Camping at Sunrise

Last summer we had our somewhat annual camping trip with the Snow clan to Bear Lake. We love staying in Sunrise Campground above the lake and then driving to the beach.

I just love how dirty the kids get! It means they're having FUN.

We had SO MUCH fun on the wave runners this year. It's just the best lake for riding. It's so big and you can go very fast for long distances. The kids weren't too interested so the adults got to play. It's exhilarating.

That night while sitting around the fire we had s'mores and Nate did some Mad Libs.

The girls were tired so I went to bed early with them while Rob went off to do his star pictures.

The next morning. The ever-popular pinata.  The poor little bound dolphin that we were beating!

Click on the pic for the video.




We broke camp and went to lunch at our favorite stop in Garden City before hitting the beach. This time was more relaxed...except for all of us trying not to stare at the inappropriate swimming attire of the foreigners next to us. Yikes! There are children here and adults not used to seeing such things in public, people! Haha.

Here are more family pics and a link to the above video.

Kitty

On our fourth try, we finally hit kitty jackpot. Meet Scouts. I'm not sure why his name is plural but that's what the kids came up with and it stuck.

I was waiting to blog about him just in case he wasn't going to be a permanent member of our family but it's been two months and my kids are still in kitty heaven.

This little guy has been the best thing to happen to my kids. He snuggles with them and follows them around and plays. He isn't shy. He isn't whiny. He lets them carry him around in the most uncomfortable of positions and he rarely tries to get away. He lets them have their way with him and then he comes back for more.

Honestly, Scouts has been a blessing to have in our home. Silly to say that about a cat but it's true. The fact that he takes up so much of my children's time and attention is nothing short of a godsend!

Perfection - A Point of View

In church today we were discussing the attributes of Heavenly Father. Two of these attributes that jumped out at me today were perfection and perfect judgement. I thought of the concept taugh by Joseph Smith that we, being imperfect, are incapable of even recognizing perfection.

I’ve been thinking a lot of that lately in respect to life and children especially. For instance, I have three wonderful children that drive me crazy but are also the joy of my life. Consider my sweet Madeleine.

Here she is holding a favorite stuffed animal. She is growing up too fast. Already the ship has sailed on princesses and she is pretty obsessed with Monster High dolls. She can be a little selfish at times (somewhat typical of a five-year-old) as she learns how to interact with others.

On the other hand her hyper girl attitude is starting to kick in and her laugh is infectious. A day doesn’t go by that I’m not surprised and amused by a hilarious quip or statement. She is a fantastic girl and I love her so much.

Getting back to my point, who’s to say what perfection really means? Life is full of ups and downs I know and we certainly experience many of those (often self-inflected). However, I can’t help but think that I am surrounded by perfection but am unable to perceive it. I feel like this is especially true of our children. It’s easy to say all of this in a blog post and I’m sure tomorrow I’ll be back to getting frustrated by the kids as usual but perhaps I can hold onto a little more of what is in my heart now.

I’d be crazy if I didn’t squeeze in this snapshot of Julie that was taken at the same time I took these photos of Madi. Julie is the love of my life and I can’t help but also recognize her perfection. She is wonderful and I love sharing my life with her.

Home Decor: Master Bedroom

Before I begin:  I'm writing this post in Blogger since we changed to a mac and I haven't learned a new program comparable or better than Windows LiveWriter. Blogger is terrible....please excuse all formatting errors. It's not my fault.

This post has been a long time coming. I started working on my bedroom almost a year ago. I think you can guess I'm considered a slow decorator (def. Do you take your time and hunt down the absolute perfect item for each nook and cranny? Do you have the time and energy to wait and buy or re-create the things you can't yet afford? Can you live in a semi-finished space?) But the real reason I'm so slow is that we are just too busy and it costs too much to do it all at once. 

On to the before:

Here's a picture midway through the process. 

I had decided to put this shelf next to the bed since it's the same color and it fit. I filled it with knick-knacks from Rob's mission and other meaningful things. But to be honest, I don't like being surrounded by stuff. Every time I walked into the space it felt heavy and all those things collected dust and I didn't want to deal with that either. My personality is to have open spaces which relax my brain. Since my bedroom of all places should be relaxing I went with "calm" as my scheme, I moved everything out, and started over.

For the bed...I wanted it to be relaxing and inviting for naps. I love napping (it's genetic) and when you have a bed that is too formal it doesn't make me want to climb in and mess it up. I wanted my bed to say, "Oh, look how soft I am. Come. Rest your weary head." :) And it does! We have a 4-inch memory foam mattress topper (Christmas gift from Rob's parents years ago) that you just sink into. I also bought two down feather pillows (Costco) and a down comforter (Ikea) to cover me. Then I topped it all with a sheet (Ross) and a cotton throw (Ikea) at the end of the bed. When I'm stressed or overwhelmed, as I tend to get, all I have to do is retreat to my bed for a few minutes and then I can go into the world again. I gaze out the window. This is the view from my pillow. You can't see very well in the snow but there are two windmills on the hill and I watch them go around and around until I'm calmer. I sound crazy, don't I...

Rob wrote me this poem for our anniversary a couple of years ago. As soon as I read it I knew I wanted to incorporate it into our bedroom somehow. At first I wanted to freehand it huge directly on the wall but I got intimidated so I decided to freehand it on canvas instead. It's not a perfect job but that's part of the charm.

Hanging on the back of the bed are shell necklaces from New Caledonia.

A friend of mine "pinned" these Ikea lights and I immediately knew I had to have them. At only $20 a piece it was very doable. I love the style so much! I guess many other people do as well since they were out of stock for a month before I could get them. I also got the matching desk lamp for $30.

The piece of pottery next to my bed is named "The Tree of Life". It was made and signed in 1973 by the well-known sculptor Max D. Weaver. I may be wrong but I think he gifted it to my dad who then gifted it to us last year. It's not only beautiful, but functional. Not only does it hide an electrical outlet and cords but it's the perfect resting place for Rob's charging phone :)

I love Rob's guitar hanging out here. Having it out in the open entices him to play it more. Plus it just looks really nice.

I got these wooden pics for him last Christmas. They're supposed to produce warmer tones. I'm not sure they do but they look much prettier than the ugly plastic kind.

I knew I really wanted a living thing in the room, you know, besides humans, so I bought a plant. The hanger and pot are from the townhome and since this is the only variety of leafy greens that I've ever been able to keep alive I went with that.



The drapes came from our family room. I just needed to hem them. I went with a simple rod with no decorative details. With the fabric motif it was perfect to keep some of the island mementos we had to create an easy-going vibe.

 

This desk is special to me. My grandfather built it for my grandmother as a sewing table. I don't know the proper term, but she was a master at her craft. I seem to remember that she sewed wedding dresses among other things. There is a top that swings up but the hinge is broken. Maybe we'll fix that someday. I love that the heavy top is supported by more delicate legs. My grandmother passed it on to my brother and after he passed away, I rescued it from his garage. It's now the perfect sewing desk for me. Rob also sits here when he works from home.

I like this chair but it really bothers me that it doesn't tuck in under the desk. However, Rob loves this chair and since he sits here for long periods of time he's asked me not to replace it. I gave in.






























The masks on the wall are from our long-ago vacation to Hawaii. My sister gave me the clock one Christmas. I bought the mirror second-hand. it was gold and gaudy and not in a good way so I painted it white and now it's wonderful.

I almost left this wall bare but Rob talked me in to hanging something on it to finish the space. We chose three views of the beach from our vacation in Bucerias, Mexico when Nate was a baby. We had the most wonderful condo overlooking the bay and it is the most relaxing place I have ever been. These were just taken with a small Nikon digital camera so we were happy to see that they enlarged nicely. 

I didn't want the formal look of frames so I came up with the idea of gluing some of the kids' collected rocks onto push pins. They helped me decide which of their treasured rocks would look good. It was a fun little project.

 

I love coming into my room at any time but at night when the lights are on is especially my favorite. With that, good night.

Building A Mac

We have been struggling with our computers here for a little while. The last computer I purchased was back in January 30, 2007 -I can’t believe it has been so long. I bought an inexpensive Vista machine the first day the new operating system came out (a dual core AMD box from HP). Vista was much more interesting to look at than XP it has been a really long time since we had a new operating system to look at. Despite the eye candy Vista was a world of hurt with plenty of software issues and periodic non-booting drives. Oy. At some point I started using more high-end software as well such as Lightroom, Photoshop, and Handbrake. Unfortunately, the AMD box was not up to the challenge.

I started to hear whispers about Windows 7 running a lot better than Vista (even in the beta version). I decided to give it a try. As soon as the Windows 7 beta was available to the public I immediately installed a fresh copy on the AMD box and that resulted in a much more stable system. I was pretty happy for a time. A few more years passed and new versions of the photo software became available and expected more advanced hardware to go along with the upgrades. The slow computer became so bad that photo editing really became a burden. Taking photos of friends and family resulted in hours and hours spent post processing the photos, or really spent waiting for the software to catch up. Pain Pain Pain!

Around this time (about 1 year ago), I learned that my office was continuing to unload some old computers. They are on a 5-year retirement cycle and were just starting to recycle the first of their Core 2 Duo intel machines. Now there was nothing revolutionary about Core 2 Duo machines as they were old in their own right but it was a decent upgrade for me.

I hatched a plan to take one of the work boxes and take the good components from our old computer and make something that could get us a little farther down the road. So I pulled the hard drives from the old box, transfered the card reader, and found some hand-me-down ram from friends. The end result was a Core 2 Duo box, 4GB of ram, 3 TB of storage, and I also added a small solid state drive (SSD) for the lightroom libraries. It was a little odd but it worked and it was much better than what we had before. The SSD was amazing, a breath of fresh air, and I was pretty happy about it. :)

A year down the road that computer started to break down. Between the frequent photo editing sessions, video encoding, and media streaming to the tv it was just getting clunky. To even have a chance at editing a photo all other applications needed to be shut down. No netflix, not itunes, no nothing could be going on at the same time. Ugh. Even under the best of circumstances certain tasks like using the adjustment brush in lightroom or having both lightroom and photoshop open were virtually impossible. Pain, Pain, Pain.

This led us to finally take the plunge and buy a new machine. However, more than $2000 for an iMac with the appropriate upgrades was not an option. I was also not interested in the laptop class processor in the Mac mini. That is when the idea of building a new computer came to mind. Better yet, building a mac. And that is just what I did. For the last few weeks I’ve been using our new mac pro and it is running great. :)

I used the guidance at TonyMacx86 to choose components, create a bootable Mavericks USB drive, and install OSX. Here is a list of the components I used for the mac pro.

• GA-H87-D3H motherboard Link
• Corsair Vengeance 1600 MHz ram 16GB Link
• Intel Core i5–4670 processor (this runs at 3.9 GHz) Link
• Antec Neo ECO 520W Power Supply Link
• LG Bluray Drive Link
• Cooler Master Elite 431 Plus Case Link
• Card Reader Link
• Seagate SSD for lightroom libraries Link
• OCZ SSD had already for osx Link
• 1TB Caviar Black HD already had for photos
• 2TB Caviar Green HD already had for music and movies
• 160GB Caviar Black HD already hadfor os drive backup
• Microsoft Natural Keyboard already had
• Logitech m510 Bluetooth Mouse new
• Altec Lansing Speaker System with Subwoofer already had
• Two HP Monitors already had

Assembling the components was a lot of fun and it turned on without any issues. I got most of the bios settings correctly; however, I was really grateful for a neighbor willing to come help me get the last few settings right.

Here are a few screenshots of my system up and running (it thinks it is a 2008 Mac Pro).

Lightroom and photoshop are running as smooth as butter. I can encode HD video, edit in Lightroom, and watch a movie all at the same time. Nice!!! It is nice to have a very powerful machine. Thanks to the hackintosh tools that are available now I was able to make this happen and I’m so happy about it.

The following summarizes my feelings and reasons for doing this.

• desire to have a Mac
• desire to run desktop apps that work seamlessly with apps on my mobile devices.
• lower cost for great components calculated as 800 dollars of new investment compared to a similarly equipped iMac for 2600.
• desire to build a computer and understand what is going on.
• desire to have a modern and fast computer.