2nd Anniversary!

Well.. I'm still a week behind.  Maybe I'll write todays post within the next few days (I try to not write twice in a day).  After Monica and I got back from Utah I had a blur of a week at work.  No matter how slow work seems like it's going once you miss a week of it there's always a lot to do!

The weekend was the real excitement.  We took a 3 day weekend in Colorado Springs.  Once we got there we went to HuHot because Monica loves it!  It didn't hurt to also have a birthday certificate that got Monica's food free.  It was a lot of fun, and a lot of NOT Mongolia.

When we got to the hotel they asked us why we were staying and we said it was our anniversary, so they gave us free champagne.  We didn't really know what to do about that, but we had one of those rooms with a kitchen and all, so we just put it in the fridge.  When we got back from HuHot Monica really wanted sparkling cider so we decided to see if we could go trade it.  They didn't have anything non-alcoholic in the liquid beverage department, but they let us switch it for ice cream.  Not too shabby as I'm pretty sure we both secretly wanted that.

The next morning we went out to they Cheyenne Mountain Zoo.  It was a great zoo!  They try to do various things to bring people closer to the animals and you can even pay to do special one on one activities with animals.

When we got there a sloth started climbing out above our heads!  There was a trainer there holding food to coax it out.  I have now witnessed that sloths are truly slow.  They also have really gnarled curly nail/claws.  Not to many people talk about that!  Also, they love green beans!  That's what the trainer had.  We watched the sloth eat for a while until green bean foam started coming out of it's mouth...

We got to the sea otters in time to see their "enrichment" time.  Nothing says enriching like a bunch of fish heads on a floaty tube.  I suppose this is why we don't live in the zoo.

In their Australia section they had wallabies that were out among the guests.  You had to stay off the grass, but if a wallaby wanted to be touched it could come to the path.  Needless to say they Wallabies were clinging to the far wall, but only a few feet away.

Fortunately they had a baby wallaby in a bag that you could come up and pet!  As I look at this picture I realize that a bagged wallaby is an interesting idea... but it was super soft and came with free hand sanitizer!

The best of the zoo was the snow leopard, which recently became my favorite animal (as I only recently found out they exist).  We got there for game time too.  They dropped a box that had a bag of meat in it for it to play with.  The snow leopard didn't seem to give it much attention.  Then it looked straight at me and started walking forward and suddenly pounced!  Lucky for me it didn't pounce at me, it jumped about 6 or 7 feet in the air and landed behind were it started on the box, and in the blink of an eye it was eating meat.  I'm not exactly sure how it got in there so quick as I may have flinched when it looked like a snow leopard was about to attack me...

That night we went to a nice Italian restaurant.  There was an old couple by us that go there every week.  It was really good food, and Monica and I got a picture together, but the lighting is quite unfortunate on Monica and makes it look like she was bleached...  I will forgo including the picture as today is Monica's birthday.

The next day we played some board games in our room before we had to check out.  We headed off for church which was only 2 minutes away!.. Well... Monica's phone got her location wrong, and then she thought the location reported as her address was the church address since it was a few minutes away.  When we got to "church" it turned out to be an industrial building...  We found the right place and got there only a little late, so that was fortunate.

After church we went to the place we were to stay that night, in a CASTLE!

We spent a while walking around the grounds because there is a lot of land around it.  It was also fun to look through the castle at the various decor.  This shower must be at least... 100 years old!

I also became great friends with the local knight!

And here we are out on the grounds in front of the castle.

After walking around the grounds for a while we headed down to Garden of the Gods, which was just barely south of where we were staying.

Awe-inspiring!

The next morning we hit up the links before returning home.  It was a lot of fun to go golfing again and I finally got to try out the golf mode on my new watch!  Sadly, my watch could not save my game.  Turns out if you don't golf for over a year you stop being as good as you were...

After that we came back home to take on another week, but I'll save that tale for another time.

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!