Friday, October 23, 2009

40 YEARS! Oh No!

I got the dreaded postcard in the mail today, no not the one from the doctor. The one from Bonneville's class of 1970 telling me about our 40th High School Reunion. Way to make me feel really old. Having 5 kids and 8 & 3/4 grandkids doesn't matter it's that big 4-0 that really brings it home. You're just going to have to ignore my moodiness for the next 10 months until it is over.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

A whole bunch of catching up.....

I think the appropriate term is "slacker", but I am going to claim "busy". We haven't updated this blog forever. The last post was from the first day of a conference in San Francisco and I had these grand delusions that I was going to post fantastic summaries of my trip every day. As it turns out, the conference was outstanding, and I spent all my time doing things for the conference. Not blogging. Since then, our life has been pretty busy and exciting. I will try to give a quick rundown, then just post a ton of pictures...

At the conference, I learned a of great information to help me do my job better. They had a party one night which was a lot of fun. There was free bowling, a Foreigner concert, pool, ping pong, mechanical bull, lots of food, air hockey. They had a baseball throw and I went to show my stuff at the baseball throw. Turns our they only had softballs. It hurts to throw a softball at 60 MPH. On the last day, I had ~6 hours in the morning before my flight to wander around San Francisco. I walked ~10 miles which felt like ~25. San Francisco is a pretty city, with a ton to do. The cable car museum was really cool, but the lighting sucked so none of my pictures turned out.

Gracie had her birthday and turned 3. She had a blast. We did a small family party the night before and then she had a bunch of friends come over and play for her birthday party. She was _VERY_ excited to get a lot of Blues Clues toys to play with.

Noah turned 5 a couple weeks after that. His favorite part of his birthday was the BlueTrak racetrack he got. Heather and I like it because it doesn't take batteries. I am surprised what kind of loops and turns you can get Hot Wheels cars to do with just gravity getting them going.

Our other news recently is that Heather has an official due date (no longer is it a 3 week range). She is due on Jan. 4th. The doctor says that the baby will likely come before the new year one way or another though. In anticipation of this, we bought a van last week. We looked around at a lot of different vans. We were lucky enough to find one that some people in Holladay were selling that had everything Heather wanted. When people ask what options it has I tell them it has all the ones Heather cared about (heated seats and power doors).

Last week Heather and I had the chance to go to Saint George without the kids for a few days. It was a good trip. I attended a security conference for work and Heather had a nice break from the kids. The highlight of the conference is that out of ~230 people, I won the hacker challenge (a bunch of geeky challenges that involved un-deleting files, eves-dropping on network traffic to get information from other computers, picking locks and that kind of stuff). I was pretty happy to win.

The thing that brings Heather the most joy from the last month though, is the basement. The walls are painted. The carpet is re-laid. The doors are hung. We even have some things put away. Our house has a chance of getting back to normal at some point in the future.