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)