Sydney riding a 2 wheeler

My baby learned to ride a 2 wheel bike today (without training wheels). Deni had worked with her a little bit this last week but Sydeny fell and got mad at Deni. So she wanted her "Daddy" to help her learn to ride a bike. Deni got all of Sydney's protective gear on (including sunglasses) and she was ready. I ran behind Sydney for about 50 feet and then let go without her knowing. She road for 15 feet on her own until she realized I wasn't holding on and started to panic. I was close enough to grab her and keep her going. I kept telling her to balance.

Here's a little slide show of her riding.



Sydney rode to Ryan's school and back today. I'm amazed how fast she picked up riding a 2 wheeler today. She still has alot of things to learn (like how to make left hand turns). Actually she just keeps going right until she's gone all the way around, so technically she does know how to go left, she just takes the longer route to get there.

New neighboors

About a week ago I was driving to my parents house when I noticed the long anticipated new addition to Spanish Fork City. The Windmill farm at the base of Spanish Fork Canyon. These are massive windmills. I believe I heard that they are as tall as the Statue Of Liberty, which is a good sized monument.

These pictures don't really show the size of these massive windmills. Notice the red crane that is dwarfed by the windmill.



Another view.



These are about 3 to 4 miles from my house, so they aren't really close. It's a good thing as I wouldn't want to have this happen if it was close to my house.

Ready for Raspberries

For the last few years, my dad has been very successful in growing raspberries. When we go to my parents house during raspberry "season", the kids love to pick and eat them off of them raspberries plants. If we let them, they'd probably eat all of them.

Yesterday Dad came over and helped me build 3 grow boxes (in preparation to get some starts from him.) I spent about half of today getting the grow boxes in place and filled with dirt.


We have an odd shaped backyard and we have this little section that is wasted, so I decided that I'd use this section to grow raspberries. A couple of years ago we started square foot gardening and have had very successful doing so, so we thought we'd do the same with raspberries. Each of the grow boxes we built are 1 foot wide. The longest one is 16 feet long. The second is 12 feet and the last one is 5 feet long.



We'll try and transfer the raspberries sometime this week before they come out of their winter sleep. If all goes well, we'll have lots of raspberries later this summer. We are also planning on planting a fruit tree back in this area, but probably not this year.

City Easter Egg hunt

We attended the yearly Spanish Fork Easter egg hunt today.

As always, we were running a bit late, so I dropped Deni and the kids off at the park and went to find a parking spot on the next street. There were probably 1000 people there as this is quite a popular event. (some of the eggs the kids find have prizes written on a paper inside, such as a bike, or some other large present.) They got smart this year and made all parents stay off the field, kids only. When we went last year, parents were grabbing eggs for their kids and running around carrying their kids. It was pretty crazy last year.

The Easter egg hunt started at 10am and when I caught up to Deni and the kids, it was about 9:53am. Deni took Ryan and I took Sydney, as they egg hunt was split up by age. They didn't have the ages posted, so I guessed by the size of Sydney to the other kids waiting. About 2 minutes before the egg hunt was going to start, I overheard someone say that where we were standing was for the 5 to 6 yr olds. By that time, it was too late to take Sydney and find the right age group for her, as if we moved, we'd miss the egg hunt. It literally starts at 10:00am and ends and 10:02am. At last it started and off Sydney went. She kept up with the 5 and 6 year olds and was able to hold her own. When I caught up to her, she had 12 eggs in her basket. I wonder how many she would have gotten if she was in the right age group. They had asked that the kids only get 8 eggs, so I think she did just fine in the older group. Because she had so many more eggs than she was supposed to have, I explained to her that she had too many and we needed to give some away. We took 4 out and gave it to a little girl that only had 2 eggs. Sydney had her 8 eggs. As we were walking out to find Deni, there was a little boy standing in the field all by himself crying. As I got closer, I noticed he had no eggs. I asked Sydney if she would share with him and give him 2 eggs. She took 2 from her basket and gave them to the little boy, which stopped crying immediately. At the same time, another little girl gave the boy a egg too. I was proud of Sydney giving up her eggs and sharing with others that weren't as swift in gathering eggs.

Here is Sydney before the egg hunt.





Ryan wasn't as lucky as Sydney in the 7 and 8 year old group. He ran and tried hard, but came up empty. He was sad too, however a city worker took the ones from the older group that didn't get anything and made sure they got a few eggs. So they gave Ryan 4 eggs.

Here is Ryan in his running stance waiting for the start of the egg hunt.



Sydney after getting her eggs.



We didn't win any "big" prizes, but the kids got candy and a few coupons (free bowling, free milk shake, etc.)

Slow Friday

Although today was the last day of Brainshare. I didn't want to go up to SLC again, so I went into work instead. It was very quiet today, so I was able to catch up on the things had missed this last week.

I accidentally left my shoes at my parents house last night, so I didn't have any shoes to go work out in. Bummer. So I was only 60% in my work out this week. Not too bad, knowing I had all the extra hours up at Brainshare in SLC.

After work, I drove to my parents to pick up my shoes. I then went home and worked on making some grow boxes for raspberries. Dad came over to help me. He also cut my roses way back.

Beat the Experts

I didn't get enough sleep last night. I got into bed at 12:20am and my alarm went off at 6:00am this morning.

I had to be in SLC to teach at 8:30am.

As I drove into SLC, it was raining and trying to snow. I had a hard time staying awake as I drove, but after breakfast I was ready to teach my session.

This session didn't go as well as the afternoon Tuesday session. The attendance was about half of the Tuesday afternoon session and was early in the morning after a late concert. However, the session still went well.

I spent the rest of the day attending other technical sessions until 5:30pm. I caught a quick bite to eat before the "Meet the Experts" night kicked off at 6pm. "Meet the Experts" is a 4 hour event where customers (Brainshare attendees) are invited to the Salt Palace to mingle with the Developers and Technical Support Staff from Novell and ask them any question they want. I'm pretty sure most of Brainshare attendees come because there is free food and an open bar. Yes there is free alcohol.

The Novell employees stand around waiting for the attendees to come up and ask a question about our specific specialty. I think that "Meet the Experts" should really be called "Beat the Experts". By the time you are done with 4 hours straight of questions from customers, (some are drunk customers by the end of the night) you are beat, tired, ready to go home, etc.

I left at 9:30pm for home. I was going on 5 hrs of sleep and had an hour drive home, so I didn't feel too bad leaving 30 minutes early. I called and talked to Deni on the way home to make sure I could get home.

Collective Soul Concert

Because of the festivities tonight, I stayed home in the morning and got ready for tonight. I took Sydney to school at 9am then came home to get all our stuff together. I got the kids sleeping bags, clothes, etc ready to go and ater getting everything ready to go, I went to the Novell Gym to work out. I was able to ride 12.95 miles in 35 minutes. (my best time). I then ran (on the elipitical) for 6 miles (in 48 minutes.)

After the work out, I showered, dressed and drove to Springville to meet Deni.

I asked my mom to watch Sydney and Ryan while Deni and I went to SLC. Deni and I stopped off at a furniture store looking for our chair and ottoman for the office, but were unable to find something we liked.

Deni dropped me off at Brainshare at the Salt Palace and then went to the Family History Center. She enjoyed her time there. She had to look at a restricted film that was only in SLC. She looked at it and got the necessary information her Uncle was looking for. She also was able to find her ancestors in some census records.

Around 5pm we met up again and went to dinner at Macaroni Grill. After dinner, we headed to the Energy Solutions Arena for the concert.

Along with the technical sessions at Brainshare, Novell has a few evening activities for the attendees. Each year they rent out the Energy Solutions Arena (Delta center) on Wednesday night and have a concert. This year the band was Collective Soul. Novell actually wants to fill the Energy Solutions Center, so they handed out 5 extra tickets per employee. Deni got one and the other 4 went to four of our friends. I grew up (High School and early college) listening to Collective Soul, so I was pretty excited.

I was able to get seats about 10 rows back from the stage on the side, first row. They were great seats. Before the concert, the opening act was a comedian named Frank Caliendo. I don't think I've laughed this hard in a while. Frank is great at doing impressions, especially of President George Bush and President Clinton. He was very funny. He did a 40 minute stand up comedy sketch. It was great.

Here is a picture of Collective Soul on stage.



Here is a little video clip of Collective Soul playing.



Collective Soul played until just after 10pm. After the concert was over we walked and talked with our friends (Kevin and Rochelle Tolley). We hadn't seen them in quite sometime and spent a few minutes catching up with each other.

We left SLC about 11:05pm headed for home. I had decided that since I had to be up in SLC the next morning to early and because we were going to be so late that it would be easier if we just slept at my parents house in Springville. I crawled into bed at 12:20am, while Deni ironed my clothes for the next morning. The kids were asleep in the room in their sleeping bags.

It was a long but fun day today.

IKEA in 11 minutes

I woke up at 4:55am this morning and headed for the Provo pool to swim before I went to SLC for Brainshare. 5am is too early for me to get up.

I got to the pool around 5:20 and was in the pool by 5:30am swimming. I swam until lap swim was over at 6am. I almost got my mile in, just a lap short.

I showered at the Rec Center and then headed for SLC.

I attended a few technical sessions in the morning but taught my "What's a good password?" session at 4:30pm - 5:15pm. Who would have thought you would be able to talk about what's a good password for an hour and fifteen minutes? The session went well. It was interesting to hear from customers on their password difficulties. Some mentioned that their normal workers were forced to have a "strong" password and also to change their passwords regularly, however their CxO levels didn't want to be bothered with it, so they were forced to have their most critical people (CIO, CEO, CFO) with passwords that were weak and never changed. However, on the other hand there was a financial company that made their administrators change their password every 14 days. Ouch. I complain about changing my passwords once every 6 months.

Anyway it was a good day and the session went well.

I left SLC about 5:30pm and headed home.

I stopped at the new IKEA store on the way home and because I was late I spent only 11 minutes in the store. (timed myself as I walked in and out of the store with my watch) I've heard to see it properly, you have to have at least 2 hours, however I ran around looking for a chair and a desk and only spent 11 minutes. I didn't find anything worth going back and looking at again.

Start of the Brainshare 2008 week

Brainshare is Novell's technical conference they hold each year in Salt Lake City, UT. Brainshare is for Novell's customers and each attendee pays around $1500 for the week to attend (which includes the conference and breakfast and lunch each day.) On top of the $1500, they also have to pay for their own airfare and hotel. There are hundreds of technical "sessions" they can attend to learn and sharpen their skills.

For the last 2 years I've co-taught with a friend at work about a product I support at Novell. This year, we submitted the same idea but it was rejected. I guess the same info 3 years in a row is boring. My co-worker, out of a joke, submitted a topic on "What's a good Password?" and it was accepted. So I helped with "teaching" this session. The session is set up more as a discussion instead of the normal lecutre. Because I am a speaker at Brainshare, I get a free ticket to the conference. My session will be taught twice within the whole week, which gives me the rest of the week to pretend like I am a customer and attend other technical sessions.

Brainshare reminds me how much I love my 15 minute commute to work each day. I would go crazy if I had an hour commute each way to work everyday.

I left at 6:30am this morning and headed for Salt Lake City. I left early to miss traffic as well as give me enough time to register (get my badge) and eat breakfast. After breakfast, I attended the keynote speaker and then attended a few technical sessions until lunch. I attended one session after lunch then decided to leave at 2:30pm and head back to Novell in Provo. I worked out for about 1.5 hours at the gym at Novell and was home by 5:30pm. I'm going to try and keep my training schedule intact this week as much as possible.

Binner - Breakfast for Dinner

Deni and Sydney stayed home from church today.

Deni has been feeling bad all week and Sydney had a nasty nose. I've been making Deni rest this weekend as I'm going to be gone/getting home late much of next week. So that means Dad needs to cook dinner. Hmm what can I cook for dinner? As I was leaving church, I made sure that the sacrament bread had been cleaned up. The boys usually take the remaining (unblessed) bread home. This week we had almost a whole loaf. As they were splitting it up, I said, that would make alot of french toast. And my dinner idea was born. French toast for breakfast.

When I got home, I convinced the kids that French toast was the best idea for dinner and then I asked Deni. Nope, no way, she didn't want that for dinner, but since I had already convinced the kids of the plan, we stuck too it and I let them help me make french toast and fry eggs.

Sydney stirred the french toast batter up for me.



Ryan was the egg man and enjoyed cracking the eggs into the frying pan.




Sydney took this picture of Ryan and myself.



Sydney wanted to have one final picture taken. You can see why. I guess she's too much like her father. Notice Ryan's bunny ears, thanks to Sydney.



The French toast and eggs were great for dinner, even if Deni didn't think they sounded good.

What would we do without tax returns?

For the last 3 weeks we have have been working on "my office". We converted the little "home teaching room" that we had no furniture for into my new office. The plan was we were going to put up french doors, do some painting, get a new desk and chair.

We started on Feb 23rd by taking the chair-rail off the wall. Apparently the builders put up the chair rail before doing any texture or paint, so I had to mud the area where the chair rail was.

Here's a picture of the chair rail down.



We had planned on putting on a rough texture on the wall anyways, but it was just another step that slowed us down a bit. An old neighbor in Springville taught me how to do the texture on a wall. It's not difficult, but it is time consuming and only one person can do the whole room, so it has the same look and feel.



After the rough texture had dried, you come back through with a damp cloth and wipe down the whole wall, which softens the edges and gives us the look we were wanting.

The majority of the walls in our house are tan. We wanted a little change so we decided on doing a "chocolate" wall. That was the easy part. The harder part was getting the right color paint for the other three walls. 3 different colors later (and 2 gallons of custom, non-returnable paint) we got the right color. We also put down new baseboards. (5 1/2 inch baseboards vs the 3 inch old ones)



Today I finished caulking and covering up the nail holes on the baseboards, so the next step is to paint the baseboards.

So phase 1 is just about complete. Phase 2 is to get a new desk and chair and Phase 3 is to put up french doors.

Stealing Deni's Thunder

It's been a while since I've blogged and I thought I'd try and steal Deni's thunder.

We started quite a few painting projects in the last few weeks and we are just about done. We started with Sydney's room. We haven't painted it since we bought our house 2.5 years ago. For the last 2.5 years Sydney's room has been bright yellow and purple. It was cute but in need of a change.

Here is the before picture.



We decided that Sydney needed a pink room, but we wanted it to be subtle. We replaced the bottom purple with a light tan and the top yellow with a light pink. Then on one wall we painted white-ish stripes. We are really happy with the way it turned out and Sydney is very happy to be back in her own room again.



We always start projects and never get before and after pictures. However we got them for this project, as you can see. It's fun to look at the before and after pictures of finished projects.

I think the next painting job is going to paint the furniture in Sydney's room white, so it's not so 1980's. But that will be later this summer as both Deni and I need to forget "all the fun" it is painting.

Games and hanging out

Today was a laid back day. The whole family hung out at Mom and Dad's visiting and playing games. Shane had an old roommate come down to visit him for a bit.

In the evening, Kennedy, Teresa's youngest asked me to play cards with her. Kennedy doesn't normally like me to get close to her, much less play with her, so I went and started playing cards with her. I then got Shane to come and play and then 2 of Kennedy's older siblings.

Anyway before you watch this video clip. You have to know a few things. First we are playing Old Maid. Second, I have the Old Maid card. If you look at my cards, you will notice that one card is sticking up much higher than the rest (because this is the Old Maid card.) Anyway my niece, Bailey picks the old Maid card from me. Shane and I laughed and laughed for a good long time. It was funny that she would picked the only card that I had sticking 4 inches higher than the rest.

Snowmobiling at Daniels Summit

Today Shane, Ron, Dad and I went snowmobiling near Daniels Summit. Dad rented 2 new snowmobiles for the day and then we took his 2 snowmobiles, so we would all have our own snowmobiles to ride. We started on the "groomed" trails but they were quite bumpy. We ended up finding alot of untouched snow that we went around and played on.

No one wanted to drive one of the rented snowmobiles as it was much faster than the others (and the fact that it was a $10,000 rented machine that no one wanted to wreck) so I drove it. I got going 80 mph before I decided that it was a probably good idea to slow down and before I killed myself.

Dad took this little video of me on the rented snowmobile. I was going about 50mph at the time.



Here's a picture of my Chinese brother Shane and I. Actually in his defense, it was very bright out, as you can see from the transitions lens on my glasses. I'm sure he would also want everyone to know that he had been wearing a helmet all morning and this hair doesn't normally look like this. I wanted to post this as I'm finally taller than Shane. Ok, so he was sinking in the snow, but I'm taller (at least today).



Shane, Dad and I



I had a great time snowmobiling. I have to add that while Shane was driving Dad's snowmobile, he ran into the back of dad (driving a rented snowmobile.) He only damaged the front of Dad's red snowmobile and didn't hurt the rented one. He tried to blame on it on me. Something about he was looking back for me and Dad stopped in front of him. Somethings never change (grin).

Skunked at Scofield

Today I went Ice fishing with Deni, Ron and my Dad at Scofield.

This was Ron's first time ice fishing, so we tried to get everything perfect so he could catch some fish.

We left on time and got up to Scofield about the time the sun was starting to come up (about 7am). I got out and started getting the snowmobiles ready and another car drove up. Two older gentlemen got out and it wasn't too long before Dad had made another new best fishing buddy. This time, one of these men was a "Professional Fisherman" that was testing some special formula he is working on.

I'm sure these 2 men pulled up, they saw a free ride across the lake with Dad's snowmobiles and struck up a conversation to see so they wouldn't have to walk out on the lake.

We got ready and headed out to our fishing spot. As soon as we got there, Dad took off to help his buddies out on the lake. The ice was deep. I was wondering if I was going to be able to get through the ice before I ran out of thread on the ice auger. Luckily, Dad owns a power ice auger.

I was going to bring my hand ice auger and require Ron to hand drill his first hole,(since it was his first time ice fishing) as his right of passage to be a ice fisherman, but I forgot to put it in the truck. The ice was probably 2 to 3 feet thick, so it's a good thing for Ron that I forgot it.

We fished for a long time without any bites at all. After visiting the "Professional" fishermans ice hole, it was decided that we should move all our stuff over by them, as they were catching fish. My dad took Ron over and left him with these two men for about 30 minutes. During that time Ron was able to catch 2 fish, so he was able to catch fish, which was great.

However the rest of us got skunked. Since the fishing was so slow and the there was about a foot of new snow, I took the opportunity to go snowmobiling with my dad. When I came back, I took Deni out. She wasn't too thrilled with the places I wanted to go. She would squeeze me with her legs when I started on a path she didn't think was acceptable or iffy.

I had a great time despite not catching any fish.

Shane's in town

Shane and Ron flew in tonight from Texas. The got in around 10:30pm. We chatted for a few minutes before we headed off to bed (as we were leaving at 5:30am to go ice fishing).

Shane will be in town until Sunday, March 9th.

Family Bowling at BYU

We went out on a family date tonight to BYU to go bowling.

Deni and Ryan had gone a few weeks ago and Sydney has wanted to go ever since. We got rails or bumpers (for the kids). Sydney used this device to help her bowl.





Ryan used a 6 lb ball and was able to do alright.



We all had a good time bowling. I was amazed on how young the students looked. It just goes to show me that I'm getting old.

Here's a picture of Deni bowling straight down the middle. She's not even taking advantage of the bumpers.

Overnight Cross Country Ski trip with the Varsity Scouts

Last night I went on a Varsity Scout overnighter up in the mountains above Beaver, UT. We did the Cross Country Beaver High Adventure base trip.

Not having ever cross country skied, I was a little nervous. Also knowing that I was going to have to do it for the first time carrying my gear, as well as doing it in the dark.

We got to the starting point around 7:45pm and it was already dark. We got our shoes, skis and polls and got a 5 minute "crash" course on how to cross country ski and more importantly, how to get up when (not if) we fall. No one wanted to take the lead, so I decided that I'd do it. With the Young Men's president behind me, I started on the first 1/2 mile downhill. We were told the first 1/2 mile was downhill but I expected it to be a minor downhill. As I started going faster and faster I realized that I should have paid a little more attention to the ski instruction on how to get up after I fall down. I started laughing and lost it and fell down in the snow. I repeated this over and over throughout the night. We had a 2.5 mile ski into the "lodge" we were staying at. Lodge is used very loosely. It was a garage like building with a heater (which was nice) but was by no means a Lodge.



I made it to the lodge with my assigned partner at about 11pm. Over the next 15-30 minutes the rest of our group came in. We had one boy that refused to cross country ski. He "thought it would be easier", so he hiked carrying his skis and poles in the snow for 2.5 miles. Needless to say, he was the last one in from our group. We had 8 in all, 3 leaders and 5 boys. There were 2 other Varsity teams there as well.

The typical sleeping quaters looked like this:


I was a little concerned about lice and other things I could contract by sleeping on these old mattresses up the mountains, but by the time I got my sleeping bag out, I was so tired, it didn't matter where I slept. I was even able to sleep through the other 2 leaders horrible snoring (which I have never been able to do on previous outings.)

The great part of this whole overnighter was that all we had to do was show up. The staff cooked for us and provided all the equipment needed.

We had some free time to go play in some open fields today and then we were taken on a guided tour through the trees and up to this look outpoint.

This is the group that went from our ward. (minus the walker)