happies

1. alex stayner finally joined facebook!!! i know that means little to nothing to most of my readers. (do i still have readers? {chirp, chirp} that's what i thought). he's been holding out on us for about a year now, and quite possibly longer. my jaw hit my desk when i saw my friend invite from him. i don't know who jamie schram is, but he is now my hero. (he's apparently the one that got alex to cave on the facebook thing)

2. matt moses committed to movie night!!! this is the first time in the history of matt moses friend-dom that matt has committed to host an event that he did not in fact plan. it's a big day. we threatened to just show up at his house tomorrow night and wait for him to come home and let us in. for once our idle threats worked!! movie night tomorrow at matt's house :) yay!! (although i must say that i don't believe that our threats were actually idle. after walking into the frat house to wait for someone to come find us in the living room because no one answered the door, i can actually believe that we would sit on matt's doorstep until 1. he came home or 2. the neighbors told us to leave.)

3. girls night with julia and debbie. i hate it how married friends drop off the face of the earth. i'm glad that we've been able to successfully drag debbie back from over the edge periodically. good times at buca :)

4. the best ever recipe for molten chocolate lava cake. to. die. for. very bad for you, but very like an expensive restaurant dessert. you can thank/curse me later. i'll understand either way.

5. it's friday and i'm going hiking with jules tomorrow :)

yay for productivity!!

yesterday at work i felt like nothing got accomplished. i only scanned about 20 projects in (which is not very many, by the way), had 2 hours of meetings, and then worked on different projects here and there for a few minutes each. i did manage to print off 3 reports (only 3 pages each), but i still feel like nothing got done.

today was a different story! i went through and scanned 60 projects, plus documented the elements of about 12 segments of my one big project. i just have to go through this video that has conference clips, documenting the speaker and the videographer, along with any graphics or artwork in the clips. it's pretty exciting stuff. i'm liking it a lot.

and in other good news, i'm getting a raise. kinda. i was told that while i'm training on the IP (intellectual property) stuff, i'd still get paid my normal rate of $11/hr. today i was informed that i will, in fact, be making $14.16/hr during the times that i'm working on my IP projects. exciting stuff. that'll add about $30/week to my paycheck. i'll take it!

work jokes

having re-entered the realm of the employed, i need a little humor to get me through the day sometimes. they're giving me a break from scanning and i've started working on some real intellectual property stuff. one of the projects that's been assigned to me has to do with the use of a particular font in some sort of training for family history. this video was recommended to me by my trainer.



and the sequel. . .

"i can see russia from my house."

today, as i re-enter the blogging world, however temporarily it might be, i would like to share a link to a pretty awesome montage of SNL clips from the last election. ah, the memories.

click HERE for fun.

tuesday funnies

i was reading on The Pioneer Woman (one of my favorite websites) and found this post of really funny puns. they're laugh-out-loud funny.

the sad business of cameras

i am so sad!! i had about 50 pictures from wedding weekend, and they somehow got erased off of my camera!! i had great pictures of the beach bbq, the kidlets playing on the playground, a visit to the reno temple, incredible lake tahoe sunsets, and the list goes on. and they're gone. instead, i'm left with just 15 pictures from the entire weekend. i don't know how this happened, but i'm very very sad about it. here's a few of what was left.

the golf course where the wedding took place. (not in this place exactly, but close)

me and lake tahoe from a scenic overlook above incline village.

ellie-bell

makayla with her birthday presents. we had a little birthday party for 3 of the kids whose birthdays are coming up. i missed it because i was taking a nap with marlee. that was almost as fun as a party :)

camping posse highlights in reverse order

day 4

capitol reef national park

another stamp in my national park passport book. that's why i look so excited :)

pool at the bottom of upper calf creek falls in grand staircase escalante national monument

upper calf creek falls, gsenm. this is about an 85 foot drop.

after the big dive. ashley, beth, sarah, seth (l-r)

the brink of upper calf creek falls and the location of the big dive.

into the canyon to upper calf creek falls

me, julia, ashley, beth, sarah, seth (l-r)

day 3

sarah. lookout on the trail at escalante petrified forest state park

camping posse all stars and some petrified wood

seth, me, sarah, beth, julia, ashley (l-r)

a reservoir whose name i forget. these are the sunniest skies we saw the entire weekend!

escalante petrified forest state park

day 2

we are amazing and resourceful. we found a way to put up a 10'x20' tarp in a place with few trees. this was the best idea ever.

at the very windy base of lower calf creek falls, gsenm. thanks to all of the extra rain, there was about 3 times as much water coming over the falls as usual. lucky us!

me, julia, ashley, sarah, seth, beth (l-r)

the perspective shot at lower calf creek falls. this waterfall is about 129 feet high.

sarah is happy, in spite of the rain.

day 1

this is me as a hobo.

on the first night (thursday), i camped up a dirt road with andrea and lyndsi (who later moved on to greener, drier pastures in st. george). we were worried about being able to find another campsite since it was the holiday weekend, so we left lyndsi's tent and andrea's sleeping bag at our original camp. dirt roads + rain=disaster, in case you didn't know. we found another campsite, but when it came time to retrieve the rest of our camping gear, my poor little car just could not make it up that muddy dirt road! we pulled off the side of the road about 2.5 miles down the hill from our original campsite. we started to hike up, when a couple of kind gentlemen from california stopped to see if we needed help. they gave me a ride up the hill to the campground, where i dismantled the tent and started to hike down the hill, juggling tent, sleeping bag, and pad. lucky for me, the elastic straps on the sleeping bag were completely stretched out, so i untied the knots that were in them, and converted a rolled up sleeping bag into this lovely hobo-style backpack. i met up with andrea and lyndsi just around the bend from the campsite, and we trudged back down the hill to my car. good times.