The 45th state and all its quirks

While Utah officially became a state on January 4th, 1896, I have a feeling not many Utahns know that. See, today is when everyone gets together and celebrates Utah. A celebration bigger than the 4th of July seems to be tradition, with the grandest firework displays and amazingly enough, if you happen to work for a Utah based company (which I don't), you most likely would get a paid holiday today. That's right, you get a day off in celebration of July 24th, Pioneer Days.
Quoted from my work intranet...

1847- Mormons Settle Salt Lake Valley
After 17 months and many miles of travel, Brigham Young leads 148 Mormon pioneers into Utahs Valley of the Great Salt Lake. Gazing over the parched earth of the remote location, Young declared, "This is the place," and the pioneers began preparations for the thousands of Mormon migrants who would follow. Seeking religious and political freedom, the Mormons began planning their great migration from the east after the murder of Joseph Smith, the Christian sects founder and first leader


Yesterday, we had to explain to a guy in my office who recently moved from California that this was no joke. People here really do celebrate the day the Mormon's settled Utah, and that no, it was not when we became a state, and yes, people really did get it paid off like any other holiday. He just shook his head and laughed. Probably wondering why he moved here...

When one phone isn't enough...

I thought I'd seen it all when commuting between work, school and home... that is until today. I kid you not when I say that in the process of going from I-215 onto I-15, I saw a lady talking on the phone, while in her other hand sat another phone that she was apparently texting with. Now I'm all for multi-tasking, but seriously, put down the phones. You know that Utah needs laws much like California to prevent people from talking or texting on their phones when driving, especially when people start attempting to do all of it at once. I'm just relieved that she went the opposite direction as me.

Another crazy weekend

This weekend was filled again to the peak with tasks, chores and obligations that needed to be fullfilled. On top of feeling under the weather the entire weekend, there was no getting out of any of it. First, the weekend started off with needing new tires (ok, so it was thursday but who's keeping score?). Fun stuff, I tell ya. Nothing like dropping a load of money off at the local tire store, but at least it was nothing like Tobi's experiance. Several hours later, after having to hop on the back of D's motorcycle so we could go get the subi, taking D back to work and then going home, D drove the car home which looked all nice and pretty with the new wheels. Definitely beat the balding tires!

Friday came around, which is when I started feeling sick. Of course, as luck would have it, I had 3 appointments that day. The drywallers came and repaired the last nail pop (now I have to wait for the painters to paint the spots), and the door guy came to fix the garage and back door so we no longer see daylight. The funny thing is, in this instance, it meant flipping the seals since the painters had originally installed them wrong. He said they do it on every house. WTF? You would think they would learn after a few homes of doing it wrong. Guess they figure no one will catch it.

The last visitor of the day was the fridge guy. I haven't wrote about this yet, but the fridge broke 2 weeks ago. In my handy ways, I thought I had fixed it but evidently I'm not skilled at fixing something that needs new parts. Doh! 2 weeks and $400 later, the fridge now has a new heating kit and we are able to use it once again. I'm just relieved we had a small fridge that we were able to use for those 2 weeks when the part got misshipped to vegas. And for those wondering... $400 was a lot, but the repair man said the fridge is a really good one and should last for at least another 10 years. Besides, $400 is much cheaper than a new fridge. Personally, I'm trying to figure out what is due to break next. Since moving into our house; The washer, fridge and TV have all broke. 2 of the three have had to be replaced and only one was fixable. Go figure. Did I mention it hasn't even been a year since we moved in? ugh! Oh well, such is life, right?

Moving on...

Sat. was my employee appreciation party. This year, they decided to make it a camping trip at one of the many canyons we have here. For those familar, we were about a mile from donut falls (pictured to the right). We played horseshoes (which I evidently really, really suck at... this was discovered after a co-worker and I played about 20 rounds and we were at 1-1. We dropped the competition at that point and gave up), ate and drank and generally had a good time. D and I decided not to camp out, particularly since I still wasn't feeling well, but had a great time still. After all, with the alcohol flowing freely, and food a plenty, how could you not have a good time? Yes, my company is a rarity in Utah. Oh, and of course there was their annual giveaway. They pick up a ton of prizes and raffle them off each year. Last year we won 2 camping chairs (and in bingo we won a frisbee golf set, a jump drive and golf balls), and this year we won a tent. I'm guessing next year we'll win sleeping bags or something to complete the assemble. Either way, it was a lot of fun. My company knows how to throw great parties, that's for sure. Even the kids had fun painting their faces (and their parents in some cases!) and in general, playing in the dirt! When we got home that night, we watched Vantage Point which was surprisingly good. We watched "The Other Bolyn Girl" the night before which I enjoyed as well, although I'm not so sure that D did.

Sunday roled around which meant some QT with homework which was plentiful as I'm going into the last week before finals, and since there is a Utah holiday this week, one of the classes only meets 2 more times before our final leaving a lot of work to be done. We took a break for lunch and then ran to my parents house after a phone call from my mom asking that I come fix her hair. She had shoulder surgery last week and thought for some unknown reason that she could use a curling iron with only one hand. By the time we got back, I had enough time to wrap up some more homework before we had to go to our monthly family birthday party. This is one of the biggest months for birthday on D's side of the family, with 9 birthdays in all (December ties with July but July has more kids). Since we have a budget for each kid that was established by D's family years ago, I always look for the biggest bang for my buck. This year I did a lot of my shopping on the disney store online, so for the 3 - 3 year olds, I was able to get a little baseball set with glove, bat and ball, all in the cars theme. Very cute. I was a little nervous about one our nephews getting the gift since he only has use of half of his body due to brain surgery he had when he was 1. Turned out we were just fine and he was extremely excited about the set so that he could play with his big brothers. He's really good at using the bat too which made it that much more fun. It turned out though that I probably should've bought more of the baseball sets than I had. I thought only the little ones would like it but all the kids up to about 7 wanted to play with the sets! Who would've guessed? After the party, we went home, took a walk around the lake and went home to eat a late dinner before getting ready for the week. It was another busy weekend, but we got a lot accomplished. I'm sure next weekend will be even better since D has thursday off to help around the house (remember that Utah holiday? He gets it paid off... I don't). Then next week is my last week of summer school. Woo-hoo! Of course next weekend will be busy as well. I don't think we'll have a calm weekend again until the weather starts getting cooler. At least we're having fun in the process!

Vacation booked

Yup, that's right, our vacation plans for next summer is officially booked. So now all we have to do is wait until after I graduate until we leave for the beautiful beaches of Hawaii. Yup, we finally settled on a trip. Since we didn't want to have to get a passport, we settled for staying in the states. Then, since I haven't been to Hawaii in years, we decided to check into there. We weren't going to book anything until later this year, however I had reserved some seats (they let you hold them for 24 hours for you to decide) and within an hour of putting them on hold, the price for the flights jumped $200 a person. Ouch! Needless to say, we weren't willing to risk having to pay that much more, or take a much longer trip to get home. After all, who wants to go several states to the east just to fly back west? Not to mention, no fun taking red eye flights! Since we went ahead and booked the flight, we booked our hotel as well. Luckily we get friends and family rates for a particular hotel chain so we knocked over half the price off and are getting a 1 bedroom villa with an ocean view for a great deal. I'm excited to go back and see everything that I forgot about and see things I didn't see the last time. Now time is just going to feel like it's going by so slow. At least now I have two things to look forward to next summer.... graduation and our trip! Yea!

How people find me here...

Since I put the feed log on here, I've been watching to see how people find me. What I found out was quite funny. It turns out that most of my visitors find me through a post I wrote about baby carrots. The most random post, and yet it is the one post that I get the most visitors from. I don't know if that is just sad or hilarious!

My weekend

Today I decided to present to you all, pictures of my weekend! Yea! Ok, so they aren't all pictures that I took, but hey, you get something to look at! So with out further adu...

Friday

Friday night my nephews went home after a 2 week visit with my

parents. It was a blast having them here and I already miss them. I
don't see them nearly enough so having that long to just do whatever with them, was fun. After all, we got to play the Wii, went to a car show, went to the movies twice, took them out on a row boat, and much much more. I can't wait till they are up again. But of course, since they had a late flight, it was the perfect oppurtunity to see one last movie with them. We ended up going to see Journey to the Center of the Earth, which I wasn't too sure about but I thought it was a cute movie. Between that and seeing Walle (that one was free), I'm ready for an adult movie. Which is perfect timing for The Dark Knight, although we probably won't see it for a couple of weeks. Once the boys went home, we went to our communities brand new pool for the adult swim time. Yup, that's right, my wonderful community has established times to allow for adults only, no kids. And let me tell you, it is so nice swimming without screaming kids!

Saturday

Sat. was a busy, busy day.

We began our day by picking up breakfast (a story for another post), and I began some homework. Then, my husband suggested we go shopping since I've been in desperate need of summer clothes (something I've never seemed to have much of). We got my wardrobe back to where it should be so that I have nice cool summer clothes that are work appropriate, as well as two dresses that I've been in need of as well since I didn't have church appropriate clothing (which comes to play on sunday). We went home, at lunch, changed and ran off to see the Salt Lake City Bees play Sacramento. That was a lot of fun since we had tickets for my company's suite which meant free food and drinks for the night. I think I gained 5 lbs from just that night since we were all stuffed with how much food there was! It was nice hanging out with some coworkers outside of work as well. Especially one guy and his family since I get along well with his wife and D played football with him when they were in high school. A few others showed up as well but there weren't many of us since the suite can only hold 16 people comfortably. It was a great night though and we're excited for this sat. which is the company party (bar-b-q, camping and breakfast... although D and I won't be camping since we have obligations for sunday).

And finally...

Sunday

Sunday we woke up late since we had a late night from the game, and immediately had to get ready to go to church. The baby to the right, our beautiful niece, was blessed. She is number 41 of our nieces and nephews and is the sweetest baby. Hard to believe that we're over the 40 mark with nieces and nephews, but we're nearly to 43 (SIL and niece are pregnant). Anyways, we stopped at the store to pick up some cookies (once again, related to the breakfast story) and off we went. After church they had a small party so we ate and then took off for home. On the way, we decided to stop by the model homes by our house to check them out since some are open on sundays, and then headed home since one of D's sisters wanted to come over and talk since she was stressing about closing on her new home (worried that they got in over their heads), and was having some relationship problems. After it looked like she was feeling better, we went for a swim again and then off to home to do homework. I took my final so one class is completed, too. So now only 3 classes to go! Whoo-hoo!

Anyways, that was pretty much our weekend. It doesn't seem like we did a ton, but we kept really busy and on the run the entire time. I have a feeling the rest of the weekend is going to be like that too!

As promised.... pictures from Cache Valley

As promised, here are the photos that Tiffani over at Immortal Motorsports sent me last night. The pictures are great! The first two are of my dad's truck (the second from the awards ceremony), and the last picture is of next years giveaway car (pre-modifications). That's the car D is hoping to win!