I've Got Plenty to be Thankful For

Sometime around Thanksgiving, I found a sheet of paper in Julia's backpack. The rows on the paper are numbered from 1 to 27, and there are four columns. I spent a little while trying to figure out what the first few lines meant.

1. Life         Grammie          Colonal          +
2. Ella         Opa                   Caffay            -
3. Dad         Gramma           DQ                 Sicors (scissors?)

It had me in quite a quandary, wondering if somehow Grandma and myself had been disqualified for something to do with scissors. (And had Grammie received a promotion to Colonel?) Thankfully, someone set me straight that this was Julia's list of things she was thankful for, and that after hitting number 27, she had just moved on to column 2, and then 3 and 4.

I'm not going to type out the entire list for you here, but I wanted to share some of it, along with a few of my thoughts. So, here it is. Things Julia is Thankful for, 2017:

1. Life
2. Ella
3. Dad [yay, I beat mom!]
4. Mom
5. Math [how did math beat out reading? She loves to read!]
6. Reading [ah, there it is.]
7. Books
8. Books
9. Books
10. Books [that's my Julia]
11. Sleep
12. Health
13. Mountain
14. Friends
15-20. Various friends and cousins
21. Food [clearly she gets this from me. Shannon would have food in the top 5 for sure]
22. Water
23. Life
24. Church
25. Violin
28-36. Grandparents and more cousins
37. TV
40. Books
48. Dad [my inclusion up at number 3 might have been an error]
49. The Periodic
50. Table of
51. Elements [extra special, so it gets three lines]
52. Helium
53. Food
54. Soda
60. Snuggling
70. BOM
71. Bible
72. D&C
73. PoGP
74. Love
80-83. × ÷ + - [maybe for an upcoming post I'll rank my favorite mathematical operators]
90. Book
91. Book
92. House
103. (Grandma Diane) [The last entry as she ran out of room on the page. That's my mom. I'm not sure why she's in parenthesis, but that's what Julia wrote.]

In all, it's a pretty good list, from a pretty great daughter.

Disney Photos

I don't take many pictures, but here are a few from our trip to Disneyland. Shannon and my parents took pictures too, but, well, I guess you'll have to wait for them to post them on their own blogs or something. The picture quality isn't always great and I'm too lazy to even think about editing them even a tiny bit, so, on that note, here are some pictures:

The view from our hotel room looking into California Adventure. The weather was lovely.

 Ella carried this leaf around all day. Not sure what kind it is, but it came from this tree.

Julia, being sensible, knew I wasn't going to buy her this lollipop for like $114, so she just got her picture with it instead.

 Tigger and Eeyore. I hopped out of line before we got to Pooh. Despite not talking, Eeyore was definitely a sweetie.

 Thankfully, Disney has one line you can wait in to see multiple princesses, so for our 30 minutes of waiting, we got to see Snow White, and this new princess they've recently invented (fine, I googled her for you, she's Elena) but really, we were there to see . . .

Cinderella. Ella made it clear that meeting Cinderella was a requirement for the trip. Not even her (Ella) tiny little bladder would be allowed to get in the way as we waited in line.

I was not convinced that meeting Tinkerbell was a priority. But 25 minutes later, here we were. (Fun fact: Tinkerbell speaks French (at least this Tinkerbell does).)

Ella in Toon Town

Julia is a much more aggressive driver, evidently.

All of us (plus plastic Goofy) in the hotel lobby, wearing our new Disneyland t-shirts.

Map Skills Revisited

When Julia was 19 months old, she was a country finding master. She could find dozens of countries on a map, and it is super cute to listen to her tiny little voice say the names of the countries.

Tonight, I re-tested her on these same countries, to see how Julia the 8-year-old stacks up against her former self. Let's just say that she hasn't kept up her skills. It's a bit trickier now that she can read, but I ran through the same countries as in the video and only gave her a second or two to find the country. This same map has been on our wall for basically her entire life, and she still managed to find China, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Madagascar, Italy, Iceland, Mexico, Australia, Japan, Iran, India, Sweden, Germany, Norway, Canada, Brazil, USA, France, Russia, UK, Greenland, Philippines and Peru.

Not so fortunate to be remembered, however, were Mongolia, Greece, South Africa, Cote D'Ivoire, Chile, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Egypt and New Zealand. For many of those it was evident that she had no clue where to even begin looking on the map. I guess it's rough when your dad is blogging about how you peaked in life at 19 months.

Julia's Baptism

Julia turned 8 on the 17th of this month, and this Saturday she was baptized and confirmed (by me) a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Here's a picture:

Both sets of grandparents were able to come out for the weekend, so we had a lot of fun with them. It's pretty rewarding to see Julia growing up to be such a wonderful kid. She's so curious about learning everything, and sucks up everything she can hear or read. The other day I was talking about a sapphire we grew at work and she asked how much it weighed. "345 pounds, I said." Her immediate response was: "That's 45 pounds more than Taft!".

I am OK alone

Shannon and the girls took advantage of summer vacation and cheap airplane tickets and jetted off to SLC for a week.  That leaves me home alone for 6 days, which has been interesting.  Shannon and Julia left me home alone years ago when Shannon was sick and pregnant with Ella, and that was the last time that we spent more than 2 nights apart.  Even the times where we have been apart for a day or two, I've been the one gone on a business trip, and there's at least been the novelty of being somewhere different for a day or two.  (Even if that different place happens to be Cleveland, which for some reason is where half of my business trips end up being.) So, I've learned a few things being alone for a week.

First off, I am OK alone. Despite what everyone else thinks, I am more than capable of feeding myself and getting myself up on time.  (It helps that the sun comes up at about 5:30 here in the summer.)  But, living alone isn't all fun and games.

Living alone is lonely. I know, who'd have thought? Maybe it's because I'm not particularly good at living on my own, but there's nothing to do.  I turn on music when I get home from work, and I talk to myself, just to have some noise in the house. TV isn't as fun by yourself. Dinner isn't any fun by yourself. This feeds right into my next point:

Living alone is boring. Between coming home from work and going to bed, I have about 5 hours of time, and almost nothing to fill them. I've cleaned up the house a fair bit, but it was messy to begin with. Now that it's straightened up, it should stay pretty clean, at least until I decide to have a My Little Pony party. Even when it is time to go to bed, I don't want to read - there's no need to find a way to quietly retreat from the world when you live in silence all the time.

Finally, living alone is pointless. I mean, seriously, if I lived alone, I'd have soooo much free time. What on earth could I do? I like to run, but there's a limit to how much of that I can do a day. I've played some Starcraft with Brett, but at some point even that starts to wear. I can't imagine having enough hobbies to fill my time. I don't know how single people do it. I suppose they have a bunch of single friends and they go off and do fun stuff all the time. I'm sure they find interesting and meaningful things to do with their time - hopefully they're much more productive single people than I am.

To sum up: Living alone - did not like; would not recommend.

Everyone gets home tomorrow night, and I'm sure I'll be wanting some peace and quiet around the house shortly after that. If you find me complaining, remind me that noisy and messy is far better than alone.

Let Sleeping Girls Lie

All of us probably have a few somewhat irrational fears, particularly when it comes to parenting.  Generally, parents are much too afraid of strangers kidnapping their children, which only happens a handful of times each year in a country with tens of millions of children. [citation needed]  For me, I have always been the cut-food-into-tiny-pieces freak at our house.  No matter how many teeth our girls had, there I was cutting hot dogs into 10,000 tiny little pieces.  An average sized grape should be diced into, in my opinion, no fewer than 20 pieces before any child under the age of 7 can eat it.  If I had my way, grapes could just be a controlled substance along with alcohol and tobacco.  "Grape juice only after you've earned your Eagle, son."

Shannon has her own irrational fear, which was that the girls would stop breathing in their sleep.  So, once the girls had gone to bed (when they were smaller), she'd be in multiple times to check on them, just to make sure they're breathing.  (I, of course, was still down in the kitchen, dicing food.)  I was never quite sure why she would go check, because it's pretty unlikely that the girls had stopped breathing, and even in the event that they had, it would have needed to have happened very recently, and then, even if your timing was perfect, what could you even do?  (At least we knew they wouldn't be choking on anything!)

Well, we moved to Illinois, and the girls share a room now, which happens to be the least temperature controlled one in the house.  Our room is always the right temperature.  The girls are right across the hall way, and their room was too hot in September, and by November, it's always too cold.  No amount of vent adjusting seems to help; their room just wants to be the same temperature as it is outside - I blame the windows.  Anyway, suddenly there was a much more legitimate reason to check on the girls before we tottered off to bed - what if they get too cold?  So we'd start checking on them to make sure they hadn't kicked their blankets off (or taken off their PJs, for reasons that they can never seem to explain in the morning).  I often climb into bed after Shannon does, so I'd make one last check - at least if they were cold, I knew what to do about it.

And that is when I learned what I suspect is the real reason that Shannon has been going in all these years: to watch our girls sleep.  I think I could do it for hours.  Julia will kick off half her covers, or slide around on her bed.  Occasionally her butt will be sticking up in the air, and often she snores.  Ella, on the other hand, sleeps on her back and is generally neatly covered by her blankets.  Sometimes her arms are flopped out to either side and on occasion, she'll even have them tucked back behind her head, as if she is relaxing in a hammock on a warm summer day.  So I go in each night now, not so much worrying about keeping them warm but just to see my girls sleeping.  (In truth, some vent balancing and leaving their door open a bit has helped.)  They won't be little forever, and in just a few more years, this sort of late night lurking will be considered a massive invasion of privacy, but for now, they don't know, and they don't mind, so I go enjoy my daughters while they're quite for once, peacefully snuggled in their beds.  It's a little nightly reminder of how lucky I am to be their dad.

2013 Year in Review - Good Parts Version

I started writing up 'Year In Review' post, and you know what, it was a total drag.  Unemployment tried its best to ruin our year, and typing up a full year in review sucked - depressing to type, depressing to read.  So I'm packing it all into one sentence and moving on.  I lost my job, it sucked, it was stressful, it was depressing, our finances are in shambles and we moved away from many of our friends.

And now, I am happy to welcome you to the good parts version of the 2013 year in review.  Rather than some sort of chronological listing, we're going through the year topically, in the order that stuff comes spurting out of my brain.

Travels:
It was a light year for traveling.  In April we made the 5 hour trip to Kirtland, OH to see the church history sites there.  Being unself-employed, we went in the middle of a week so we could avoid people (not that April is peak tourist season), and so we could go see the Kirtland Temple on April 3rd.  Rather than re-invent the wheel, I'll point you to Shannon's blog post for more details.

We also made the 1,685 mile trip (each way!) from Michigan to Utah for my little sister's wedding.  I'll try not to get too judge-y about Jessica getting married in the middle of a day that was like 102°.  I'll leave that for my sister who was like 8 months pregnant at the time.  Being the lame people that we are, we produced two blog posts on the traveling.  But only one on the month we spent in Utah.  So what did we do?  The wedding went well, and more importantly, Jessica picked a good guy.  (Jess: Have we fully explained how much better Tyler is than pretty much every other guy you ever hung out with? Not like the other guys were bad people or anything, but . . . well done.)  We did the standard Utah things: hike the Y, drink BYU chocolate milk, ride the train, see downtown and temple square, weenie roast in the canyon.  Some of our favorites were probably kayaking in Oquirrh Lake (Daybreak) with Shannon's parents and I really enjoyed my hike (with Stewart) from Lamb's canyon to Little Cottonwood Canyon (via Millcreek and Big Cottonwood).  It was about 17 miles, and we never got seriously lost, despite heading onto some trails that we were probably the first people that year to hike.  Even thinking about that hike makes me miss Utah.

Running:
This year was a banner year for running for me.  This was partly made possible by slacking off sufficiently in all other years that the bar was set reasonably low.  I ran only a single race, the Dow Run 10k, in which I got a medal for taking 2nd place in my age group.  I ran it in a personal best 43:08.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't checking the mail every day for weeks waiting for the silly thing to arrive. I'm going to end up with new records for number of runs in a year (96) and miles (452).  I struggle a lot with running consistency; every month this year I've either run more than 40 miles (6 times), or less than 20 (6 times).  I have hopes of run a lot more next year, provided it quits being so freaking cold.  (High of 6 °F on Monday)

Blog:
blogger doesn't let me look at yearly stats (day, week, month, and all time are the options), and I don't want to bother to add up page views or anything.  But, I can say that the two most popular blog posts of the year have been Enders Game, the Movie and I like big Books (and I can not lie).  Those had 99 and 76 page views, while nothing else I've written this year had more than 40.  Ender's Game also won with 6 comments. (2 of which were me.)

Reading:
At the start of the year, Shannon and I set out to record every book we read for the year.  We gave up on the children's books after a month or two.  It was just too much work.  By the time we quit we had amassed 97 unique books, which we had read 227 times.  We did keep up with our adult reading lists though.  Currently, I'm at 10,937 pages from 29 books and Shannon is at 9790 pages from 35 books.  (Don't worry, Shannon will get to 10,000 before the end of the year!)  My top five books for the year are:

1. "Moonwalking with Einstein" a book about memorization
2. "Born to Run" perhaps you've heard about people running in silly footwear?
3. "Signal and the Noise" by Nate Silver explaining how predicting stuff is really hard.
4. "Mistborn" I'm currently reading the second book in this fantasy series.
5. Wheel of Time #14 was an excellent conclusion to a very long series.

Girls:
Julia reads all the time now.  We never really taught her how to read, but at the age of 5 1/2 she's pretty much an expert reader.  We went to the library the other day and got her two Junie B. Jones books.  Both done by the end of the day.  We're pretty sure she understands everything in the books - I mean, who would sit there hour after hour reading if they didn't grasp the story?  It's been amazing to see Julia learn manners and to pay attention to other people over this year.  She long ago learned that we demanded the use of words like 'please' and 'thank you', but now she's actually learned to mean them, and to go out of her way to use them.  On the other side of that, she's also developing an attitude sometimes.  If we ask her to share a toy with Ella her response is often something like, "Fine! I'll just never play with any toys again, and Ella can keep it forever!!!"

Ella is goofy.  She has the most toned legs of any little kid I've ever seen.  I don't think toned is the right word.  They're muscular. She can't walk, she only skips, hops and twirls.  Just this morning she was laying in bed at 6-something in the morning singing jingle bells. Not just jingle bells though, the Barenaked Ladies version, which means that it starts out slowly, then she does the swirling interlude between verses where it picks up energy and roars into a raucous double-time chorus.  Julia, meanwhile, was sawing logs on the other side of the room.  Neither of my girls have ever been snugly, but we went and saw Frozen the other day, and Ella cuddled right up to me for much of the film.  It was heavenly.

Achievements:
There weren't any round numbers this year, but we did manage to turn 32, 31, 5 and 3.  Unemployment did manage to come to an end, finally, and in September I started working at a place called Rubicon Technology.  I do roughly what I've always done, and by this point, you either have an idea what it means to grow crystals or you don't.  With the new job, oh hey, we moved.  We've still got a house for sale back in Michigan, because selling empty homes is a hobby of ours.  Julia is doing great in Kindergarten, though it's eye-opening how little we really know about her life at school - and it's only half day kindergarten.  It's a mystical world full of kids and teachers that we don't really know.  We finally got to see Ben Folds Five in person, along with Guster and BNL.  For about 15 years I've been bummed that I missed BFF and Cake at the Big ___ Show in SLC.  It was the same night as the priesthood session of General Conference.  I don't regret my decision, but I was disappointed that I could see them.

Stream of Unconsiousness

It's been 5 or 6 years since I've pulled an all-nighter, but for the last 2 nights, I've been nocturnal. See, in my career, I've gone from making germanium crystals in about 3 days, to making silicon carbide crystals in a bit under a week, to making sapphire crystals that take 2 or 3 weeks.  And that means sometimes equipment needs someone to keep an eye on it over night.  I never had to do that at DC (mostly because you couldn't see anything while it was growing - you just put everything together, hit go, and then come back days later and see if it worked).  But now I'm in much more of an R&D role, and we've got a big (really big) new furnace, and it needs some baby sitting.  Luckily, tonight is my last night of hanging around here.  I've done reasonably well with this whole staying up late thing, which isn't to say that when 5:30am rolls around I'm not ready to pass out anyway.

So, from my sleep deprived brain, some stories about the girls.

Julia is growing up and has recently learned how to think about other people.  In a way, it's amazing to see little kids and realize that they really no notion of how much of an imposition they are nearly every moment of their lives.  Ella really just doesn't understand that I'm not waiting around all day to go wipe her bum at a moments notice.  But Julia is figuring things out more and more, and as the sensitive soul that she is, trying to make people feel better.  So, if she sees me or Shannon stressed out (usually because of Ella) she'll come over and gently stroke my hand, or give me a hug or something.  It's very sweet.

Ella, on the other hand, just gets goofier every day.  The girls usually take showers, not baths, these days.  I'm not entirely clear why, since they seem to want to stay out of the shower stream as possible, but that's what they pick.  Anyway, while in the shower the other day, Ella declared that she was having a "bum party" and starts doing her little booty shake dance.  Which brings us back to one of the rules we have to go over and over at our house: no dancing in the shower.

Crazy Carl

Last night I read Julia a book at bed time about a dog named Carl who is left to watch a baby while mom goes up to the second floor of the department store.  Mom seems to be gone for a good half and hour while baby and Carl go get into mischief.  But right at the beginning of the story, when the baby climbs out of the baby carriage and onto Carl's back, Julia's comment was, "That's not an expected thing to do!"

Working Girl

Julia recently got a job.  She'll be 4 in April, so we figured it was about time to get her to work and become a contributing member of the family.  A friend of ours works for a professor at a local university who is doing some sort of study on young children learning or test taking or something like that.  (This is clearly a friend that Shannon knows better that I do.)  So, she has come over a few times and spends an hour or so with Julia asking her questions, doing puzzles, and testing short term memory.  So far, she's earned 40 bucks!  (I wish I could get paid to take tests.  Especially since taking tests is one of my best skills in life.)  Julia has used some of her money to buy a cash register, which is her new favorite toy.

But things really got interesting when I related all of this to my parents, who asked, "Did she pay tithing?"  Oh.  Yeah.  Tithing.  I remember that.  And we pay it when we earn money.  But for some reason it never occurred to us that Julia should pay tithing, too.  The trick, however, is to explain tithing to a 3 year old who barely even understands what money is at all.  Or fractions.  Let alone making a connection between God granting us abilities to earn money and pay checks and funds for running the church and other related issues.  To further drive home the point that this is above age level for her, there is no tithing lesson in the nursery manual, nor the Sunbeams manual.  So we made it up ourselves.  Hopefully it worked.  At the root of it all, we decided, "When you earn some money, we give a little bit of it to the Bishop, because it's a commandment."  And really, what else is there?

Bum Jokes

Julia is officially 2 1/2 how, which means we've hit the age where anything can be made funnier by replacing any word with "bum". Examples:

From Blues Clues:

"We just got a letter, we just got a letter, we just got a letter, wonder who it's from"

becomes . . . .

"We just got a bum shake, we just got a bum shake, we just got a bum shake, wonder who it's from"

Or, if you're feeling slightly sacrilegious:

"The Lord commanded Nephi to go and get the plates"

becomes . . . . .

"The bum commanded Nephi to go and get the bum"

While Julia makes the jokes, the rest of us try our best to pretend they aren't funny.

X-ray vision

In my previous post, I made reference to x-ray vision. The typical view of x-ray vision is that it lets you see through or inside something. Let's clear up how x-rays actually work.

X-rays let you see through your skin and look at your bones. This is true. What happens is that the x-ray go through your soft skin that is mostly made up of light elements. Carbon, oxygen and hydrogen are probably the three most abundant elements in your skin. They have atomic masses of 12, 16 and 1 amu, respectively. The x-rays react very weakly with the light elements and hit the x-ray film. Your bones are made up of many of those same elements, but also one more: calcium! Calcium has an atomic weight of 40, so it stops a lot more of the x-rays, leaving a white spot on the film. Ta-da! You can now see your bones.

The problem is in adapting this to other uses, like Superman's x-ray vision. It only works if you're looking through something made of light elements, to see something made of heavy elements, which has a film behind it. But apparently Superman can shoot x-rays out, which travel through walls (note: sheetrock is made of gypsum, which is made of . . . . calcium! (and sulfate ions, and water)) (also, cement or cinderblock is pretty good at stopping x-rays, because cement is made from limestone, which is made of . . . . calcium carbonate!) bounces off of soft people, goes back through the walls and then is processed by his hi-tech x-ray eyes. It just doesn't work.

So, even with fancy x-ray equipment, Julia would have been hard pressed to identify the sugar and paper sucker inside the paper bag. (Sugar is made of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, and sadly, no calcium.) We're down to exceedingly impressive spelling skills and ESP as the top two explanations. And ESP isn't looking too likely.

Or maybe it was ghosts.

Julia the Psychic

Somehow, Julia seems to have developed special powers. She is constantly coming up with stuff that we can't figure out how she knows it. And this isn't stuff that she could have over heard, or seen on TV. As we are driving towards Target she says "there's Target". Can she read road signs? We just moved, and we went a way to get there that she has never been on. Maybe she can read, or at least recognize the Target logo.

But then puzzle me this one: A few weeks ago we drove past PetSmart. Julia says "can we go to the pet store?" She's never been to a PetSmart before. In St. George we had a PetCo that she loved to go to (its our poor person's zoo). How does she know what these buildings are?

And finally, we went out to eat at A&W a week ago. I don't know that Julia has ever been there. She got a kids meal. We pulled out her food, leaving the treat in the bag. I looked in the bag to see what she got, and told Shannon it was a "t-o-o-t-s-i-e-p-o-p". Shannon told her if she ate her food she would get a treat, and she said "a sucker". I asked her "how many suckers?". She said "two". I asked what color. She said "red". I asked for the color of the other one. She said "blue". But she was wrong. There was one red and one brown sucker. HOW ON EARTH DOES SHE KNOW THESE THINGS??? The bag was never tipped over such that she could see in. I checked, and the bag is not translucent enough to see what is inside when it is held up to the light. Either that girl knows what "t-o-o-t-s-i-e-p-o-p" means, or she has x-ray vision, or she has ESP. I just don't get it.

Julia

Tonight at dinner Julia shut her eyes tight and said, "I'm hiding behind my eyes."

Yesterday Julia got to jump on a trampoline for the first time ever. How would you know which kid out there was her? She was the one hopping around saying "Sauté, sauté, sauté".

Tonight's prayer: "Bless us to go to Wal*Mart to see the fish that sucks on the glass."

Baby Juice

The other day, Julia started asking for "baby juice". This isn't the first time she's come up with a name for something that has left us completely baffled. What on earth is Baby Juice? (Surely she doesn't want juice made from babies!)

When we asked her to show us what she wanted, she went right to the refrigerator and asked me to open it, which I did. "Do you see it in here?" I asked. "Baby Juice!" she said, pointing to the top shelf. And there it was, the only thing on the top shelf that she doesn't know the correct name for:

A week or two ago, Shannon bought a 2 liter bottle of root beer, something we don't normally have around the house. Julia found it in the pantry and was carrying it around the house, so I asked her if it was her baby. We wrapped it up in a blanket and rocked it for a bit and had a good laugh. 10 days later when she wanted it, how else was she supposed to describe it? It was sweet like Juice and you play with it like it's a Baby. It's "Baby Juice"!

Pink

I don't know how it happened, but Julia is a pink girl. Now, despite rumors I've heard to the contrary, I have nothing against pink. I did make comments before Julia was born that we didn't need to overload her in pink. We don't need 50 pink outfits, a pink crib, pink sheets, 11 pink blankets and a sign for her room that says "Julia's Pink Kingdom".

But, Julia loves pink anyway. If we let her pick anything, she's pretty much guaranteed to pick the pink option. Pink bowl for breakfast, pink shirt, pink blanket, pink pajamas, pink toys. She's just a pink girl, I suppose.

Now, this still doesn't mean that we need to overload her with pink stuff. In 6 months, her favorite color could be orange.

Diapers

Tonight getting ready for bed:

Clark: Are there any poops in your diaper?

Julia: Nope. Just a wet diaper. No wipes.

Chart

We are in absolutely no position to be promising any sort of regular updating at all, but various people have been interested in a current puking chart. So, here it is.

The mayhem is staying at fairly reasonable levels, though Shannon still doesn't feel well. Julia is doing admirably with 2 parents that have both been battling their own issues. I am nearly better these days, except for the cough that shows up around bed time.

You'll note that this post has been tagged "Baby #2" because we still haven't come up with a name for it yet.

Absenteeism

Neither Shannon nor I have blogged much at all lately. Usually this is ascribable to either traveling or illness. In our case, it is both.

We went to SLC for Thanksgiving, and got to see all the Grandmas (ours and Julia's). That's not always an easy thing to do, as they live in Salt Lake City, South Salt Lake, Taylorsville, South Jordan and Sandy. Among the highlights were:

- Turkey

- Not working

- BYU beating Utah. (My very brief comments on that game: this is 3 out of 4 close games where BYU has beaten Utah. I thought Utah was supposed to be the team that came up big in the important moments. On Halls comments: a small percentage of fans on both sides are absolute jerks. Let's not try to deny they exist, or pretend that it is easy to turn the other cheek when they do get in your face. It would be nice if Max had done a better job of ignoring them, but he didn't. But just because he made some stupid and unfair comments doesn't mean that all of us should go join that small percentage of jerky fans.)

After the vacationing was over, we decided to start the illness phase of our non-communication. I started Sunday on the drive home, Shannon shortly after, and Julia on Wednesday (I think). I am still fighting through the cold that will not die. I don't have a fever. If anything my temperature is abnormally low. So, I don't think I have the pig virus. But whatever I have has made the rounds from my head (as achiness), into my throat (as soreness), to my whole body, back to my throat (as an inability to speak) and back to my head (as every imaginable sinus issue all at once). I like to think that as it has made the rounds, it's got to be just about ready to leave my body. For the last 24 hours it has been doing its darnedest to escape via my nose, taking every last mucus membrane with it.

Finally, I would like to announce a big announcement. But, the announcement deserves it's own blog post. So, like all good bloggers do, I'm telling you that I'm going to tell you something, and then make you wait. Unlike the other bloggers though, I'm not going to string you out for days or weeks. It'll be up in 18 hours or less. (For those of you who know (or think you know) the secret, you can hold onto that little treasure of knowledge for another day.)

Planning our family vacations

The video is long, but I wanted to show off Julia's talent.

Make photo slide shows at www.OneTrueMedia.com

For the record she can locate (to the best of our knowledge) the following countries: Canada, USA, Greenland (we know this isn't really a country, but she doesn't), Mexico, Peru, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Madagascar, Cote d'Ivoire, Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sri Lanka, India (sometimes), Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, Russia, Japan, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland.