It Has Been a Week!

Today has been a wonderful day. I had the potential to not be so, however. Utah Power had a scheduled power outage for the entire city this morning starting at 6am and going until as late as 9am. Actually it was quite humorous. I woke up and the clock said 6:05am and I thought YEA! It is already done! Just then the power went off. I got to shower in the early morning light as well as shave. I am sure that didn't turn out so well. But, I guess since I don't have to look at it, it doesn't really matter to me. Anyways...

I guess I can catch you up on the last few days of my life!

Wednesday:

I headed over to Huntington with Melinda Durrant to meet with our group from class. We arrived at 9:30am and worked until class time (4:00pm). we even worked for a few minutes after class. We were working on getting out 6-8 page SINGLE SPACE GROUP PAPER completed as well as the power point presentation that needed to be ready. We got a great start on it! Two of the group members live there so they were very kind and generous to provide snacks and meals for us while we worked.

Thursday:

We reconvened the following morning at 8am and worked until 7pm. Even after all that time, we still only had 4 pages of our paper and most of the power point. It was a little discouraging on how long it was taking to try and make this assignment fit the teacher requirements. We had a great time as a group, and it was nice to work with people face-to-face and not just in "TV LAND" (as the on-site group likes to call us). Melinda and I headed home knowing that we would need to meet and finish off the paper. Which wasn't a big deal We had the basics all sketched out. We went to Wal-Mart (sadly- but required), and then came home. It was nice to see my wife and kiddos even though it had only been one night. However, I do have to say that I enjoyed visiting with my sister (who was nice enough to feed me and let me sleep on her floor Wednesday night...okay air matress for the night). We stayed up fairly late, but I was SO tired from all the early days and late nights that I didn't last long.

Friday:

Ms. Durrant and I met at the school at 8:30am to get the lab ready for the summer school program we created and have been running this summer. After that was over (it runs for two hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but since we were gone on Thursday, we moved it to Friday) I headed to Grand Junction with my parents and my 5-year old. We were on a Chest Freezer Mission. It was wonderful to spend the day with my little one. He often feels left out and neglected, so getting to spend almost a whole day with him was AWESOME! He had a lot of fun and was spoiled by grandma and grandpa (of course- although so was I. They got me some new shoes and BOY did I need them- Thanks mom and dad). While we were picking up "stuff" we also got Ms. D a freezer. I was glad to help her out. she has been wanting one, but had no way to get it to her house. Anyways, I also bought MORE PAVERS (I know right??!!?! With the amount of cement in our backyard in the form of pavers we could have just covered the whole yard! lol. But, we finished out a corner of the patio by the clothes line. I don't dare say it is done, as I am sure that we will add to it. But it is done "for now". After getting our new freezer setup and cooling, we headed over to our friends house. He and his family were cooking Korean food for us. The kids had hotdogs and hamburgers. I got to try lots of new things- and I liked them all. The fresh kim-chee about caught my mouth on FIRE! I tried dried seaweed (which tasted really good and earthy), uncured bacon (which tastes like porkchops in bacon form) on a lettuce roll with rice and some kind of red paste, and some wonderful rice-cake soup. I am sure all of those are titled wrong, but I did my best. Thanks Keith- the food was GREAT! After spending sometime visiting, we headed home. Since my wife has developed a painting bug, she had painted our piano room while I was gone to work on my paper. We came home from dinner and set to work putting the room back together. It turned out wonderful. It is elephant grey (although to me it looks purple in the lamp light- lol). It was about 12:00am when we finished. We then set to work moving all our frozen food around. We discovered that we had quite a bit of food that was VERY OLD! I was even able to hammer off the ice build up on our smaller deep freeze we already had. We are very excited to have THREE, yes 3, deep freezers. With that done, we tucked up our oldest son who had been helping us and went to bed.

Saturday:

Phew. Are you as tired as I am yet? Just typing all this is making me exhausted. I knew that I had A LOT to do before Melinda came at 2pm to finish the paper. I was able to wake up and work on many little projects (mounting the magazine rack to the wall, moving the power outlet box (not as big a project as you are thinking- just a box that plugs into an extension cord, watered the lawn, watered the garden, finished the patio corner, and added a new layer of sand grout to the walkway we added earlier this year. Unfortunately, it was 2pm and I still hadn't read anything for class. Oh well. Ms. D showed up and we set to work on our group paper while my wife worked on her Ward Newsletter. Thankfully Melinda is very gifted in the word department. She took what we had and added while I looked up quotations, citations, and internet resources to help beef up our paper. Around 11pm we finally finished. So, if my math is correct this silly paper took us: 28 hours. TWENTY-EIGHT HOURS! OH MY WORD (actually LOTS OF THEM- Over 1500 of them, I believe. After Ms. D headed home, my wife and I went to the church so we could copy the Sunday program (which she also creates weekly) and the monthly newsletter. We finally crashed around 1am.

Sunday:

I made it to all my meetings on time for once and had a good day at church. I was able to get A LOT done with updating the ward calling list and getting the new rolls printed for each auxiliary.

After church I took my oldest son and we delivered the ward's monthly newsletter (actually, my wife is the one who creates those every month- go babe!) to the five families that I am responsible to visit. It was nice to stop by, deliver the newsletter, and chat for a minute or two. I only had to leave ONE letter in the door.

From there I came home and had a wonderful dinner with my little herd. My wife got this amazing recipe for Baked Potato Chowder! Can you say YYYYYYUUUUUMMMMYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!

And this is coming from someone who DOES NOT like baked potatoes AT ALL!

After dinner we all settled in to our afternoon activities. What did I do (you may be thinking). Well, I tried REALLY hard to read all the articles that are due for tomorrow's class- but I found that I would wake up every ten minutes when my arm slipped on the arm rest- lol. So that didn't work out so well. I finally had my daughter come and play with her littlest pet shops on the floor by me so I would stay awake, and I got my son to come and play POGO by me so I would stay awake even more. In the end I ended up watching my daughter and helping my son. So, I got to spend time with my kids and STILL have to read (which at this point may just be considered a complete loss!- Darn it! lol)

I finally decided I needed out of the house so we loaded up the trooper and headed out to visit my parents. Well, that didn't go so great because they were out of town picking up their new 24-foot party boat (or something like that :) ) So, instead, we went for a drive. We went out Long street for a while (yes, that really is the name of the street, and YES it really is a LONG street!) Then we headed out to the south of town towards the old airport. We tried to drive up "G" hill but the car stalled and we ended up backing down. My poor little trooper just didn't have the guts to make it up the steep road. The kids were freaking out. I was a little freaked out at first, but it all worked out. Nothing ventured, nothing gained! From there we took side roads and ended up somewhere in the middle of nowhere. No really, I mean in the middle of now where- like the road kept going, but had to end. The kids wanted to keep going, but I decided that it was time to head back to town. We came back into town and tried my parents again. I had called my mom and she said that they were within an hour. It had been 40 minutes and we figured we would just wait for them. Well... after 40 more minutes, and still no grandma and grandpa, we headed home. Of course, as we were piling out of our car they turned the corner and headed up the road to their house. The kids were bummed. That's okay. We will go tomorrow or Tuesday to see them and the new "toy".

That brings us to this point. I just enjoyed a simple meal and plan to finish this up. (I may read my articles, but most likely I will read my 2009 blog book and catch up on all the TIME magazines and catalogs I have been wanting to look at). I will be so grateful for the next two weeks to come and go. Then my summer classes will be over and summer can REALLY begin! :)

Have a great night!

Later...