I want to get away... I wanna flyyyy away...

So Dave and I flew away a few weeks ago. We didn’t go very far. But we still flew away.

It was so much fun!

So my company has a personal pilot to fly all of the head-honchos around to their meetings in Texas, Arizona, California, and Montana etc. His name is Sage and he’s awesome. I actually know him from a previous job. When he walked into JD Premium as their new pilot, I was shocked! But it’s cool to work with him again. Well, I kept asking Sage when he was going to take me on a plane ride. He always promised that it would be soon, but I never really thought it would happen because he flies Roger Ball’s (the owner of JD Premium and most of the Idaho Falls area) personal plane and I didn’t think I would ever be privileged enough to fly on Roger Ball’s plane.  Well, just a few weeks ago he wandered into my office and asked if I wanted to go for a ride. I said HECK YES!!! When? Oh, how about later tonight? PERFECT! So I rounded up Dave and told him to come to Idaho Falls ASAP. 

Here is our plane!!

Here we are by our plane... see how small it is?

So after some lessons from Sage about all the gauges and gizmos... we were ready for take off! Actually, Dave really did take off! Sage let him control everything and he really flew the plane!

We flew over Idaho Falls and headed off to the dry farms and mountains. We flew over the Idaho Falls Temple and I took a movie of it, but it's still on my camera. If  I remember, I'll post it up here. 

We flew over our local ski resort, Kelly Canyon 

Then we went to go find my parent's house!

There it is!! (My Dad named our little homestead Willowstone. I made this picture and framed it for my mom for her birthday/mother's day. Click for larger view)

Then we took off towards Rexburg where we were gonna land and switch pilots (My turn to fly!)

Here's the Rexburg Temple

Then we landed at the Rexburg airport and it was my turn to fly the plane!

We flew back over Rexburg and got a good shot of the BYU-I campus

Then we flew out towards Menan and back towards Idaho Falls.

The Menan Butte

It was so much fun!

Thanks, Sage, for taking us on such a great adventure!! 

Funny Newlyweds…

I don’t know if we still qualify as newly weds. I’m gonna say yes. But maybe the cut-off time for being newly weds is a year. Or maybe it’s after you have kids. Whichever one comes first? I don’t know… but Dave and I are somewhere in between. Been married for a year and a half and no kids yet. So… Newlyweds…

Here’s our newest problem (ok, we have lots of problems and this is probably the least of them, but it’s the one that goes with the story…) I work from 8 to 5 every day. When I get home, I usually haven’t thought of anything for dinner. So that takes time to prepare. I also haven’t seen my husband all day, so I usually just want to cuddle and talk with him. But I also want to start getting a little more healthy and I want to go to the gym more. All of that condensed into a 3 or 4 hour time frame. I also have lots of relief society stuff to do and meetings to go to… excuses, excuses. 


So it turned out that me going to the gym was not happening. I would rather make dinner, sit down and eat it with my husband, and then watch movies or talk to Dave for the rest of the night.  The only time I could fit in going to the gym was RIGHT when I got home from work. But then Dinner would be pretty late... 

One night Dave was kind enough to say that he would make dinner while I worked out! What a nice guy! Then dinner would be all nice and ready for us by the time I got home and we could eat and spend the rest of the night together. Lovely. 
So I got ready and went to the gym while Dave decided that he was going to make potato soup! Yummy! When I came home about 30 minutes later, everything was smelling pretty good! So I took a look at the soup. 
"Um... It's pretty runny... did you let it thicken before you put all the ingredients in it?" I said
"Yep! I thought I did." Dave stated. 
"Alright, maybe we just need to get it hot again and boil. Maybe then it will thicken up..." I said. So we heated it up again. It started to thicken up a little bit, but not very much. But I noticed that it started to get a funny texture. So I took it off the heat and let it sit for a minute. 
"Did you put all of the flour and butter in there?" I said. 
"Yep! I thought I did." Dave stated. 
"Ok, well, let's taste it and see if it needs any extra salt and pepper." So I took the wooden spoon that we had been stirring the soup with and had a big sip of the soup. 


Immediately I knew something was wrong. But I wanted to boost Dave's confidence in cooking so he would be more likely to cook more dinners... I kinda liked not having to cook the dinner! So I thought, well, it's not THAT bad... just kinda... off. So I tasted the soup again to see if it was edible. Um.... no. Not edible. I turned to Dave 
"This doesn't taste right.... It tastes.... sweet." Potato soup isn't supposed to be sweet. 
Dave decided to take a taste of it. "Yeah... that's gross. What did I do?" 
We went through Dave's cooking process to figure out what went wrong with our pot of soup. It sounded like he did everything right! I was so confused. 
"You put the flour in, right?" Dave said he did and then even showed me what flour he put in. When he reached up in to the sugar cupboard instead of down to the flour, potatoes, and pancake cupboard, I knew immediately what happened. 
Dave and I decided to buy our sugar in bulk at Winco recently. So we bought brown sugar, regular sugar and powder sugar. All of our sugar was in generic plastic bags from Winco. But we didn't buy flour in bulk because I had just bought a bag of flour from Broulims. So Dave, thinking that we had bought flour in bulk used powdered sugar instead of flour. 
I started laughing. This was just such a funny little mistake to me, that I couldn't stop! But Dave was feeling really bad that he had ruined a whole pot of soup. I composed myself and called my Mom. She always knows how to fix things. 
She suggested that I just add the flour. So I dissolved some flour and added it. The soup still tasted bad. So I added some salt and pepper. Still bad. More flour and some milk, still bad. More garlic powder, salt and pepper... still bad. More salt (What's the opposite of sweet? Salt! I thought adding more salt would balance out the sweetness)
We got to a point where we thought we could maybe choke down a bowl of it. It just needed a little bit more... masking. So I added more pepper. 


BLECH!!! I overdid it and the resulting mess-in-a-pot tasted ok at first, but the aftertaste was a combo of sweetness that wasn't supposed to be there and an overwhelming salty/pepperness that left the WORST taste in our mouths!! Dave dumped the entire thing down the sink. It was so GROSS!!! 


While we were cleaning up our mess, I decided to show Dave the difference between powder sugar and flour. So I got down the powder sugar that was just in a generic plastic bag and opened up the flour. I showed him how much whiter the sugar is and how the flour kinda clumps up a little bit. But when I grabbed the bag of powdered sugar to put it up in the cupboard again, I had accidentally placed it on a warm burner on the stove and the plastic bag had melted through. I lifted the powder sugar and sugar went POOF!!! all over the counter, stove, floor... 


OK!!! EVERYONE OUT OF THE KITCHEN!!! WE ARE NOT MEANT TO COOK ANYTHING TONIGHT!!!
After we vacuumed up the sugar, we left the mess as-is and went out to eat. 


Sheesh. Silly Newlyweds...... 




Needless to say, I have bought little containers and have labeled them "Sugar" "Flour" "Powder Sugar"... I have also made dinner every night since then. And no, I haven't gone to the gym regularly. But I am going to work on boosting Dave's confidence again... Tonight: Left over roast beef made into taco meat. I'll let you know how it goes...

Bodrie: My puppy, my friend

Bodrie when he was a little older.

 
This is a tribute to my puppy Bodrie. He died Monday, March 14th. Bodrie had an aggressive cancer that would have made his last two weeks on Earth miserable so we decided to not have him suffer any more and ended his life before he was in too much pain. But Bodrie was an old dog with many ailments anyway... It was his time.

Goofy Family picture when Bodrie was still a puppy. (I wasn't choking him, I was making him smile...)

Our family got Bodrie when we moved from Idaho Falls to Rigby. I had been asking for a dog for years, but we finally had a yard big enough when we moved. It was December and I was at an achievement day activity (So I was 8 years old) when my dad came home with the cute cream colored puppy. My mom and dad told my brothers and sister not to tell me about the puppy and that they would surprise me. But when I came through the door, my little brother (about 3 years old) shouted immediately "We got a PUPPY!!" I looked around all confused and then my mom came out with the cute little puppy in her arms. I was speechless. I took him from her arms and cuddled him close. "Whats his name?" I asked. My dad answered "Bodrie." Bodrie and I were best friends ever since.

Bodrie being a part of our family.

Me, Bodrie and Fritz sitting on the porch

Rubbing Bodrie's belly while Kali and I were waiting for our turn to sled.

I remember that winter putting my puppy Bodrie in a sled and running around with him until he jumped off and sank in the snow. Then I would go find him and plop him in the sled again and run around.

Bodrie sledding with Lucas, Jessi and I think Miranda

I also remember a night that my parents were gone and my older brother and I brought Bodrie inside (he was an outside only dog) and Bodrie pooped all over the floor. I had to clean it because Austin didn't want to. We didn't let Bodrie inside any more after that.

Bodrie and Ginger in our family picture

Bodrie liked to fetch. He had some lab mix in him but not very much. I had to teach him how to fetch. But he got pretty good at it. So we would play fetch for a long time on hot summer days and sometimes Bodrie would get tired. When he got hot and tired, Bodrie would go take a swim in the canal. But when we were playing with a ball or a Frisbee, Bodrie would take that out to the canal too. I would run my fastest to the bridge to see if I could fish the ball or Frisbee out of the canal, but most of the time I missed them. We lost many balls and Frisbees.

Me and my pal Bodrie and a kitty

Bodrie went with me when I rode horses, played in the woods with me, followed me on four wheeler rides, he sat with me on the bridge, always had time for me to talk to him, loved me when I was having hard times and he was always happy to see me. Basically he was my partner in crime and permanent sidekick on all of my adventures.

Bodrie and Grandma when we went camping at Sheridan Creek.

Bodrie and Me on my horse Jasper on our way out for a ride.

Bodrie was a good dog too. He knew how to sit and lay down pretty well. But mostly he was the family's protector. He killed two badgers that came onto our property. He always pooped out in the field and not in the garage or on the lawn.

Bodrie letting a kitty play with his tail.

 
He would always make sure I was ok when I played outside. One time, my little sister was running towards one of her friends and she tripped and fell. Bodrie ran to her, stood over her and growled at her friend until Miranda was able to get up. He wanted to make sure she was ok.

Bodrie didn't mind cats. He let them brush against him.

Bodrie was a really funny dog and had a couple of weird quirks. One was that he was deathly afraid of ropes. He could not be tied up and when I took his collar off to brush him, I would have to sneak it around his neck or else he would cower away from it. Once he had the collar around his neck, he was fine. He was even scared of ropes on the ground or hung up. He would always cry out or whimper if he got mixed up in one. Another quirk was that he howled at car horns honking. At first we thought it was because it hurt his ears, but the vet told us that he did it once and got attention for it, so he did it from then on! It was kinda a funny party trick that our family had. Honk as you drive away and Bodrie will say goodbye too!! Bodrie also knew when he wanted to be fed and put to bed. He would come to our sliding glass door and scratch on it and whine until we got up and fed him and locked him in the garage for the night. He pretty much ran our family.

Bodrie got into something on one of his adventures and he was pretty guilty about it!

Bodrie loved to wander and explore. But he always came home at night. One time he didn't come home for two nights in a row and we started to get worried about him. The next day, my mom decided that she would go out and look for him. Our other dog, Max, was there and was following her around as she looked for him. It was winter and very cold.  Mom called and called for Bodrie but didn't find him. Mom had a feeling that she should go look back in the woods for him. Max followed her out there and just when Mom thought that he would come home on his own, Max started barking and whining and then ran across the frozen river. Mom watched him as he found a little bush and barked and wagged his tail. Then Mom saw a little Bodrie face push through the bushes. Mom, relieved that she found Bodrie, started calling to him. But Bodrie didn't come. She could hear him whining and jumping around, then she would see his face poke through the bushes and look at her. Then it dawned on her. They had let a little neighbor boy set traps last fall for raccoons and porcupines. He must of forgot one of his traps out there. Bodrie was stuck in a trap! My mom rushed home and called my dad to tell him that she was going to cross the frozen river to go get Bodrie and if she didn't call back in an hour, send the search and rescue team out for her. Then she went out to get my Bodrie puppy. She was able to cross the river and get Bodrie out of the trap and back to the house safely. Bodrie was very sick and hungry and cold and his paw hurt him. But we nursed him back to health and he was fine after that! In the last year, Bodrie's foot got worse and worse and this last winter he wasn't able to put any weight on it at all. Stupid trap.

The last year of his life, Bodrie was pretty old and uncomfortable. His foot hurt him and he hobbled around on it. But he was always cheerful and happy to see the members of our family. Bodrie was such a good dog and was my best friend. He will always be remembered and will always be a big part of my childhood and an important member of our family.

I love you, Pup. You're such a good dog. Rest in Peace.

Dave's Florida Trip

So this post is unacceptably late. But better late than never! I was going to do a Christmas post, but I decided that I was just way way way too late for that. So I'm just going back as far as Dave's trip to Florida. Then we are going to accept that I am a slacker and move on with life. Deal? Deal...Also Dave is going to contribute to this post as well.


Dave went with his competition team to Orlando, Florida for four days. I was desperately lonely. But I hung out with some friends and with my family and it turned out ok. I just wouldn't let go of Dave's bicep for about three days. But we have both since recovered and his bicep is still as nice and muscly as ever.

I don't know too much about the competition he was in, but this is a model of the house that they did. They did an awesome job with it.

                            We received a brand new laser cutter at school and tested it out on this
                             house. It turned out pretty sweet I think. The judges liked it anyway.


It's pretty nifty and also amazing that it got there safely. However, they didn't want to spend money on it to get it back home, so sadly, it didn't make it out of Orlando.


This was the convention center that the competitions were held in. HUGE. GORGEOUS. HUGE. That's how Dave described it. I married a man of many words...

The absolute enormity of this convention center cannot be conveyed with pictures. It freakin gigantified. The first two pictures are of the south wing of the building. There is an entire other building. Altogether this entire building was the size of a medium sized airport. Not even joking.

Here is some pictures of beautiful and warm and palm treeish Orlando. (Remember that I'm still in snowy and cold and non palm treeish Idaho when these pictures were taken)

Definitely not our hotel. This was one is called the Peabody and is down the street from the convention center. We were all very jealous of the pool area. It was all ok because our little hotel ended up having a hot tub and that turned out to be quite useful at 2 in the morning.

"Oh hey, I have a good idea... lets put this building upside down! Whaddya think, Fred?"

"Sounds like a good idea to me, Frank. hehehe... let's have it sit on another building too!"

**Disclaimer... Imaginary talking men, "Fred" and "Frank" will stop now. Remember that I haven't escaped snow, cold, icy roads and general freezingness since October and this is most definitely the cause of me making up imaginary talking men... end disclaimer**

This is a picture of the front of the conference center.

At the convention center there was a program called the solar decathalon. These models are from schools all over the world. There were some from China and Australia and a couple more countries along with several from the United States. These models are for buildings that are going to be actually constructed and displayed in Washington D.C. This was my absolute favorite part of the convention. These models were just amazing and the thought and planning that went into them was extraordinary. It was inspiring to see the creativity that can be expressed in the form of buildings. Just a great thing to see.

This one was one of my favorites.

Of course the team got a few hours of playing time. So they went to:

 It was pretty chilly still. They didn't really get to swim. But they put their feet in the water and got to eat at Bubba Gump shrimp!!

Even though it wasn't the warmest day, the beach was so much fun! It was a nice relaxing little mini vacation after all our hard work. It was nice.

They did awesome on their presentation. Dave will have to say more about it. But the team got 2nd place in the Nation! Pretty amazing! Here they are with the plaque.

It is of my own opinion (David) that we should have gotten first. Of course I have a slight bit of prejudice in that area. It's just the only thing that we were able to judge against the other teams is the presentations. We saw the winning teams presentation and I honestly think our presentation was the better of the two. Its all good though. we came home with second place and that is still very good. It was a great experience and I had an absolute blast.


Awesome job team!!