A few random things

(I haven't taken near as many pictures as I'd thought! Anyway...)

Uncle Freddie came to visit again. I sure do enjoy seeing him. I wish Aunt Moira could've come too but she's still a working gal.

My boys are quite enamored with their cousin's ROTC uniform. John is now informing me he wants to join the Army or the Marines or be a Navy Seal. I'm selfishly hoping he grows out of that.

My sis and her hubby have done a little redecorating and I especially love how they displayed his guitar collection on the wall. And yes, he does play them. :)

The pack meeting:

It's nearly impossible to keep those shirts tucked in. Almost as bad as trying to keep shoes on their feet.



The Spring Sing:

John is in the front row, middle.


Are you noticing a trend with the shirts? You can't tell in Ben's picture below, but I assure you. His shirt is untucked too...

Ben's little face is right, smack dab in the middle.



Christopher, shockingly, was being a little goof ball and messing around instead of smiling for his mother. Fortunately, my camera went off during the split second that made him look like he was smiling.

"My Principal's a Pirate!"

Alright, that's all for now. There will be more coming...

Catching Up

I'm back! Well, kinda. I make no promises about the frequency of posts from here on out. I still want to keep a record of certain things but life is a little different now. A bit busy. (By "bit" I mean "a lot".) I think things will settle down eventually though. In the meantime, I am fully enjoying nights like tonight.

We got home shortly after 3 pm.

The kids have their homework done and have been playing outside.

I have no appointments, no meetings, no pressing matters, no nothing.

Well, not nothing exactly. There's plenty I could be doing. Plenty. But nothing that has to be done right this second. Or even tonight. Oh, it's a luxury. And I've been enjoying it. It's been nice to have a night that just feels normal.

So, I'm going to see if I can get some personal blogging done. I've managed to kinda, sorta, somewhat keep up with the America Jane posting. But this little CookZoo blog is so neglected I was worried I'd forget my password to sign on.

Rather than one big post, I'll do a few shorter ones. They may be nothing but pictures and perhaps a few captions, but they'll be here. I'll schedule them out too so I don't bombard you all at once.

Lastly, I just want to thank everyone who's been so, so, so supportive over the past few months. I hope you know what a difference it has made. We've been very blessed. The Lord is truly watching out for us.

Love to you all,

Donna

The Aye's Have It

The blog will stay public. I'm actually glad about that. I've been falling behind on the private blogs I follow because I don't have them in my reader.

Anyway, I know things have been quiet here for awhile. As most of you know, there are some pretty big changes happening in our family right now. I'll get back to some normal blog posts when I can.

Hugs to you all.

Very Informative Letter

Yesterday I got a letter from the Census department. It read, in part:

"Dear Resident,

About one week from now, you will receive a 2010 Census form in the mail. When you receive your form, please fill it out and mail it in promptly." Etc etc.

Only the government would send me a letter to notify me that they'll be sending me a letter.

Random Stuff

Random Item #1

This is Ben checking himself out after getting his eyes dilated.

He wasn't super crazy about the glasses he had to wear to protect his eyes from the sun.

This kid's eyes are (in a word) terrible. His prescription is strong even for an adult. John will be getting glasses soon too. Apparently no one wanted to inherit their mother's perfect vision. I suppose Chris could end up having my good eyesight but I'm not holding my breath.

Random Item #2

Brian and I attended the stake's Marriage Relations Class the last couple of months. I hear there's a stigma attached to these classes, that it's only for folks with marriage problems but that's not true. It's a great class for anyone to take. Good stuff.

Anyway, the last class is held at the Pierson's home where they feed us a delicious steak dinner. Very yummy. Poor Brian had to miss the class because he was short-staffed at work and had to dispatch (for Pete's sake), but I decided to go without him anyway. I'm glad I did. The food was excellent and the last lesson was helpful.

Plus, they have this cool slide in their house. It's for the grandkids and goes down to the basement. It's a tight spiral all the way down. You know I had to try it out!

Now that was fun!

Random Item #3

I'm learning there's a lot to launching a website. I'm getting all kinds of bugs worked out. First, it took awhile to get the site approved through Norton Safe Search. That's the thing that puts a little green check mark next to your site when listed on a Google search. The technicalities of getting that done was a bit of a pain, but it's all taken care of now.

Then I used a free credit I had for an SSL certificate, not really realizing that I do NOT want that on my website, because first of all, I don't need it and second of all, when that certificate expires in a year people browsing to my site will get a warning saying my certificate has expired. Well, I don't want that, so I called and cancelled it. I figure, better to take care of it now while I'm getting pretty much no traffic instead of having that kind of glitch after I've been promoting the site for awhile.

Well, unfortunately my Internet browser's cookies and history was remembering the address for the secure site, so when I tried to pull up my site it wouldn't work.

Now, that's not something I wanted to see.

I called GoDaddy (I've been on the phone with them A LOT the past week) and they told me I had to clear my cookies and history. So that's what I did. And now I can see my site again. Thank goodness for that!

Meanwhile, I discover that if you type "personal progress honor bee" into Google, I'm now on page one of the results.

Victory!

But the link wasn't working.

Not good.

One phone call later and I learn what the problem was. I'd changed the name of the file for that particular page of the site, which Google doesn't like. So I changed it back and now the link works.

WHEW!!!

So glad I decided to go live with this site before it was all the way done, so I could get all these bugs worked out BEFORE I started promoting it to death.

Meanwhile, I've had zero problems with the America Jane Speaks blog, so that's my favorite site. Nice and easy. Ahhhhh!!!!!

Speaking of which, I thought I'd spread the word about a contest I just blogged about. If you know anyone who has a teenaged daughter, Jo-Ann has this contest for girls that sew their own prom dress. There are several prizes, but the grand prize is $50,000 for college and a $1000 Jo-Ann gift card. How cool is that???

Looky What I Did...

Holy cow, has it really been a month since I last posted? If so, that means it's been a month since I've checked anyone else's blog too, which means I'm up for a few hours of catching up. Hmmm.

For the record, that picture is not what I did. I don't have a picture to go with this post, so I decided to torture myself with a picture of what I wish I could have for lunch. Chimichangas. Mi Amigos. Ah heaven.

I'm really hungry.

Anyway, here's a brief update on a few things that are new with me.

For those of you who don't know, I'm working during the days now. Kind of. I work for a market research firm a couple of days a week, and only during school hours. I don't know how they're going to feel about this arrangement once summer vacation starts, but they knew what they were getting into going in. :) Anyway, I like the work and everyone is really nice, which always helps.

I'm also freelancing a bit. (Have I mentioned this already?) I'm writing these little web content articles for DemandStudios.com They set the titles, I write the articles, and then they pay me money. It's not the most literary work I've ever done (*cough*) and I get tired of their titles sometimes (*shrug*) but some of the work has been really fun and I like getting paid without even having to leave my house. I'm really grateful for it.

But here's the exciting news. Are you ready? Are you???

(Oh man, does anyone think I'm pregnant? That just occurred to me.)

No, I didn't create a baby, I created a website!! And a blog to go with it. It took me quite a long time to get this baby (no pun intended) going and I'm not even halfway done with everything I plan to do. But the first part is up and ready for hits (hint hint).

You wanna check it out right? Right???

I thought so. :)

Go HERE!!!

Viva Las Vegas

We made another trip up to Vegas last month and since Brian most likely landed this contract for his company he may be going up every couple of months to check on things. I'll continue to tag along. Now that we've found a corner of Vegas we really like (mainly because we found a FABULOUS little Italian restaurant and plenty more enticing restaurants nearby we're anxious to try) I'm more excited about possible upcoming trips.

Here's highlights from our latest quickie trip:

The foot belongs to "Dumbledore." This guy is standing outside a really fun metaphysical shop in the same plaza as our new favorite Italian restaurant.

Poor Dumbledore lost his hand. Hunting horcruxes, no doubt.

But not to worry. He has a friend nearby to cheer him up.


We decided to stop and see the dam on our way home. We pulled over at the Lake Mead lookout, which is on the Nevada side just before you get to the dam.

Look how low the water level is:

This is an information board there which has an illustration of the lake as it should be:

Big difference. If you look to the left a bit, you can see where the boats dock. I drew a red line to show where the water line used to be:



While we were there a ranger was handing out goodie bags and showing people this coyote pelt:

It's not legal to hunt them, but they found this guy dead somewhere and saved his pelt. He's really soft. In fact, on our way home we saw a dead coyote on the side of the road and I was tempted to turn around and bring him home. Do you think we would've gotten in trouble for that?

This is an old train tunnel that was in use when the dam was being built:

Okay, on to the dam. This is a view of the back side. (See the new bridge they're building in the background?)

I remember coming here when I was a kid. The water used to go all the way up to the rim of the dam. You couldn't even see the turbines (are they called turbines?) because they were all under water.

From where I was standing when I took that picture, if I turn to the right a bit, this is what was across from me:

You can see where the water line used to be by looking at the color of the rock.



This is a close up of the same shot. They had to make a little road to get down to the water, then as the water continued to drop, they built stairs from the ramp to the boat. Crazy. I just could not get over how low the water was.

Backing up from that view is this spillway. This also used to be completely submerged and I thought it was really interesting to see.

Looking to the right. You can see how those silver plates can swivel up and down to control the flow of water into the spillway.

Looking to the left.

Left some more.

Standing on that bridge and looking straight down into that hole, it looks like this:



Creepy. :)

That hole leads down to the river. If I were in a movie, there's be some exciting chase scene where I end up sliding down that tunnel like a ride at Disneyland and land in the water on the other side, no worse for the wear, and my enemies cursing at my ingenious escape. Heh heh.

This was posted all along the dam on both sides. It's for the morons who can't figure that out for themselves.

Moving right along. On top of those turbines, if that's what they're called, are these little towers. One has a clock for each time zone.

This came in handy on our first trip when we had completely forgotten about the time zone change. Since Brian had a meeting to get to, that was good information to have.


Looking over the edge:

It was dizzying...

An absolute marvel:

This cool monument is on the Nevada side:

It reads, "They died to make the desert bloom."






At the base of the monument:

I only understood about half of this. There were "helpful explanations" like this all over the place. After this one I didn't even bother reading them, but I enjoyed looking at the astronomical designs anyway.

To the right of the monument:

That's me baby. Watch that stinger.

And that was our Vegas trip.


What should we do next time?

P.S. In case this long post isn't enough for you, check this out. I SO want to do this! It's almost as high on my wish list as Italy. Almost.

Ben's First Pinewood Derby

These pinewood derbys are so fun. I love looking at the different cars:

Look at that cute happy face one. Actually, I think it's Pikachu. :)

This cheese car was my favorite, and it ended up winning first place.



Here's Ben's car:

A great big thank you goes to Brother Goff for helping Ben with his car. There's no way it would've look this good if we'd done it here at home.

I love watching the boys gather in the pits as the excitement mounts. Here's Ben in the pits, waiting his turn.

I love watching the races. Ben getting ready to race:

I love the little award ceremony they have at the end. Everyone gets a certificate and a prize, and then they award prizes to the three fastest cars as well. Here's Ben getting an award for Most Futuristic Car. :)

It's been fun watching Ben take part in the Scout program. I'm grateful for all the good experiences and memories that program gives to my kids. :)