15 second fishing

We signed Ryan up for an Urban Fishing class, put on by the city,where they teach young boys and girls the basics of fishing. Tonight was his first class (out of 6 classes). Deni dropped him off at 6pm for the 2 hour class. Deni had a ward activity she wanted to go to, so I got to pick up Ryan at 8pm, which seems a little late for a 7 yr old.

I got a little worried that he might be cold, so Sydney and I headed off for the pond to see how Ryan was doing. We got there about 7:40pm. Ryan hadn't caught anything yet (in the 1 hr and 40 minutes.) He was happy to see me as he wanted to go off the beaten path an on the other side of the pond. There were probably 30 kids lined up all fishing within 5 feet of each other. No wonder he hadn't caught anything.

So Ryan pointed to where he wanted to go and we walked over there. We were under a tree, so I asked if I could cast the line out for him. He agreed. Not even 15 seconds after the line hitting the water, Ryan's bobber started moving. I set the hook and handed the pole to Ryan to reel in. It was fun watching him. You would have thought he was pulling in a 50 lb trophy fish. He was excited and I was excited that we was able to catch a fish. When we got the fish in, it actually was bigger than all the ones others had been catching. Ryan wanted to keep the fish, so we did. I unhooked the fish and cast out again to the same spot. Again within 15 seconds of casting, the bobber started moving again. I set the hook again and let him reel it in. This fish was smaller, so we let it go.

At that point we were out of bait and it was about 8pm, so we decided to call it a night. I wasn't prepared to bring a fish home, so I made Ryan hold it the whole way home. He gave me a play by play description of the fish wiggling and squirming all the way home.

Here is Ryan with his prize fish.




Same fish, just holding it different.



We cleaned the fish together, leaving the head on, at Ryan's request. Apparently Deni doesn't like to have the heads still on and has requested from now on that the head is taken off so when she opens the refrigerator she doesn't have fish eyes looking at her.

Sydney the triathlete

Sydney learned to ride a two wheeler last week and since then our house hasn't been the same. She wants to be outside riding her bike. This evening she asked me to go on a bike ride with her, so while I was pumping up my bike tires, she took off. Until today, she has always needed help getting started but apparently I was taking too long, so she figured out how to start by herself.

I caught up to her while she was riding the horseshoe loop around neighborhood. On my bike, I have an odometer and when I caught up to her, she was riding at 10 mph and got up to about 12 mph at her peak. The horseshoe loop is 1/5th of a mile. We rode around it 5 times and I had to convince her it was time to go get Ryan from fishing lessons, else she would have wanted to go around and around.

So we rode 1 mile together and apparently she rode 2 other miles earlier today. So there you have it, my 4 year old rode 3 miles on her bike. If a 3 year old can do it, anyone can do it.

Deni and I think Sydney is going to follow in her parents shoes and be a little triathlete. She learned to swim this year too, so maybe next year she will debut her skills as a 5 year old triathlete (in a kids tri, of course).

We got snow again, but snow doesn't stop Sydney from riding her bike.

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.