Busy week

This is the first week of summer vacation, though it seems like we are more busy than we were during school. Lori has been driving all over the valley. The kids are enrolled in swimming lessons, still doing gymnastics, and Sierra just started piano lessons this week. She likes playing the piano, but not the drudgery of practice, so I know she is definitely my daughter. The teacher (Lori's cousin Audrey) gave Sierra an assignment for practice, which pretty much constitutes the first 3 pages of her work book. But I think Sierra is getting bored with playing the same thing over and over again, because she keeps wanting to move on beyond those pages. She's getting better at playing the assigned passages, but I hope, for her sanity and mine, that Audrey will let her move on next week.


The other exciting news (aside from all that and buying a piano too) is that Sierra began riding her bike without training wheels this week. She had been begging to get them off her bike, ever since her friend Gage had his removed last week. So, Monday evening, I ran out of excuses (I really wasn't looking forward to chasing her bike up and down the street while holding the seat to keep it steady), and removed the training wheels. The first pass up and down the street, she did pretty good, though she kept leaning to one side. She denied she was doing it until I let go of the seat briefly to prove my point. After the second pass though, she had it down! All in all, I think it took about 10 minutes for her to be able to ride without the training wheels, though it took a few practice turns for her to be able to make a turn without putting a foot down to save herself a fall. She's been zipping all over the neighborhood since. We've gone on a few small rides together, and perhaps this weekend, we'll go down to the parks along the river and ride for a bit. She's a little nervous about that, because of all the people that walk/ride along the bike path, but I think with a little more practice, she can handle it.

Camping 'n stuff

My friend Erin over at flarinerin has been giving me a hard time about posting, so that's a clear sign that it's time.

It's been a busy few weeks. Over the Memorial Day weekend, we went camping with our church congregation. Lori and I were not all that thrilled about going when the day came, but the kids were already pumped about going camping, so away we went. Our church maintains a campground in the Cascades near White Pass. It's a beautiful area set on a small reservoir. Once we got there, we had a great time. The kids were instantly interested in going boating, but since we had gotten to the campsite so late, we promised them an outing Saturday morning. There were skits and dutch oven cooking that night. The kids enjoyed the campfire most of all though. Sierra was a marshmallow roasting machine. I think she was more interested in making smores than eating them. The other attraction was throwing pine cones from the huge pile of them near each fire pit. Eventually, we did get them to settle down and go to sleep. The next morning, the kids were impatient to get on the lake. Unfortunately, the boats were locked up so we waited until after breakfast (also provided by the church). When we finished, the boats were still locked, so Lori hunted down the caretaker for the camp and got him to come unlock them. There was one row boat, and 5 canoes. We never really considered the canoes, there was no way that we would be able to keep the kids from standing up in the boat, and we really had no desire to end up swimming. We rowed around the lake for some 10 - 15 minutes, dodging trees and fishermen. But eventually we had to take the boat back. Hailey could have spent the entire day in that boat, and she protested at the top of her lungs! Once back on land, we cleaned up camp, and returned home. Later that afternoon, we headed over to Evans house to celebrate the birthday of Daniel, Evan's stepson.

Sunday was pretty crazy. Lori and the girls went to church with Evan and his family, while I rehersed our church choir and conducted then during church. I then ran over to Evan's church to be there as Daniel received the priesthood, and then ran back to church to substitute leading the music in primary in my church. I had a few other things planned that night, but was able to get out of them so that we could spend the rest of the evening with Evan's family.

Monday, I attended a memorial program for the veterans in the Tri-cities. The stake choir has sung at this event for the past 2 years, and it's something that I've really looked forward to. The program is always very touching, and it reminds me of my grandfather, who served in World War 2. This year, I took my camera and took several pictures during and after the program. I'll have to post them sometime.

This last weekend, our church engaged in a service project for several single older ladies. The week before, I had been asked to lead the activities for one of the projects, so Friday night, I and another member went to Home Depot and spent about $70 on flowers and other supplies. The plan was to do as much for these ladies as we could in just 2 hours. I don't know how the other projects went, but ours went great. A couple of young men spent most of the time planting flowers, and they did a great job. I replaced a couple of electrical outlets for her, and checked out the fire alarms. The toughest part of the whole project for me, was crawling into the crawl space below her trailer to pull a dryer hose from the dryer to the vent exit on the side. I hate spiders. I don't mind getting close enough to kill them, but the idea of crawling under that trailer, especially after opening the door and seeing all the spider webs. There was quite a bit of debris, and I just knew there were spiders in every corner. It took me a few minutes to work up my nerve to belly crawl to the hole in the floor where the dryer hose came through. Ten minutes later, I had the hose pulled through and hooked up, and you couldn't have gotten me back under there for anything. We finished by fixing a cabinet door, which required that I run home to get a drill to modify the mounting hardware. The project was a great success.

Wow, I didn't mean for this to be such a novel, but I guess when you post once a month, lots happens between posts. I have a few posts I'm working on that aren't travel logs. Hopefully I'll get one of those out here for your enjoyment.

Updates

Wow, Lots has happened since my last post! I guess things like that happen when you go a month between posts. So, I'll try to catch you up on what's going on.

A few weeks ago, we had a birthday party for Megan. She's 5 now, and we're gearing up for her to enter kindergarten. We invited a bunch of friends over for cake, icecream, and grilling. We were pretty excited, because this year, Megan opened her presents without any assistance. In the past, she has been a little afraid of what might be hiding under the wrapping paper, but this year, she really got what was going on, and tore into the presents. I think it was nice for the kids who came too, because she showed she was excited with each thing she got. It was a red letter day for me as well, as I didn't turn the burgers into charcoal this time. My grill skills are getting better!

Then, Lori and the girls left for 10 days to go down to Utah for spring break. We have a friend that is on the board of an autism school, as well as having a child with autism herself, so Lori went to observe in the classroom, and to get some pointers from our friend. I was a little nervous about her driving the whole 10 hours by herself, but aside from Megan having some stomach problems (and throwing up 3 times!) on the way down, the trip went well. They spent time with both sets of grandparents. For the first half of the trip, they stayed at Lori's parents house Orem. The cousins were out of school too, so they were able to spend a lot of time visiting and Grandpa Sampson took them all horseback riding. The girls also learned respect for kitties, as Lori's old (and cranky) cat, Tikka, lives at her parents house. That cat is psycho, not nearly as good natured as our cat. Showing how brave (or crazy) she is, Lori, her dad, and her sister Kiersten, took all the kids to Moab and went hiking up to the arches. I think this in particular had an effect on Sierra, as seeing the delicate arch (a mouthful for a 6 year old) was one of the highlights of the trip that she made sure to tell me about.

Later that week, Lori and the girls drove down to Delta and spent Easter weekend with my parents. The kids did easter egg hunts, and in what has become something of a family tradition, they went out to the sand dunes and rolled easter eggs down the dunes. I was a little worried about their visit to my parents house, because Megan had gotten attached to a kitten when we were there last summer. She dubbed the kitten "Sparkle," and talked constantly about seeing Sparkle on this trip. Unfortunately, Sparkle had died just a few weeks after we returned home from that summer trip. When one of her fish died recently, I took that opening to explain to her that Sparkle had died too, to which she responded matter of factly "No, Sparkle doesn't die." Well, when she got down to Delta, she seemed to take the fact that Sparkle wasn't around in stride, so I guess I was worried for no reason.

Lori's mother rode back up with her, for which I was grateful, and they returned earlier this week without incident. Her brother, Steven, who is preparing to take his first job after graduating, followed them up in his car, and they left today to return to Utah. Just in time to skip helping out with our huge project that we are working on this weekend.

Several months ago, the wooden terrace wall between our yard and our neighbors yard was pushed over by the roots of one of our trees. At the time, we sought a quote from a landscaper friend of ours. They sent out their estimator, and then never got back with us. Tired of waiting and asking for the quote, I've pretty much decided to do it myself. So, this weekend, I'm tearing out the remains of the old wall, and putting up a block wall, which will hopefully last longer than the last wall did. Included in that is killing the tree that did the damage in the first place. My neighbor has been kind enough to allow us to cut into a concrete pad that was poured next to the original wall to allow us enough room to put in the new wall. My original intent was to try to save the tree, but to do that, I would have had to cut nearly a foot into my neighbors pad. So, down comes the tree so that I can use the smaller blocks in the wall construction. I *hope* to be able to finish the entire thing tomorrow, but it is a big job. We're inviting a few friends over to help, with the bribe of steaks for dinner. I'll post pictures of the project once it's done.

This posts for you...

Well, after reading Erin's blog, I figured I must be one of the blogs she reads that posts infrequently. So, Erin, here's a post just for you!

I started re-reading the Getting Things Done book a couple of days ago. The book is structured so that he gives kind of an overview of the GTD philosophy, then he goes into the "coaching" phase where he walks you through the steps of implementing the GTD process. I remembered the introductory stuff being kind of dry and hard to chew through, but it seems more exciting to me this time around. Maybe it's because I'm more motivated this time around, I don't know. But I have high hopes that I can get myself more organized this time around.

Lori has had a rough day today. She attended an IEP (Individual Education Plan) meeting with the school district about Megan. While there, they reported the results of Megan's latest round of testing, and the results were pretty disappointing. On the one hand, the school district is finally taking us seriously, and have accepted the diagnosis of Autism. That's great, in that we have a good chance of finally getting the services that we have been insisting that she needs. However, it's also quite scary, because they are taking us seriously. It brings back some of the fears that we have had for her for a couple of years. Normally I would have gone to the meeting with Lori, but Megan was sick, so we couldn't send her over to a friends house while we both went to the meeting. Lori is the most familiar with Megan's needs, so I came home from work early, and Lori went to the meeting. The disappointing thing about the meeting, is that because Megan will be attending the new school being built behind our house, the district doesn't quite know exactly what services they will be able to provide. So, the actual details of the IEP are still up in the air. We did get an agreement that those services will be specified before the school year starts. In the mean time, we have a lot of work to do to get her ready for kindergarten.

On a lighter note, I have a funny story. A few months ago, I got an MP3 player. I picked one that could play movies and display photos too. I brought it in to work, where my friend Evan promptly began to fiddle with it. He discovered some image file that we thought had something to do with the splash screen that displayed when the player was turned on. He replaced the image with something he threw together in the GIMP. But, we were wrong, and it didn't seem to have any effect at all. Over the course of the next couple of months, I forgot that we had done anything to that image at all. Anyway, today I was upgrading software so that I could take advantage of playlist support on the player, and when I connected the device to windows media player, this dialog appeared. I nearly fell out of my chair!

Sad little things that make us human...

I found this movie while browsing a time management site I hit every once in a while when I come to the realization that I really need to get more organized. This feeling usually comes to me when I run up against some deadline or another for something that I should have been working on but for some reason avoided. This has been a pattern throughout my life. In college, I could get away with it by pulling an all-nighter the night before my deadline and somehow pull it all together just in time. I was young then, and going all night without sleep didn't seem to affect me as much as it does now. I'd delude myself with the excuse "I work best to a deadline," but I wasn't really working to a deadline. That implies that I'd actually done more than just thought about the fact that I needed to do something.

Anyway, the movie is hilarious and sad all at the same time. Sad, because I have to admit that I am a champion procrastinator. I've been working at it for a VERY long time, I'd say since I was 10. The things zeFrank talks about in the video strike very close to home. I mean, I feel the time crunch because I'm up against a deadline, so I go browse a time management blog? Huh? I've found myself looking at mono spaced fonts for use in my text editors... Oh, an text editors? How many does one really need?!? I have at least 10 installed on my computers (not including notepad and word pad which come pre-installed on windows machines). I've even procrastinated going to bed, you can ask my wife. No, I don't mean that I stayed up way too late (though I do that too). I mean I'm completely exhausted. Ready for bed. All I have to do is get up off the couch, go brush my teeth, and crawl into bed. And I think "I'll just 'rest' my eyes for a few minutes." Then I wake up at 3:30 am, freezing because I don't have a blanket covering me. That's what I mean by procrastinating going to bed. Pretty sad.

OK, so why do I mention this? Well, I'm tired. I'm tired of feeling like I have to scramble every time some deadline rolls around. I'm keeping up, but I feel like I'm hanging on by my fingernails, and I'm not enjoying it. A year ago, I had Lori pick me up a book called Getting Things Done with the intention of applying it's process for keeping on top of tasks. I haven't used it. I keep putting it off because of the setup time that it will take. Well, no more. I hate posting somewhere and saying "I'm gonna do this." But if I don't, then I don't progress, there's no accountability (not that there's much on my personal blog site that is read infrequently by only one person that I know of). So, I am going to implement the "GTD" method. I also purchased a book off Amazon.com earlier this week about procrastination, called The Now Habit. I'll probably be talking quite a bit about both of these in my blog over the next few weeks (just a warning). Anyway, enjoy the movie. All seriousness aside, it is pretty funny.

NOTE: I had a movie embedded in this post, but apparently, shortly after I put the post up, the link broke. So, here's the wiki page on ZeFrank's page with the transcript of the video and a link to the video.

Strange thoughts

So, I was reading the latest post from my good friend Erin over at Everything Erin, and she mentioned that I had stepped in a deposit her dog had left on their lawn while I was at their house on Saturday. What struck me as odd at the time, was that Malcom's poop doesn't stink. No, seriously. It doesn't. You know the drill, you step in dog poop, and immediately, the smell assaults your senses, and you get all frustrated "ah crap, I just stepped in dog poop!" There was none of that. I walked around for a few minutes afterwards, and might not have noticed, except that one shoe seemed to be riding a little higher than the other, and then after putting the kids in teh van, I noticed some poop spots on the pavement. But, no smell. Strange, the things that strike you in the moment.

OK, enough talk of poop. Our valentines day was pretty low key. I teach on Wednesdays, and so we decided to celebrate it early. We went out to dinner at one of our favorite Mexican restaurants, Azteca. It's a little pricey, but we tend to go there once every few months or so. Anyway, since we had already gone to dinner, we ended up staying home. That was a good thing, since Lori wasn't feeling good when I got home, and she ended up sleeping some 11 hours that night. I did stop in at Wal-Mart on my way home and picked up a bouquet of roses for Lori, and a few stuffed animals for the girls. I got a unicorn for Hailey, and she has hardly let it out of her sight since. Sierra has insisted on having her bear with her each night as she goes to bed. She sleeps with 2 bears now, "Hug Bear," which I had given her for valentines day last year, and the new bear, whose name escapes me at the moment. Anyway, I pretty much just stayed home, put the kids to bed, and played video games. Pretty relaxing for me, and hopefully for Lori too.

Weekend fun

So, this weekend was a lot of fun. On Saturday, the campfire group went to the McNary wildlife refuge. I didn't catch how big the refuge is, but it is quite popular with bird watchers. There were a ton of ducks on the river while we were there, and a couple of times they all just took off. It looked like a scene from "The Birds." Pretty crazy. I didn't get to do the whole tour, because Megan was being a turkey and just wanted to sit in the car the whole time. We had a lot of people, more than we usually have for campfire activities (I mean, I was there, so that should tell you something, I've never been to one yet), and I think that along with the new surroundings were a little hard for her to deal with. Anyway, Lori and I took turns, one of us staying with Megan, the other joining the rest of the group for the tour. We took the DSLR camera, so we were kind of the official group photographers. Oh wow, I just realized that we never took a full group photo. Some photographer I am :)! We took well over 100 pictures though. It was a great time, and the kids had a blast. I'll probably post a few of the pictures once I get them all off the camera.

Sunday Megan did the funniest thing. She was having a hard time with church that day, and had been really grumpy with Lori. When they got to church, Lori said she was in trouble, so I made Megan sit on my lap until she calmed down. After a few minutes, she started telling me that I was in trouble. At first I thought she had just mixed up her words, as she does that from time to time. However, she then began saying that I needed to sit on her lap because I was in trouble. After I let her off my lap, she pushed her way on to the seat behind me and proceeded to order me to sit on her lap because I was in trouble. It took a little work, and it wasn't very comfortable, but I somehow arranged it so that I was sitting on her lap... well, sort of. I had my legs across hers, but I was still sitting on the seat of the chair next to me. She made me sit that way the rest of the meeting (about 30 minutes or so). It was pretty funny to hear her say "You're in trouble, sit on Megan's lap!" in a stern voice.

Finally, Lori was released from her calling as the nursery leader. She's pretty excited so that she can once again get involved in the adult activities in the church. She's had several people approach her and wonder if she's inactive. It's pretty funny. Of course, what did she end up doing the first day of freedom? She sat with Hailey in primary. Hailey is having a hard time adjusting to primary. Nursery was a blast. She got to play, eat snacks, and color. Pretty low key. Now she has to sit quietly and listen to a lesson. Pretty tough stuff. Fortunately, she didn't need to stay in their the whole time, and was actually able to go to join the the other adult ladies in their class.

Anyway, that was our weekend.