Saturday, December 31, 2011

The Parrot

Yay! I am finally caught up on my posts! I have even got everything for this year in before tomorrow.

So another funny thing Cash does is act like a Parrot. He loves to sit on my shoulder. I will often put him on my lap at which point he crawls up me and sits on my shoulder. Every time he does it Jake calls him a parrot.

Girl’s Night

Since Alicia was in town for Christmas we decided all us sisters would go to the Temple for the first time together. Since I got endowed we haven’t been able to get everyone together and someone to watch the kids long enough for use to go to the Temple. We planned it in advanced and made sure the dad’s watched the kids.

Mom, Andrea, Alicia and I went to dinner first then we picked up everyone and went to Jordan River. After the temple we went to Amanda’s house and made a silly video. That’s also where we got the group photo. It was a fun and spiritual night.

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Christmas

This Christmas was good one even though Jake had to go through some scary things in order to be home. Originally Jake was supposed to work over Christmas. However, when at work the medical person on site saw some strange things with his heart and sent him to Fairbanks to get a better opinion. Well in Fairbanks they gave him an EKG which they thought showed WPW (Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome) and wanted him to see a cardiologist. It turns out that he did so Jake had to have microscopic heart surgery and with the recovery time allowed him to be home for Christmas. We had a little extra money this year so we had some nice presents and were able to spoil each other. Jake got me a Nook which I am loving. I got Jake an office chair, a watch and some clothes.

Since Christmas was on Sunday we went to Church and 9:00 so we could make it to my Grandma’s traditional Christmas morning breakfast. Since Jake and I are not morning people we decided to open our presents Christmas eve. We went to Church at Shelly and Jason’s, partly because it was at 9:00 and also because Jason was speaking. It was a great talk. Abby was funny during it, Shelly lifted her up so she could see Daddy and she kept saying Daddy loud enough so Jason would hear her. She kept saying it over and over again so Jason finally responded. “Hey baby girl” it was too cute. When he was done Shelly let Abby go and she ran up to daddy who was sitting up on the chairs behind the podium.

After church we went to Grandma’s for breakfast. Jake’s parents were not in town so we hung out at Grandma Burns’ for awhile then went home and relaxed the rest of the day.

Anniversary

Happy 1 year Anniversary to me and Jake. Yes I know it was a month and 1/2 ago, but I still wanted to say it. Jake was actually in Alaska on the actual Anniversary date, but we still celebrated. We ended up going to the Desert Star dinner Theater. They were playing It’s a Wonderful Life in the normal Desert Star way, a spoof on the real It’s a Wonderful Life. It was pretty good. The dinner was good as well. Although I had expected that we would eat and watch the show at the same time, but it turns out that you eat then once everyone has finished eating they will start the play.

Sunbather

So I have learned the Cash is a sunbather. He loves to lay in the area where the sun is shining. He even moves with the sun.

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Hot Springs

In early November I went to Hot Springs Arkansas for business. Xerox corporation bought out ACS and we are combining some of Xerox’s F&A clients into the ACS F&A division. Hot Springs is where their Mailroom is located. The project manager thought it would be good for me to visit the mailroom to get a better idea of what was going on. It was an interesting trip. I went by myself so it was kind of boring. I hate going out to eat by myself so I ate at the hotel mostly. Plus I was only there for 4 days. Not much time to do stuff. However, one night I thought I would walk around. It turns out that Hot Springs was the first declared resort. It was once a neutral place between the Native Americans who would come to the healing waters during war. Then in the early 1900s people would build houses over the springs can have bath houses, the first spas. It was interesting.

This is a picture of downtown, about 10 minute walk from my hotel.

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This is the beginning of bath house row. There were probably 10 to 15 buildings like this in a row. I didn’t finish the entire walk.

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In keeping with the tone of health, they had a promenade walk behind the bath houses.

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Puppy Graduation

When Jake I got Cash we knew that I would have to train him. I started watching videos and reading books, but was getting frustrated because I had a lot of questions that the a video couldn’t answer. Also almost every video said that puppy classes were good because it also got the dog used to other dogs and people. With that in mind Jake and I decided to have me do puppy class with Cash. I actually loved the classes. There were three other puppies there, the same ones came every week. I enjoyed talking with them and training my dog. I was not good at doing what I was supposed to during the week so he wasn’t as strong as he could have been, but Cash became a good puppy. After the 8 weeks of training they did a puppy graduation. We played a gamed called my puppy can do that where you would pick a card and then see if you dog can do it. The cards I got were hard, things we hadn’t taught our dogs yet like have your dog run around a stool 6 feet away and come back. It was still fun. Then the dogs got some dog ice cream which Cash loved. He was the first one to finish his. It actually worried me because he ate so fast that he was shaking from the cold, but he wouldn’t stop. He even ate faster than the blood hound who was 4 times the size of Cash. Then we took pictures which I had a hard time keeping cash to remain still.

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This is the entire class although I only remember the puppy names. We never really said owner names. From left to right: Rosco, a blood hound, Bentley, a mix, but I forget what, Teddy, a Shih Tzu, and Cash.

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These are pictures of Teddy and Cash playing. Teddy was Cash’s best friend in the class.

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Friday, December 30, 2011

Cash

So it turns out that Cash is just like me. He likes his Dr. Pepper.

One night I had left a bottle of Dr. Pepper out and Cash just loved to play with it. Since it was circle he kept having troubles holding on to it and the bottle would go flying across the room causing him to chance and pounce on the bottle. It was funny.

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Flowers

When Jake was up in Alaska one time he decided to send me some flowers. I don’t remember why, but they were beautiful and I loved them!

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Mom & Dad’s Anniversary

To be honest I am not sure which anniversary it was for my parents. It wasn’t one of the milestones like 30, I think it was 33. They had originally wanted to go out together to a nice restaurant, but Andrea didn’t want to be left alone. Then they figured since Andrea was coming that they would invite me. They wanted to go to this restaurant in Alta so we drove all the way up the canyon to realize that with it being between the resort seasons that everything was closed. So we ended up at Snowbird’s Steak Pit. It was beautiful! We ended up sitting outside and watching the sun set. It got a little chilly by the time the sun set, but I still enjoyed the view as well as the gorgeous flowers.

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Rainbows

I love rainbows so beautiful and full of hope. during September it was raining a lot and I got pictures of a couple of rainbows. One was while Jake and I were diving home. If you look closely you can see a double rainbow in the picture.

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This rainbow was so vivid and at one point a full rainbow. Although it was hard to get the full rainbow in the picture.

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Thursday, December 29, 2011

St George

When Jake got home in September it happened to be Labor Day so Jason, Rashelle, Jake and I decided to go to St George, just us four, no kids. It was  a lot of fun. We mostly just hung out. I think we went out to eat together one night. Another night we went to Mesquite Jason and Rashelle left earlier than Jake and I. The day after they left we got a massage. It was fun. One night I wanted to get some pictures of dusk looking over the city from Dixie Rock.

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Camping

This is terrible I really should have done this long before now. I just had a crappy way to post and nothing was working. Know that I’ve got my Windows live writer it’s so much easier to post. Anyway the next few posts may not be in the right order. However, they are all things that happened in August, September and October.

I think this happened in August while Jake was in Alaska. Although that would make my August very busy because I know Oregon and New York were in August. Anyway, one weekend my parents decided to go camping up little cottonwood canyon. I ended up planning on meeting everyone up there. Well my parents have impeccable timing. They always seem to go either when it rains or we hit record colds for the summer. Anyway this trip happened to be the rain. 

Well on the way up I got a call from my mom saying they had shut down the road up the canyon because of an accident. Mom, Shelly, her kids and I waited at McDonald’s on 90th and 20th east to kill the time. Dad and Andrea were stuck up in the canyon. Anyway, Rashelle really didn’t want to eat at McDonald’s so we didn’t eat anything. Well we ended up deciding to eat at Buca de’beppo’s. As we waiting for a seat and got seated they opened the canyon and Dad and Andrea were able to come down and met us. It was fun to have dinner. Afterwards we went up the canyon and stayed the night. It ended up just me, mom, dad and Andrea that stayed the night. I didn’t get many pictures, but I was able to get some of the rain on the leaves and the drive down. I must say that I love Little Cottonwood Canyon it is so beautiful and I have so many memories from growing up going to Snowbird.

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This last on is one of my favorite scenes driving down little cottonwood. 1 reason is that you can also see the seven sisters (which if you include my mom) is our family.

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Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Nostalgia

So right after Oregon, literally Jake and I flew out of Oregon,  he went back to work and I went to New York. I had a two week business trip in Schenectady, which is upstate too far to visit the city. However, I enjoyed the trip. I went with a couple of co-workers that made it fun.

Anyway the nostalgia part is that I flew through the Detroit airport. Which reminded me of the many times I had been in that airport during my days working with Chrysler.  I flew in and out of that airport so many times. As I was wondering the airport (I had like a 4 hour layover) I kept saying to myself. “Oh I remember that place, I ate there with so and so” and “That’s a good place.” To be honest I actually like the airport it’s clean, it has a lot of things to do while your there. Plus to get from Concourse A to B you have to go through this under ground tunnel that has a color changing wall, the colors change to music. Then I had to get a picture of the jumping fountain in the main area (right after security.)

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Well I was trying to load the video of the tunnel, but I couldn’t get it to work. I had to link my google account to a youtube account which I don’t have so yeah, I just decided to not post it. Sorry.

Finally Finishing Oregon

So I think it’s finally time to finish posting about Oregon. I know I haven’t blogged in a very long time, but be prepared for a ton of posts. I pretty much need to sum up the end of the year (from August to now) in three days. I would like to get all my 2011 posts done before new year. I guess we’ll see.

So Oregon is where I left off. Since it’s been awhile I don’t really remember the timeline so well (I know that’s why you’re supposed to write sooner) Anyway I’ll just give a highlight of the rest of the trip and put up some of my favorite pictures that I didn’t add.

The second day of Oregon we went to some tide pools which I have to say was my favorite thing. It was awesome to see some of the ocean plant and animal life where you didn’t have to scup dive. There were tons of starfish which were huge. After the tide pools we went to a lighthouse and took a quick tour. It would be interesting to be a worker of a light house way back when they were manually operated. The workers had to have been very strong. They pretty much had to carry heavy buckets of oil up and down a ton of stairs a few times a day.

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As you can tell this lighthouse isn’t very big, but it still would be hard to do the up and down stairs all day. We had to take a 1 mile hike to get to the lighthouse and Jake and I decided to stop in the shade to get a picture. I’m just being silly. Finally my wonderful sister Amanda and her cute little chunker Matt. Although I love the picture because you can see the beautiful Oregon coast in the picture.

After that we pretty much relaxed at the house, played games, hung out and talked. The first day at the beach caused sand to get into my camera and wouldn’t work so I didn’t get anymore pictures after the day at the tide pools.

I love hanging out with my family and enjoyed this trip a lot. .

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

New Computer

So I know it has been way too long since I blogged last. I was having troubles blogging on my computer and Jake’s computer was never around for me to use. However, I know have a new personal computer. I am supper excited to use it and have something that I can keep without feeling like I rely and am owned by my company. It will take a while to get this computer to what I like. Putting my pictures and music on this one, but I can’t wait until it’s done.