two weeks back!

Sorry for the tardiness of this post!  Monica and I have been out of town for the last three weekends so it's been a while since I posted... possibly three weeks!

Well, this post will focus on the first week of this month when Monica and I went out to Utah!  I just found out I took a LOT of pictures, so that's good news for everyone.

I think my favorite part of the drive was when we passed this little gem.  Yup, a budget moving van towing a UHaul trailer.  I suppose there's nothing technically wrong with this, but what ever happened to brand loyalty?  I mean really, what's next?  Using Crest toothpaste with a Colgate tooth brush? Blasphamy!

On Saturday night we had a baby shower for Monica.  I wasn't there for much, but the left over food was great!  Here's a picture of... at least some of the people that came.  Sorry to anyone who left early.

Monday morning we headed up to a little outside Kamas to our cabin retreat with Monica's family.  It was a pretty nice place and we had a lot of fun, but I'll get into that later.  We must first start with this prize that was awaiting us in our room!

There were a lot of metal work things like this.  It's unfortunate you cant see it move, but it rocks back and forth and totally looks like he's catching the same fish over and over!  It was a spectacle to behold.

Melanie and Monica then taught me the perks of having a mirrored closet.  You can see here that Melanie is working on her levitation.  It was definitely a new experience for me.  My poor, sheltered, un-mirrored childhood!  For shame!

We went up to the Olympic museum in Park City one morning.  When we got there there were a whole bunch of people practicing ski jumping!  It was a lot of fun to see.  There were people of all ages and skills.  Some went off of bigger jumps, and there were even little kids that went off little bumps.  Jack and Sam loved it, and every time anyone went off a jump Sam would exclaim "Wowwie Wowwie!"

After the museum we went to lunch and then I had the privilege to go to the outlets with Monica.  We went into some maternity store which was super interesting.  On the plus side they had large fake legos!  Most of them were water themed so I built this wonderful underwater land scape!  I'm glad these clothing stores think up the essentials to keep everyone happy!

We went out to get family pictures since we were all out there, and Melanie needed help with her hair.  Luckily for her Monica is quite good at doing hair, and therefore, I am as well by marriage extension.  Behold, my masterpiece:

For reason's beyond me Melanie decided to take out the braid and let Monica do her hair later.  It didn't turn out quite as well.

I grabbed a couple pictures while we were out getting our pictures taken.  Here's one of Monica and I:

And the barn that we were by.

And this is really a picture of... some animal.  Look close down by the shed.  If anyone has the animal expertise to know what those are I'd love to know because after much debate we didn't know quite for sure.

And finally this picture:

We spent most of our time at the house playing various games.  This night we tried out a board game that Alan had that he'd never played.  It's based around a youtube show called Video Game High School, and shares the name.  There were a lot of parts to the game, but in the end it turned out to not be all that complicated.

The next day we went down to the lake.  We is relative as Monica and I never quite made it.  Right as we were getting ready to leave we got a call that it was way too windy and everyone was coming back.  We almost made it.  I made a very important discovery as I was putting the towels away that I grabbed.  One of the towels was two towels.  And those two towels had princess crown hoods on them!  Say what!

Since the lake got winded out we decided to head out and get some shakes.  We went to a place called Granny's which is about a block away from Dairy Keen.

The next picture doesn't show up for me... so I can't really tell you what's going on there.  I don't even know if it's gonna show up in the post, but I'll leave this comment and the potential of an unknown picture... Hope it's not embarrassing.

We also went for a tour of a candy factory.  Michelle knew the people who own the factory, and they were nice enough to give us a tour.  They primarily make caramels, and all the ones I tried were really good!

We tried to go for a walk on a path that headed to the lake later.  Unfortunately it was a HOT day!  About half way to the lake several people were not feeling great and turned around to head back to the house.  Monica, understandably so, was among this group and I offered to come back with her.  Thank goodness I did because who would Sam have talked all about rescue bots with if I wasn't there?!

When we got back we again played games.  Here's a shot of us playing Formula D.  It's a really fun car racing board game.  Jack joined us as he loves this game, and we didn't even have to help him that much.

I think my pictures hit most of the highlights of our stay.  And as I say that I remembered what the broken picture was!  We had a hearts tournament one night, and that's a picture of it.

It was a lot of fun, and definitely nice to take a break from work.

Saturday morning we drove over to my parents house to spend the day with them.  We played some games before heading to Cheese Cake factory for Monica's next baby shower.  The food was great and everyone had a great time!  We spent the night at my parents house that night.

On Sunday we went to church with my parents.  Monica started to feel sick so we ducked out early.  Once she felt better we packed up the car and headed back for home.  We finished up the 4th Harry Potter audio book and started the 5th!  That one's long enough to last us another 2 trips I think.

I don't remember anything eventful happening when we got home... so I think that's all!

Dragon Boat Festival

Well, I have two weeks of stories to talk about since Monica guest posted last week... and you can't double post!  Anyway, first item of note is that sometime my lunch got invaded by a pack of Sandwishosauruses!  There were delicious.

Last Saturday (7/18) Denver had a Dragon Boat Festival.  It happens every year at some park in the middle of the city.  There are a bunch of boat races all through the day and they also have an Asian market and a whole bunch of Asian food places come.  Here's a picture of a group in a dragon boat.

They did all kinds of cool Asian things.  They had a dragon dance... or whatever it's actually called.  It was a lot of fun to watch.

There was a large Asian market, at which we found some great hats!!  Just check it out.  We also got a book of Japanese children's stories to read to our kid(s), an umbrella (seen soon) and some candy.

Here's Monica with the umbrella as promised.

We even watched the boat races for a while.  It was a little funny looking back on it.  I thought the event would be much more about the boat racing, but being there it seemed that all the focus was on the food and the shopping.  The people on the PA were mentioning that the boat racing get's more heated up toward the end of the day when it's on to the final groups, so maybe we just weren't there for the prime race time.

While it was a lot of fun to be there, there was also not a ton of shade.  It was a pretty hot day too.  Monica got real hot and felt like she might pass out so she sat down.  One thing led to another and BOOM!  Here we are in the air conditioned medical trailer.  It was nice to get out of the heat.

All in all the Dragon Boat Festival was a lot of fun to go to, and we may go again in the future, though it might be hard next year what with a 6-ish month old.

This last week I was able to start running again!  That's great!  It's been about 2 months since I've really run, I had Ragnar and a 5K in the last 2 months, but 2 months since I've been able to train.  I ran inside on the treadmill so that if my leg started hurting again I could just stop right away so I didn't re-injure my leg.  Toward the end of the week I got sick!  So I started taking a nap every day and with work that basically fills an entire day.

Friday night/Saturday morning out CO alarm started to go off...  This same alarm had gone off the other day, and Monica thought the batteries were just dead cause it was beeping pretty intermittently, so she changed the batteries.  So once is started going off we took out the batteries and went and grabbed the new CO monitor we bought recently from the basement.  The new CO monitor has a little screen on it and will tell you what it measures the CO level at.  0 ppm... pretty high right?  Monica and I sat in bed looking up carbon monoxide alarm manuals trying to figure out what our other alarm was trying to tell us.  Well, after some digging into the manual it turns out it has 3 alarms.  One for CO, which is described similar to what we heard (except it should have beeped more frequently), one for low battery (which is different than what Monica heard the other day), and one to signal that the CO alarm is about to die and you need to buy a new one.  It never tells you what this alarm should sound like, but by the process of elimination we decided this was the culprit.   Total worth being awake from 1 to 2 in the morning.

By the time that whole thing got sorted out we were to hungry to sleep so we had to go have breakfast before returning to bed for a "nap".

Then on Saturday one of the families in our ward was trying to clear out furniture because they're moving soon.  We bought their kitchen table (mostly because kitchen chairs are expensive) and the great news is that the chairs match our table quite nice!

Monica's friend Katie came over most of the day Saturday too.  Her husband is in flight attendant school with Southwest and is down in TX for a month or so.  Turns out it's really challenging to become a flight attendant.  If you're ever late for class you're out of the program!  We're hoping he'll make it through, and from what I heard it sounds like he's doing a great job!

Things went well at church today.  I taught the teachers quorum today and they weren't even as crazy as usual.  Also, one of the teachers gave a talk in sacrament meeting today and started it off with the following: "My parents told me if my sister went into labor before church we'd go to the hospital and I wouldn't have to give my talk, so me and this baby aren't off to a very good start!"

I think that's about all that's happened around these parts other than our lawn dying... hope everyone is having a great week!

We're having a......

Hi everyone! This is Monica this time. I'm writing a guest post about how we found out the baby's gender because I told Alex he would not sufficiently convey our (okay my) excitement at FINALLY finding out if it's a boy or a girl!
I was actually supposed to write this almost two weeks ago....but well, you know, I'm just so busy hanging out at home right now!
So, Monday morning was the ultrasound. That weekend I was so anxious to just go and find out! I couldn't wait any longer! The night before I told Alex that he should wear blue the next day if he thought it would be a boy and red (he doesn't have any pink) if he thought it was going to be a girl. I decided that I was going to wear blue- not exactly because I really thought it would be a boy.  It was more because the week before I had been looking at little girl clothes and they were so adorable that it made me really want a girl! But I still wanted to be excited if it was a boy, so I wore blue to help me be more excited. Alex wore blue too!
So we went to the ultrasound and guess what?? We were wrong! We're having a baby girl!! I was so excited to be able to buy all the cute girl clothes, and do her hair, and you know just all that girly stuff!
Here's a picture of our little girl. (Alex posted this picture last week....but it's just fitting for this post)

Everything looked good so far and she's just the right size she should be so due date is still November 28th.
Later that day we did a video chat with my family and decided to fill up balloons with pink confetti and then pop them to tell everyone. Unfortunately it didn't work out as well as we had hoped. And then we took a picture of that to announce it to everyone else, and that also didn't work as well as hoped. Thanks Pinterest. But after about 43 attempts to get a good looking picture of it (using the timer on Alex's phone camera) I decided it was just good enough! You could see a little pink.....so it got the point across right?? Here's the picture. Oh and now you know why we're both wearing blue in this picture too.

So there you go, it's a girl and we are SO excited! Alex can't wait to have tea parties and play dress up with her :)

Busy Beaver

As you may have guessed from the title I chewed up a lot of wood this week!  Not really, but I feel like I was working on projects all day Saturday!  Also, I missed a week because Monica wanted to write a guest post.  She said she'll write it soon :).  Anyway, I've got a little more than a week of fun to cover, and I'll still end my tales at the end of last week so I've got a full fresh week of stories next post.  So back on July 2nd SEAKR Engineering had their 4th of July party (because we got the 3rd off and the 4th was a Saturday, so they held it after work on Thursday).  They had lots of food, a bike parade with decorations for the children, and a car show!  Our favorite car can be seen here:

That's right, that baby has a sink in it and standing room!  It's almost a camper, but still just a car.  In addition to the items mentioned above the company also does fireworks every other year (or at least that's what I was told).  This year happened to be the year they had fireworks, so that was awesome!

Monica and I had a great time at the event.  It was a great event, especially for a small company to put on.  I really like SEAKR Engineering, it's a great place to work!

Well, on the 4th of July Monica and I decided it was time to go camping... in our back yard.

We had a fire and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows for smores.  It was a very healthy dinner!

After dinner it was time to go to sleep.  Unfortunately the neighbors a couple houses down are huge into fireworks and at 10:30 we gave up on sleeping outside and came back in the house.  I had to wake up at 4 the next morning to drive a friend from church to the airport, so 10:30 was plenty late enough to be kept up.

The rest of the weekend went great.  On Monday we went to the baby doctor again for another ultrasound.  I have confirmation that this is indeed a picture of the baby's head.

In the ultrasound anything that showed up and looked roundish I was sure was a head.  I'm pretty sure our baby has at least 7 heads... That's normal, right?  Eventually I admitted I knew nothing when I saw the head again and the Doctor said "and there's the pelvis!"..  Pretty close though... right?  Anyway, there will be more about the baby later.

I don't remember much of what happened through the rest of last week.  Probably just a bunch or work.  But at the end of last week was the weekend, and that's when I got super busy.  Upstairs in the two bedrooms we don't currently use there were switched outlets but no ceiling lights.  The attic access was also just outside of what will be the baby's room.  Well, a trip up to the attic and some rewiring later I installed two ceiling lights for the rooms upstairs.  Now all of our rooms have lights except for the basement which is unfinished.

Once I finished putting in the lights it was time to play with the new pole chain saw we got!  It attaches onto our weed wacker (you take of the weed wacker part first).  We took that out and cut down a bunch of dead branches that were on our trees.  We're also going to trim down the tree in the front yard with it, but we need a taller ladder and to do some small branch pruning first.

Here is the pile of soon to be firewood in the back yard.

It's not a great picture because the shadow, but there were a lot of branches back there.  It took me quite a while to break them all up and sort them into piles, but eventually I finished.  At that point I was quite tired and it was time to call it a day!

We went to Tyson and Tina's house for dinner on Sunday because Celeste, Michael, Oriah, and Jonathan were out to visit.  It was a lot of fun until Oriah harassed me for not posting (and again this morning... which worked better apparently).  It's always nice to see family, especially those who don't live around here since we don't get to see them very much.

Well, with that I hope everyone out there is having a great week!

Sisterly Love

Well, we had lots of fun this week with Melanie out to visit.  Monica sure liked having Melanie here since I had to work a bunch.  It helped Monica to not be bored.  It also made for fun nights playing board games.  Such as:

 Gubs

 Rampage

 Roborally

Just to name a few.  We had a lot of fun.  We played board games most nights during the week when I got home from work.  Melanie was also super great and kept doing the dishes and stuff!  How nice!

On Saturday we finally had a little more time to do things.  Saturday morning started off with running the SEAKR 5k.  The race was fun, but my leg was still gimpy.  On the plus side Monica couldn't run very well either, so we just stuck together through the race.  The race is used to raise money for the SEAKR foundation, which is a charity the company started to help wounded veterans who got disabled serving in the military.

Pre-race!  Check the smiles, that's how you know it's still PRErace. 

After we got home from the race I mowed the lawn real quick and headed into downtown Denver to do some sight seeing with Melanie.  We went to Hopdoddy for lunch and then walked around in the city.  We found a herd of buffalo:

And a public piano!

All the keys on the piano were stuck down though.  It's probably been hammered on a whole bunch.  But please, only 1 hour per person!

There were a couple of these pianos scattered around that I saw.  The other ones worked better, but this was the first one we ran into.  We also went up to the Capitol building and to a Cathedral that's across the street.  Unfortunately my phone was dead by the end.  I have some pictures on Monica's phone, but I haven't gotten them yet.

When we got home Saturday we were all pretty beat from being out in the sun all day!  We still managed to play a couple games before heading off to bed.

Sunday after church we went up to visit Tyson and Tina.  Spencer and his family were driving through Denver and stopped for the day at their house.  We came up and all had dinner together.  It was a lot of people, and a lot of fun!

I think those are the highlights from this week.  Hope everyone reading this is doing great!

Ragnar 2015

Well, the start of this week flew by.  I worked 13 hour days Monday through Wednesday... how joyous!  I didn't have much time outside of work to do anything other then work out in the morning.  I was also able to pull together this:

Behold! My Psych board game!!

The base of the game board. 

It's a quad-fold board game, so it folds up nice and small.

Sometime last year I started to enjoy working on creating my own board games.  This is the second one I've worked on.  It's based on the TV show Psych.  In the game you drive around to various locations in the show and try to collect evidence to solve crimes.  I wanted to have a quality copy of it before I showed it to my family.  Since we were heading out to visit/run Ragnar at the end of the week I decided I'd try to get a board together before we left.  It turned out pretty well, and I learned some valuable lessons of things to do different next time.

Unfortunately the night I intended to debut the game everyone decided to go home and go to bed quite early, so I played with Mom.  Monica joined in about half way through.  My mom ended up champion... at least for now.

Wednesday night we went to Tyson and Tina's house to spend the night because we were planning to leave quite early the next day.  Thursday we spent the morning in the car driving out to Utah.  We left around 6 am, and it was super nice leaving so early in the morning.  We stopped in Laramie to get some breakfast.  Then Monica and I were going to drive to Rawlins to get gas, which was about 100 miles away.  We got approximately exactly 2 minutes out of town when BOOM! a bird flew up right in front of the car and into the windshield!

It was pretty... interesting, and gross.  It hit the window right in front of my face!  Well, the reason I point out that it was 2 minutes out of town is because the bird didn't quite clean off the windshield... and we were only just 100 miles from our next stop... great...

We also stopped in little America because that's Tyson and Tina's designated stopping point.  Monica and I took advantage:

It took some serious lassoing, but I eventually tamed 'im!  I wanted to ride the dinosaur the rest of the way to Utah, but Monica told me sometimes when you really love something you have to set it free... sigh :(.  So we just took the bird-smasher instead...

As mentioned above, Thursday night I tried to get a group together to play my game, but to no avail!

Friday was the big day of the race.  I successfully tapered for 5 weeks in preparation.  Not really.  In reality I got a super bad shin splint or something and I couldn't run or else it was gonna get even worse.  So I was resting my leg in hopes that it would be better for Ragnar.  It wasn't, but that's life sometimes.

My first run was 8.1 miles downhill.  The downhill was nice, and by the end my leg loosened up and I thought I might have run through my injury.  That was not quite the case as I found out when I tried to start my second run.  Here's a picture from my first run:

It looked very nice running down the hill.  I apparently made it a habit to take a picture while running, because I took one on each run.

In the end I survived and ran about 20 miles!  It was fun, but it was really hot this year!

The team medals this year were matching sets.  When you put them together on the back they said Ragnar Wasatch Back (not show in the picture), Together we ran 200-ish Miles. We made it back pretty late Saturday night and we were all pooped!  What a day.

Sunday we got to go to church with all the family.  Before church started Johnathan wanted a turn holding Matthew:

He kept trying to hide behind Matthew when I tried to take a picture.  So cute.  After church we drove back to CO, and brought Monica's sister with us!!  That should make for a fun week!  We got pretty late, and I was really tired, so I decided to wait till today to post!  Hope everyone is doing great!

Alex

Little Catching Up

Well... It's been a while, and I have a little catching up to do.  Firstly, I don't think I'll end up doing part 2 of my new house tour... that's just really old news (3 years old), so I think I'll spare you too many details.  It was in that house, however, that I started dating Monica Blood.  If you're reading this post, you're probably familiar enough with my life to know that we are now married.  If you're not that familiar, SURPRISE! I married her!  Here's us at Snowbird right after I proposed!

We got married 6 weeks laster on August 17th, and promptly left on a cruise to Alaska to escape the summer heat.  It was a lot of fun!  Once we got back from that it was off to our last year of school, mine for a Masters, and Monica for her Bachelorettes.  We rented out a basement to live in and it was a pretty great first place.  The people above who owned the house were great!  Just a little older than us and had a little baby, so cute.  They also kept there air on, and it kept it nice and cool for us :).  The house unfortunately sprung a leak...



During my final semester of classes I traveled a whole bunch interviewing for jobs.  I went to FL, CO, TX, AZ, and UT!  I interviewed at 5 companies, and I got 5 offers.  We accepted the job in **SPOILER ALERT** Colorado **END SPOILER**.  I had to enroll in Spring semester to finish writing my thesis, and we moved in with Monica's parents for a month while I was working on it.

With my thesis complete (and my Masters degree as well) we were ready to move out to Colorado where I started working for SEAKR Engineering.  Here's my picture by the fireplace on my first day of work!

Things have been going good at work so far!  I just passed 1 year working at the company and we're getting ready to deliver hardware for the first project I've been on.  It might be a crazy next couple of months while we try to get everything integrated and out the door, but things are going great so far.

When we moved out to CO we first moved into an apartment.  We were there for about 6 months while we were house hunting and eventually we found the one!  Funnily enough, we bought the house from one of Monica's childhood friends!  Small world!  Here's a picture of our house:

We moved in in November, so we've been here just over 7 months!  Time sure is flying.  We've undertaken various projects since we moved in, such as replacing all the blinds, and planting a garden.

Our most recent item of note, as you probably all know, is that MONICA IS PREGNANT!

So exciting!  She is due toward November 28th, so just a little after a year in the house.

Well, I think that is a very brief recap of the last ~3 years.  There are obviously things I missed, but I think might return to some past stories in their separate/own posts (this is really just me covering for when Monica and I are boring for a week).

I am hoping to start posting each week, and to include at least 1 picture each time, so feel free to come back and read more!

I hope everyone is doing great! and hopefully we see you here again soon!

Alex, and to a lesser extent, Monica (Monica approved me saying that)