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.

A-OK with Moroni

I thought this was pretty funny. The chapel where I've gone to church is right next to the temple in Tokyo. About a month ago there was a pretty strong earthquake that hit Tokyo (7 something on the scale) and the earthquake actually knocked the trumpet out of Moroni's hand. They still haven't put it back up yet. Oh well. At least Moroni making an "A-OK" sign is just as good.

Shakey's and shakers

Saturday was a busy day. It all started with a very good lunch at Shakey's Pizza in Shibuya. It was all you can eat and boy did it hit the spot. From there I went to a place called Asakusa, which is the souvenier capital of Tokyo. There was a ton of shops here. Anything and everything you would ever want dealing with Japan is sold along a very long corridor as seen below.

At the end of this corridor was a huge shrine. Definitely the largest shrine I've seen so far.

Right on the other side of this shrine a mother and her young son stopped me and asked where I was from. I told them I was from the United States. The boy asked if I he could take a picture with me. His mother took the picture and as a thankyou he gave me a folded origami bird. It was kind of neat. If I was thinking, I would have asked his mom to take a picture with my camera too. This is another shrine next to the one above which is a famous one. I've seen this in pictures in books before.

The icing on the cake was a huge festival that was going on at the same time I was there. The parade reminded me of the dancers I saw at Carnival in Sao Paulo. Not as many scantily clad women, but there were some. The band seen in the picture marched right by me. They were "shaking" and grooving to the drum rhythm.

Something else that I found strange was this interesting fountain also near the shrines in the pictures above. People came up to the fountain, picked up one of the ladles and would either pour the water into their hand and drink it or they would actually sip right from the ladle itself. Some after they drank the water would immediately spit it out too, but most swallowed. Not very sanitary if you ask me, but I think it has some sort of ritual significance.


I also happened to see these two little boys playing with pidgeons and snapped a quick picture. It made me miss Brooklyn and Isaac. They would have loved playing with the pidgeons.

Good Friday everyone!

The Typhoon has passed and skies are clearing. But boy is it muggy today. It was a good Friday though. After a delicious pancake meal at McDonalds this morning and a pretty boring day at work, I decided to walk home to the hotel instead of take the train. It is only about a mile walk. I did enjoy a night out on the town though. It started with some very interesting music in the patio area below my 12th floor balcony. It was pretty hilarious to listen to a Japanese woman trying to sing "Route 66" in English of course.


It was then off to TGI Fridays (appropriate enough) for dinner where I sat close enough to the bar to watch this Japanese bartender put on an incredible show of making drinks. With bottles flying through the air and cups and glasses spinning in his hands, it was enought to keep me entranced. I then ventured out on a quest to find some more intersting English'isms and found a few funny ones:

This first one caught my eye. I think that this phrase sounds much better than "psychiatrist." This was a walk up little store with booths that reminded me of those you see in nail salons.


While walking through a bowling alley I came across a very interesting video game in the arcade that intrigued me. I had seen this series of game in the States but never with this twist.

I had to try it. The only problem was that all of the words were in Japanese. Granted they were not the Japanese characters. They were normal letters, but it sure was hard. I did fairly well though, furiously typing, trying to keep the evil zombies from getting me. Every correct letter would shoot off a hand or an arm or something.

The last thing that caught my eye was a sign at one of the local movie theaters. I couldn't help but laugh. All other movie titles in English were correct except for this one:

Movie tickets are pretty pricy here. To see a standard movie, the pricetag is about $25. Needless to say I'll wait until I get back to the states to go to the movies.

And now I'm sitting back in my hotel room getting ready for bed while everyone back home is just getting up for the day. CNN is getting old really fast. I did get a load of laundry done though. Too bad that washing 5 pairs of garments and 5 pairs of socks came to about $40. Oh well. Not my bill fortunately.

Typhoon Mawar

So, what is a trip to Japan without the excitement of a typhoon? This is my first typhoon. From what I've been able to pick up on tv, it is the 11th typhoon of the season. It isn't a very large one however it is causing some mud slides due to the earthquake they had here last month. I found this article that explains a little about it: http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/25/japan.typhoon.reut/

My hotel room is on the 12th floor and there are quite a few trees below me that are whipping around pretty ferociously. The rain is pretty heavy. But it looks like the brunt of it will hit while I sleep. We'll see how it is in the morning.

More on bidets

So, Mike sent a very interesting link from a friend who has had some experience with bidets in South America. He sums it up much better than I could. If you want the true bidet analysis, please click HERE.

The only difference with the bidets here (remember that I'm in a technologically advanced society) is that the bidets are built right into the toilet seat. Makes things very convenient.


Basically you do your thing, push the button and a little telescoping arm shoots out from just underneath the back of the toilet seat. There are two setting, the bidet button and then the shower button. Not sure about the difference. I guess you use the bidet to clean and then the other button rinses. You can also turn on the seat warmer if you want to.

There must be some sort of sensor in the seat because whenever you sit down, water starts to trickle into the bowl. Kind of strange because you feel like somethingn is leaking out of you. I really worried that I had the runs or something the first time I sat down. Sorry. Didn't mean to paint that picture.

Good ol' American Food

Nothing like a nice meal at the Outback Steakhouse to bring you back home. This restaurant is literaly about 100 yards from my hotel. Ate here for dinner tonight. Very good food. I had a nice medium steak, cole slaw and french fries. They had the normal hot bread that they bring out to you before your meal along with a Caesar salad. To top it off, a nice slice of New York style cheescake with strawberry syrup. Nice restaurants here are a little pricy. Just my meal alone came to about $40.