long drive home

Drove home from Heber, AZ today. During our 4 day trip, we drove roughtly 1500 miles. With 5 of use in the Camry for 10 hrs, makes for a long drive, but the kids were amazingly good. I told Deni that the purchase of the DVD unit for the car was worth its weight in gold. The kids watched a number of DVD's and didn't even know we were crusing at 80 MPH down the highway.

Got home to a cold house. It was 53 degrees inside (as I had turned the heat down). It took about an hour and a half to get the house warmed up. Most of our driveway was shoveled too, which was nice. There is quite a bit of show at our house. Was told the TV stations reported 10 inches in Spanish Fork while we were gone.

picking up the rose petals

My sister-in-law, Jessica Bigler got married today to Nic DeSpain from Mesa, AZ. Sydney was a "flower girl" at the wedding. There were two other little girls that were also dropping rose petals as they walked up to the wedding altar.

Sydney happened to be the last flower girl. She was carrying a little metal basket with rose petals in it. The idea was they were supposed to drop them as they walked from the church to the altar outside. The first 2 flower girls did just that, however Sydney was quite concerned that they were dropping their flowers, so she stopped each time a girl dropped one and would pick it up. It was quite funny.

I heard a number of people snickering and whispering about the "little girl picking up the rose petals".

Some how she made it to the altar (with a full basket of rose petals) After the wedding was over, she decided to go and get the ones that she had missed and wouldn't go into the reception inside, till she had them all in her basket.

snow coming.. leave while you can

Woke up today around 7:30, so didn't get much more than about 4-5 hrs of sleep last night. I called home to see what the weather was like and heard that we left at the right time. Spanish Fork had anywhere from 10-12 inches overnight. It would have been a nightmare if we had left today. I'm glad we left when we did.

driving to Mesa

We left Spanish Fork today at 4pm. We hadn't planned on leaving today, but because of the coming weather, we decided it would be best. It started snowing as we left but about an hour or so we got ahead of the storm.

We arrived in Mesa, AZ at 2:30am very tired. We slept on the floor in Nic DeSpain's apartment (soon to be my new brother-in-law).

Gone fishing

I took the day off today to go ice fishing with my dad and 3 uncles. 2 of my uncles drove down from Idaho to go fishing with us. We left Springville abot 6am and were fishing by about 7:30am. It wasn't long till I caught the first fish of the day. But, as always, was in the 15-22 inch size limit that I had to throw back. We fished for most of the day. Around 4:30pm, I headed back to the parking lot to get my tent set up before the sun went down.

Pain, Pain, Pain

I haven't posted much lately as I have been fighting pain in my arms and hands from work. I've been going to a chiropracter and a massage therapist trying to help out. However I end up in pain by the end of the day, which means I don't post anything here.

Things are getting alittle better, but I'm still in quite a bit of pain.

Interesting Videos

Here are some interesting videos on http://video.google.com Most of them are in French (I think)

You need about 20 -30 minutes to watch all of them, but they are pretty interesting.

* Le Parkour
* Yamakasi
* Russian parkour video

Want to learn how? Click here:

Finally....

Holiday, Dell, India, Floppies, Sled, and Stairs

Worked today. Out of the last 5 holiday days I potentially had off (2 days at Thanksgiving, 2 days at Christmas and now the day after New Years), I have worked all 5 of them. Never hurts to get paid and extra 8 hrs when you don't have plans. However it does make it hard when all your co-workers come back to work rested and ready to work.

I took the oppurtunity to contact Dell about my home laptop, which we have had a nightmare of a story about. Since purchasing our Inspiron 5100 in 2003, Dell has sent a brand-new replacement laptop and sent out an engineer to replace the Processor and heatsink/fan. Both times, the laptop got hot and would randomly turn off. Personally, I think there is a major design flaw in their Insprion 5100 (which is probably why they don't sell it anymore, but what do I know.)

I chatted with Dell India Support (it is so much easier chatting with India than it is talking to them.) Anyway, they had me do the dumb things like used compressed air to blow out the fans, then take out the battery, cd drive and wireless card) to see if there is something wrong with those parts. Of course, that did nothing except waste my time, however I played their little game. Next they asked me to run their diagnostics against the laptop. One problem, I didn't have the disk and Deni couldn't find it at home. So I spent about an hour trying to track down a floppy drive and 4 floppies so I could download their utiltiy disk and test it out. During this hour long chat, my laptop turned off 3 times, as it got hot. But nothing is wrong till the dang diagnostic says there is a problem.

I finally get a floppy drive and make the boot floppies. I forgot how SLOW floppies are. No wonder they aren't used anymore. Waiting on the floppies, made me remember back in 1996 after my mission when I worked at Stream, I answered phones for Compaq and people would call in to purchase their 96 floppies that had Windows 95 on it. OUCH. Can't imagine installing Windows, or any other Operating System from floppies. Very Painful. We have changed quite a bit in the last 10 yrs. Wonder what another 10 yrs will do. We will probably laugh that DVD's only held 4 GB and took us 10 minutes to burn a disk.

Anyway, I finally get the 4 disks made, boot off of them, and before the dang computer can boot by putting all SLOW 4 of the disks, guess what, my computer gets hot and turns off. Of course, I told the Dell India rep that this would happen, but we need to run the diagnostic to see what the problem is. Grrr.

I finally borrowed a buddy's CD and ran the dignostics and guess what - it all checked out.

After I chatted with Dell, I did blow out the computer with compressed air, as they asked me to do. I can't imagine that blowing air into my computer magically fixed it, but so far so good. The computer is cooler and has been on for most of the night.

Around 8pm Deni and I were downstairs attempting to get the kids to bed. Actually I was cleaning up in Sydney's room, Deni was putting Ryan's clothes away and both kids were upstairs. All of the sudden, I heard a massive noise, as if a piano had been pushed down the stairs and then a deafening thud, followed by crying. I jumped up and ran to Sydney's door to see Ryan laying at the bottom of the stairs on top of a round snow sled we got for christmas with a horrible look of pain on his face. Apparently he thought it would be a good idea to get on the sled and slide down the stairs. He later told me he had tried to stop (ha). Ryan hit his head on the door frame. Had it been 6 inches to the left, I think we would have a huge hole in the sheet rock. After a few minutes of crying and some pain reliever he settled down. I kept him up for another 30 minutes to watch him as I was afraid that he could have a concussion. He came upstairs and layed on our bed and I read him a book. Afterwards he read a beginner book to me. It is fun to hear him sound things out and then for it to click and he know the word.

New Years Day

We are finally on the 9am church schedule, which I like a lot more than the 1-4pm schedule we were on last year. However at about 6pm, I had run out of things do to and I still had another 4 hrs to go till bed time. It will be an adjustment.

This last week, Sydney started wanting to be potty trained. She did pretty well yesterday and today. She is still trying to figure out when and how much time she needs to get to the bathroom, but she is learning. I'm excited, as I don't want to pay for diapers anymore.

Tomorrow is a holiday, but I volunteered to work.