Canyoneering

Garrick and I are pretty much canyoneerers (I think that's a new word) after a trip we took last weekend. We left Friday after work and drove down to Zion National Park. It was after 10 pm when we arrived, but we still pitched our tents and called it a night. We got up early the next morning so we could get started on our first slot canyon.

When Sharon & Trent first invited us to go hiking, I thought, "Yeah, that could be fun. We'll see." It wasn't until later that I realized that the hiking would be way more than just hiking. We would be swimming through mucky water, rapelling down very steep cliffs, and climbing over rock after rock. Garrick and I decided we'd give it a try. (Just between you and me...I was in it for the camping. I needed to see if Garrick could survive a night in a tent.)

Anyway, we had a lot of fun, but we were scared, too. (See picture #2) We knew that the last rapel would be a "free fall" rapel of 90 ft, and that had both of us nervous for the entire second hike. In the end, it was pretty fun and not as scary as we thought it'd be (or maybe that's just my take looking back a week later.)

Luckily, Sharon & Trent have a waterproof camera, so we were able to get some "proof" of what we actually did. ENJOY!

"Are you sure you want to do this?"

It's all about trusting the equipment!

Garrick's having fun!

The 90 ft. "freefall" rapel. It really wasn't as bad as I thought.

But, I was too scared to look down the whole time.

Garrick getting started on the same rapel.

A view of the last rapel from the bottom of the canyon floor.

Racoon # 11

Racoon # 11

Caught this one about three days ago. He was a big one.

Dad

New Bathroom

We just finished overhauling our master bathroom. Mom in the beginning wanted to take off the wallpaper and plaster the walls. Her goal? Get rid of the mold problem we have back there. To which I said something lilke. "What color are you going to paint it, harvest gold?" Yuk. As you might know we had a harvest gold shower, toilet, sink, and formica to match.

I said, "We are pretty limited by that color. Maybe we ought to look into changing it or something." Mom thought there was a company that epoxy painted showers and tubs. We checked it out and ,"walla", there was.

"Well maybe we should just get a new toilet, sink, counter top, etc," I replied. "Do a total makover"

She was "overjoyed" by the fact that I was suggesting doing such a thing. One thing led to another.

"Do you know what beadboard is?" she asked.

"No," I said. Then she explained it to me. We went to Home Depot to check it out, look at toilets, sinks, and countertops. We picked the ones we liked and got prices. The rest is now history.

So you are now invited to the grand tour.

One of the newly plastered walls

Two pictures of the newly epoxy painted shower

New beadboard, painted window and blind.

New toilet New counter top, sink/faucet, painted cabinet. (cabinet matches kitchen)

New light fixture, painted mirror

New hand towel holder, White electrical outlet, switches.

New beadboard behind door
New beadboard on corner next to shower

New bath towel holder, towels, and toilet paper holder

So there you have it. Mom LOVES it, and I do too. It turned out really nice, don't you think?

Dad

Suh-WEEEEET!

I just had to write about our sweet shopping deal last night. As I was recovering from yesterday's parent-teacher conferences, I flipped through the grocery ads and noticed a great deal at Albertson's. They had Life cereal and Quaker granola bars, oatmeal, breakfast bars, etc on a 10/$15 deal. But, if you bought all 10, you also got $5 off. So, they were 10/$10. In addition to that great deal, I had about 5 $1 coupons for those items, so half of them were free! This is only the beginning. :) They also had Post cereals on a 5/$10 deal, but if you bought all 5, they were $7 AND you got a free gallon of milk (worth $3.65). I'll let you do the math on that one. They were even the good Post cereals (Honey Bunches w/ peaches, Grape Nuts Trail Mix Crunch, etc), AND I had another $1 off coupon! We bought a couple of bags of Halloween Candy with coupons, and a pint of cream. All in all we got a cart full of groceries ($87 worth) for $19.83!!! Oh, and Garrick won the guess-the-price contest with a guess of about $19.50. (I love that he loves guessing games.)

One more thing...As we were looking at the Post cereals, Garrick said something like this, "I'm thinking maybe we ought to trade one of the Cinnamon Life boxes for a regular Life box because we need something to mix with all of these Post cereals, and I don't think the cinnamon one would 'go.'" Yep, he's a cereal mixer!!! Who haven't I converted? Let me know, and I'll work on you.

Long Time No Write

Ok, so Garrick and I are officially the blogging slackers. : ) I am embarrassed to admit that I had to ask Stephen for directions on how to post. But, now that I know, maybe you'll hear from us more than once every 3 months.

Just wanted to include a video or two from our summer rafting trip. Kelly came out to Utah to visit. She went to Education Week during the day while Garrick and I worked, and then we hung out in the evenings. (By the way, we love having company.) Anyway Sharon was excited to get us rafting again this summer, so we left Friday after work for Wyoming. We drove for about 4 hours to get to Bedford, stayed in a "cabin," enjoyed a Saturday on the river, spent Sat night with Garrick's parents in Montpelier (less than an hour from the WY cabin), and traveled back Sunday afternoon. We had a great time!

A beautiful day in Astoria

An artistic glamour shot of me with my name etched in the cement. Hot or not?
Just a beautiful shot of a ship sailing along the Columbia river. Melissa, Eric and I ventured to Astoria last weekend only to enjoy one of the hottest days for Astoria this year. It was warm and breathtaking.

Sunriver 2

Sorry, the number is 150484, but I just checked it and it looks booked. He just contacted me a couple of days ago and it was free--I don't think he is holding it for me so I better keep looking.
Mom

Sunriver

I have been looking at some Sunriver Houses lately. Before I make any reservations I wanted to ask some questions:
First of all, to the best of your knowledge, are you planning on coming next summer? I know that several of you may be looking at new jobs, school, etc.
Is there anyone that knows they couldn't go the following weeks: June 16-20, June 23-27,or June 30-July 4?
Also, some of you offered to help with costs. How much do you resonably think you could contribute, without it being too much of a burden? I realize that some of you may not be in a position to help.
I have been looking at 7 bedroom houses, as that would give each family a "sanctuary" and a place to go if being with the rest of us gets to be too much. If anyone else would care to be in on the search, be my guest. The house I have inquired about is Homeaway.com and the number is 15084. Love you all, Mom
You can send me your info via e-mail

Losing weight here now Boss!!! aka movie Cool Hand Luke.

Just thought I would report on my latest "adventure". As some of you might be aware, I have not been feeling too well since about the middle of August. Pain around the left kidney into the back area, pain below the right soulder blade and around under my arm across my chest. Pain pills precribed by Dr LaFrance, the neurologist. Big horse type pills (300 mg) four times a day. Enough to make anybody sleep pretty much 24 hours at a time. Then on top of that they don’t take "all" the pain away, just most of it. Sort of like "He is mostly dead" on a princess bride. I am just "mostly" pain free.
Well anyway, Monday night when I rolled over on my right side to go to sleep I was feeling these real sharp stabbing pains down in my right groin near the hip. "What is that?", I thought.
Appendix. Now is it the right side or the left side???? Tomorrow. I will look it up on google tomorrow. It wasn't doing stabbing pains in the morning but was uncomfortably painful. I poked around down there to determine the location of the pain. Belly button to the hip, on an angle down, right side. Google said belly button to the hip, right side. "Ok, houston, we have a match." I thought.
So while sitting down at Mike the mechanic's I phoned Dr. Peterson for an appointment. Better to be early than late so it doesn't rupture. "He only works till noon today," Came the reply from the receptionist. It was about 10:30. My face sagged in disappointment after a long silence, Then, "How about noon today? Can you make it then?" “Now you’re talking my language,” I thought. “I’ll be there.” I replied.
Anyway to make a long story short, Dr Peterson poked around, thought there was a good possibility, & sent me across the street to the hospital for a Cat-Scan. The scan was positive. They scheduled surgery and somewhere around 8 pm last night out came the appendix.
But even MORE amazing than that is the other pain in my back came out with it. As soon as last night while I was laying in bed at the hospital it became apparent to me that my back and chest were no longer hurting.
I lost the weight of the appendix and the burden (weight) of the pain.
Soooooo, other than a little bit of pain from the operation, I feel the best I have in about a month or so. Let’s here a big WOOOOHOOOO for the weight loss!!!!

I love you all

Dad

Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

So I finally finished my translation website! Most of you probably didn't know I was working on one to begin with, but alas, I was. You can check it out here:

www.stwtranslation.com

I've got a former co-worker/Translation graduate/native Spanish speaker who has allowed to be my partner in this adventure. I haven't added her information to the "meet the translators" section yet.

So anyways, if you know anything that needs translating, let us know. We have very competitive rates.

Stephen

Labor Day - gotta have some DIET DITTO!

We had a really nice Labor Day! We headed to the beach about 9:00 in the morning. Labor Day is already one of the busiest beach days of the year and then add in that the temperatures in surrounding areas had been ranging between 100-110 for over a week - we knew it would be crowded! Anyway, on the way, Jon gave us a tour of his new Intuit offices - they were so nice. We agreed that he will probably never work somewhere as nice as that. Since there are times of the year that he practically lives there, I'm glad he'll be comfortable :) The beach was very crowded, but we found a parking spot not too far away and were able to squeeze our umbrella inbetween some others. Despite the crowd, it was still fun - the kids had a great time building sand castles and splashing in the water. Carter has been learning to boogie board and Jon and I each took a turn boogie boarding - and it felt great not to be melting into the pavement. Sure enough, when we returned to Murrieta, the temperature was 105 degrees. We decided that in order to help out the state of California and their energy crisis, we had better not use our oven or stove or even microwave for that matter - so we took the kids for their first trip to Taco Bell!
Jon and I had not been there for probably 8 years - so it was kind of fun. We also stopped by the grocery store for a nutritious dessert of Donuts and when we walked by the DIET DITTO, we thought - it would not be a Labor Day Dinner without a little DIET DITTO - so we picked some up and thought of the DITTO's as we enjoyed this scrumptious meal!

My hobby

So awhile ago I posted a random drawing I did onto this musician's myspace page.
He's a rapper, and I like a lot of his music. Anyways, I had a couple other musicians who saw the drawing send me messages asking for me to help them with some art work. One of them actually followed through about a week ago. The name of his album is The Subjective Nature of Sound, so this is what I came up with:
It's not all the way done, I told him I'd do a logo for him too. He really likes it though, and said he'd advertise for me, so we'll see. It'll look nice in a portfolio, if I ever decide to go into advertising or whatever.

Stephen

News from Albany

News from Albany

Good financial news--First of all, the government now owes us $400 instead of us owing them $11,000. On top of that, the good state of Oregon is returning a kicker tax, that is when the economy exceeds their expectations. The checks come out in Dec. and if I figure right, it should be about $600. Yeah~! Now, a few photos from the last few weeks:

My Trip to Crater Lake

Are they really straight???

Malia with Abraham Lincoln

Braden and I went to Kelly's on Friday and made peach salsa. We have had a great year for peaches around here.

A lonely swing on a beautiful Sunday Morning (today)
Uh--Not such a great picture. Some things are drying up but there are still a lot of beautiful flowers. It has been a great year for potatoes and beans.

Oh Dear . . .