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.

Happy New Years Eve

Deni and Kati went to SLC today. They left in the morning . They toured Temple Square and the Conference center.

While they were gone, I cleaned the house and watched the kids. Ryan wanted to go play with a friend, but before we got done with the chores, a neighboor called and said his son wanted to play with Ryan. I said that was great as Ryan was wanting to play with someone. The neighboor said, Ok, well I'll send my son right over then."

Hmm that wasn't what I had planned on. I didn't want to babysit someone elses child. I had just gotten Sydney down for her nap and was hoping Ryan would go play at someone elses house while Sydney slept. I now know how to answer that question from now on. Don't assume anything and make sure I'm the first to say, sure I'll send Ryan over right away.

I survived, but would have been a much better day if I didn't have to go down and stop the problems like the neighboor kid writing on the walls or hitting Ryan in the face. Oh well.

Deni got home around dinnertime. We didn't really do anything for New Year's.

We sat in our nice warm home and watched the evening news of people outside in the cold rainy weather here in Utah and decided we had made the right decision to be lame and stay home.

We did play a few card games with Kati and her friend, Chad.

Perfect day - fishing and playin in the snow

Woke up at 4:45am this morning and got ready for the day. I got a few things together then woke Ryan up at 5:00am. We headed to Dad's house and got there just after 5:30am. I loaded all my stuff in his truck and we were off to Strawberry Reservoir to fish. We drove up Provo Canyon, which is under construction. They are building a new bridge up there which looks like it is going to bypass the dam. We got to Strawberry (Mud Creek) about 7am. The roads were extremely icy. Just before we made our turn off to Mud Creek we stopped to put the truck in 4 wheel Drive. I didn't have my shoes on yet, so my dad said he would do it. He opened the door, took a step out, then I didn't see him anymore. I leaned over to see him laying face down in the ice. He slowly got up and locked the hubs in so we could make it down the snow packed road to the parking lot. There were a few other cars there when we got there, but not too many.

Now that Dad has his little trailer that he made for ice fishing, we can get on the road pretty quickly. We pulled the snowmobiles off, got the trailer attached and we were off. Our ice fishing place is only 3-4 minutes by snowmobile.

We drilled a few holes and within about 15 minutes we had our first fish. Although it was not my pole, I was the closest to the pole when it fish hit the lure and the pole jumped. I picked up the pole, set the hook and began reeling it in. It was the biggest fish of the day. Around 20-21 inches. It was a nice fish.



We continued to have success for most of the morning. I ended up catching 4 total fish, one of which I let Ryan reel in. Dad also caught 3 fish. So our total was 7 fish for the day, but we had to let them all go. At Strawberry Reservoir, Cutthroat trout, which is all you catch at Strawberry, must be thrown back if they are between 15 to 22 inches. For some reason, even though we were catching fish, Ryan didn't want to be out fishing. To his defense, it was very cold. It snowed off and on very lightly today and with the wind, it was hard to keep everything warm. I had a great morning of fishing and enjoyed pulling in the big fish we caught.

On the way home it began snowing. By the time I got to my house in Spanish Fork, there was about an inch of snow on the ground. Deni's sister Kati and friend were at the house (they came up for New Year's). Shortly after I got home, Deni and Kati left to go shopping. Since it was snowing, I decided it would be fun to go to the park to let the kids play with their new slides that they got for Christmas. On the way to the park, I realized that the snow was perfect for making a snowman, so we stopped and made this snowman in our front lawn.



After making the snow man, we went to the park. I don't think Sydney has even made a snowman or ridden a slide. Sydney would come up to the top of the little incline at the park, sit down on her slide and I would push her down. She would giggle the whole way down till she stopped. Then stand up, carry her sled back up to me and do it again.

At the park, I also made a huge snowman. So big in fact that I had to get Deni and Kati's friend to help me lift the middle section and the head.

I sure had a fun time with the kids in the snow.

I'd rather be fishing....

I worked today till about 1:30pm then decided it was time to come home. (Since it was very slow - however I did get to read some of the Da Vinci code today) I stopped at Dad's for a bit, hoping the Eye Dr in Springville would call me back, so I didn't have to make a trip back out.

While I was at Dad's we decided that we would go fishing tomorrow up at Strawberry. Dad has been ice fishing almost everyday this week and has yet to catch any fish.

Since we were leaving so early in the morning (5:30am) I thought about going and spending the night at my parents, but decided against it and will set my alarm about 15 minutes earlier so I can get over there.

I started working on my taxes. The first day that you can submit your taxes e-file is Jan 13, 2006. It hink I might switch and use taxcut this year.