I've been a bit lax on blogging lately having discovered Facebook and putting brief blurbs there. However, since this blog also serves as a bit of a family journal, I'd be remiss if some things over the past few months got away without mention.
On the first weekend of May we had a Ward (church) camp-out. Unfortunately Maria wasn't able to join us as she was visiting her sister Brenda. So it was just us boys.
We had a nice time as you can see by the smiles of the boys in this picture. You can also see how tired the boys were after I put up the tent. At least they helped a little bit more this year than in the past.
We packed our own dinners. Colin brought some hot dogs to roast over a fire. Spencer nuked some chicken nuggets which he brought in a ziploc bag. And I put together a tin foil dinner which is making me drool as I type this although I forgot to add carrots.
We also brought fixings for S'mores which we joined the rest of the ward in cooking while we had a short devotional that evening around a campfire.
The next morning the Ward fixed a nice breakfast and we spent some time playing some games like tug-of-war and jumping rope. The whole time the weather was completely overcast and I was expecting it to rain at any moment, but miraculously it stayed completely dry the whole time.
--
The same can't be said of that Saturday evening when the boys and I (still without Maria) attempted to go attend a Rangers baseball game with Colin's Cub Scout pack. They were supposed to show up in their shirts and participate in a pre-game parade. Unfortunately, despite preparing ourselves with rain ponchos, as we set out for the Arlington ballpark the heaven's opened and dumped themselves out on us. We were in our smaller car which was barely making it over some of the water pools flooding the freeway. Maybe due to the poor sleep we got in the tent, Colin fell fast asleep in the backseat, so I decided to give up and go back home instead. Amazingly, despite how wet it was, they didn't call the game, but I'm sure we would have been miserable had we been able to surf our vehicle all the way there to attend.
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During my birthday week (April 19-27) I flew to Salt Lake to attend a conference there for work. The conference itself (SSTC, which was what I went to in Vegas for last year,) was okay but nothing interesting to report here about. Instead, since I still have family and friends in Utah, I was able to have some fun visiting after hours and over the weekend.
I arrived on Sunday, the day before the conference started. My parents invited me over to dinner. In discussing my schedule for the week, my mom suggested that since the conference ended on Thursday, I could come to her school to do a magic show for her school class on Friday. With no magic supplies, save for one small trick I packed for the nieces and nephew, I spent several hours and lunch breaks over the next few days searching for magic stores and trick ideas. Much to my surprise, there are currently no functioning magic stores in the Salt Lake area. All of them have closed their doors and have moved on-line instead. Luckily one of the on-line vendors allowed me to come visit his office which doubles as an insurance agency and purchase some rope and sponge balls and another item or two from his storerooms in the back.
On Monday night, I visited my oldest and still best friend Chad Curtis and his family and had nice Family Home Evening and dinner with them. I convinced Chad to sign up on Facebook where I've been able to interact with him more in the past month than I have in years. It's great to have a friend that I can still just hang out comfortably with. We spent time trading bands, movies, and comedians to check out, and played a bit of Guitar Hero too.
On Wednesday as a birthday present for my mom, I invited her to join me downtown Salt Lake where the conference was holding a social event. Last year it was tickets to Barry Manilow which I skipped. This year it was a murder mystery dinner. It was called the "Godfather of the Bride" put on by a local troupe. It was a lot of fun, but for a show that was supposed to be two hours long, after two hours there was still no murder thus no mystery. It wasn't until the very end when someone died, that they told us all we had 10 minutes to question all the players (in a room full of several hundred people who all had to do the same thing) before revealing the murderer. We did what we could and pieced together a guess and were right! But so were a lot of other people, so we didn't win any prizes which were given away through a drawing. Still it was a fun and unique evening.
Thursday was my birthday and the end of the conference mid-day. Dad took me to see a movie in the afternoon ("17 Again" which was fun,) and then we joined with mom and went out to eat for dinner.
On Friday I put together all the items I was able to find over the week and put on a magic show for the entire First Grade class at my mom's elementary school. It actually turned out pretty good despite the short notice and significant lack of props. At the end I taught them all a rubber band trick just before school ended, so there were 100 kids running around at the end of school showing every teacher 10 or 20 times over the same trick. It was pretty funny.
That evening we joined my sister Shauna's family for dinner and a combined birthday party for Mom and me. I did a reprise of the magic show for her family. The most entertaining part of that night was seeing Melody riding a unicycle. That's one skill I've never mastered so I was pretty impressed.
Saturday I went with Mom and Shauna to BYU where they had an amazing exhibit at their Museum of Art. It was called "Walter Wick, Games, Gizmos, and Toys In The Attic." Walter Wick is the artist/photographer behind the "I Spy"books as well as the "Can You See What I See" books. The show had many large reproductions of the photos in those books as well as many of the original props which were just amazing to see.
Afterwards we went to the BYU bookstore where I was looking for some T-shirts for the family as souvenirs and we found some Walter Wick books. So I bought one and Mom bought me a second one as a birthday present.
I stayed with my parents over the weekend and attended church with them. Mom and Dad are both serving in the primary as a tag team of pianist (Mom) and music leader (Dad). Dad asked me if I would help during sharing time to turn one of my tricks into a method of having the kids choose songs to sing. None of the ones I had been doing seemed to fit, so I came up with a new rope trick which I performed for the junior and senior primaries and then had them draw rope ends from my hand to pick a song. I had a super long rope extending from my sleeve of a jacket Dad loaned me so that when they pulled the end, it just kept extending from my hand for a long while. It was a lot of fun. I also filled in for Mom on the piano on a song she didn't know and took over for Dad teaching a song when he had to go grab some water, so they kept me fairly busy. I had just been released from my calling in primary at home a few weeks earlier but I still feel more at home in there so I was happy to help.
Here's a couch full of souvenirs I brought home with me:
I flew home Monday morning and then turned around on Tuesday and flew to Marietta GA for a work meeting there. I also had a trip to Dayton OH earlier that month. So I was pretty tired of traveling by the time I got home later that week. I was almost two weeks away from my desk at the office which was nice, but meant a lot of catch up when I finally got back.
--
Well, this is getting pretty long. I think I'll stop here. I still need to post on a few other things like our trip to Scarborough Renaissance Festival this year, my birthday, and our recent primary Mission activity.
In the mean time, here's a nice picture of me that Maria took with her new camera.
On the first weekend of May we had a Ward (church) camp-out. Unfortunately Maria wasn't able to join us as she was visiting her sister Brenda. So it was just us boys.We had a nice time as you can see by the smiles of the boys in this picture. You can also see how tired the boys were after I put up the tent. At least they helped a little bit more this year than in the past.
We packed our own dinners. Colin brought some hot dogs to roast over a fire. Spencer nuked some chicken nuggets which he brought in a ziploc bag. And I put together a tin foil dinner which is making me drool as I type this although I forgot to add carrots.We also brought fixings for S'mores which we joined the rest of the ward in cooking while we had a short devotional that evening around a campfire.
The next morning the Ward fixed a nice breakfast and we spent some time playing some games like tug-of-war and jumping rope. The whole time the weather was completely overcast and I was expecting it to rain at any moment, but miraculously it stayed completely dry the whole time.
--
The same can't be said of that Saturday evening when the boys and I (still without Maria) attempted to go attend a Rangers baseball game with Colin's Cub Scout pack. They were supposed to show up in their shirts and participate in a pre-game parade. Unfortunately, despite preparing ourselves with rain ponchos, as we set out for the Arlington ballpark the heaven's opened and dumped themselves out on us. We were in our smaller car which was barely making it over some of the water pools flooding the freeway. Maybe due to the poor sleep we got in the tent, Colin fell fast asleep in the backseat, so I decided to give up and go back home instead. Amazingly, despite how wet it was, they didn't call the game, but I'm sure we would have been miserable had we been able to surf our vehicle all the way there to attend.
--
During my birthday week (April 19-27) I flew to Salt Lake to attend a conference there for work. The conference itself (SSTC, which was what I went to in Vegas for last year,) was okay but nothing interesting to report here about. Instead, since I still have family and friends in Utah, I was able to have some fun visiting after hours and over the weekend.
I arrived on Sunday, the day before the conference started. My parents invited me over to dinner. In discussing my schedule for the week, my mom suggested that since the conference ended on Thursday, I could come to her school to do a magic show for her school class on Friday. With no magic supplies, save for one small trick I packed for the nieces and nephew, I spent several hours and lunch breaks over the next few days searching for magic stores and trick ideas. Much to my surprise, there are currently no functioning magic stores in the Salt Lake area. All of them have closed their doors and have moved on-line instead. Luckily one of the on-line vendors allowed me to come visit his office which doubles as an insurance agency and purchase some rope and sponge balls and another item or two from his storerooms in the back.
On Monday night, I visited my oldest and still best friend Chad Curtis and his family and had nice Family Home Evening and dinner with them. I convinced Chad to sign up on Facebook where I've been able to interact with him more in the past month than I have in years. It's great to have a friend that I can still just hang out comfortably with. We spent time trading bands, movies, and comedians to check out, and played a bit of Guitar Hero too.
On Wednesday as a birthday present for my mom, I invited her to join me downtown Salt Lake where the conference was holding a social event. Last year it was tickets to Barry Manilow which I skipped. This year it was a murder mystery dinner. It was called the "Godfather of the Bride" put on by a local troupe. It was a lot of fun, but for a show that was supposed to be two hours long, after two hours there was still no murder thus no mystery. It wasn't until the very end when someone died, that they told us all we had 10 minutes to question all the players (in a room full of several hundred people who all had to do the same thing) before revealing the murderer. We did what we could and pieced together a guess and were right! But so were a lot of other people, so we didn't win any prizes which were given away through a drawing. Still it was a fun and unique evening.Thursday was my birthday and the end of the conference mid-day. Dad took me to see a movie in the afternoon ("17 Again" which was fun,) and then we joined with mom and went out to eat for dinner.
On Friday I put together all the items I was able to find over the week and put on a magic show for the entire First Grade class at my mom's elementary school. It actually turned out pretty good despite the short notice and significant lack of props. At the end I taught them all a rubber band trick just before school ended, so there were 100 kids running around at the end of school showing every teacher 10 or 20 times over the same trick. It was pretty funny.
That evening we joined my sister Shauna's family for dinner and a combined birthday party for Mom and me. I did a reprise of the magic show for her family. The most entertaining part of that night was seeing Melody riding a unicycle. That's one skill I've never mastered so I was pretty impressed.
Saturday I went with Mom and Shauna to BYU where they had an amazing exhibit at their Museum of Art. It was called "Walter Wick, Games, Gizmos, and Toys In The Attic." Walter Wick is the artist/photographer behind the "I Spy"books as well as the "Can You See What I See" books. The show had many large reproductions of the photos in those books as well as many of the original props which were just amazing to see.Afterwards we went to the BYU bookstore where I was looking for some T-shirts for the family as souvenirs and we found some Walter Wick books. So I bought one and Mom bought me a second one as a birthday present.
I stayed with my parents over the weekend and attended church with them. Mom and Dad are both serving in the primary as a tag team of pianist (Mom) and music leader (Dad). Dad asked me if I would help during sharing time to turn one of my tricks into a method of having the kids choose songs to sing. None of the ones I had been doing seemed to fit, so I came up with a new rope trick which I performed for the junior and senior primaries and then had them draw rope ends from my hand to pick a song. I had a super long rope extending from my sleeve of a jacket Dad loaned me so that when they pulled the end, it just kept extending from my hand for a long while. It was a lot of fun. I also filled in for Mom on the piano on a song she didn't know and took over for Dad teaching a song when he had to go grab some water, so they kept me fairly busy. I had just been released from my calling in primary at home a few weeks earlier but I still feel more at home in there so I was happy to help.Here's a couch full of souvenirs I brought home with me:
I flew home Monday morning and then turned around on Tuesday and flew to Marietta GA for a work meeting there. I also had a trip to Dayton OH earlier that month. So I was pretty tired of traveling by the time I got home later that week. I was almost two weeks away from my desk at the office which was nice, but meant a lot of catch up when I finally got back.
--
Well, this is getting pretty long. I think I'll stop here. I still need to post on a few other things like our trip to Scarborough Renaissance Festival this year, my birthday, and our recent primary Mission activity.
In the mean time, here's a nice picture of me that Maria took with her new camera.
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