Down Week

Well.  This was a bit of a slow week it seems.  The highlights start with Monica and I playing a mean game of lawn darts!  We have a more safe version than legit giant darts, but that didn't stop me from driving one all the way into the ground (bottom right).

It was probably the best game we've ever played.  There were only a few rounds where neither of us got a dart in the ring.  Guess we're getting better just in time for winter and it being too cold to go out and play...

I made it a goal way back at the start of the year to run to work (and, ideally, run back home too).  Well, training hasn't gone quite as planned yet this year, but I have at least run to work once before.  I decided to run to work again as it's just a little over 4 and half miles away, so shorter than many of my runs that have me returning to home.  The new challenge this time was that I needed to pack not only my clothes but my lunch.  Last time I ran in was for a big meeting with a customer with free lunch provided.

Well when the morning came it happened to line up with the first snow fall of the year!  Lucky me.  So I had to wear extra warm clothes, and then when I got out running, it turned out I was over prepared and I could have left a layer or 2 behind.

Once I got to work I decided to play a fun game with Monica called "Does it make it to work safe" which revolved around my lunch.  Here you can see my once all yellow, really great looking banana:

And my PB&J sandwich:

So I guess in the future I'll have to plan a little better what to take for lunch.  Everything else survived all right though.

We went to a play at the high school on Friday night.  One of the teachers in our ward, Joe Robinson, was in it.  The play was "And Then There Were None" and it was really good!  He even had one of the main parts and made it down to one of the last 3 alive!  It was a fun night, and good to get back out to a play again.  It's been far to long since Monica and I last went.

Now well kinda jump a couple more days forward to today.  Monica and I went on a walk after church to go see the prairie dogs.  They ran and hid initially when we stopped right outside their homes, but after waiting for a little they came out to play.

Monica was so excited to be back with her prairie dog brethren!  Just look at the excitement!

We'll that basically bring us up to the current.  We're trying to get the baby's room finalized (this week I believe) so I should have some picture of that for you next week.

I'm not sure of anything else cool going on around the house, but if you're interested in anything else feel free to leave a comment, I do try to check them occasionally.  I think that's all for now.

I think this house is haunted...

Happy Halloween everyone!  We had a splendid week, which mostly highlighted Halloween.  

On Monday Colby came by.  We had a lot of classes together back in college, and he's off finishing up grad school in New York.  He was driving from Texas to Utah to visit family and stopped by on his way.  It probably didn't hurt that we offered him a free place to spend the night :).  We went and got ye ol' Indian food and played some Roborally and didn't take any pictures ever, so there's that...

Tuesday the youth had baptisms for the dead.  It's been a long time since I've been to the temple to perform baptisms.  It was a lot of fun to be there with the youth.

Fall is definitely in full swing out here in CO.  We have one tree that is red and another that is yellow in the back yard, and the leaves are currently fighting for control of our back yard.  I guess I could go out and rake some time, but we couldn't find any of those garbage bags that look like pumpkins at the stores, so really, the yard belongs to the leaves now.

On Friday we started to celebrate Halloween with a pumpkin shaped pizza from Papa Murphy's.  I would say the pizza we got did not look as good as the ad...  What'cha gonna do...

We didn't get around to carving our pumpkins until actual Halloween night.  Luckily we finished and got them outside before any trick-or-treaters came by.

We also got a couple of decorations for the house, such as these glow eyes.  I hung them up by the corner of the house in hopes they might scare someone as they rounded the corner.  I think they spend most of the night not glowing cause sunset takes too long...  I did go shine my phone flashlight on them for a while to get them to glow a little.

This is how we decorated our front porch.  We did all of this starting at like... 5pm.  Guess we're last minute decorators.

As the night went on there was a group of three little girls that came to the door and two were ready to get candy but one was lagging behind a little and looked kind of scared.  I coaxed her into taking some candy, and as they walked away one of the other girls turned to her and said "See, I knew it wasn't really haunted!!!"  Guess that orange tape across the door is just way to convincing.

While trick-or-treaters were coming by we watched Halloweentown.  It's an old Disney TV-only movie, and it was as scary a movie as Monica was willing to watch.  We made it through the night nightmare free, so that was a relief!

We ended up with 2 extra pieces of candy, so all in all our estimating skills were pretty good.

And with that, I think it's time I go finish off the candy!

Trunk or Treat!

Due to Facebook no longer letting me pick which picture I want shown with my post I have to put the desired picture first.  So here's a look at the end of the week and going to the ward Trunk or Treat.

Some of you may be familiar with my costume.  The benefit to switching wards for the last 4 years is that the costume is new to everyone around me.  It's also such a great costume that I really did have to wear it multiple times.  It's hard to tame the ostrich rider in me.

As for Monica I'm still not sure if I'm supposed to say she dressed up or the baby dressed up... but either way an Octopus was involved, and took both of them to create!

Going back to the start of the week we finally got around to trimming the tree away from our house.  It's been growing really close to the roof and left window and all the wall round about.  I decided there wasn't a good way to take pieces of the branch down as they were all over the garage roof and would have fallen there, and I didn't want to damage that.  So the only other option was to tie up the branch to the rest of the tree.  I, however, had no way to safely get to that branch.  The key there was safely, I could have climbed the tree or tried to grab it jumping off the roof, but Monica shunned those ideas.  Instead we tied a block of wood the the end of the rope and threw it into the tree until I got it over the right branch.

Once we got the branch all tied up we cut it off and slowly lowered it to the ground.  It ended up being very successful.  You can see the rope wrapped around the tree on the left.  After the branch was cut and starting to fall we just loosened that up and let it come down little by little.  As the branch fell it even swung away from the house and landed nicely on the drive way.  Safety accomplished!

Once the branch was down it was time to put it into our chipper!  This is a stock photo from last time we used the chipper:

We didn't have quite as many branches to chip up this time, but it worked like a champ today again.  Also, now that we've used the chipper twice it has officially become cheaper to buy this chipper than rent a chipper each time we needed one.

This Saturday was crammed to the max!  My leg's been feeling a little weird and I didn't want to get another 2 month injury, so I took the latter half of the week off from running.  Saturday morning we went out to get material for Monica's costume.  Then of course was the BYU game.  Monica missed basically the entire game to get a pedicure and got back about 30 seconds after the game ended.  Then we had to rush to get her costume together before our ward Trunk or Treat that night.  It was a chili cook off as well.

We decorated our trunk as so for the kiddos:

And all in all had a lot of fun.  We even scared a kid with our big spider, to the point where he almost wouldn't take our candy... oops.

I also had several kid ask me if they could have a turn riding my turkey/duck/chicken.  In defense of the children, many of the parents at first thought I was on a turkey/duck/chicken.  I guess ostriches just aren't as cool, or discernible rather, as they used to be.

Tour de Farm

First picture's first, here's Monica at 34 weeks!

Or possibly 34 cinnamon rolls...

Monica made Pumpkin Cinnamon rolls for Conference Saturday as that's our yearly tradition of 2 years.  I don't see the tradition being broken any time soon :)

In the world of forgotten news I finally made good on Monica's birthday two weeks ago and bought her a chest freezer!  Now we just need to fill it up and we'll be baby ready!

In farther back forgotten news our shower sprung a leak :(.  I fixed it a couple weeks back:

The issue was that we had a gap between two of our tiles where the grout had basically gone away.  After re-grouting the tub everything's dried up.  We found the issue because I was mowing the lawn one day and Monica happened to be in the shower and there was water dripping out of our house... that's never a good sign.

In more recent news, our friends came to visit this week.  I took a picture of them frolicking in our back yard.  I guess they don't have their own yard at their place, cause they sure think highly of ours (and our tomato plants...).

THIEF!!!

On Saturday morning I went for a brief 9 mile run.  Once I got home we went over to the JV football game to cheer on some of the teachers in our ward.  Go Chap!  The boys parents noticed us and came by to thank us for attending the game.  We even had a short conversation about my morning run with the comment "I hope you're training for something running that far."  I responded that I was going to run a 5K next year.  I don't think they'll be trusting me to help their son with math any time soon after that comment.

Saturday was also Fall Fest at the local 17 mile farm (a historical site about a half mile from our house).  We walked over in spite of the heat, and pregnancy.  You could tour through the old farm house and the barn, which was full of old farmers tools, and they had a mini petting zoo.

In the house I kept seeing things that my Mom and Dad have at their house, gifted to them from my grandparents.  No doubt these items came from when they used to live on a farm.  As we walked through the house I made comments like the following to Monica: "My parents have a butter churn just like this one, except theirs fits in a glass jar, not a metal bucket."

When I made a comment about having a sewing machine similar to the following:

Monica replied "People are going to think your parents are 300 years old!"

Something new I learned in our visit is that wind mills were primarily used to pump water.  In the following picture you may be able to see there is a water pump at the base of the windmill.

I always thought windmills were used to rotate grinders, and you know, MILL wheat.  But according to the plaque next to this it said in the west most windmills were used to pump water for live stock and grain.

We got hot pretty quick and had to trek back home.  We cooled off with some ice cream from Costco though.  Being out in the sun all morning really took it out of us, so we recovered the rest of the day.

Currently there's a huge fly relentlessly flying into a window somewhere, and it's super loud, so I have some hunting to do.  I wish you all the best in your own endeavors this week!

Turkey Heads

Monday through Wednesday existed... 

Thursday found us at target where we got a little festive a little too soon!  We almost skipped Halloween!  But then we remembered and didn't buy new head gear quite yet.

Friday was date night!  We went to Casa Mariachi for dinner and it was great!  After dinner we went to the dollar store and salvation army looking for Halloween items.  Surprisingly I'd say the best thing we found were those turkey hats at Target the day before...  We actually found a few decorations for the house at the dollar store, such as glow in the dark eyes for our front door/or/maybe the garage door?

Saturday was scout training!!  I had a training that was supposed to go all morning, but got out 2 hours early.  With my extra time at home I mowed the lawn and ran a hard 5k.  I finished in 21:48, which is pretty much exactly 7 minute miles.  Still got some work to do to beat 18 minutes, but I don't really think I'll best that time till after winter.  Saturday night we watched the Tanner Mangum show, cause really, when he wasn't in it was all down hill...  It was a fun game and I don't think I've ever seen so many blocked punts before!  Pretty nuts.

For those of you dying to see it here's a picture of the baby's room.  I was told things are not finalized so expect more pictures to come.  Also note that this is the only striped wall.

Recruiting Trip to BYU

So... I missed a week.  But two weeks ago I went on a recruiting trip to BYU.  It was nice to be back in Provo.  Here's the view from my hotel room.

I went out for a run the first morning and tried to run by all the fun places I remembered around BYU.  This run took me up the never ending staircase by the field house, up to the Marriott  Center, for a lap around the track and to the BYU sign, pictured below.

On my way back I stopped by my old stomping grounds.  This is the house I lived in when I met Monica (at pre-dawn).

And here's the blue house that Monica lived in (and her parents happen to own)!

My hotel was down on First north, so I decided that was close enough to go check out the progress on the new Provo temple.  I'm really glad I ran the extra block out of my way to go see it cause it looked great!

The run was a lot of fun and it was nice to get to go see my personal highlights of Provo.  I wish I could have run by the house Monica and I lived in when we were first married, but I was pretty much out of time when I got to the temple or else I would have made us late to the career fair.

When we got to the career fair we set up our booth:

And then we talked to people for several hours.  All in all it was a good experience, and some of my old friends who are finishing up school came by and said hi too!  Some even left resumes, which was a smart idea.  Once the career fair ended we packed up all our stuff and got it ready to ship back to SEAKR.  Then I made a b-line for the BYU bookstore to get some baby clothes!  I may have also grabbed some chocolate covered cinnamon bears as well...  oops.

We had an information session about SEAKR later that evening on campus and I got to go meet with Dr. Wirthlin and go see the lab and how everything is going just before.

After the information Jarom Neumann and I went to J-Dawgs and partied the night away.  When I was over at his place I happened to sneak a peek at these babies!

We made them for an FHE activity one week.  The idea origianly comes from here: Strong Bad Action Figure  It did make for a fine FHE activity however, and the durability is outstanding.

It was a lot of fun to see Jarom again and we had a blast until way to late...  I did not get much sleep while in Utah... Oops.

On Friday we had interviews in the morning, which again was an interesting learning experience.  After those wrapped up I took Brandon to the Airport and then went to spend some time with my family.  This of course means there was a lacrosse game!  Niki is the head coach of the Westminster Griffins for those of you who don't know, and she does an amazing job!  It was a just a scrimage, so no real score or anything, but the team did great!  It was a lot of fun to be there with family too.

After the game we went to dinner and then I had to head out to the airport to come back home.

Monica's parents happened to come while I was away, so fortunately Monica did not have to be home alone.

While they were out the helped Monica paint the baby's room and made a bunch of freezer meals (now we just need a big freezer...).  I also had a free moment over the weekend to finish making this bench thing for Monica.

That's about all I really did thought, cause then all that not sleeping in Utah caught up with me and I was pretty dead all weekend long.

Then this week... I didn't go on a work trip.  So coming to this weekend, or more specifically today, we decided to check how are garden was doing.  The only thing we've gotten from it before today was tomatoes, but today we had a big haul!  I don't even know when the zucchini came to be.  Sadly, it took until just before winter for things like the peppers and zucchini to grow, but hopefully we'll get a few more before everything dies.  We also have a tomatillo plant that has probably around 100 tomatillos growing on it, non are that big quite yet though, so hopefully those finish growing before it starts to freeze!!

This week when I was helping with homework Sister Robinson baked me a pie!  It was super great too!  Good thing we had some spare ice cream in the freezer :).

Monica's doing well, but feeling ready to get the baby out.  I'm excited for her to come too.  Just a little longer yet!

The Bump

Well... this seems to be a bit of a slow week.  I think mostly... I wen't to work.  Saturday Monica and I hit up the birthary for a child birth class that took approximately all day.  We got a tour of the hospital at the end and the hospital looks very nice!  We also started working on a new project, but it's pretty preliminary... and I forgot to take a picture.  Wouldn't be a project without a lack of pictures, right?

Well, there was a lot of requests for a picture of Monica, so here ya go!

After consulting with Monica it seems I got everything important...  So there ya go.

Furniture Warehouse

Sorry for missing last week.  We were knee deep in a project and I wanted to wait until we finished so I could post about it, but we finished during the work week and that's associated with all kinds of other craziness.  

Some of you may remember this old couch!  I believe we were at least the 4th people for this to be handed down to.

Well, when we moved into our house we tried to get it moved around and long story short we got it stuck in what was going to become the baby's room.  Well, we decided a few months ago that we would reupholster it, so we started ripping off all of the fabric.  We successfully managed to not take any pictures of ripping the fabric off though... Once all of it was off I decided to cut the couch apart so I could move it back to the garage with the plan of adding some pieces to it would be modular.

If I remember I'll have to get some pictures of the pieces, but we at least have a picture of me stapling all the fabric on again.  If you look close you can see little pieces of wood that I attached on the back on the two sides and the middle.  The couch now comes apart into 4 pieces, the backrest, the arm rests, and the base.

Here you can see a picture of all the pieces upholstered and attached together.

Once that was done Monica set to work sewing together new covers for the cushions.  It took a little planning to make sure we were going to sew everything together correctly, and we did have to do some unstitching a few times, but really it wasn't too bad.

Ta-da!  The completed couch.  It looks very nice and dark blue.  Now we just need to get a Y embroidered on it...

That was the major highlight of last week.  Coming into this week we had to take our car in yet again.  We took it to a different mechanic and he found what seems to be the root cause of all our troubles.  Turns out the plastic housing around our fuel pump was cracked and leaked gas out of the crack.  Luckily we weren't loosing gas and still got good gas mileage, but it made the pump work extra hard and killed off 2 pumps in the last 9 months...  Hopefully everything is taken care of for real this time, but the car definitely seems to be working better than it has been for a long time.

I also had a big meeting at work this week with our customer.  It was a 2 day design review to make sure they were still happy with all of the steps we were taking.  Sadly, the car was in the shop from Wednesday to Thursday, so no car to get to work that morning.  So instead I ran into work.  It was actually quite nice, and I might make it a regular practice.  The run isn't that bad (~4.5 miles) and there aren't a lot of cars then so it's still not too bad to breath the air.

Friday we went out to Monica's friend Katie's house.  They had a bunch of friends over for a little party and it was a lot of fun!

Then of course on Saturday we watched the BYU Football game.  What a great day and week.

And as a sign off, here's a picture of Monica holding a tiny salmon sandwich she made today with mini toasts!

Twenty WHAT!!!

This seems to me to be a great week to finally catch up and write about 2 weeks at one.  Why you might ask?  Because after our trip for our anniversary I worked 10 hour days at work and basically nothing happened.  There is one highlight.  You might remember the tree trimming rampage we went on a few weeks back... I still didn't get the picture ready... :)  Anyway, it was going to take us approximately the rest of our lives plus 3 years to get rid of that pile of branches.  We needed a wood chipper to help us out!  I looked online at renting one from Home Depot as that's the closest place around and it was almost $100 per day!  I only expected to need it for a day, but that's still a lot of money.  Then I looked at buying one from home depot, and Chipper Joe was only ~20 more!  It's a beast of a chipper and did a great job!  Reduced our huge pile to about 3/4 of a garbage can full.

That was a successful endeavour, and it's nice to not have a huge pile of nesting material stacked up by our house for the local wildlife.  Also, in the 3 or 4 days the branches were sitting on our lawn HUGE mushrooms grew up under them.  I can't believe I didn't take a picture, but they were at least 6 inches wide!

That was the most exciting thing until Sunday when it was MONICA'S BIRTHDAY!  We had a lot of fun on her birthday and she got lots of great presents!  Look how happy she is to eat brownies and ice cream!

 This week I sent out and email offering tutoring help to the youth in our ward.  I started my first tutoring too!  It went great!  And fortunately I still remember how to do algebra.  What a relief.

During this week I also introduced Monica to Risk after finding out some time recently she had never played it.  She loved it and wanted to play again and again!  We just played twice though... over I believe 3 days.  It was a lot of fun until the end when I couldn't roll anything but 1's.  I legit rolled snake eyes 3 times in a row.... It wasn't meant to be.

This weekend we went out swimming, which we were supposed to do last week for Monica's birthday, but we went to see Andrew and Tina run a half marathon and when we got back we were just too tired.  After the pool we picked up a few groceries that we needed, and that's basically the day.

Phew, finally caught up!  Feels good to no longer be behind.