Happy Birthday Isaac!

Isaac turned the big "2" today! We actually celebrated his birthday yesterday up at Grandma Marva's house with the family. He got some pretty cool gifts including a huge pack of dinosaurs, a big 4x6 rug with roads and streets on it to drive his cars on, some clothes including some glow-in-the-dark dinosaur PJ's and his very own Mr. Potato Head. Too many toys to keep track of. Tami and I made a pretty cool birthday cake though. We got the idea out of a magazine. The cake in the picture is the end result. We baked a 9x13 yellow cake and then cut them into squares, stacked them on top of each other and then poured green glaze all over it. Isaac is a pretty cute kid. He sure has grown a lot in the last year. Pretty soon he'll pass up Brooklyn! Happy Birthday Isaac!

Santa Claus is coming to town

The Christmas season is in full swing. The kids are enjoying the many Christmas lights that line the homes in the area. Isaac is very good at picking them out. On Saturday, Brooklyn and I went on a Daddy-Daughter date and saw The Polar Express on an IMAX screen in 3D. If you thought the original was amazing, seeing it in 3D is incredible. I'm not sure how they do it, but it adds a whole new dimension (literally) to the movie. It was like we were actually riding the train. This evening we went to the library for Family Night . . . one of the bonuses of living in Spanish Fork. Every Monday the have Family Night where they read stories and play games. And of course tonight Santa Claus came. Brooklyn was very excited that "Santa was working at our library tonight".

Decorating the Tree

This Christmas will definitely be an interesting one. We have been living in our little 2 bedroom basement apartment for about a month now and there just isn't room for a tree, so we are improvising by using some small little fake trees that sit near the fireplace. The kids had fun decorating them tonight. Isaac was more interested in just shoving the ornaments into the tree and didn't get the whole "hanging" concept, but oh well. We had our first snow of the year yesterday and the kids love the snow. They're even more excited that the owners of the home upstairs have set up one of those air filled snowmen in the front yart that have a light inside. Although we won't be in our new home this Christmas, we've realized that it's not where you live or your living circumstances, but the Spirit of Christmas that makes it all worth while.

Black Friday!

So, is it crazy that I got up at 3:45 am Friday morning, the day after Thanksgiving to go shopping? Heck no. I live for the most popular shopping day of the year mainly for the good deals on electronics, but also for the experience. I did pretty well this year. I had my battle plan all laid out the night before. I was on the road by 4:10 and made it to CompUSA at 4:30. They had been open since midnight, so it was pretty mellow. Kind of weird being at CompUSA at 4:30 in the morning. Then it was off to Best Buy. I was probably #400 and something in line. They opened at 5 am and boy was it a mad house. I picked out what I wanted but decided to try something new this year . . . I hid what I was going to buy in a very clever place and left the store. I arrived at Circuit City at 5:15 and found what I needed and again hid it. I got to Target at about 5:30 and stood in line and waited in 25 degree breezy weather for the opening at 6am. When the doors opened, it was a mad rush! People were cheering and running like wild animals to the back of the store. People were losing their shoes and I even saw a 10 year old boy go down amidst the stampeed. I knew exactly what I wanted and was in the checkout line and out of the store by 6:10, a new record! I then circled back around to Big 5 Sporting Goods and then back to Best Buy at about 6:50. I found my stash and stood in a much shorter line than I would have been in otherwise. Then it was back to Circuit City to find my second stash. I was pretty proud of my newly found technique. I got to Staples at 7:30 and the item I wanted was long gone, but luckily I had actually hid my stash Wednesday night in the back of a desk drawer on display. K-mart was the last stop, but everything had been picked over. I pulled into work at about 8:15. It was definitely a fun morning. 7 stores in 3 1/2 hours!

Lilo & Stitch

Last year we purchased a Stitch costume for Isaac taking advantage of the after Halloween costume sales. However neither Brooklyn or Isaac had ever seen Lilo and Stitch. Of course that has changed over the year and it is now one of their favorite movies. When we pulled out the costume this year, Isaac was very excited and of course Brooklyn was pretty jealous, but after we tried to explain to her that Stitch was a boy and Lilo was a girl, she was OK with that. It really was too bad that everyone that saw Isaac mistook him for Eeyore, but Brooklyn was very defensive of her little brother and wouldn't hesitate to correct.


Every year at Novell, the kids are invited to walk around to the offices and go Trick-or-Treating. It sure beats going around at night in the cold and they get tons of candy. We did take them to a few homes in the evening though. Little did we know that Lilo and Stitch would have more fun handing out the candy to those that came to the door than actually going door to door getting candy. Each time the doorbell rang, they would drop whatever they were doing, sprint to the door and get the candy ready to hand out. It was fun to watch them.


Our little girl is almost 4 years old and is already addicted to talking on the phone. I think she's talking to Kaley in this picture. All in all it was a very fun Halloween. Monitoring the post Halloween candy intake is another story, but it sure makes for a good bribe.

Pumpkin Carving 101

I love Halloween, especially the pumpkin carving part. Several years back I bought one of those pumpkin carving kits and have had a ball trying to make some pretty intricate pumpkins faces. The process involves taking the pattern, taping it to the pumpkin surface, using a little poker and transferring the pattern to the pumpkin face with a series of dots. Once the dots have been transferred, you remove the paper and rub white flour into the dots so that they are easier to see. Then with a little tiny saw, you just start cutting out the pieces connecting the dots as you go. Certain pumpkins took longer to do, but it takes roughly a couple hours to do each pumpkin. Below you'll see the pumkins I've done over the last 4 years.

This was the first one I did Halloween 2002. I actually repeated this pumkin pattern in 2003 and entered it into the Ward pumkin carving contest and won. Go Cougars!

Halloween 2003 was all about Elmo. This one was harder than it looks trying to make the fur look good.


How can we forget Halloween 2004. This pair of pumkins was by far the most difficult, but we got a lot of comments as people came to the door that year.


And finally we have Halloween 2005. With the move, we really didn't have any trick-or-treaters come to our home, so I carved this one very quickly and displayed it on the inlaws porch. This one only took me about an hour to carve, but thought it was cool.


I'm sure that our next neighborhood will enjoy my future pumkins. Who knows . . . maybe 10 years down the road I'll be cutting my pumkins with lasers.

Good Morning!

Most mornings, the kids are up before I head to work. The ritual of the morning is of course to eat breakfast. Brooklyn will come running into the kitchen and the first question she asks is "Dad, are you staying?" If I say no, she gets pretty sad, but part of it is that she's still half awake. If I tell her yes and then after she is fully awake I tell her I have to go to work, she's fine with that. The kids love Cheerios, but they're pretty funny about getting started. They both need to be sitting together on the bar stools and need a bowl with a spoon (or as Isaac says it, "poon"). They also need their sippy cup of milk. However, they'll just sit there and stare at it for about 3-4 minutes as they finish waking up. Then they dig in and are usually quite happy. Check out the before pictures above and then the final one is after they've waken up. They're a pretty cute couple.

House under contract!!!

After being on the market for 41 days, our home is officially under contract. However we're not out of the woods yet. The house still needs to be appraised and the buyers need to read our full seller's disclosure. Hopefully they won't have any problems with the whole flooding issue. If they stick to their dates, we should be out of our house in 3 weeks! Happy Halloween to us! That's not a lot of time. We'll be living in temporary housing for the next 3-4 months while they finish our new home, which we're very excited about. It's only about a mile from our current house, which is nice. I never thought I'd hear myself saying this, but Spanish Fork is starting to grow on us. Below is a picture of Brooklyn standing in about where our garage will be. The second picture is a view of our lot from across the street. It's a little over .25 acres and is a corner lot (like our current house), so we'll have to focus on the front yard a little more yet again. Our home is a rambler and has a side load garage with a driveway that will empty into the street to the right. The front of the house will face the street to the left. Brooklyn calls our new house the sunflower house. If all goes well, we'll be moved into the home by the end of January.

Braids . . . . finally!!!

So the day has finally come. We never thought it would arrive. We're talking about the day that Brooklyn's hair would be long enough to actually French braid. We went up to the cabin this weekend to watch conference up there. Brooklyn was pretty excited at first, but by the time that Grandma Adele was finishing up, she was definitely ready to be done with it. They did turn out to be pretty cute though. She's growing up fast!

The "Dirty Room" finally clean

Ever since we refinished the basement, but left the one bedroom unfinished, Brooklyn has nicknamed that room the "dirty" room. The picture above is what the room looked like shortly after the demolishion crew came through. Both Brooklyn and Isaac know that room is off limits. Well, we have finally finished the "dirty" room. It's been a long project with laying the tile and putting up the beadboard, repainting the room and of course all of the little touch-ups. I've had to repair huge cracks around the window frames where the corner bead was pretty damaged when the demolishion crew tore out the old drywall. I've had to re-texture several areas as well, but you would never know now. If I could count all of the cool new skills I've learned working on that room and this house in general, I'd practically need a book. We cut the red ribbon on the room last night and the kids were finally allowed to play in their new room. Of course the floor is a little cold with it being tile, but it finally looks complete again. Brooklyn will still sleep upstairs in her bed, but this room is now the play room. Let's just hope that covering up the hole in the corner where the sump pump was doesn't come back to haunt us. Actually it won't haunt us. It will haunt those who move into the house, so why do we care!

The Alpine Slide

What a wonderful Saturday it was yesterday. The weather couldn't have been better. As a Christmas present from last year, Mike and Marinda decided to treat the family to a ride on the Alpine Slide in Park City and then a picnic afterwards. We headed up to Provo Canyon and met everyone there at about noon. Brooklyn had been on the Alpine slide at Snowbird but didn't remember it, so it was a first for the kids. They have actually added two more lanes to the slide there in Park City to make a total of 4 lanes. The chair lift up to the top was nice although Isaac's little heart was pounding the whole way up. He wanted so badly to stand up in the chair and look around. Tami rode down the slide with Isaac and I rode down with Brooklyn. The kids sure loved it too. Isaac thought it was fun but "a little bit scary."


After the slide we found a nice little park in town and had a lovely picnic. With BBQ'ed shish cabobs including various marinated types of chicken, fresh peppers, onions and tomatos, all fresh from Mike and Marinda's garden (except of course for the chicken). I love this time of year, expecially with all of the fall colors. The trees up the canyon were absolutly vibrant with bright reds, yellows and oranges. You can catch just a glimpse of that in the picture below. Imagine the colors you see in the picture below, but everywhere!

Spanish Fork 1/2 Marathon

Tami is the running maniac these days. She compteted in the Spanish Fork 1/2 marathon on Saturday the 10th of Sep. She did surprisingly well. By far the longest run she has ever done. Her finishing time was 1 hr 53 min placing 6th out of 13 in her age group. She even won a Nike duffle bag. She ran it with her brother Brian and her dad. All three of them did very well. Her goal is to ultimately run a full marathon sometime next year. I've thought many a time that I should join her, but my aspirations aren't nearly as high as hers. We'll see.

First day at Pre-school

Tuesday was Brooklyn's first day at pre-school. She was so excited. We went out and bought her a little backpack and some pencils. She takes classes 2 times a week at a place that also offers gymnastics classes. They do academic activites for part of the time and then spend some time doing gymnastics type of stuff. She really enjoys it. Trying to get them to go to sleep early is the only hard part now.

The Healing Field

Happy September 11th, everone. This morning was Stake Conference, which is always enjoyable with two young children. After getting home we went up to Sandy to be with family for Stephanie's birthday. On the way up we stopped at The Healing Field in Sandy. We've made this a yearly tradition ever since 9/11. For those of you not familiar with this, go to www.healingfield.org. Sandy was the first to do it, but it has since spread nationwide. Basically they have put up a flag for each of the 3,031 people that died as a result of the crashes of 9/11. Very cool to see that many flags. The kids sure enjoy running through them too.


On each of the flag poles there is a laminated card with the names of each person who died including a small excerpt about who the were. There is also a ribbon tied to each flag pole with the name of anyone that has since been killed as a result of the War on Terrorism after the 9/11 attacks. Anyway, hard to believe it's been 4 years since that happened. I recorded some video footage on the one year anniversary in 2002 and took some time to watch it last night. I also ran across a very cool website with several slideshows put to music. The slideshows are all very well done and are put to some great music. The producer must be LDS seeing that there are several songs from the Brigham Young choirs and even Kurt Bestor. Please check it out by clicking HERE. Among my favorites are "Untill Then..." and "9/11/01"

Finally home

So, the plane ride home wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting. I was told that the best way to overcome the jet lag is to force myself to stay awake on the plane, and that I did thanks to a few movies on the plane and Season 4 of 24 (the TV series). I actually watched almost 7 episodes, which about used up my 2 laptop batteries I had with me. My plane left at 3:30 pm on Sunday and arrived in Salt Lake at 2:00 pm on Sunday. Kind of cool to experience Sunday morning twice.

After getting to the airport in SLC, Tami and the kids met me there and we drove to Temple Square and walked around a bit to take advantage of gas prices since we were down that way already. Once home, we opened gifts I had brought back from Japan and enjoyed the afternoon and a BBQ together. It's really good to be home. I didn't actually go to bed until about 10:00 Sunday night (awake for almost 30 hours), but after an 11 hour night's sleep, I actually felt pretty good Monday. I swear that the kids look older. Especially Isaac. I think most of it though is from the nice tan that the kids got while down in California at the beach for a week, which they thoroughly enjoyed.

Coming Home!!!!

Well, the 2 weeks here in Japan have come to an end. It has been a very neat experience. Once in a lifetime. Tokyo is a fine place. Dang expensive but fine. I have gotten use to the hoards of people going every which way. Coming back home to Utah will be a change. I'm so looking forward to the dry climate though. I'm ready to get out of this humidity and "sticky" heat. It is Sunday morning right now, still Saturday night back home. The plane ride home will be long and tiring. I'm going to try to stay awake as long as possible so that I can get rid of the jet lag quickly. Maybe I'll come back someday to vacation. I'll have to be a millionaire though to afford vacationing in Tokyo. Maybe it's cheaper in the outer cities.

Good news. There have been about 5 people that have come to see the house while Tami was gone in California. Only 3 people left their cards though. They were concerned about the hole in the basement floor though, so I think we'll be covering that up soon. It will be nice to get home and get into the "buy/sell" mode again and be able to focus on the months ahead. If anyone wants to see a cool virtual tour of our home, click here.

I hope you have enjoyed the blog I've kept while here and have been able to experience a little of what I have over the last two weeks. Its been fun posting it.

So, from Tokyo, Japan . . . Sayonara!

More thoughts on Japan

I'm going to continue my thoughts and observations I've made over the last week. I appologize if some of them are pretty random.

1. Wendy's Frostys are not the same here as back home. They remind me more of a weak soft serve chocolate ice cream.

2. Most restaurants have two floors here. The second floor is normally just for eating. Most have a plasma monitor screen on the bottom floor with a video camera of the 2nd floor to give people an idea of how crowded it may be.

3. It amazes me how some of these women can actually run in their high heels. Some of these women are practically sprinting to catch a train. Very talented.

4. There's a lot of bowlegged people down here. Not sure where they get it from, but it's all over the place.

5. Every car has a GPS/DVD system. If it isn't built into the dash, it is mounted on the dash itself. I've actually seen some of these cars look like they're pulling TV signals too.

6. Cell phones are crazy here. And they are all the flip phone (clam shell) type. Each cell has a camera too which is at least a 1.3 Mega pixel camera. However people don't use their cell phones on the Subways and trains. It's an etiquette thing. For this reason, inside the subway and train cars, you could almost hear a pin drop. It's surprisingly quiet at least when the recorded announcer voice isn't playing. However as you look down the car, probably half of them are staring at their cell phones either chatting, surfing the web or playing a game or taking candid pictures.

7. Umbrellas are popular here even when it isn't raining. Most women use umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun.

8. They're pretty environmentally aware down here, so each fast food restaurant has a separate trash can for the plastic items, the cups and then the paper items.

9. Tokyo is a very clean city. Cleaner than the States. The subway and train stations are incredibly clean. You never see any trash anywhere. Makings traveling via the rail very nice.

10. You can only take so much of CNN! Too bad it's the only tv channel in English down here. I definitely have gotten my fair share of Hurricane Katrina new coverage.

Sushi anyone?

I will have to say that my first experience eating Sushi was an interesting one to say the least. Lorin, the other American guy that I'm here with took me to this Sushi Bar down the street. Basically you sit down at a bar and a conveyer belt moves in front of you with plates of all different kinds of sushi and you just grab whatever you want. The first plate I tried was some raw tuna. Very interesting texture and taste. I like tuna cooked much better than raw. I did try some cooked eel and shrimp, but the most interesting plate of all was the last one. The picture says it all. These squid were very chewy at first and then they just started to get slimy in my mouth. The only option was to just swallow them whole, which, given the slipery texture they slid down very nicely. I even got one of the legs stuck in my tooth. Luckily there was a Wendy's just two shops down. Nothing like a nice Frosty to take away the after taste of raw squid!

Public Toilet

I don't think I need to explain this one. The pictures say it all. Granted not all public toilets are this way. It was worthy of a picture.

Sunday - walking day

I went to church on Sunday and then walked my tail off trying to go out and see everything that I could. My first stop after church was a very cool little park just across the street from the temple. Very calm, but very noisy (the bugs here make an incredibly annoying sound. I've been told that if you've ever lived back east, these bugs are pretty common. Much louder than crickets). I happened to catch some men fishing in this small pond although the only fish in the pond were carp. They seemed to be enyoying themselves though.

From there it was off to the Imperial Palace. The inner place grounds themselves are off limits to the public, but there are several gardens and places where the public is admitted. The palace is considered the center of Tokyo and everything revolves around it (including the train system). The whole palace is surrounded by a large moat that was used in older times. There used to be a huge castle built here until it was pretty much demolished during World War II bombing raids. Only the walls, moat and some buildings are original. I grabbed a pre-made ice cream cone while walking around the grounds. The cone itself was a little rubbery as you can see in the picture. I tried to eat the cone, but just couldn't. I had to squeeze the ice cream out of the cone just like you would an Otter Pop.


This is one of my favorite shots of the bridges that lead to the inner palace grounds. This bridge is a very famous bridge.


To see more pictures of the palace grounds, check out my posted pictures HERE. From the palace grounds it was off to Shinjuku, which is considered the sky scraper district of Tokyo. The Tokyo Municipal Government Building is there, which is pretty impressive. The towers themselves are about 800 feet tall and each tower has an observation deck on the 45th floor that gives you a pretty good view of Tokyo. I happened to go up there at night to see the lights. Quite an awesome view.

Tokyo is definitely a beautiful city at night. All the lights and fun of Las Vegas, but much cleaner. I was dead by the end of the day. Fun day though.