eating at restaurants alone often or maybe I had something on my face. Who knows.

Yesterday was pretty uneventful. We made some changes on the machine that really seemed to fix the issues I came out to correct so I'm glad this visit was successful for at least one thing. There were some other people from my company visiting the plant yesterday too so I got to share my hotel with them back to town. They're all the annoying staff type people so I tried not to say much to them. They tried to convince me to go to dinner with them but I successfully declined. I doubt I will be so lucky tonight. The one good things is they go home on Thursday so I won't have to deal with them much longer. It was nice to speak English with people and not worry if I was using a word they understood.

Last night I took another nice long walk around town and after thinking about going to a Chinese restaurant in the town square, I decided it would be a good night to try the hotel restaurant in the basement. I'm glad I did. It was really good. I ended up having a ginocci with broccoli and cheese. I'm pretty sure that's not Czech food, but judging from the cafeteria at the plant all Czech food is a different combination of the following, meat (chicken, pork or beef), carb (rice, pasta or these really good potato dumpling things) and brown sauce. I'm not kidding about the sauce either, that's what the plant people call it "brown sauce." Maybe it has a real name in Czech. It tastes pretty good but there's not a lot of variety there. Hopefully someone can tell me the real name of the potato things because those are seriously so good. I would like to know how to make them.

Now that I've fixed the problem I came to fix, I'm getting really excited to go explore Prague on Friday. It will be nice to take pictures in the daylight.

Wheel of Fortune

2009-12-07T04:21:00.000-08:00

I found out last Tuesday that I was heading to the Czech Republic for a week for work on Saturday. I’m planning on updating as much as possible to keep everyone updated on the fun.

12/5/2009

Today all I had to do was get to the airport and get on my flight to Paris, sleep on my flight to Paris and get on the right plane to Prague. I accomplished two of the last three things listed. That’s pretty good. Which one did I miss? The sleeping one of course. I was even super prepared with drugs to take, ear plugs, my sleeping app on my iPhone. None of it worked. Even after I turned off the overhead light for the nice French lady next to me when she fell asleep (it was really bright, you would have done it too.) I was no where near sleep. Needless to say when I finally arrived in Prague at 3 PM the next day, I was exhausted. So exhausted that I made it to 7:30 that night, and decided instead of finding somewhere to eat, I would just go to bed. I doesn’t help that it was dark at 4:00 so I didn’t really want to venture out into a strange foreign city in the dark.

So yes, my first night in the Czech Republic and I went to bed at 7:30. Don’t worry, I woke up at 3:00 ready to go. What do you do in the Czech Republic at 3:00 in the morning when you can’t sleep. I don’t know what you do, but I watch the Czech version of Wheel of Fortune. At least that’s what it kind of looked like. I don’t really know, it was all in Czech. But there was a wheel they were spinning and it looked like they were guessing letters to add to the blanks on the screen. A few major differences, no Vanna (doesn’t she just make the show? Is Vanna still on wheel? I haven’t watched it since I was at least 10, anyway.) You don’t have to buy vowels (or at least what I would consider vowels) because I swear 60% of the Czech words are made up of vowels. No one would win anything if they had to pay for them. The last and most entertaining difference, the studio audience looked like they were forced to be there at gun point. I’m not kidding and maybe they were but the kind of clapped when something good happened and that was it. No smiles, even the contestants weren’t in the mood to smile. Except when the host made a lame joke, you have to suck up to the host. (Yes the entire show was in Czech but you don’t have to speak a language to know when the game show host is being a jerk to be funny.) Thank goodness I fell back asleep after one episode.

So far it’s been an interesting adventure and I haven’t really even left my hotel room. I can’t wait for more fun.

Update?

2009-11-20T12:42:00.000-08:00

Sorry I’ve been so bad at blogging lately. I’ve been busy copying and pasting things at work. Kidding, but we have been pretty busy at the Bracken house.

Aside from our new master bedroom and people making me mad at work (sorry if I tend to vent on this blog…it seems like a good place to blow off steam), I have a lot to update you on.

This year was our first Halloween with a house (and a puppy) so I was even more excited for one of my favorite holidays. We decided to throw a Halloween party on Halloween Eve just to celebrate. It was a total blast and I’m so grateful to all our friends that came up (dressed in costumes none the less) and had a good time with us. I didn’t take pictures because I suck at taking pictures when I’m trying to play hostess but I promise it was good times.

Because this was Dublin’s first Halloween I had the fun of picking and making him a costume. I decided to make him a shark costume since he’s already quite vicious and intimidating. We even took him with us to the ward’s trunk or treat on Halloween to practice being calm around children (his favorite!). He did pretty well and most people could actually tell what he was.

He also did really good with the doorbell on Halloween. I think Halloween should be once a month simply so our dog can practice the things he really struggles with. It would really help me out. Think about it and get back to me.

A couple weekends ago our Young Women’s got a new presidency (yay!). I’m really going to miss (some) of the old leaders, I was the only one that got to stay in my position. One of our teachers (one of my favorites) moved into a counselor roll but all the other leaders were gone. I’m super excited for the new ones. Already they appear to be much more organized and task oriented than the last bunch so I might not end up stabbing my paper to death during our planning meetings. The girls were pretty disappointed since they’ve had the same leaders FOREVER but it really is going to be good for them.

Last weekend was pretty normal for us. Friday night my family came up with my Grandma and Aunt so they could see our house (neither had seen it yet). It was really fun to get to see and talk with everyone. Saturday I went tutoring the went down and saw the wonderful Marci to get my hair done. Goodbye awkward blonde roots.

Saturday night was quite the adventure. Our neighbor (who I hadn’t met until she came over and invited us) was having a birthday party. We felt like we should go since we (really me) need to work on getting to know our neighbors better. We went, unfortunately we were the only ones that went so it was us, our neighbors and their parents. Good times.

In other news, tonight Ben and Jake are coming up to record vocals for our latest EP. I’m super excited to get it done. It’s going to me my new favorite, there are some really great songs that are going on it. I even like the song I wrote (I usually don’t really like my songs but the get put on the cds anyway) so look forward to that.

It's essential...

2009-11-10T13:02:00.001-08:00

So I never knew until today that I was so special. I had no idea I was the only person in my office that can do something essential to day to day life at the plant. What is my special power you might ask? I can copy and paste. Seems like a pretty regular skill but the only logical conclusion I could make after a co-worker emailed me asking to update a poster file with the new graphs another co-worker had emailed us a week ago when I was on vacation. I mean the graphs were just as close to him in his email. I was on vacation when we received them and thus knew, if he wanted it done before this week, he should have just done it himself. So that’s how I learned today I’m the only one in the office that can copy and paste because if he had that power, he would have just done it himself, right?

Modern Oasis

2009-11-06T08:49:00.000-08:00

So I know since Shad and I don't have kids yet, it seems kind of ridiculous to pick our master bedroom for an overhaul (didn't Shad just paint that builder white room orange and golden yellow a few short months ago?). We have an entire house to ourselves to escape to from the outside world but the long and short of it is that my once daring move to paint the walls orange and yellow turned out to be a huge mistake that I loathed everytime I entered our room. And I have to sleep in that room every night so it's kind of a big deal. With the method to my madness justified lets move on to a description.

Okay so I took interior design in high school from Dotty and I'll be the first one to admit the only thing I learned in that class was to not leave harsh corners and I can guarantee you, there are almost no harsh corners in our house. Other than that, most of the interior decorating ideas I get come from magazines and blogs. My latest blog obsession is younghouselove.com . I'll just warn you. Don't click over unless you want to devote a good amount of time devouring their tutorials, before and afters and my favorite MOOD BOARDS. They are to die for.

So the mood boards that they post don't just happen, people request help for their design dilemas. They're ever so popular. They typically sell out minutes after they post new ones every week. A couple months ago I was one of the lucky ones to snag a board. You can see my custom mood board here.

I think I'm done rambling now...I'll just let the pictures speak the rest.

Before

After

Looooong Beach

2009-11-02T09:23:00.000-08:00

I have a lot to cover so forgive me for slacking last week.

I guess I’ll start with my trip to Long Beach. My company sent me to the Society of Women Engineers Conference this year and it was a total blast. I had been before a few times in college and I was super excited to see it from a professional perspective instead of the desperate college student please give me a job perspective. The professional side did not disappoint.

We opted to stay at the Queen Mary Hotel. This alone was an adventure. For those of you that don’t know, the Queen Mary is a luxury cruise liner built in the 1920’s and cruised around the world for a few decades. After being retired, the city of Long Beach, CA purchased the ship, made it into a hotel and permanently docked it at the Long Beach Port.

Okay now that we all know what we’re talking about, let’s think about what I just told you. A luxury cruise liner…from 1920. The luxuries of 1920 are nowhere near the luxuries of today. It was like staying at your grandma’s house. Sure it’s clean, but it still kind of smells funny because it’s old and nothing works quite right. Another wonderful feature was the colony of ants that lived in the bathroom. Every morning I battled with them. Several lost their lives. Neither one of us won. Another funny thing about the ship was that after talking to the other ladies staying there, none of our rooms were even remotely similar. Okay they all had a bed and scary extension cords for wiring (is that up to code?) but other than that, completely different. Bathrooms were in different spots, there were desks in weird places, some had sitting rooms, some nothing. I guess standardization wasn’t invented before 1920.

Now for my favorite part about the Queen Mary, it’s supposedly haunted and other than being a hotel, it’s kind of a tourist attraction. So what do you do with a haunted tourist attraction in the middle of October? That’s right, you turn it into a haunted house. And not just one haunted house, several haunted houses. That overtake half of the levels on the ship and allow people to scream at the top of their lungs outside your guests windows until 3 AM.

In summary, all of my previous observations about cruise ships were validated regardless of the decade the ship was manufactured in and whether you are actually sailing on said ship or just enjoying your time. I’m so glad this time around it was my company footing the bill because I would have seriously been mad if I was paying $300 a night to not sleep and get attacked by ants.

Other than the Queen Mary from Hell (Good name for next year’s haunted house?), Long Beach was fun. The conference was wonderful, I collected lots of great swag at the career fair, and learned a lot in our sessions, actually got to meet a few ladies from other locations (I even met one I talk on the phone with on a weekly basis but have never met because she’s in South Carolina. She’s a delight in person by the way J). I’m glad I only opted to go to a few of the networking opportunities though. It was fun playing Jenga in the Irish pub across the street with the other ladies and it was great to have lunch with the company big wigs that were in town but for the most part, I like exploring alone.

I found a Z Gallerie and picked up some great pieces for the master bedroom makeover I’m undertaking this week and I had some awesome meals (see giant pot pie picture below) while people watching the drinkers at the bar. I even got to meet up with my Sister and brother in-law to play at the lake and eat some delicious frozen yogurt. It was a fantastic week and I’m so glad I had the opportunity to go.

Do You Smell?

2009-10-19T09:39:00.001-07:00

During my trip to Long Beach last week I came to a realization, I hate people that wear perfume and cologne. It seemed like at every turn my nose was greeted with a new scent. So many different strong smells is quite jarring if you think about it. I certainly did this week.

I guess I’m pretty spoiled when it comes to people wearing scents around me. My workplace isn’t exactly conducive to waking up in the morning and feeling like you need to look fab-u-lous. If fact it’s really funny to see a new female engineer start. In the beginning she shows up, hair all blow dried and down and with a full face of makeup. Then slowly but surely, the hair turns into a wet ponytail and you’re lucky if you get mascara and eye liner. I can poke fun at this because that is exactly what happened to me. Every time I look at the picture on my badge, I chuckle to myself about the energy I had to spend time on looking so good under my hair net and safety glasses.

Sorry back to smells, the point of that story was to show even the ladies at work don’t take the time to wear perfume. My shampoo and hand lotion (which is usually only slightly scented and if you, like me, use the Huggies lotion, smells like babies.) is good enough. I can’t remember the last time I actually put perfume on. I don’t even know where my perfume is. I don’t think I even need to say the male engineers don’t bother with smelly stuff. We’re lucky they wear matching socks most days.

It really made me feel bad for people that are allergic to that type of stuff. Seriously, how would they leave the house in Long Beach?

Maybe I’m just a scent Nazi. After marrying Shad I refused to buy him his Old Spice body wash (do you think he’ll be embarrassed that everyone that reads our blog now knows he uses body wash instead of a bar of soap?) because it smelled like old men to me and I hated how it made our bathroom and bedroom smell like old men…everyday.
So did this post distract you from the fact it tells you nothing about my trip to Long Beach except for the fact it smells (good?) there? Nice. There are two reasons for this:

1) I left my camera (and thus pictures of Long Beach) in Cali with my sister so they could take a picture of themselves at UCLA for her in-law’s Christmas card this year (I don’t know).

2) Because I don’t have pictures of Long Beach, I don’t really remember what I did there for 5 days. I’m not kidding. I have the worst memory ever when it comes to the question what did you do today or this weekend? Shad asks me that every night and I usually just say I was in meetings all day because I honestly can’t really remember what I did. I guess it’s a good coping mechanism to separate the stress of work from home but honestly that’s no excuse for not remembering what we did Saturday night on Monday morning.

Yosemi - me?

2009-10-14T07:28:00.000-07:00

Shad and I just got back from Yosemite National Park on Monday. Neither of us had ever been (neither had our friends Jared and Jen that went with us) so it was way fun to wander and find what the park had to offer.

Being from Utah, I was surprised at how many lakes there were this late in the season (most of the waterfalls dry up in August).

What is it about a log in a lake that makes you want to climb on it?

I wasn't causing any trouble on the log, promise.

The trees in the park were so big. This one had been hit by lightening and split. Jen told us to get in the hole and look happy so we did.

This was probably my favorite stop of the trip. Tenaya Lake. We were driving to go to another lake but as we drove past this one and I saw the white sandy beaches I insisted we stopped. It ended up being a good time. The water wasn't even that bad so we got to play in it.

Day two, we found ourselves hiking around the valley in the main part of the park.

Here we are relaxing by a river. Notice the man in his boxers in the back ground getting ready for a swim. He wasn't even European. Ah the people you meet in national parks.

Nevada falls, one of the few that still has water this late in the year.

Day three was Giant Sequoia day. There are a few groves of Sequoias in the park, this is the biggest. The trees were so cool. It made the gross curvy road to get there that made both Jen and I sick worth it.

The wood from one Giant Sequoia is equal to 100 acres of forest. Too bad they're really fragile so when they fall over they literally shatter.

Here I am demonstrating how one of their pinecones is bigger than my head.

For our last night in the park we waited on a ridge to watch the sunset. So pretty.

Today I'm headed back to Cali to attend the Society of Women Engineers national conference in Long Beach. It's going to be a blast. I hope the house is in one piece when I get back.

Sweater...

2009-10-06T13:06:00.000-07:00

What is it about the cold that makes you want to curl up in a ball on the couch and not come out until it’s 80 degrees outside again? If I had had that choice this weekend, guarantee I would have done it.

Instead of laying on the couch, I was very productive. Friday night our friends Tosca and Ben had a little get together at their casa to celebrate finally being moved in. It’s a super adorable condo and I love both of them to death. Unfortunately for Shad, he got stuck at work late and didn’t make the departure cutoff so I went it alone. I’m sure he had a slamin’ Friday night at the house with our puppy though. I had a great time visiting with friends and hearing ridiculous stories from Ben and Ty about their antics while in the Green Peanuts together.

Saturday morning I got up and went tutoring and then returned home to watch some conference and get ready for craft day with Jen and Danielle. We had originally planned to do mosaics but that plan got nixed due to none of us finding something we wanted to mosaic and another opportunity came up that couldn’t be delayed. Instead we helped Jen get her Halloween costume together.

What is she being, you might ask? To which I have to respond that it’s amazing and there were lots of pictures taken but because it’s a surprise and the surprisee might glance at our blog before Halloween, you, my friend are going to have to wait. Jen’s sister is getting married on Halloween in Ohio and to celebrate the holiday in style, costumes are allowed and encouraged for the reception. Jen, looking for any excuse to get out of her bridesmaid dress early, decided to opt for a costume.

After craft day and priesthood session, Shad and I enjoyed a delicious dinner at Bistro 258. If there was one thing I could change about Ogden, it would be the lack of delicious nicer restaurants. If we’re down in Salt Lake and get to have dinner, it’s almost too hard to decide. In Ogden I always have to make a choice do I want a nice dinner (which leaves us with one maybe two options) or an okay dinner. It’s a hard choice and part of me says at that point, just make dinner, which is good for our wallets but not as satisfying.

Sunday was couch day while we watched conference. Well, I watched conference, Shad slept through at least half of conference. It was such a nice relaxing Sunday.

So you know how some people say that their kids are their punishment for being a really stubborn kid or a really out of hand kid or for never sleeping when they were little? I think Dublin is my punishment for hating the cold. He loathes it. Yesterday when I got home from work, I went to let him out. He rang the bell like a good puppy and at that moment it started to snow outside. I opened the door for him to go out and he looked at me like I was crazy. I tried to get him to go out, I even tried to push him but when a 75 pound pit bull doesn’t want to go outside, I’m not going to get him to go outside. Luckily it stopped snowing and he happily went out after that. I’m going to have to buy him a sweater.

Birthdays?

2009-09-25T13:41:00.000-07:00

Now that I’m done blogging about the cruise, we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming. Last week was a super busy week for us. It was Shad’s birthday and our first anniversary and I had gotten us tickets to see The Get Up Kids. Good week.

Wednesday night was The Get Up Kids show. I had mixed feelings about the whole concert on a weeknight after having some exhausting days at work post vacation. Sometimes I think it’s not worth going on vacation to face the mess at work you have to come back to. But, we had the tickets so we went. We tried to go to Café Niche for dinner, apparently they only do dinner Friday and Saturday nights. I hear their brunch is to die for though so check it out sometime. Instead we ended up at Faustina, it was amazing as usual. It’s Dine O Round time in SLC so I was excited to see what they were offering; turns out they’ve changed their entire menu to work like Dine O Round – all year long! Ideal!

After dinner we trekked over to At the Venue for the show. While listening to the first two bands, I got bored and started to wonder if I was getting too old to go to shows still, it kept getting later and later and I kept on thinking about the 6:30 morning meeting the next morning and started thinking more and more about just going home without seeing The Get Up Kids at all. Luckily we toughed it out and made it to their set, and it was amazing. I think taking a few years off did a world of good for this band. I saw them a few years ago and they put on a good show but this time around, they were relaxed, they joked around, the strayed from the set list. It was great, all the reasons why I love their type of music in the first place. I hope they make plans to do another CD together and tour again but a few years off again wouldn’t be so bad either.

Thursday was Shad’s birthday. Because I tutor on Thursday nights, we planned to celebrate it on Saturday but Shad did get to open his present from me, the latest season of The Office and some new clothes. I feel like anytime I give Shad presents I give him clothes, I can’t help it that he tends to ruin clothes quickly (at least by my standards – maybe not his). Friday was our first anniversary. Shad had asked if he could plan a surprise for me, unfortunately the spa called me the day before to remind me about our couples massage. Someday he will be able to plan a surprise I won’t find out about. I wasn’t even trying this time! The massage was wonderful and after we went to our favorite Chinese restaurant right next door to the spa in Layton. I miss living right across the street from that place. For my present, Shad has stolen my Martha Stuart craft book earlier in the week and made some paper flowers at our friend Jen’s house. That’s right one year later and I have the man crafting for me.
They say that the first year is the worst and I’m willing to believe it in a heartbeat. Shad really could have used a sister growing up. Hopefully our next year won’t be so life changing either, we went from working 100 miles apart and seeing each other on Tuesdays (even though we were married and lived in the same apartment), to new a job, to buying a house and moving to Ogden, to various house projects (we do not paint well together), to getting a new puppy. It’s been a fun adventure so far and I’m looking forward to the fun years to come.

Saturday, I went tutoring and came home to start Shad’s birthday celebration. Shad had said for his birthday he wanted to take Dublin swimming somewhere and then go up to Huntsville for a lone star burger. We took Dublin Swimming at Willard Bay and he did surprisingly well. I was worried he would get to where he couldn’t touch and freak out, no instead he started trying to chase a boat that went by where we were. Luckily Shad was in the water to stop him and point him back towards shore. Too bad he’s not bred to be a water dog though. After 30 minutes in the water, he was shivering so we called it a day. I was such a proud Mom to see him actually swimming. With some more practice, he’ll be a champ.

After that, instead of going up to Huntsville, we had Jen and Jared over for a BBQ and to watch the Ute game. It was a fun night despite the game being pretty terrible.

Sunday we went down to my parents to celebrate our birthdays with them, dinner was delicious and it’s always great to see my family and hang out with them.

This weekend Shad gets to go camping with the 11 year old scouts so hopefully I will get a quiet night at home.

It's all about comparisons

2009-09-22T09:22:00.000-07:00

So, in my last blog post I ended our cruise summary by telling you I will probably not go on a cruise ever again. You curious to hear why? Tuff, you’re going to hear it anyway through my list of pros and cons.

Pro: Cheap transportation to many different destinations – it seriously would have cost $6000 in airfare each to visit each spot. Not worth it.

Con: We only got to spend a few hours at each destination. Shad and I are engineers and thus very good at setting a very ambitious schedule and accomplishing it, that’s just not the way I like my vacations. I like to take my time and have less of a plan and more time just exploring. On the plus side, the spots we didn’t really love, we only were there for a few hours.

Pro: Copious amounts of food all the time. Now this is the number one thing people raved about while talking about their previous cruise experiences. I don’t know where these people eat normally but the food was not of good quality, even in the fancy dining room. Seriously it is convenient to go get pizza whenever the thought occurs to you, but is it really that hard to get pizza on a daily basis outside of a cruise? For me it is not. I guess for other people it is.

Con: Eating with strangers for dinner every night. On cruises typically when you eat in the dining room you have an assigned table with your fellow cruise passengers. I pictured a large round table when I thought about this situation. Not a cozy booth with one other couple we had never seen before in our lives. It’s much harder to ignore the others at the table and talk amongst yourselves when you are staring directly at two strangers two feet away from you. This was our situation. Enter Hannah and Christian from Chicago (originally Poland). Chicago is rising fast on my least favorite places ever – it will never replace Wyoming but it might come close. Hannah and Christian both work in the financial sector in securities or something. They both hate cruising yet have been on several. They hate the food on the cruise ship, they hate the cheesy activities, they don’t go swimming in the pool and go to bed by 9:00. On our days at sea, we had to hear how bored they were the entire day. We had to hear about all the things the cruise line used to do but have cut back on. During the days we stopped at places, we got to hear about their scuba diving trip (that’s all they did at every port) and then the annoying things that happened to them while on land and then lastly, the told us what we did wrong on our excursions for the day. Seriously best night of the cruise was the night we got back from port too late and opted to shower instead of rushing to dinner.

Pro: Towel animals. Who doesn’t love a good towel animal with turndown service?

Con: It’s loud. I didn’t get a good night sleep the entire time on the cruise. The walls are thin and with people walking and stewards rolling carts up and down the hall all hours of the night, it was my worst nightmare. I was so happy to get home to our silent house to actually sleep.

Pro: We made new Australian friends. On our way to the port on the shuttle from the hotel we bonded with a cute couple over the less than fancy hotel we stayed in the night before. Throughout the check in day, we kept on running into them. They’re names were Matt and Bella and we had a blast hanging out with them for a lot of the time on the ship. It was nice to share our time with a young couple that didn’t hate cruising. They even had a few incidents that required medical attention and that still didn’t get them down. (Bella twisted her ankle on the water slide at Margaritaville in Grand Cayman and Matt cut his head and had to get stitches in Roatan after a shop awning fell on it.)

Con: People everywhere. I don’t really like people and on the ship beside you’re really loud stateroom, you have no option but to be surrounded by them. I couldn’t help to think back to our honeymoon in Cabo where we saw a maximum of 5 people in our resort the entire week. That was bliss.

There you go. There are a ton of other places in the world Shad and I are dying to see and chances are good we won’t be seeing them anytime soon from a cruise ship.

Crusin'

2009-09-16T09:11:00.000-07:00

Okay, I couldn't help myself. Here's what we brought Dublin back from our cruise, doesn't he look ready to go to Mexico? Maybe next time pup.

In my usual vacation style, most of this post will be pictures. I'm sure there will be other posts to follow. I have a lot to cover.

Here's Miami as the ship was leaving. It was our first time in Miami, I don't think I would go back just for a vacation but it was fun to stay for the night.

Here we are on our first formal night. Don't we look lovely?

Our first stop was Grand Cayman. Here's a picture in Hell (yes that's the town's name, you can see why).

Here we are, looking happy in Hell.

Next stop in Grand Cayman was the Turtle Farm, I was pretty excited for this activity. We got to actually pick up the turtles. They raise turtles here to eat. These are just babies, the other ones were so big! None of my pictures of them turned out so great though. We learned there's no limit to how big a turtle can grow, it's only limited by how much food it can find. They feed there's like 10 times a day no joke so they grow to be 100's of pounds.

Turtle!

Our next stop was Isla Roatan. It's an island Honduras owns. It was easily our favorite stop on the cruise. We did some ocean kayaking and snorkeling here. So fun. After snorkeling we got a tour on the nature park they have there. Unfortunately while snorkeling, my camera battery died (I forgot to charge it before the cruise, and I forgot the charger, my bad). Luckily for us, Shad had the disposable one left from our honeymoon with him so the pictures of us with monkeys and parrots will have to wait a bit. Also luckily for us when the 20 pictures on the disposable ran out, I still had my phone. (How many times has this thing saved my life? I've lost count!)

Pretty reef in Roatan.

This was my first time snorkeling ever (Shad's first time when there was something worth seeing) and I loved it! I definitely would do it again (and did!).

Our next cruise stop was Belize, it's the country that borders the south part of Mexico and Guatemala. Here we opted to go visit some Mayan ruins called Altun Ha. It very cool to hear the history of the specific buildings and see the amazing things the people were able to build with such primitive means.

On our way to the ruins, we also got to have a little city tour. If you're looking for cheap land, Belize is the place for you, the government gives it out (to anyone!) all you have to do is build something on it, you don't even have to finish that something.

There's only a Coke plant in Belize so no Pepsi or Dr. Pepper for them but they do get to have Coke made with real sugar and in glass bottles. So delicious.

Our last stop on the cruise was Cozumel, Mexico. We didn't really do anything exciting here, we took a Taxi to a beach with all sorts of water toys and relaxed there all day. It was fun but it felt exactly like all the other Mexican cities I've been to.

While snorkeling at the beach, we found Patrick Star next to his rock. And yes, I took this picture underwater with my iphone using the bag my camera previously used for snorkeling. More on that later.

All and all it was a good vacation. Would I cruise again? Honestly, probably not. We can get into those reasons in another post for now, just imagine yourself on a warm beach listening to the waves.

9 Months

2009-09-02T08:50:00.000-07:00

Our sweet puppy turns nine months old today. Here's your obligatory picture with the monkey to show how much he's grown. I'm still amazed.

3 months

6 months9 months

Where is it?

2009-09-01T11:22:00.001-07:00

Another weekend, another weekend adventure down for our End of Summer Vacation Bonanza. I just came up with that name on the fly, pretty sweet.

Last weekend Shad, Jen, Danielle and I drove to Great Basin National Park. Now if you’re like 99% of the other people I’ve told this to, your next question is where is it? I will tell you my friend. Head south on I-15 until you see the signs for one of my favorite towns – Delta, UT. Head West until you reach Nevada. It’s that simple and surprisingly close.

On another happy note, this is the first time I’ve been on a vacation with Jen that something terrible didn’t happen on our way to our destination. Let’s review just for fun –

The Grand Canyon – we got lost driving to Kanab to spend the night. It was dark and there were signs saying we were in Arizona already. How can we be in Arizona without passing through Kanab? Danielle’s Iphone saved our lives, I fell in love with a phone that night…

Moab – This trip was full of unfortunate events – Hitting a deer in Rex, Jared being hit on by a 70 year old man, Jen kneeing Jared in the face. That vacay really sucked for Jared.

Zion Narrows – We ran out of gas 5 miles outside of Panguitch, UT and my hips decided to stop working about 3 miles into our 14 mile water hike.

Now for Great Basin, NV. For some reason you can’t reserve campsites in the park in advance so I reserved us a spot at the campground in Baker, NV. It was across the street from one of the parks visitor centers. Why the visitor center is not in the actual park, I do not know. Now I knew this campsite would be fun, it was advertised not only as a campsite but a Motel, RV Park, Showers and Bar. Sweet. I kind of wish I had taken pictures but the thought didn’t cross my mind when we were living it.

We arrived late Thursday night only to find we had reserved a campsite for three consecutive weekends. Pretty amazing considering I had called on Monday and managed to reserve a site for the weekend before that Monday, I’m just that good. We told them we wouldn’t be back the next weekend.

We set up camp and realized there was nothing to do and it was too early to go to bed. What did we do? We went and played pool in the bar, we know how to camp in style. It was the most depressing bar I have ever seen, not saying a lot I know. Danielle made me promise her if she ended up as a regular in a bar like that anywhere in the world, I would come get her and remind her to get a life.

Friday we got up and headed to the visitor center in the park for the Lehman cave tour. The cave was actually really cool, I had never been in a real cave before. I took lots of pictures. Our wonderful tour guide, Travis did a wonderful job taking us back in time to the year the cave was discovered. We did our best not to snicker at the fact he couldn’t say the works Monument, document or electricity. It was more like monament, docament and alectricity. They were used quite frequently throughout the tour considering we were in a national monament, where the scientist was docamenting lots of things and the year was 1800 something when there was no alectricity. Good times.

Another favorite cave experience was when another tour group member volunteered to take a picture of all four of us, while the entire rest of the tour group awkwardly stared at us in silence. Have you ever had an awkward pause with 20 people simultaneously? We have. Here’s the picture.

And some cave pictures.

After the tour it was time to do some hiking. We did a mountain lake hike and then headed to the glacier – it’s the only glacier in Nevada!

I found a friend.

Here's lake Stella. It was fun.

Great Basin is known for it's Bristle cone Pines. Here's one we passed on our way to the glacier.

Jen made a snow angel.

We all helped make a snowman.

Saturday we picked for the long hike we wanted to do in the park. The Wheeler peak hike gains about 3,000 feet of elevation in its short 4 mile distance. As we started out on the hike and two easy miles into it, we realized that with only two miles left to go to the peak, it was going to go straight up the side of the mountain. Here are pictures of us at the peak.

It was not easy and I don’t think at the end of the day any of us thought the hike was fun (maybe Shad, he wasn’t even winded). I don’t think I’ll do a summit hike again anytime soon.

After the hike we stopped at the other visitor center for Jen to get her magnet. Then it was off for a much needed shower and to one of the two restaurants in Baker, NV. We picked the one not attached to a motel. It actually turned out to be very delicious. I would highly recommend it next time you're in Baker.

After dinner we could barely move so what did we do, headed down the street to play on the school playground. It was quite fun.

Sunday morning we packed up and headed home. I was so excited to get home and see my puppy. He's so cute. We promised him next time we went camping he could come with us for sure.

We rock

2009-08-24T14:01:00.000-07:00

I can’t believe summer is officially over. I can’t believe how fast it went this year. I had always heard that when you get older time goes faster because your days are so much more the same than when you were little. I’m starting to see how true that is. One minute it’s Monday and the next it’s Friday. I don’t know where the time goes.

On to updating you on our latest activities. Two weekends ago we had one of the busiest Saturdays I can remember having in quite awhile. I started off the day with tutoring – something I haven’t done much of this summer since the children were coming mostly during the day. I came home did some cleaning and got ready for our fun filled evening. We had a birthday party, wedding and show to attend, in that order. I was actually amazed how well the times worked out for each event.

First was Annie’s hubby’s birthday party, he was turning the big 30 so she planned a surprise party. We were a bit late due to cutting up the watermelon so we missed the surprise. Sorry Steve! It was wonderful to see Annie and all of my other girlfriends. I don’t get to see them enough. Hopefully they will come and play after we’re done with vacation. After only staying a little bit it was off to our next destination, our friend Brandi’s wedding.

We made it out to Toole in 40 minutes – after the Iphone saved us from getting stuck on traffic on the 201. Thanks Iphone for keeping us on schedule. Brandi was a fellow co-op at the company Shad and I met at as co-ops. She is an adorable girl and made a beautiful bride with her bright green shoes. Totally sweet. She had been together with the groom for years and still Shad and I had never met him. He seems like a nice guy though.

On our way out of Toole, there was a quick stop at Del Taco for some food (we had missed the food at both the party and wedding and didn’t want to wait to eat another 40 minutes). We arrived at the Sweater Friends show in Jake’s backyard only about 5 minutes late – super sweet! We watched his cousin Ben perform a few songs then it was our turn. It was a bit chilly for August and by the end, I couldn’t feel my fingers but all and all, it was a good show with all of our favorite people.
A
fter the show, instead of driving home we opted to sleep at my parents since I was singing in my parent’s ward the next morning – Don’t worry Dublin came with us and stayed too. We’re not that bad of parents.

The musical number with my sister went pretty well, I think it was better than the first time we sang it in her ward. That done and over we returned to my parents for a Sunday afternoon nap and family dinner. It was almost like a mini vacation away from home to see all of my friends.

This last Wednesday night was designated our monthly craft night. We opted to do a craft from Martha’s Encyclopedia of Crafts. Ideal. We made Sand candles. Martha told us to use fine grain sand, we used paver sand – just a slight difference. Needless to say, our candles didn’t look like Martha’s. We’ll try harder next time.

Just as the pizza arrived Shad and Jared came home from golfing. We ate and put them to work assembling the slip n slide. It’s not craft day without slip n slide. This is maybe why the church encourages people to have kids while they’re young instead of spending their evening modifying slip n slides for adult use, they’re engaged in righteous causes.

This weekend I was supposed to be on coverage (should have retracted my previous blog post about not having it for awhile). It was called on Friday which left me with a very open weekend. Friday Shad went to SLC for his brother’s birthday party. I got home too late to go. I heard it was a good time though. I lounged on the couch and watched TV. Saturday I cleaned the house and then my family came up for dinner. My sister’s husband was in town for the weekend (he is going to school in LA now and Kristen is still working and living here) so we all wanted to get together. If was fun to have them come up to us for a change. We went to dinner at the Oaks and Shad and I got to ride in Scott’s beamer. It was good times in the canyon.

Sunday I slept in super late and went to the 3:00 session of the Oquirrh Mountain Temple dedication. It was a wonderful meeting despite the lady that had to yawn every five minutes so loudly right next to me.

I’m super excited to head to Great Basin this weekend. It should be a fun trip, then it’s off on our cruise. It’s going to be a good three weeks.

A Fair Time

2009-08-13T08:25:00.000-07:00

Last Friday night Shad and I trekked on over to the Weber County Fair grounds for the Weber County Fair. Who doesn't love a good fair? Animals, terrible cover bands and fried food. I know of no other place you can compete in such exciting areas as table settings and terrifying looking dolls. Here are a bunch of pictures from our fair experience.

We Considered picking up a new organ in the vendor building, because organs are fun, the display says so.
I think I might suggest these to my company for cost savings. Forget Sharpies - Skerples are all the rage!
And how could we go home with out a transformable robot? He looks like someone very familiar.
We then braved the animal areas, we saw some really fat lazy pigs. We found one that was awake.
There were some adorable sheep - Shad still won't let me get one! I keep on telling him Dublin likes sheep but he thinks otherwise. Plus he keeps on telling me they're stupid animals and will get into trouble. I made sure he didn't say those things around the sheep - their feelings would have been hurt.

We paid 50 cents to get our faces painted. Thanks Weber County Library.This is why you should pay more than 50 cents for face painting. This lightening bolt was no where near this obese in the example.

Lastly I think the fair confirmed Dublin's previous goat existence. When we visited the petting area which animals were shoving their heads through the cages and stealing food to get attention? Sheep is the wrong answer, it wasn't the really obese cow either. You guessed it, the goats. They loved new people especially children just as much as our dog does. He will stop at nothing to get their attention!

Oh yeah, we did come home with a new friend for Dublin. His name is Zeke, short for Ezekiel. He's a Dwarf African Frog. I showed him to Dublin when we came home and he tried to eat him. I say new friend, and he thinks I wonder if he tastes good. Zeke lives on the kitchen counter now, safe from Dublin's reach.

PS - The other day Dublin caught a grasshopper and I had to rescue it from his mouth. I saw him chasing something in the grass then suddenly he just stopped and sat down. I went over and opened his mouth and sure enough, there was a little green grasshopper sitting on his tongue. Lucky for the grasshopper our dog doesn't believe in chewing things he eats, he hopped out and went on his merry way. I guess since he can't catch birds, grasshoppers are the next best thing.

Narrowed?

2009-08-05T12:09:00.001-07:00

This last weekend Shad and our friend Jen took a trip down to Zion to do the narrows. It was a weekend full of adventure as always. We left Thursday night after work and drove down to Mount Carmel, Utah. On our way, Shad thought there was a gas station at the exit on I-15 to get onto Highway 20. There was not, and the gas light was on. Since Panguitch was only 30 miles away, we thought we could make it.

Apparently our guesstimation was 5.7 miles wrong because 5.7 miles outside of Panguitch we ran out of gas. It was a first for all of us and we got to hear all the gossip on the local gas station drama from the triple A guy when he finally showed up so really I think we are much better for it.

We arrived to our campsite without issue to find a note on the office door saying we could camp at site 1 or to the left of the cabin. Turns out the RV park in Mount Carmel doesn't really have the tent sites it advertises on it's website. We opted for left of the cabin because there was grass there.

The next morning we got up and headed to Zion to catch the shuttle to Chamberlain's Ranch (where the Narrows hike starts). I was pretty excited we were doing the shuttle since the car fiasco you have to do is such a pain. It might have been worth it though.

I guess our shuttle driver was on a schedule because he drove up the dirt road to the ranch (typically a 2 hour drive) like we were being chased by Nazis. We made it there in 1 hour and 15 minutes. New record maybe? Who cares? All I know is all of us were so car sick by the end and neither Jen nor I have EVER been car sick in our lives. I literally stopped talking to Jen mid sentence and turned around to face the front of the van or I would have pucked all over her. Yikes.

I think I'll let the pictures do the rest of the talking...
Just getting into the narrows.

Look at how fresh and happy I look. Ready for lots of fun river hiking.

Jen told me I wasn't allowed to wave.

Can you find me in this picture? Jen was going for something artsy. Apparently that means you can't use a flash...

They made me get in the water to go see the waterfall. My husband decided it would be a good time to give me a nice wet hug. Thanks hubby.

Then Jen made us take a "cute one."

This is a picture from where we camped. Very pretty. I think we went to bed at about 6:00 pm though. We were tired!

Still day one somewhere in the river.

I don't remember why Shad was making this face. I thought it was awesome enough to include though.

So at this point, my hip flexors are starting to really hurt and I'm praying they will be miraculously healed for day 2 A.K.A. death river day. See how I can still hide the pain with a smile?

Here I am about 2 hours into day 2. See how I can't hide the pain through a smile? No miracles happened overnight while sleeping on the hard ground hoping the animals running around near my head wouldn't run over my head (it happened last time I was sleeping in the narrows). They didn't.

Here we are in more really cold water Jen and Shad made me get into. I got out to "take pictures."

Here are Jen and Shad playing on yet another waterfall. I took one for the team and stayed dry.

And that's where the pictures end. The waterfall was just too much for the digital camera and it decided to slip away to the big white flash in the sky. Don't feel too bad for it. Jen's camera had already withstood being dropped in the ocean and getting sand stuck in it (hence the grinding noise it made when you turned it on) and being bashed against a rock in Moab while Jen was kneeing Jared in the face (the lcd screen was a gonner so you never knew if your pictures were actually being taken until after the trip). Now Jen gets to get a new camera. Bonus!

It's probably best the camera died, none of the pictures of me would have been good. I can't remember a time when I was in more pain. Luckily it only hurt when I had to pick up my leg which when you're hiking through a river full of rocks happens just about every step. Other than that, the trip was a success.

When the river finally ended, we went back to our campsite (really a patch of grass next to a cabin in a trailer park so not really a campsite) and made the camping staple, cheese stuffed bacon wrapped hot dogs and went to bed. The next morning it was back home to see our puppy and take a nap.

Whoopee!

2009-07-28T11:05:00.000-07:00

Guess what, I have good news – I don’t have any more coverage for the foreseeable future. Do you know how good that feels? It feels really good. We’re also going on vacation this week. Also very delightful.

I’m not going to fill you in on the weekend, I was asleep so I don’t really know what Shad did all weekend. Last night we had a very…interesting experience.

Jen’s mom is in town for a month long visit. Jen’s mom wanted to attend some sort of play while she was out here. Jen told me this a few months ago and I suggested a few of the companies in Salt Lake thinking she wanted something great. Apparently any play would do, including something at the local community theatre. Shad and I had the pleasure of attending with them. Without further ado, I bring you my review of Whoopee!

Okay so going into the play there was quite the discussion prior at work as to what it was about. Many people guessed Whoopi Goldberg, they would be wrong. The description on the playhouse website told of singing cowboys and flashy costumes. Okay, I asked Jen if it would be like High School Musical but with cowboys, she told me yes – As a side note, after the play was over we soon realized we were thinking of different high school musicals. Me, the delightful Disney production filmed at East High, Jen was thinking of her actual high school musical. She grew up in a small town and in order to have all necessary characters for the play, girls had to play men. Very different mental pictures.

The program explained the play was written in the 1920’s about the time when musical theatre was just getting its start. A possible excuse for the spectacle to come? As the theatre started to fill, it became apparent the mid twenty age range was not their target audience-more like seventy. Jen assured me we would be in the majority once the cast was on stage. Participating in community plays is all the rage amongst our demographic, right? With the opening chorus, it became apparent we were still not in the majority. And that’s where things went wrong.

Now, I felt bad for the actors because I know my facial expression showed my moderate disgust as they poorly danced around the stage and sang. We were in the second row and I knew they could see it, but I was too appalled to hide it. Things took a turn for the confusing about the time of the third scene. A character was talking to the “love of his life” begging her to not marry Sheriff Bob and run away with him to live with “his people.” With his effeminate gestures, orange spray tan and loafers, he clearly wasn’t straight. I was confused why he wanted to bring Sally back to “his people”. I mean the lace wedding dress she was wearing was a bit unfortunate but not enough to call in the Queer Eye guys, right? I turns out he was supposed to be an Indian (loafers=moccasins). I thought Waninis was just a new trendy name, kind of like spelling Tom with a th. I’m glad Jen was there to help me figure out what “people” he was referring to. It was still pretty distracting. I know gay actors and have seen them act absolutely convincingly straight on stage. Were the pickings that slim? Jen didn’t help with her chuckles and comments.

Things got better once Sally and Harry? (Herbert, Walter, Chuck – I don’t remember his name) ran away. Now those two actors were surprisingly wonderful. If the play had just been them for the remainder, we wouldn’t have solved anything plot wise but it would have been a good experience.

I think Jen’s comment after the play sums it up nicely, “In high school we had girls playing men and they did a better job than that guy.” It was a very entertaining night, but not for the right reasons.

They were roasted

2009-07-24T19:00:00.000-07:00

Sorry for no real update until now this week, I was waiting to be on backs to have something to do. I'm sure you've all been dying to hear how the hot dog roast went. I have one word - Fantastic!

I was a little worried it was going to be super hot, that's why it didn't start until 7. I really wish our backyard had a bit more shade. Hopefully it will in the next year or so. Since the house is pretty much done, next year's project is the backyard. Gulp.

The evening started off with everyone roasting their hot dogs on the fire - or getting Shad to do it on the grill (cheaters). I was actually surprised how many people roasted their own. Also surprised how hot the fire was, the paito around the fire pit needs to be enlarged a pit - see paragraph above. Here's everyone (mostly my fellow ward members) enjoying dinner.

After dinner and popcicles, and the sun had disappeared behind the house across the street, it was time to play. Jake and I played for about an hour since we were the only ones and it was really delightful. It was nice seeing everyone sprawled out on the grass enjoying the music instead of awkwardly standing in a venue.

Jake and Jess also brought some of their neices and nephews to the roast, they were really cute. They even got up to dance during some of the music. Ah to be young again.

After the music, we roasted marshmallows on the fire and called it a night. I can't wait to do a similar thing in a few weeks at Jake and Jess' house. There's information on our blog if your interested.

Non Sweater Friends related news - Dublin made Shad go and get him a chair to sit on the other day in the backyard. He's kind of a high maintenance pit bull. I thought he only made me do it because I taught him to get on the chair. I would be wrong.

Coping with transition

2009-07-21T11:51:00.000-07:00

For those of you that don’t know my company announced a few weeks ago it was laying some people off. The goal was to lay off about 600 salaried people worldwide. We found out about the layoffs about 3 months ago. Luckily the Ogden facility was told our impact would be very limited which was nice, but no one could give us specific numbers. Yesterday was the day of layoffs and not surprisingly Ogden only lost one employee. By yesterday afternoon, work was finally back to normal, it was great.

K-C also has an employee assistance program, if you or family members are struggling, they will pay for you to go see a counselor etc. I guess it’s company policy to have an EAP person present at every facility when a lay off occurs. The EAP person at our plant happened to pick the conference room by my cube to set up shop for the day. Now normally that would be fine, but after lunch a few of my co workers stopped by to pick up treats Jen had left on my desk. We started talking about what we had heard from some other facilities and departments. One of them brought up the story about the French union workers that had wired their facility with explosives because they were angry about wages. The news story reported they had agreed to go into negotiations on Thursday and had removed the gas canisters but promised they would put them back in “15 minutes” if negotiations didn’t go the way they wanted. We had a pretty good laugh at the ridiculousness of wiring the facility with explosives in the first place but we thought it even worse that the facility would allow them to be put back. I guess this was the wrong day and place to be joking about something like that.

Mid conversation the EAP guy walked over to my cube and explained he couldn’t help but over hear our conversation. He reminded us that he was over in the conference room if we felt like we needed to talk. We just sat there in awkward silence until he walked away. I then pointed my finger at the one that had started the explosives conversation and jokingly told him that was obviously not an appropriate conversation to be having at work. The others walked away and the guilty party stayed for another treat. While we were still talking the EAP guy came back and handed us each an article, explaining he knew sometimes people didn’t want to talk about problems. The title of the article…Coping with Transition. I think the EAP guy should try and spend some more time around engineers before he comes back again. Maybe then he would realize the explosives conversation was a normal thing we had all been dying to get back to once we knew everything would be okay. He shouldn’t have been worried to hear that conversation, he should have walked away with a smile knowing we were all going to be just fine after yesterday.

It's Tuesday

2009-07-16T12:23:00.000-07:00

Today might be Thursday for the rest of you but today is my Tuesday. There’s nothing like random coverage to totally screw with your schedule. Tomorrow will be my Friday though. I can’t wait until August when things hopefully will be back to normal. I say hopefully.

I’m pretty excited for the hot dog roast on Saturday. I think it should get a pretty good turnout which will be fun. I’m always nervous when we plan stuff in Ogden since I haven’t been here for a long time, I underestimate the number of people I know that might want to hang out at my house. Our house warming party was a good example of that.

I really need to text Jake and get a set list put together. I’m going to do that right now. Hold on.

Okay. Check and check. Speaking of the Sweater Friends we had an ideal show a few weeks ago. It started off as one of the weirdest places we’ve played but by the end of the show, we felt right at home.

We played at a place called the Boing Collective. It’s basically an anarchist bookstore/house. Jake had just told me about the bookstore part so when we pulled up to the address and it was a house, I was a little worried. When we walked in the house and set our stuff down, no one said a word to us. So we stood there awkwardly looking around. Jake went to go find Robin, the kid who had set up the show, only to be asked if he was looking for the girl Robin or boy Robin. While we were standing there two guys came in and asked for Steve Miller. The people in the house said they didn’t know a Steve. Then another guy said, isn’t there a guy living in the basement named Steve, but I don’t think his last name is Miller. They left. We stood there wondering why the people that lived in the house didn’t know the names of the other people who lived in the house. When we asked one person how many people lived there we were given a range. A range? We opted to sit out on the sidewalk in front until it was time to play.

By the time we did start to play, there were quite a few people there (more than the range?) which was surprising. When we started playing, it’s safe to say they were the most attentive audience we have ever played for. The other artists that played with us were amazing as well. I came home with 4 new cds.

Because of coverage I had Monday and Tuesday off this week. I took the opportunity to take my friend Jen down to the Oquirrh Mountain Temple open house. I hadn’t been to an open house since the Vernal Temple was built so it was nice to go. I’m glad Jen was willing to go with me since I wanted to go on a weekday to avoid the line being long and slow. I was surprised at how small the temple seemed but it was beautiful as always. We also may have gotten yelled at in the celestial room by an usher. We had stopped so I could explain to Jen what the room represented and tell her a little about the temple. Apparently the 6 foot wide aisle way was not wide enough for the group behind us to go around.

After the temple we went back to our house and played on a slip n slide. I had told Shad awhile ago I wanted one (the kiddie pool got me in the mood) and he left me a note a few days ago with a Walmart giftcard that said “for a slip n slide.” I got up early Monday morning before the temple to go purchase said slide. Unfortunately the Walmart near us doesn’t sell slip n slides. LAME! Luckily Shopko came through for us. We brought it home and got it set up. Of course the pieces that were the most time consuming to put together were useless and got chucked to the side after two uses. I guess it’s the thought that counts. We had a delightful afternoon playing though the slide was not built long enough for two average sized adults. We have plans to extend it next time. Sorry for the lack of pictures…I’ve been lazy with the camera but you can imagine the good times that were had.

Also this week I got around to booking the stuff for our cruise in September. I heard there was an airfare war going on last week and decided to take advantage of it. I am already super excited for it. The countdown Carnival puts on their webpage when you log in doesn’t help either… 52 days.

We have a pretty full summer ahead of us trip wise. In two weeks, we’re going to Zion to do the Narrows with a few of my co-workers. At the end of August, hopefully we will be sailing around Catalina. Then we finish up the summer with our week long Caribbean cruise. Ideal. It seems like I tend to save up my vacation time just in case so the end of the year always ends up a lot busier.

Pulley changes

2009-07-08T04:06:00.001-07:00

I've been waiting for a pulley change on the machine I'm on tonight for 2 hours. There are no signs that it's going to be done before it's time to go home. So why do I get to stay here? Two words, turnover meeting. I can't tell you how many times I've had nothing to do on coverage but have had to stay the enitre time so I could give my turnover to then next poor engineer that is forced to stay for another 12 hours to turn it back over to me. It makes perfect sense.

In other coverage news the button pusher is back. On the bright side he's not on the same machine as me. On the not so bright side the machine he's on is right next to the one I'm on. He ventured over several times this evening. Luckily since the machine isn't running, he wasn't tempted to push any buttons several thousand times (at least that I personally witnessed).

I also may or may not have been very kind to a fellow engineer that is on coverage on the machine next door. I don't particulary care for this engineer on a good day so combine that with a crappy night on a machine and 5:30 AM, it's only natural for me to make snide comments that the engineer is way overstepping their bounds and if I wanted their help, I would have asked for their help and will you please go back to the machine you are on coverage for and leave me alone this instant before I stop using sarcastic tones and start using my serious tones.

I do have some good news, I bought a bed for the back shift room today. The futon is quite comfortable when you are exhausted after a back shift and could sleep on a cement floor easily, it's not so comfortable when you elect to sleep down there the night before your back shift in hopes of sleeping in longer due to the pitch blackness of the room. My hips are killing me today. I'm pretty excited to use it. I will get the chance next weekend since tonight is my only backshift this week.

Kiddie Pools and Pit Bulls

2009-07-05T20:10:00.000-07:00

As the holiday weekend winds down, I keep asking myself if I have to go back to work tomorrow. I really shouldn't complain too much. I start coverage again this week so I have some time off to look forward to. Also more back shifts. Maybe in my back shift stupor this week you'll get a post about the camp song I wrote. I know you're all dying for that. Or maybe I'll get really ambitious and do a post of befores and afters of the rooms in our house. Just a few blogs I've been putting off.

I will up date you on our weekend for now. Thursday afternoon before I left work I was IMing my coworker Danielle. At the work shower a few weeks ago my coworkers had started talking about how nice it is to sit in a kiddie pool in the backyard on the weekend and drink. It sounded really delightful minus the drinking part. It had been a hell of a week at work and she mentioned to me how nice that kiddie pool sounded...It did sound nice. Really nice. Nice enough to brave Walmart the morning of July 3rd and purchase said kiddie pool (a lime green one none the less!).

My husband returned from the gym to find me blowing up the pool in our dining room. He laughed really hard and told me he wondered what got me out of the house so early on a holiday. He had been present for the coworker kiddie pool conversation. I proceeded outside and filled the pool up. It was ice cold, I had planned for that though and went in to clean the house while it warmed in the sun. By noon it was ready so Dublin and I treked out for an hour of bliss. Now I have no issues with water so I dived right in. Dublin on the other hand was not a fan. It did serve as a really big water bowl but other than that, he wanted nothing to do with it. I picked him up and put him in it, he would run right back out. I kind of expected this, pit bulls aren't known as water loving dogs. I layed in the pool until it was time to get out and shower. My parents were coming up to help us get some stuff done at the house.

My mom and I painted the second bedroom upstairs and the boys weeded the front flower beds - we can see dirt now! When we were done the boys cleaned up and we went to dinner at the Bistro. It was delicious as always and I was so grateful to my parents for the help. It was off to bed early - holiday weekends mean catching up on much needed sleep to me.

Saturday I woke up and cleaned up the room we had painted the day before and put the furniture back. I decided on what furniture needed to be added and I think I'm finally going to buy a reall bed for my back shift room in the basement. Hopefully I will get both of those accomplished this week while I'm off.

Saturday afternoon was time to play in the pool again. I was more determined. Shad had mowed the lawn that morning so the pool was full of grass. I emptied it out and Dublin climbed right in and layed down without an issue. Shad and I hatched a plan that we would play with him in it for a bit empty, Shad would take Dublin in the house while I refilled it with water. I would then stand in the pool and call Dublin to come to me. It worked like a charm and he jumped right into the water. He was pretty mad but after playing with him for awhile he chased his ball into the pool and did this...

You can imagine my surprise and joy when he did this. Issue with water fixed. After playing in the pool he ran out and jumped on the lawn chair. He really knows how to make his mom proud. Today while I was sitting in the yard with him, he insisted on getting up on my chair with me. I finally went over and got him his own chair which he sat in next to me for a good half hour. Shad was napping inside or I would have a picture to share. You'll just have to take my word for it. I may have created a monster.

Saturday night we also attended the Ogden Demolition Derby. It was pretty ideal Here is why you don't see many truck demolition derbies. CRAZY!

The fireworks were okay. We sat on the side of the arena that was partially blocked by trees. Now we know for future reference.

Monkey!

2009-06-29T19:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-23T10:16:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-22T08:14:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-19T08:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-12T10:53:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-06-03T12:04:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-06-01T10:51:00.000-07:00

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!

BOAM

2009-05-19T11:22:00.000-07:00

I just overheard a new co-op say “I just feel so insecure.” It made me giggle. Moving on to the real reason for this post – vacation!

A few months ago Jen and I were talking to our friend and coworker about his sail boat he keeps in L.A. We somehow convinced him he should take us on a boat trip. We picked a date in May and started planning for our ideal adventure. As May came closer and closer, Jared, our friend started warning us the trip might not happen, the boat was in need of some repairs before we could go on a trip. We told him to get to work and get that ship in shape in time for our trip – he promised! Meanwhile Jen and I worked on a backup plan. Neither one of us had been to Great Basin and Jen wants to visit all the national parks out here before she moves back home. We began planning.

Jen called the ranger to be sure things would be open for us when we were there. We were planning a long weekend so we needed enough stuff to do for 3 days. When Jen outright asked the ranger if we would have enough stuff to do in the park for 3 days the ranger didn’t even hesitate in saying no. Crap. Time for a backup plan for the backup plan.

We finally settled on Moab for a few reasons, it is warm there and we could go to two national parks. Excellent. Jen, Jared, Shad and I left for Moab last Thursday night. After dropping Dublin off at my parents we were on our way. After only a few hours into the trip we started our adventure. While driving on I-6, a deer ran out onto the road and hit our car. I say hit our car because it literally ran into the side of the car, I didn’t hit it. After walking to the nearest mile marker and calling highway patrol, we were on our way. Poor Rex has some dents that will get fixed this week but everyone was fine (minus the dead deer) and we had a good laugh.
The next morning we headed into Arches National park. We started off with the Delicate Arch hike since I had never done it. Here are a few pictures.

During lunch at Delicate Arch, someone (not someone in our group) lost a water bottle over the edge of the cliff. Jared being very concerned about the environment went to the edge of the cliff to see where it was. The next thing we knew, Jared was over the edge after said bottle. Meanwhile an older couple next to us got really concerned. We reassured them he had his ID in his pocket so they could ID him when they found his body(I’m not kidding – those were our exact words). A few minutes later, Jared returned to our ledge triumphant with the bottle. Then the real fun began. The man from the elderly couple insisted the group give him a round of applause then asked Jared what he did for a living. When Jared responded he was an engineer, the old man was so disappointed and said “that’s too bad; I could use a nimble man like you to work at my steel mill. Mmm.” That’s right. An old man hit on Jared by calling him nimble and offering him a job in his steel mill in front of his wife. He also called him Jerry instead of Jared. If you’re a nimble good looking young man, I have some job hook ups in the steel industry apparently. We went on a few more hikes then came back to camp and made bacon wrapped cheese stuffed hot dogs. So delicious.

The next day was mystery day. We put the boys in charge of this day. They gave us the option of doing the Firey Furnace in Arches (this requires a special pass you have to get the day before) or going Jeeping. I wasn’t sure why Jeeping was even an option – Shad has told me on several occasions off roading makes him sick. I voted for the hike so off we went. The hike started off fine, there aren’t any trails in that area of the park, so you’re kind of on your own. We wandered for a bit then the boys climbed up some rocks leaving us in a hole, with no way to climb out. Stupid boys taking for granted their upper arm strength. Here’s a picture of us in the hole. We were actually really mad though none of the pictures showed it.

After that, we reminded them that they had girls with them and they could scale rock walls to their hearts content, they just couldn’t expect us to follow. We enjoyed lunch in a cave we found the headed back to Moab.

It was a pretty toasty weekend in Moab so we headed to the public swimming pool for an afternoon of cool water. It felt really good. After that we went out to eat at a Mexican restaurant.
Sunday we spent the day in Canyonlands hiking. The ranger there suggested we do a bunch of little hikes to see the diversity of the park. That is exactly what we did. It was another good day of hiking though I was a little sore from scaling rock walls with the boys the day before.

We went back to camp and made some tin foil dinners then went back to Arches to enjoy the sunset and get ice cream after. It was a great night to end our trip with.

Mother's Day!

2009-05-10T22:29:00.000-07:00

Since I am the Mommy to an adorable puppy now, this was my first Mother's Day. Too bad I spent it sleeping after a night of backshift. Tonight is my last night for at least a few weeks and I'm very excited for that. Maybe I'll even get to go home early.

When I work up this afternoon (I slept until 4:30 - new backshift record!), my sweet puppy gave me my present. I made it to the top of the stairs before he ran over with a very nice wildflower in his mouth and a card tucked in his collar. Shad told me he picked the flower for me on their walk that day and the card included a paint puppy print as the signature. Well, I was told it was a puppy paw print, I couldn't really tell. Apparently the practice went much better. I'm a bit skeptical about him personally picking the flower for me. He did bring me home a pinecone last week from a walk - I had asked him to bring me one a while ago. I was expecting one of those. Much more his style than a flower. He didn't really want to give me the flower - he was intent on eating it but it was the thought that counts.

Shad and I have decided he was a goat in his former life. We've been debating between goat and cow for awhile now due to the amount of grass he chooses to eat when he's in the back yard. We finally decided on goat for two reasons. 1) He stares very intently at the goats when we walk past them on our walks. I used to think it was because of the square pupils - I guess I was wrong about that. 2) He eats other "non-food" items (paper, drip system tubing, monkey tails, random plastic - you get the point) other than grass which I think rules cow out as his past identity.

Shad also made me a delicious breakfast of waffles this morning. He had wanted to serve me breakfast in bed, but he didn't want to wake me up so he waited until I was up. Sadly after that, it was off to work again. At least this week will be a short week thanks to our boating trip turned great basin trip turned Moab trip. I'm sure I will have lots of pictures to share when we get back. I wish Dublin could come with us, he would love it. Instead, he gets to stay at Grandma and Grandpa's which I'm sure he'll love almost as much. It's funny he's still so little but he gets excited when he realizes where we're going when we go visit them. I thought it would take him awhile for him to realize Grandma and Grandpa's house means spoiling. I understimated him.

Familes are forever

2009-05-08T23:45:00.000-07:00

Well my lack of patience has finally paid off...I got to pick up our family pictures today. I'm pretty sure I love them all, too many to post. Here are a bunch of my favorites though.

In other non-picture related news – if you haven’t guessed by the fact this blog was posted at 2 AM, I’m on coverage again. I had really high hopes that I would sleep in really late this morning since I’ve had a few days off to get into the habit, no such luck for me. This morning instead of rolling over and falling blissfully back to sleep after Shad got up for work, I laid there and tried to wish myself back to sleep. I even took drugs last night to help me sleep. Not fair. I’m not feeling as bad as my last set of back shifts, we’ll see how I’m doing in a few hours.

Because I had Tuesday through Thursday off this week, I had a very productive week at the house. Tuesday I slept in (superb!) and took Dublin for a long walk. We got back just in time for me to finish the laundry and go grocery shopping. After that was finished, I had the chance to go down to Layton to visit my friend Kay. I absolutely adore Kay and I don’t get to see her often enough. We spent a few hours talking at her parents’ house catching up on life. After visiting Kay, I headed down to Salt Lake. The Sweater Friends had a show that night and I didn’t see the point in driving back to Ogden just to drive down to SLC again. Luckily my parents don’t care if I use their couch for a few hours. After chatting with my mom for a bit, I left to go play at Sugarhouse Coffee. We had a really good show, Jake’s family came which was fun since I haven’t seen his sisters since they came home from Mexico. I love those girls. If you go to our blog, you can see a video of us singing a new song we have. Good times.

In other Sweater Friends news – Go pick up this month’s City Weekly and turn to page 60. That’s right a little sweater review for you all! Since we played until 9:30 at the coffee shop, I didn’t get home until late. Shad sounds like he’s drunk when you wake him up. It’s good times.

Wednesday I finally finished painting the trim in the rooms I painted while Shad was out of town. Yes that was a month ago – it’s done now, that’s all that matters. Dublin and I went for a nice long walk and I made some delicious citrus chicken for dinner. After dinner we headed down to the Bountiful rec center to see Shad’s brother play water polo in a tournament. I don’t even get how water polo works and I can tell you that their team is sad. Luke is still young though so maybe with some time, they’ll get better.

Thursday I registered Dublin (he’s finally legal) and made a trip to the DMV. Apparently they entered our address in wrong when we registered the Forester so we never received the title. I was a little annoyed I was going to have to go again but luckily the DMV in Ogden is a ghost town at 11:00 AM on a Thursday. I walked right in and my number was called. 5 minutes later the problem was solved. I spent the rest of the day shopping for my dad’s birthday, Mother’s Day and my brother’s graduation present. After that was finished, it was off to tutoring. After tutoring Shad and I had a delightful dinner with our friends Jen and Jared and then went to a late movie. We originally decided on Monsters vs. Aliens but when we got to the theatre, we were informed Star Trek was playing now instead. That left us with Wolverine or Star Trek. We picked Wolverine – I wasn’t a fan but what can you do?

Today, Dublin and I drove down to Salt Lake to pick up our family pictures. Before heading home, we stopped for a walk around Liberty Park. It was a perfect afternoon for the park. When we got home, I started cleaning out the junk room in the basement and Dublin took a nap. When Shad got home, we headed down to attend my brother’s graduation. He finished up his MBA at the U this year. The highlight of the ceremony was the cheer from the crowd when the dean (? – I wasn’t paying attention to who the guy was that was talking, my bad) announced there was no speaker. Good times. In true Lundberg fashion, after receiving his diploma and posing for pictures, Scott kept on walking so we could go to dinner. The usher even tried to tell him they like them to stay, he told her he had other things to do. We had a delightful dinner at the Wild Grape. We had to leave right after dessert though since I had gotten permission to come in late to work, 11:00 was all I could barter for. I’m so proud of him and grateful to have Scott as my brother! Way to go!

Patient?

2009-05-02T16:57:00.000-07:00

I used to think I had grown up because I don’t get so impatient about things anymore. Now I’ve realized, I haven’t gotten more patient, things have just gotten faster. Little things you used to have to wait for can happen in the blink of an eye now. Waiting for an email response from someone? I’ll have to wait until I get home – nope, I have to wait until my phone can download my inbox. The 2-3 hour wait has turned into about 5 seconds. Waiting to get a chance to go to the cd store to buy a cd I’m dying for? I’m no longer waiting weeks – I once again log onto my phone and in the length of about a song – I’m listening to new tunes. Why am I talking about this you may ask? We got our family pictures taken approximately a week and a half ago. Our photographer told us they will be done in about 2 weeks or so. Every time I think about them I get excited, then I get super impatient because I have to wait – GASP! – 4 or 5 more days. I’m lame. End of story.

Other than being impatient this week, I got a lot of stuff done. I successfully completed 3 trials at work despite every effort my staff contact gave to ruin said trials. Sometimes I wonder if Wisconsin randomly disappeared from the planet, if anyone would notice. I might notice only because suddenly my trials might not start off with me planning all the things that should have been planned a month ago. Maybe some day.

Tuesday night for Young Women’s, the young women planned a prom for the adults in the ward. They did a really good job, they even had someone there to take pictures. Shad and I got volunteered to teach a bit of West Coast to those that were interested so we had to go. Teaching turned out much better than I thought it would. We had never taught a class before so I was worried. I was also worried we would show people the first step, they would think it was dumb and opt to hug and turn with their significant other for the rest of the evening. It was not so. After teaching the basic, they asked for another step and after that step they asked for another. We stopped at 3 – You’re not going to retain that many steps anyway from one class – plus, Shad had lost his voice by then.

My parents also made it up to Ogden Friday night to go to dinner and see our house. They didn’t come to the house warming because they were in the Grand Canyon so they hadn’t seen any of the changes we’ve made. They seemed to like them and we proceeded to the Oaks up Ogden canyon. It’s a delicious burger joint with a delightful patio right on the river. The food was good as always even though I made everyone sit on the patio in the cold. I think it was worth it, plus we had blankets. We came home and they left. Shad and I watched Frost Nixon after that. I thought it was okay, the acting was good. I actually felt bad for Nixon at a few points during the movie – a part of me felt somewhat manipulated and angry when I realized that.

I’m now in the middle of my recent bout of coverage. I really just need to get used to it, the way our project schedule is this year, I won’t be getting much of a break from it. It’s a good thing the weekdays off are delightful, that makes it a bit better. Plus I always get so much done when I’m on coverage. I’m already psyching myself up to sleep in Friday morning so I won’t want to die on my back shift Friday night.

Just when you thought it was warming up…

2009-04-27T09:50:00.000-07:00

I’m sick of cold. I was so mad this weekend when I had to turn the furnace back on. Angry eyes.

Other than the cold weather, we had a delightful week and weekend. Wednesday we were finally able to take family pictures. Stay tuned for them, they should be ready in a couple of weeks. In the mean time, check out our photographer’s blog – Stacy Marie Photography. Stacy did all of our wedding pictures and I didn’t want to ask another person to do our family pictures too. She’s so cute, I feel like we’re going to hang out with one of my friends and take pictures at the same time when we see her. Plus she’s super affordable. I thought about having someone up in Ogden do them since the puppy was going to be included, after looking around, I couldn’t find someone that was less than 10x what she charges for an on location shoot. Plus, who am I kidding, she’s totally worth the drive. We couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful day and the puppy was actually pretty cooperative. I guess his never ending desire for attention has finally come in handy. Thanks Stacy!

Friday night, The Sweater Friends had an awesome show at Kilby Court. This was another show Jake picked the bands for and it was an absolute delight. I seriously don’t want to play another show with bands that don’t relate to us – It just can’t compare. Despite the slightly rainy weather, Kilby Court was lovely, not too hot and not freezing cold. We got to play with Mindy Gledhill and Josaleigh Pollett. Both are singer-song writers and are truly talented. Josaleigh was feeling a bit under the weather but her voice still sounded like velvet. I love her songs, they all are just so honest. She manages to make you feel like you’re having a conversation with a friend instead of watching a show. Mindy Gledhill was headlining the evening with her big band – okay, it’s a normal size band but when you only have two people in yours, it seems big in comparison. She’s an absolutely adorable person and her band was a blast. They took a break in the middle to allow the keyboard player (Lamar Holley) to play his own song. I can’t wait for his CD that’s due in May. He’s a 6th grade teacher by day and has a CD of educational songs he’s written. We traded CD’s so Shad and I listened it on the way home. Check it out if you have kids, it’s not annoying like a lot of other children’s CD’s I’ve heard – plus it’s educational. His CD coming out in May is just regular pop songs if you don’t like to learn while you listen. If you haven’t heard of any of these musicians, seriously check them out! After Friday’s show I left with a renewed hope for the music scene here in Utah, there are still super talented not jerky musicians out there that just want the time to express themselves.

Saturday morning I got up in the rain and went tutoring. After tutoring Shad met me for lunch at our favorite Chinese place in Layton, then it was off for a couples teaching massage at the spa next to it (Shad got me a gift certificate for Christmas). The teacher took things a little too seriously if you ask me but it was a delightful way to spend an afternoon. I’m just hoping now when I ask Shad for a massage, he won’t try to massage my bones instead of muscle (ouch!).

After the massage, I went home and tackled the spare bedroom we have upstairs. Since we moved in, it’s been full of boxes of stuff from our office. The new office is just on the other side of the wall so we’ve been lazy about unpacking that stuff. I boxed and labeled the things we don’t use often, cleaned out the trash and organized a few things. You can actually see the carpet now!

Saturday night we went out for Italian then we saw Monsters vs. Aliens. I wasn’t sure if I was going to like it, I hated The Incredibles and wasn’t too keen on seeing another animated superhero movie. I was pleasantly surprised. It was great. My favorite line was the stab at Al Gore and global warming – “It seems like the globe is warmer, that would be a very convenient truth.” I think I’m the only one in the theatre that got it – I was certainly the only one that laughed.

Sunday after church, Shad took Dublin on a very long walk up a trail behind our house, I took the time to pay the bills and make real mashed potatoes for dinner. When they got home we headed to my friend Jen’s house for Sunday dinner. She made a homemade chicken pot pie, it was delicious. After dinner we were able to stick around and play a board game. Jen let me pick so we played the Game of Life, one of my favorites that my siblings would never play with me. Jen had the new version, so we all struggled with some new rules. My least favorite new rule was the lack of betting your money at the end to win it all, I always did that when I was younger – I don’t think it ever worked but I went for it every time.

Bar = Late night

2009-04-20T09:01:00.000-07:00

I think that’s a sad fact I have forgotten as I don’t visit them often. The Sweater Friends had the pleasure to play a quaint location called The Woodshed this Saturday night. This is the first time we’ve played a bar. It was fun, the bartenders were nice and there music guy really liked us, my only complaint was the 10:00 start time. It’s way too late to make for a good show. And we were only the first band, which meant by band etiquette rules, we had to stay for the band after us (they asked us to play). I was so tired Shad and I started talking about teleportation on the way home. We could have used it Saturday night.

Because I had 3 week days off this week from coverage, I had a really eventful week. Tuesday night a group of my girlfriends went to Britney. It was amazing. Thanks to Kelly at Chili’s we missed half of the Pussy Cat Dolls show. I was a bit disappointed but the parts we did see were pretty good. I expected them to be stronger dancers though. Maybe they were tired. Then came Britney. As I’m sure many of you have read, her show is based off of her single Circus. She had all sorts of circus performers entertain before the show actually started, and then they participated all throughout the show. It was great. There was always so much going on and so much to look at. I think I could have ignored Britney for the entire show and still been super entertained.

Wednesday, I was able to wrap up a bunch of stuff around the house. Shad commented to me when I’m home during the day, it’s like a scavenger hunt when he gets home to see what I’ve done. I put the guest room back together and decorated it a little bit, hung some shelves in the living room and painted a table and chair from the office. I then finished it all up with some tutoring. Pretty good day.

Thursday I did laundry and cleaned the bathrooms. Then I went and got my makeup done for our family pictures that afternoon. When I got up that morning, it was cloudy but I was hoping it was done raining for the day. I got home and gave Dublin a bath so he could be all clean and shiny for pictures. He actually climbed into the tub himself this time and sat down before I even had his stuff out. I wouldn’t go so far to say he loves baths but he doesn’t hate them either. After his bath I let him out to go to the bathroom. Unfortunately there was a bird in the yard. Dublin hates birds. He will try to chase a bird on the ground, in a tree and even on telephone poles. Luckily he’s nowhere near fast or stealthy enough to come close to catching them. Maybe that’s why he hates them. This particular bird was standing in the mud where the swing set used to be. So of course my nice clean puppy charged full force after the bird only to land empty handed in the mud. After his second bath for the day, I took him out in the back yard on a leash. At least one of us learned a lesson. Sadly all of this effort was in vain. As we were driving down to SLC, our photographer called to say it was raining and we would have to reschedule (again). We will get it this Wednesday, I'm sure.

Friday night we drove up to Maddox for dinner then went to the hot springs. We didn’t last very long at the hot springs, it was still way too cold to go down the slide and the hot pools were overflowing with 13 year old scouts. Such is the hot springs on a Friday night.

Sunday after our late Saturday night, I was excited to get a nap. Shad took Dublin for a walk so I might get to sleep. They returned just as I was drifting off. Shoot. Shad of course laid down and was out in 5 seconds. Dublin laid down too but didn’t go to sleep. Once again just as I was drifting off, Dublin had the uncontrollable urge to get up and lick my face and hair (I was laying on the floor). I resolved a nap just wasn’t supposed to happen and watched leatherheads instead.

Pushing buttons in more way than one...

2009-04-11T13:39:00.000-07:00

It's a beautiful Saturday afternoon and I find myself at work. Good times? At least today I feel like we're making some sort of progress and I have things to do which is alway nice. In fact the day has flown by compared to my night shifts this week when I had nothing to do. It's been a delightful day except for one person.

How many times would you press a button, and it didn't work before you determined it wasn't working and pressing said button was a waste of time and annoying the person next to you? I would guess I would push a button three maybe four times before I would come to a conclusion that it doesn't work and I should stop pushing it hoping for a different outcome. It's like asking you mom for a treat, if she said no the first time, she's still going to say no the twentieth time. Plain and simple.

There's a guy from staff here to help us out. He's supposed to work on glue so maybe that's why he's not so bright about machine things. I don't know. He seriously pressed a button that wasn't working on the machine a good 100 times while I was standing next to him. I finally told him to stop and to go tell and electrical guy it was broken so he could fix it. I thought I was doing pretty good not to slap his hand and tell him to go sit in the corner. After the button incident, he's continued to annoy me today. I'm not even the shift lead, shouldn't he be annoying him? I don't know anything about glue, don't ask me what the temperature should be, that's why you're here. I have no problem throwing out a random number but when your adhesive system doesn't work, blame yourself (the glue expert) for listening to a process engineer that really doesn't care about glue. He better not be here tomorrow. It will be war.

Surgery and Night Shifts

2009-04-05T22:15:00.000-07:00

As another weekend has come to a close, all I can think about is that I'm tired. Okay it might be because I'm sitting at work, in the middle of the night waiting for a mechanic to fix the machine I'm working on. He couldn't tell me how long it might take, I think when you get an ETA like that, you should be able to say - I'm going home to sleep, call me when you're ready. It's a bad sign when I'm this tired and it's only midnight. I think the Rockstar will be consumed earlier than usual tonight. I really don't mind back shifts when you're busy. The time flies and you're good and tired for bed. Tonight is not one of those nights. I think I'm done ranting now. I'll update on the rest of our weekend.

Friday was a big day for Dublin - he got fixed! I went into work late that morning so I could drop him off at the vet at 7:30. He was so excited to go to the vet - he gets to meet new people and they have to pay attention to him - his two favorite things. I had to pin him down just to give the tech some chance of getting his name tag around his neck. She asked me if we had done any obedience with him yet, when I said yes and she acted surprised. She should have seen him pre - trainer. Then she might appreciate the significantly calmer dog he was that day. I can't help it that he really loves new people - new people that can't follow the no touching rule because they have to put a name tag on him. He'll get better at it, I know he will.

I went back to pick him up around 3:30. After the tech finally dragged him close enough to the room I was in to see me, he was so excited. I guess he wasn't to keen on the vet after the whole surgery thing. He was bouncing around the room so much, the tech commented that she was sure he would be fine. I responded I was almost positive surgery wouldn't phase him. I got him home, then the real fun started. He was tired so he pretty much slept until Shad came home. Because of the meds, we couldn't feed him until 6 that night, and only a little bit in case he threw it back up. That's his normal dinner time but since he hadn't eaten since the day before - he was hungry. Shad and I have come to dread when he's hungry. We experienced it while we tried to get him on a set eating schedule. He gets cranky and nothing can really calm him down. Since Shad woke him up when he got home, Dublin was suddenly reminded how hungry he was. After letting him out in the backyard and watching him devour every dandelion head he could find, I knew we were in for a terror. By about 5:30 I had had it, he hadn't puked the dandelions up yet so I took that to be a sign he could eat. I gave him 1/4th the amount he normally gets for a meal (doctor's orders!). When he finished he looked up at me like, you've got to be kidding me. About a half hour later to prove his point, he got desperate. He went and picked up his food bowl and brought it to me. When I didn't respond, he took it upstairs to Shad when Shad didn't respond, he sulked for a bit. Since we took away his food dish, he drank all his water and then brought that bowl to me. I finally gave in then, he hadn't thrown up yet and he was so persistent, I gave him another 1/4th amount of food and he finally settled.

Saturday morning I got up and went tutoring. There weren't a lot of kids there because of conference but I still had some unruly children. I blame the weather. I came home and did the laundry, cleaned and went shopping while listening to conference. My sister and her husband were coming up to spend the night so I wanted the house to be some what clean. Dublin was exhausted after spending the morning helping Shad with yard work so he napped the rest of the day.

Kristen and Mitch arrived a few minutes before Shad got home from priesthood. We chatted for a few minutes and I showed them what we've done to the house since they had been up last. We went to dinner at the Bistro and then came home to watch Ocean's Thirteen. Delightful. I only managed to stay up until midnight though - probably one of a few reasons why I'm so tired right now. The next morning we got up and had breakfast and they were off before the first session of conference. I'm so glad they came up. Nothing really compares to a fun night with your sister and our husbands. It makes me wish we lived a bit closer to SLC so we could see them more.

After they left, it was Shad's turn. He was off to the airport to catch his flight to Oklahoma. This just left me with Dublin to worry about all day today. I was a bit nervous how he would be with Shad gone, he tends to search the house if one of us leaves and he's not in his crate. He didn't even look for him. Maybe the luggage was a dead give away. So far he's been good. He napped all day on my lap while I watched conference. I hope this cuddly puppy sticks around even after his incision heals.

He is asleep in this picture - he just has too much loose skin so his eyes droop open. I think he started barking because of a dream not too soon after this. Adorable in a really creepy way.

Garden Treasures

2009-03-30T13:29:00.000-07:00

We've survived yet another weekend that has been chock full of excitement. After having a week of coverage trying to get my module lined out to start up, we were all pretty exhausted. Since the safety system for our new machine was not operational as of Friday, our manager told us to go home at noon on Friday. You don't have to tell me to go home early twice. At 12:30 I was headed home to get my cleaning and laundry done a day early. Ideal. I think I got the grocery shopping done. I'm not sure when it happened, I just know it got done.

Friday night we signed up to do sealings with our ward at the Ogden Temple. It was the first time I had been to the Ogden Temple. For not being an attractive temple on the outside, I was a bit worried about the inside. I shouldn't have been, it was wonderful. It was fun to spend some time with a few of the older couples in our ward too. They're pretty spunky. The sealer was great too. He took every moment he could to teach us something about the ordinance. After the temple we went to the delicious Thai place down the street. It had been awhile since I had eaten some curry. Fantastic!

Saturday morning started off with tutoring as usual then it was home to brainstorm ideas for the personal progress activity I'm in charge of this week. When I got home I found a very happy puppy playing in the pile of stuff Shad had found in the garden area.

To give Shad a break I took Dublin on a walk in hopes of tiring him out before I headed off to the General Young Women's Meeting. The meeting was good. Hardly any girls showed up. They didn't get a very good reminder from the presidency so I can understand that. The meeting was good - everyone talked on virtue which was awesome. I left the meeting with the perfect plan for our personal progress activity. Now we will see if the girls show up.

When I returned home, Shad and I went to dinner then we went down to the basement to dance for awhile. We hadn't been dancing in a very long time and since it's too far to drive to the MAC, we figured the cement floor in the basement would do. To spruce it up, Shad went and got balloons. After we finished, we thought it would be fun to see what Dublin would do with them. I think it's safe to say he likes balloons. He's so cute.

The French Guy is Gone!

2009-03-23T11:46:00.000-07:00

The peace of my cubicle has once again been restored. The loud French guy was not at work this morning. I can only hope he's returned to Wisconsin where I'm pretty sure he came from.

In other news, we survived our house warming party this last weekend. It was a total blast. I'm super grateful to all our friends that made the drive up here to come celebrate with us. I was totally shocked at how many people actually showed up. I wasn't even sure we knew that many people but I guess we do. I was also delightfully surprised to find everyone fit pretty well too. The house didn't seem too crowded at all. There will definitely be more parties to come.

A couple of my coworkers gave us an adorable puppy kit as a house warming present. Since we could tell what it was, we thought it would be fun to let Dublin open it. Here's a video. He's a bit slow at first - I'm hoping with practice, he'll get better.

Because Saturday was spent getting ready for the house warming, we didn't really do too much else this weekend. We went to church on Sunday. After I took Dublin on a very long walk to wear him out - he was still pretty wired from the party. I got home just in time to change and head over to the stake center for the temple dedication.

The Dedication was fantastic. I was thinking about the last one I went to - I'm pretty sure it was the Nauvoo Dedication. It was a little sad to think President Hinckley wouldn't be the one doing it but I really do love President Monson. He makes me laugh like President Hinckley did, just in a different way.

After the dedication, we made dinner and then we opened the rest of our presents. Thanks to everyone that brought us something. It was so not necessary but very much appreciated. After that it felt so good to sit on the couch with my husband and just relax. I don't think we've done that once for the past 2 months.

I'm pretty disappointed by the weather today - we were supposed to go down to Salt Lake to take family pictures today. We will just have to try again next Monday. Pray for sun!

It's Done?

2009-03-18T12:56:00.000-07:00

I think it's safe to say we're in the home stretch of home improvement things and I am so grateful. I was in a meeting yesterday at work and the topic of how much I do during the week came up. Between church, work, tutoring, husband, house and a new puppy - I'm excited to cross something off the list. Not that I don't thoroughly enjoy all of the things I'm involved in, and I'm not happy unless I'm busy, I'm looking forward to warm evenings where I get to cook a decent meal then take a walk with my husband and puppy or (gasp!) make it to the gym again. Those will be good times. It was funny to hear an observation from one of our non-LDS engineers that "the engineers that don't drink really seem to accomplish a lot more with their time." I was pretty entertained by that. Apparently even occasional drinking and productivity have direct correlations.

Aside from home improvement tasks, we still had a very full weekend. Friday afternoon we had the insurance nurse come and take blood for our life insurance. That went well and I was happy not to have to fast anymore. Plus I found out my husband really doesn't like needles, which was a bit entertaining to watch. I'm a mean wife. While having my blood taken, I received a call from RC Willey that they would be there to deliver our couch from 6:30 to 8:30 that night. Which would had been nice but we had a wedding reception in Salt Lake to go to that was from exactly 6:30 to 8:30. After discussing it, we decided I would go since they technically were my friends and Shad could get some painting done. We headed to dinner in the mean time since we were both starving. Just as I was about to get into the shower, the phone rang. It was RC Willey saying we'll be there in 5 minutes - a half hour early! Ideal. The couch was delivered and we headed down to SLC for the reception. It was beautiful and I'm so excited for Bryce and Lina. They're so cute. After spending 20 minutes at the reception we turned around to drive the hour home. Totally worth it for those two!

Saturday I got up and went tutoring in the morning. Before I left I gave Shad explicit instructions to get the bedroom painting finished and meet me in SLC at 7 for the Sweater Friend's show. After tutoring I went down to SLC to attempt to learn the song my sister and I were singing in her ward the next day. That went okay. We were able to practice it a few times together. I then proceeded to Jake's house for a few hours of band practice for the show that night. In between I went to my parents to lay down for 15 minutes to get some energy back for the show.

I left for the show which was at an ideal establishment called the Blue Star Cafe - it's on 2300 East and about 2700 South. It's a really sweet laid back coffee shop/bagel place. We hung out there until it was our turn to play. The show went pretty well. After 4 hours of singing prior in the day - I was just grateful I still had a voice. My hubby wasn't able to make it down for it because the painting still wasn't done so I headed home right after we finished.

The next day we went to our ward for young womens and sunday school then went home to walk Dublin so he would sleep while we were at my sister's ward. We took him down with us for family dinner so he could meet his uncle Scott. I think he loved him. The song in Kristen's ward went really well and I'm excited that it's over.

All and all it was a very busy but rewarding weekend.

P.S. Do French accents bother anyone else? A French guy showed up at work today a few cubicle's down. After 20 minutes at my desk listening to a loud phone conversation, I wanted to bang his head into the wall. I hope he's not staying awhile. He might beat the loud guy with the Wisconsin accent that sits next to me. He hasn't been at his desk a lot. It's been nice at mine. Weird.

Parenting Advice

2009-03-12T09:24:00.000-07:00

Since I'm an engineer, I have the pleasure of getting to work with mostly men. I'm not being sarcastic about that at all. I would die if I had to work with a bunch of women, having to hear them whine about their husbands, that the receptionist looked at them funny yesterday and the vending machine has been out of diet coke for a week would kill me. Don't get me wrong, I love my girlfriends and the girl talk we have, there's just a time and a place for it and work is not really one of those. I much prefer my lunch conversations to be about the motorcycle trip last weekend or hilarious sarcastic comments about whatever is on the news during lunch. There's lots of laughing and no drama at all.

I really enjoy the unique perspective I get from my male counterparts on parenting. The other day a group of us were discussing improvements to our work tracking board. We're pursuing an alternative to post-its as our tracking medium and we were discussing the need to get our leadership bought into using the new system. One of the engineers said, "It's like getting your kid to stop using a pacifier." The other male engineers nodded their head in agreement. The other female engineer and I said, "How exactly do you do that?" (Neither one of us has children). He then said, "you just start cutting it shorter and shorter until they can't suck on it anymore." The other female engineer then said, "So you're saying we should just make the post-its smaller and smaller until our leaders just get too frustrated, they use the new method out of desperation?" He said exactly. I then asked, "What did your wife do when she had an angry, frustrated 2 year old that couldn't use a pacifier anymore because you cut them all up?" He just said, "I don't know." Hmm...

Another favorite parenting story from work was when one of our team leaders received a call from his wife saying his 3 year old son had managed to jump out his window. Apparently he had been misbehaving and his mother put him in his room for a time out. Judging from other stories about this particular child he's a tank with boundless energy. He was mad mom had shut him in his room and while she was on the other side holding the door shut, he decided to open his window, remove the screen and jump out to the backyard (his room is on the 2nd story). I can only imagine the shock and frustration his mom experienced when her 3 year old that was in his room on time out walked in the front door ready to play. Now as our team leader was telling this story, was he concerned about the safety aspect, not really - the child was fine, worried about the blatant lack of respect, nope - he was proud of him for figuring out how to get the screen off and having the guts to jump out the window. Ah dads and their wonderful bits of advice about child rearing. Thank goodness for mothers.

Paint, paint, paint!

2009-03-09T08:31:00.000-07:00

I've reached the point with our house where I still hate the white walls but I'm so sick of painting, I want to hide the rollers and trays and wait until I find them 6 months from now to start again. Luckily, we're pretty close to having the main stuff done. And we did get the really hard stuff done this weekend. I guess I can tough it out for two more rooms this week. It will be ideal when it's done.

We tackled our giant vaulted walls this weekend, it was quite the task, I should have taken pictures. We had to rent scaffolding and everything. We started on it Friday night and finished all the walls with high stuff at 11 Saturday night. My friend Jen from work came and helped us paint. She really was coming over to return our ladder and smack the puppy around but, I convinced her to help paint too. She was such a gem to help out, we wouldn't have finished it without her!

That just leaves us with our bedroom and bathroom, which we're hoping to get done today and tomorrow before the scaffolding needs to go back. Cross your fingers for us!

On a much happier note, while we were painting Friday night, the tile guy finished the last of the tile. It looks amazing! I'm so glad we decided to just do everything while we were doing our bathroom. Now we just need to put new molding in and it will be a beautiful house. Because construction is done, I was finally able to clean the house yesterday. It's a big pet peeve of mine when you can't walk around the house barefoot because of the fear of debris impaling you.

Dublin was such a champ through it all since he had to stay in his crate all day Saturday. Especially with a new friend over, he just wanted to play. We tried to tell him, puppies and paint don't mix but he didn't get that.

Sunday was also pretty hard for him. I made Shad keep him upstairs so I could clean with out worrying about him drinking the mop water or chasing the broom. He managed to escape once and because he knew he was in trouble, attempted to run out the back door. After running into the sliding glass door at full speed, I think he learned his lesson about running away when you know you're in trouble. He just sat there stunned, you could tell he was thinking - "that was stupid of me." Hopefully he'll learn. The trainer came up on Thursday to help us get him started on learning to be a polite calm dog, he's doing pretty good so far. Hopefully as he gets older, things will stick more.

Now that you've read about all the wonderful things we've done to our house, I'm sure you want to see pictures. Tough! You have to wait for the house warming. I know you're excited.

Dublin!

2009-03-02T07:39:00.000-08:00

I guess life happens a little faster than you expect it to sometimes. There's a new memeber of the Bracken family, his name is Dublin. He's an 8 week old brindle Pit Bull. Here are a few pictures of our new puppy.

These were taken our first night with him. It's taken him a few days but it looks like he's right at home in our house. He's even been able to sleep through the night for the past few nights - with LOTS of snoring. We're really excited to have him.

Dublin has already helped us discover the last owners of our house had garlic growing in their garden, flower beds and grass. Garlic puppy breath is not the most pleasant smell but he does do a great job of finding it for us to dig up. We spent all of saturday digging up the flowerbeds in the back yard trying to get rid of it. Our garage reeks right now.

Dublin also got to take his first long car ride with us this weekend. We took him down to Salt Lake City to surprise his new grandparents. They were very surprised and happy to meet him. Plus he's going to be a great car dog - he passed out in my lap for both hour drives. Hopefully when he gets too big for that, he'll sleep in the back.