What a Smile

So I am totally amazed at how much Nate smiles. It is so great! This picture is so dang cute. It is really funny because he does cry more than the average baby (maybe) but he sure does smile more as well!!! It is so much fun to play with him and see in his eyes that he knows me and thinks that I'm just sooooo funny!!!!!!!

By the way, I have uploaded some pics of Julie and me for our engagement as well as some funny pics of me playing the drums.

Julie joins the blogosphere.

So the other week Julie turns to me and says, "hey, I think I want to start a blog. I have a great idea and I want to know what you think." So she explained her idea and I thought it was fabulous. We thought about a good url for about a week and it finally came to us. www.juliepages.info I checked out her first post and it was a lot of fun. Keep checking her page, I expect very good things from her. I put a permalink to her site in the sidebar.

Nate Laughing!!!!!!!!!!!!

Guys, you will not believe this. So this evening after we got home from the day's varied activities I decided to play with Nate for a while. He was sitting in his chair and starting to get a little bit annoyed just sitting there. So I hovered above him and started smiling at him and making all the funny noises that dads make to their children. (Dad's really are the best and making funny noises!!!) Anyway I was making weird noises and shaking my face at him and MUCH to my surprise he sort of went, "ha ha" and I was like, "hey he laughed!!!!" I said to Julie, "did you hear that," and she said yeah with much excitement. So I kept doing what I was doing and he did it again just a little longer!!!! We are so happy!!!! Nate is such a happy little boy as most of you know. He smiles and smiles and smiles, and he also cries quite a bit but I think that is a part of his personality right now. We'll see how he continues to develop.

Del.icio.us

Hey guys, I just want to let you know that I have started a del.icio.us feed. If you don't know what del.icio.us is you might check it out. It is basically a good way to share all the cool things we all look at online. When we find something cool we tag it to our feed in a click or two and anyone who cares can see what we think is cool. So you can always click on the link in the sidebar but I recommend using a feed reader such as newsgator (free online based feedreader that I use). For instance, I have a link to a desktop search client that I think is fabulous and I use it all the time. It is tons faster than any of the other that I have tried. And you can see it by following the link in the sidebar.

Goggled Goat?

032906_eclipse_lebanon
Originally uploaded by EngineeringNerd.

It is a good thing this kid put goggles on his goat!!!! This kid is looking at the solar eclipse that the other side of the planet was blessed with today. That would have been soooo cooooool to see. Anyway, I just couldn't help sharing this picture with you guys. Enjoy!

Alaska Voyage - May 2001

In May of 2001 my family went on a cruise to Alaska. We left flew into Seattle, Washington and drove to Vancouver, British Columbia to board the ship. We made two stops, one in Sitka and one in Ketchikan. Both were very small towns with not much but a main drag with shops. We didn’t end up doing any pricey excursions. But these two towns were cute.

Sailing Alaska’s Inside Passage was soooo beautiful. It was amazingly quiet; there was hardly any sound at all…just peaceful. One thing that amazed me the most was how large and empty the “Last Frontier” is, and I just saw a small portion of the coastline. It’s very cool how secluded and lonely Alaska can seem.

One of the coolest moments of the cruise was being on the upper deck in the middle of nowhere in freezing temperatures, soaking in the hot tub surrounded by the majesty of the mountains. Very cool.

Check out the gallery for a few more pictures.

Public Service Announcement

Recently Julie and I were discussing what types of phrases we should stop using because we are too old to use them. This was really sad because I don’t want to change my vocabulary just because I’m old. This also sucks because it is a reminder that I am getting old!!

“When the crap (or other explicative) hits the fan”

This is a really good expression because it really represents the worst thing that can happen. I mean really, it is the worst scenario when poop is involved. My friend over at the Mommy Going Crazy blog really knows that we are talking about here. She dealt with the lesser poop problem. She had it pretty bad but I am quite sure that no fans were involved over there.

So you got some crap, it’s a localized problem. It is a mess to clean up at this point! So imagine you have an industrial strength fan, no of these wimpy ceiling fans, I’m talking high velocity here. So you turn the fan on “high” and throw the crap at the backside of the fan. It hits the fan with a “womp” and now you are experiencing the worst scenario. The small and localized problem you had before is now terrible and most likely hazmat will need to be called in to take care of the problem. It is everywhere and has been smeared into everything.

So Julie and started talking about things phrases we could use to replace this one. So we put on our thinking caps and this is what came out.

“When the crap hits the fan” can be replace with, “when a whole family of dead (poisoned of course) bloated field mice are found under a wood pile in the garage and must be sucked out with a ShopVac fitted with a special bag and filter made specifically for this type of application.” Oh yeah, the sounds associated with this one is, “Thwump.”

So I think we have made and improvement here. I think this is more fitting for the situation where you just can’t say “when the crap hits the fan” such as during a professional lecture, during church, or while speaking for foreign dignitaries.

This has been a public service announcement

We're In

It is official. We are now living on campus. We live in Shoreline Ridge Apartments close to Red Butte Gardens. They were built in 2001 for the Olympic athletes. We wonder which athletes stayed in our apartment. We're guessing the gold medalists men's snowboarding team. But that's just a random guess.

The move went well. We were able to get it all in one trip. A loud shout-out to all those who helped. They include: James, Michelle, Mark, and Karen Raines. Bob, Gail, and Kelly Snow. Mike (Kelly's friend). Jace, Colleen, and Jason Painter. Troy and Dianne Denter. Greg and Elizabeth Maxon. Becca Gatrell. Brett Lingwall. Hmmmm, I think that was everyone. Thanks!!

So we've spent all week unpacking and I think we're finally to the point of decorating the place now. It'll be so nice when it's all finished. We're tired of living in an unsettled home. Oh, and after 3 1/2 years of marriage, we FINALLY bought a kitchen table!!! YAY!!! So we can finally have people over for dinner without doing it Japanese-style around the coffee table. We're pretty stoked. Oh, and Nate loves his own room. He's slept all the way through the night since we've been here. It's been great.

Well, we'll post some pictures of the place when we have some. Au revoir!

Are we moving??????

So on Monday morning our plan was to move to the Santa Fe Apartments in Sandy in a couple of months, soon after the end of the semester. It was a good plan that would have served us well. Anyway, our friend Becca works up at residential living at the U of U. Our other friend Shannon worked there in the past as well. Anyway, we have called both of them in the past asking about the price to live up there and have always gasped is horror at the price. So we decided to ask again knowing that our costs have gone up and it that it might be economical at this time. So we got on messenger to contact Becca and made a lunch appointment that afternoon. That next morning we paid our security deposit and made a plan to move in a week later during spring break! Crazy world!! It is funny how quickly our plans can change.

We had some really good help this weekend getting packed. My parents came over twice on Saturday and took care of Nate for like 4 hours at a time which allowed us to get almost all the packing done. We are really grateful for their help.

Today was our last day in the Ensign 2nd Ward. It was a really nice day. One of the hard things about leaving a ward is that everybody wants to say that you did a fantastic job and I don't like to be recongized publicly. It is really weird for me for some reason. I love it when Julie sings me praises but it is weird for other people to do it.

But I guess the important thing is that we really learned a lot in this ward from the people and the opportunities that we had to serve. We really learned a lot while living in this apartment. We had our first child here. What a change! So leaving here is very positive but also strangely disappointing. Julie feels it more than I do but I know where she is coming from.

The next time we blog it will be from our new apartment. How exciting!!

California 2003

In May 2003 we went on our first vacation as a married couple to Los Angeles and San Diego. We visited Julie’s grandparents, went to Six Flags Magic Mountain, and the beach. We also went to Tijuana, kind of. We got off the train, walked over the bridge, and were about to go through the turnstile into Mexico when we looked around us at the ghetto, didn’t see one gringo, and turned around, got back on the train, and headed back to San Diego. We’re not racist, just not stupid. We had no idea that the touristy part of Tijuana wasn’t right on the other side of the border and didn’t feel like wandering around the shacks lost asking to be mugged. But we had such a great time on our trip that we’ve decided we’d love to live in San Diego one day.



You might think that I am in flight school but no I’m actually not. I’m in a really cool tester plane at the Balboa Park Aerospace Museum San Diego. This is the first of many times that I’ve drug Julie into a flight museum where she proceeds to be very bored. But since she is wonderful she pretends to have fun.



Here we are at Julie’s Grandma and Grandpa Clark’s house in Tehachapi, California. What a cute couple!! We’re standing in front of one of the many pieces my grandma has painted in her lifetime.



We are standing at the end of Santa Monica Pier. It was a pretty cold and foggy day, but doesn’t the sailboat in the background look picturesque?



So that same day we went to the little dive (hahaha) of an aquarium that was on the pier. I must say that I found the aquatic life on the beach much more appealing – If you know what I mean. That is about as far as Julie was willing to go into the water.