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)

Change of pace (part 1/2)

Alrighty, So it's been a while since I've blogged.  I had finals, and graduation and moving and all sorts of stuff, and I'm not settled into my new house and feeling good.  In all honesty I totally had time in the past... I just forgot or didn't make updating my blog a top priority.  But I'm here today, so everyone can relax and celebrate again.

In big news I graduated about a week and a half ago.  I don't have any cool pictures on my computer or anything so you'll just have to take my word for it.  Anyway, so now I'm just chillin here in Provo waiting until fall semester to start my Masters... I guess that's not technically true.  So at work you get paid more if you're a graduate student, so I actually got readmitted for the Spring semester and signed up for some thesis credits.  So I guess I'm technically already in grad school right now!  How crazy is that?  What a fast transition.

In other news I finally moved out of Miller.  We moved across the street into a house.  It's so sweet here.  It's crazy nicer than living in any apartment I've been around, and for sure at the price.  While it's admittedly more then Miller and other cheap student housing, it's also considerably higher quality and so much more space.  There're only 3 of us living here, and we've got the entire top floor of the house.  Here are some pictures.

In our front room we currently have 3 couches.  It was convenient last Sunday as we all took Sunday naps on a different couch.  We have a projector set up in our front room again too.  The couch on the right belongs to the people who used to live here and is currently up for sale.  So we may lose it at some time, but I'm not sure we'll mind.

This room is our "tile" room, cause we dont have any other name for it.  Currently it's purpose is for Jarom's art stuff, my computer, and being wide open to remind us how big our house is.  We're thinking about pulling  a table in here as a kind of dinning room when we want to have people over.  We've thrown talk around about making a felt top board to place on the table so it doubles as a game table too.  Could be fun.  I'll have to keep you updated as to what we do in here.

This is our kitchen.  It's basically a kitchen.  The cabinets are a little small, but it holds what we need.  If there's one thing I've noticed about this house compared to apartments is that this house is not made to store tons of crap like college apartments are.  

Anyway, the most exciting part about the kitchen is the:

TOASTER OVEN

I love this thing.  We don't have a toaster, we have this instead.  And I love it even more.  I think toaster ovens are pretty much one of the greatest things made for kitchens.  I use it at least once a day.  Why not toast your sandwich and melt the cheese onto the bread when it's as easy as placing it in and turning a knob?  Yeah, I love toaster ovens.

Lastly we come to our room.  We took the blades of the ceiling fan cause they're a little uncomfortably close to where I sleep.  We got 2 book shelves and 2 dressers of KSL classified for $90 total.  Pretty great deal.  One of the book shelves was out in the front room, and you can only see one dresser in this picture.  I like our room.  It feels much more like a normal bedroom than do the rooms I've lived in in apartments.

Anyway, that's the brief tour of the house.  I've got a couple other cool things to report on, but I didnt want to make this post too big, and I need to have something to keep people coming back after my dry spell.  

In running news the training is going well,  I don't think I've posted up my new running schedule in a while, but as a summery I've been putting in weeks in the low 30's (meaning ~30 miles per week).  I've already run a 16 miler.  This week is a recovery week, so I don't have any long runs or anything, but next week I go 18 on Saturday, pretty crazy.  Today for my run I drove up to the canyon.  It takes longer to run up there, but I figured since it was my birthday it was all good.  I ran up to Bridal Veil Falls, then back to my car.  It was great being up in the canyon, it's definitely my favorite part of a long run to get to be up in the canyon.

Anywhoot, I think that's all for this post.  I'll talk to y'all again in a few days!  Have a great one.