Tree Huntin'

In Cedar we don't go out and buy Christmas trees like the city folk. No sir, we go Tree Huntin'. Tree Huntin' is when you buy a $5 tag from the city, drive out into the cold and treacherous mountains with nothing more than your bold spirit and a rusty saw and cut your own tree down, ala Clark W. Griswold. You then "tag" the tree, take it home and put it on display as though it were a stuffed bear.

Sorry about the bad pic. This is us with our friends the Sidwells after we bagged our wild tree. We got it from a camp ground, which I am pretty sure was illegal. Oh well, teach them to put better directions on that map of theirs.

It's official...

Two lines means baby.

Just got clearance from the committee to release this: We're prego. Well, really we're not, just my wife is, but it's a teamwork sort of thing you see.

I'm really excited. It's been a little tough as she's not always her usual cheerful self and spends considerable amounts of time praying to the porcelain god. As a guy I want to just make everything better. It's hard to be in a situation where you can't.

It's amazing to look at her and think, 'Wow, right now my wife is making a person. Have I done anything productive today?' I made a little snowman a couple days ago, but it's just not the same...

Our due date will probably be late July or early August, although if we follow recent familial trends we can expect it sometime in April.

St. George Triathlon

So I've decided to enter a triathlon. The St. George Triathlon takes place May 13th, 2006 at Sand Hollow State Park. Yessir, 700 meters of vigorous swimming immediately followed by 10 miles of mountain biking, 3.2 miles of running, and, from what I hear, 10 minutes of freestyle puking. Needless to say, I'm very excited and have been training for about a week and a half. This should be interesting for 3 reasons:

1. I despise running as a form of exercise;
2. I pretty much taught myself how to swim and therefore have no technique (my stroke of preference happens to be the "underwater torpedo", which I made up); and
3. Every time I've started training for a relatively large athletic event I inevitably get injured. Sprained ankles, bad knees, debilitating diarrhea, you name it. Well, maybe not diarrhea, but you get the picture.

The training schedule isn't half bad though. I was worried I would have to run 2-3 hours a day and start rinsing my cottage cheese (Sorro should get that reference), but really it's just about half hour a day. I can do that.

So of course I'm excited about it now, but the real test will be to see if I keep it up once the initial excitement wears off. Just like blogging...

Back Home...

Ahhh... It's good to be home again. This week was the end of Regional Meetings. Tuesday I was in Vegas and Wednesday was Phoenix. Here are some pics:

In Phoenix we stayed at the Arizona Golf Resort, a beast of a nice place full of sun, golf, and old people.

Here's the front of my room. A boring pic, I know.

Here's the backyard though, a nice green golf course.

More golf. Don't have any pics of Vegas, the place is no longer a novelty to me and I don't find it picture-worthy. If you're immensely disappointed about this and aching for some candid, high quality pics of Vegas (such as the ones of Phoenix I have displayed here), then you can visit the great state of Nevada's webpage. I'm not even going to bother getting you a link for that.

It's good to be back. I find I appreciate Cedar City a lot more when I leave it every once in a while. I also came home to some pretty big news, though it hasn't been cleared for publication on the blog yet. Here's a hint though: akachan.

I'm in Denver

Apparently La Quinta has had a problem with eggs exploding in the microwave and decapitating hapless customers. "We're warning you, do NOT microwave the egg for more than 10 seconds! You wanna see what happened to the last guy?!"

It's Friday morning. Last day of Regional Meetings (for this week anyway). I'm excited to get back home. I've had loads of fun, but this trip reminds me of the movie Groundhog Day-- go to meeting, give little spill on Employee Management, get on a plane, check into a random hotel, go eat dinner around 9:00PM, watch an NBA game, call my wife, sleep, alarm goes off around 7:00 AM playing festive mexican music that somehow gets incorporated into my dreams, eat semi-good continental breakfast, then start the cycle all over again. Don't get me wrong--this trip has been loads of fun, but I wouldn't want to do this anymore than once every 4 months or so. Consequently, I can't wait to get back home.

Here's a couple quick pics of Denver. As you can see Denver is actually about 200 miles away, which is curious considering our hotel is next to the Denver Airport. As far as I can tell the airport is actually located in Wyoming.

See that distant, white dot? That's the start of Denver. You can't see it very well in this pic, but the entire city is behind it, and the Rocky Mountains are behind that. I was wrong about Wyoming, I think we're actually in Nebraska.

Me in front of the fabulous La Quinta Inn, Denver Airport. Oddly enough our Salt Lake hotel was a La Quinta, and my room is almost identical to the one I had there, which only adds to the eerie Groundhog Day feeling.

It's a pity we're not closer to the city, I'm a big fan of Denver. Went to a U2 concert here with some buddies back in aught-1, one of the best road trips I've ever been on. I also have another brother that lives here, Gid, but I don't think we'll have time to meet up.

That's all. Next update will be from good old Cedar City! Peace Out.

Salt Lake City

Yesterday we were in Salt Lake. Got nothing to say about Salt Lake. Here's some cool pics from the plane though.

Here's the company plane. Not flying commercial is the best: No delays, no demonstration of how to buckle your seatbelt, no waiting 45 minutes in a security line and having to take half your clothes off.

I'm kind of bummed that this one didn't turn out better. This is the Dallas Mavericks private plane, owned by the benefactor Mark Cuban himself. Our plane pulled up and parked right next to it. They were in town to play the Jazz. Jazz won.

Here's the inside of the plane. It seats about 10 people. The woman giving the unsuspecting "oh crap, someone's about to take a picture" face is Joanne, our new HR Director.

I'm in Portland

Yep, that's pretty much what I thought this place would look like.

Last night we flew into Portland. I'm excited to be here, I've always wanted to see the Pacific Northwest (Oregon or Washington) and this has been my first chance. I guess I came to Oregon once when I was a little kid, but that doesn't count because all I probably cared about was whether or not my dad was going to buy me candy. Anyways, we got here around 7:30 PM and it was too dark to see anything, but the air was cool and it smelled like camping.

I also have a brother that lives here, Adam. I called him up and he met us at a steakhouse downtown. We don't see each other or talk very often, so it was really good to see him. He moved up here with some friends just to get a change of scenery.

That was last night. Now it is morning and I'm getting my first look at Portland. I went jogging, here's some pics:

Cool houses. For some reason this place reminds me of "The Goonies"

While in Portland, participants of Regional Meetings will stay at the fabulous Windgate Inn. Amenities include a workout room, heated indoor pool, full breakfast bar, and B.O. free rooms and sheets.

That's pretty much the most ducks I've ever seen at one time.

The Cord

See. Here's the cord I was talking about. You thought I was lying didn't you?

I'm excited it's here, that means I can update much more frequently.

I'm Still Here

Look! Seals! Reminds me of the frat days...

Haven't updated lately, we've been waiting for a cord to come in so we don't have to pay WalMart $4 every time we want out pictures. That's why I haven't been updating lately. The cord's here, so I'll update soon. I've even got a pic of it so you know I'm not lying...Anyways, good stuff to update on; a trip to San Fran, Idaho, Halloween, & more. Stay tuned!

Regional Meetings

So I just found out that I will be attending Regional Meetings for work. These happen once a year and give us the chance to meet with agency co-owners from all over the country. The first stop is Sacramento, from there we go to Portland, then to Salt Lake, then Denver. Next week is Vegas and then Phoenix. We have a company plane, so that should be good.

Honestly I'm a little bummed about going to this.

HR Conference

Tomorrow I am going to a conference up in Salt Lake for the Society of Human Resource Management, of which I am a memeber. We will discuss important and boring HR issues such as current employment law and strategic planning. I've got a lot to get finished before I go so I'm going to stop writing in my blog and get to it. Ready...go.

Book Review: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

So I read this back in July but am just getting to post it now. It still hurts...

It is with a heavy heart that I write this review. What went wrong? Why this feeling of emptiness, disappointment, malcontent? Perhaps nothing could live up to the expectations I had for this book, an expectation caused by two years of eager anticipation. Reading it was like seeing the Cubs disintegrate after the Bartman debacle all over again.

I should make it known that I'm a huge Harry Potter fan (despite the constant urges it gives me to practice witchcraft and sorcery), I even wrote my own book 6 because I couldn't stand waiting for the real one. You can see it here if you want. I think that's the problem--I had thought about it so much that I had enormous expectations and was dissapointed when I saw how it turned out. I have more specific gripes about it, but I don't have the heart to go over them. They are here if you care to read them, post #44.

Anyways, HBP is a good book but it didn't do it for me. By all means check it out. Don't NOT read it because of my review. Me? I'm going to go get a new hobby.

I give it a 7/10.

The Weekend

This weekend we went to Sand Hollow State Park in Hurricane with some friends. None of us had ever been there, but we had heard it was fun so we went on faith. It was awesome--picturesque, not too hot, water not too cool, and me and Nick Sidwell went cliff-diving. I really shouldn't have, as I sprained my ankle on Labor Day and had fallen on some rocks on the way to Sand Hollow, cut open my hand and almost broke my thumb. Mmmmm....But I did it anyway. I love cliff jumping...

Sand Hollow reminded me a lot of Lake Powell, another one of my favorite spots in the world, except that it was much smaller, not as crowded, and the water was a much healthier color. I'll get some pic's up later.

Book Review: Post Captain

My latest read is Post Captain by Patrick O'Brian. Remember the movie Master and Commander with Russel Crowe? That was the film adaptation of 2 or 3 Patrick O'Brian books. There's 20 total (not counting #21, which was being written when O'Brian died) and they are very good reads. It's amazing--half the time I don't even know what's going on in the books as they are filled with nautical jargon (booms, pulleys, yards, top-gallants, royals, etc), yet somehow I'm enthralled with it all the same. At first this worried me, until my step-dad Jim (who is a big sailor himself and was the one who recommended the books to me in the first place) told me he doesn't understand most of it either.

The books take place in the early 19th century during the Napoleonic wars and center around the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey and his surgeon friend Dr. Stephen Maturin. I don't feel like writing a summary, so go check the book out yourself. I'd recommend starting with Master and Commander first though.

I give it an 8/10.

I'm officially an old man.

Remember being a kid and hearing your parents and grandparents say, "When I was your age, gasoline only cost 25 cents a gallon!" and you realized that, perhaps 50 or 60 years in the future, you would be saying the same thing to a similarly ignorant and uninterested kid?
Well, that moment has come about 30 years early for me. The other day Amy and I were driving home from work when we passed a gas station posting $2.99 per gallon and I said, "Man, when I was in high school gas was only $1.10!" I then realized that by saying this I had unwittingly come one step closer to becoming an elderly man (at least in mind-set), as I already think teenagers today dress stupid, have despicable music, and are much more superficial and directionless than I was as at their age. All I need now is to hike up my trousers and get an indescribable urge to move to St. George...

Dancing

First there was the enigmatic All Your Base Are Belong to Us. Next came the hefty hillarity of the Star Wars kid. Then the Numa Numa dance came on the scene and revolutionalized the way we look at fat kids with a computer camera and too much time on their hands. Just when I thought the internet couldn't possibly provide another nugget of joy of this caliber, I come across Matt Harding's Dancing. Go see it.


Now here's a guy who has life figured out.

Trip to England

Our trip was actually back in July but I'm working on getting it up now. I should have a new one each day.

The weekend

This weekend we drove up to Salt Lake for a reunion with some of Amy's high school friends. She had a good time and I was happy for her. For me, on the other hand, the experience can best be described by this cartoon.

We also did a yard sale with my mum and looked at cars. The end.

Hiring Your Own Boss

Slowly trudging out of the swamp. I've brought on an assistant, a beast of a nice guy named Layne, and things are progressing nicely. We're almost on top of things. You ever notice how the people who are always going off about how busy they are usually waste large amounts of time telling people how busy they are--and not working? Well, I've realized that I'm one of them.

Anyways, one of the biggest jobs I'm working on is an HR Director. My job being part of the future HR department, I am in the unique and fascinating position of being able to choose my own boss. It's pretty fun.

Swamped.

Ouch. This has been a tough week. I'm working on about 12 jobs right now, not to mention turnover reports, exit interviews, and trying to set up a buddy at work on a blind date.

My job can get stressful at times. Usually when people call me up to fill a position they need someone right away, so if I don't find someone soon they tend to get a little...impatient. It's like they think they're ordering a pizza or something: "Ok, we'd like a commercial lines csr with 10 years experience and extra people skills. Put a college degree on that. No olives. You'll deliver in 30 minutes, right?"

I'm bringing on an assistant soon, so that'll help out. For now though I'm stressing.