Flowers for me!

Last night Nik needed to do some picture taking for his painting class and it involved roses. Which means...Lena gets roses! Two dozen to be exact! Thank you Costco. Nik asked me if I cared that he wasn't getting the flowers just for me, and I told him no. What do I care the reason, as long as it results in pretty, pretty flowers in my living room? And because of the number, I have two vases full. One is the pottery pitcher that Al gave me and the other is a cool vase I got at a yard sale...I think it was from Emilee actually. But she was selling it at a yard sale. So I wasn't lying.

I will post pictures later, I was just so excited to get flowers again, I had to share it with everyone! I will also post some of the pictures that Nik took for class. They are pretty good.

Be Strong

I just have to express my thoughts about our beloved past Prophet Gordon B. Hinckley. President Hinckley was the only Prophet I knew. I remember my mom calling me upstairs when I was 11 years old and having me raise my hand to sustain him during Conference. At the time I wasn't really interested in Conference and didn't know what was going on. I asked mom what that was for and she said, "We just got a new Prophet and I thought you might want to be a part of it." Thanks mom. She easily could have raised her hand to the square by herself in the family room, but she shared the moment with me, and now I have a memory of an important day in history. I am sure I will sustain more Prophets in my lifetime, but I will always remember President Hinckley as the first.

So far I have not cried over this loss. I feel very saddened by it, but I am not in mourning. I know that he is happy. I know he is with his childhood sweetheart.

I am excited for the new Prophet, Thomas S. Monson. I know he was very close to President Hinckley, and will be very intune with the Spirit as well as what Hickley would have wanted for such a "peculiar people."

He will never be forgotten.

U23D

Oh. My. Gosh. That show was amazing! Ok, start from the begining. Four or five days ago I won tickets on 107.9 The Mixfor the U2 in 3D show at Jordon Commons. I had no idea what this was at the time, but thought, "hey, Nik likes U2 and the last few 3D shows I have seen have been half way decent, so what the heck." I actually got through twice while calling. Once as caller 6 and then again as number 10, so I won! Yay! Well, the show was last night at 9:15 so Nik had to get out of class early. Luckily Mr. McKay is awesome and lets Nik do what he wants.

We got there early and redeemed our pass for actual tickets. Before the show started the morning DJ (Jay Parker, who has hooked me up with quite a few fun things through out the years) handed out some prizes. I got a tee shirt because I won on the radio, and Nik got a CD cause they still had prizes left over and he aske for one. Lucky Nik. He got the Pat Monahan album, and is letting me listen to it. For those of you who don't know, Pat Monahan is the lead singer of Train, and is doing some solo stuff. I like it.




We all got to wear Bono glasses to complete the experience. When the show started, I had no idea what to expect, but it turned out that it was a U2 concert filmed live in 3D. So cool! The arial shot of the drummer was my favorite, but the bass player does some cool stuff with the 3D. They had a HUGE tower of screens that would show different images like a posterized version of Bono or this funny stick figure guy walking on a tredmill. It was pretty cool. The whole show was about an hour and fourty-five minutes. And worth every minute. And this is saying something because I am really not a huge U2 fan, and I was amazed too.


(ps-I think this is an awful picture, but here it is anyway.)

I encourage everyone to go see U23D at the IMAX Theater at Jordon Commons. They said it will run though mid February.

Quick post

This will be fast, I promise.

I found out the other day that I will not be staying at the Main branch here at Granite Credit Union. I will be moving to the Taylorsville branch at the end of January(ish). This branch is conveniently located at 4700S. and about 3100 W. This is even more conveniently located right around the corner from my parents house! This means many lunch hours with my mom. And dad if he is home. I am excited for this move because I have been missing my mom lately! And she just got to take this great trip to Texas, so it was even harder to have her gone for a week!

So I am excited to be so much closer to her so she can entertain me like she used to!

Icicle's, Rocking out with Noah, New Frog and New Couch Cover

Ok, if this works out I will have covered all the stuff I wanted to blog about.  Here it goes.

First here are some pictures of the icicles around my building here at Spring Hollow.  I originally took pictures of these pictures because I thought they were really cool looking.  After a revelation though, I grew to hate them.  A few weeks back I started to notice the carpet my side of the bed  (the one by the outside wall) was very cold.  A little while later I noticed that it was also wet.  Wet and cold.  Great.  When I finally reported it the repair guy said it was probably water backing up into my room from the drain pipe that was frozen solid with ice(the first picture).  He took his blow torch out and cleared off the icicles and gave me a heater and a fan to run so the carpet would dry out.  Amazingly enough...IT WORKED!!!  My carpet is all dry.  I was sad to see the ice go, but I was more glad to have my problem fixed.

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Saturday Nik and I enlarged our family again.  We added little Harvey to our frog tank.

Nik got to name this one and he chose Harvey because this one has brown spots on his back, so Nik said he looked like Two Face (from Batman). Here are a couple pictures of Harvey's entrance to his new home.

Harvey is the smallest of the frogs and he is right up front in the picture above.

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Another addition we made on Saturday was a new couch cover! It is what Emilee got us for Christmas (in the form of a gift card to Bed Bath and Beyond...stay away from that Beyond section...). Unfortunately when we got to BB&B they did not have any covers that we liked. Ok, I take that back, we liked a bunch of them, but we didn't LOVE any of them. We decided that we would go to Target and search there before we settled for something from BB&B. After much searching for the Slip Cover section, we finally found someone to direct us. We looked long and hard before finding the best one. It is sage green and I love it. It is actually the same material and layout as the last one but with one very important difference...the seat cushions are in their own cover. That means that the whole cover is not screwed up every time you sit down. I am very anal about my couch cover always falling off. This new idea of having the cushions in their own cover is making my life much less stressful. The best part about this find is that it was on clearance for $22. That is amazing in the world of couch covers. And now we can use our Bed Bath gift card for something extremely useless. It will be lots of fun!

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Last but not least is to spot light a budding talent. Nik and I brought Rock Band (surprised?) over to Lou and Ten's so Kersten could see its coolness. Lou was nice enough to let us play while she was feeding the baby, who we found out is not a big fan of Nirvana, Ok Go, or Red Hot Chili Peppers. Too bad. Kersten loved playing, but I think the star of the show was Noah as he rocked out on the drums. I don't think he missed a note (of course the drums were not plugged in, but he was doing awesome hitting the colors in the right order and playing with the sticks the right way). He was upset when we told him we were done and needed to put it away. I think his parents could have a budding musician on their hands! I am going to try and post a short video I took (with my sweet new camera) so you can all see how cool Noah is!

A post for Lou

Hey, Lou!  Nik and I are watching Music and Lyrics and we just figured out the real reason you named your new daughter Sofia.  Because it is Drew Barrymore's characters name in the show!!!  All that talk about it being a family name...that was just to get Kersten to agree to it, wasn't it?  You are a sneaky one Lou, real sneaky.

Happy New Year!

Happy 2008 everyone! I have so many things to blog about, I guess I should start at the beginning. I have tons more pictures than I have posted, but I think these give a good idea of what the evening was like.

Nik and I really wanted to have friends over for a party, but our place is so small that it never would have worked out. My parents were wonderful and offered to let us have our party at their house. I am so glad they did! We only had three friends over, but with the rest of the family it ended up being a full house anyway! Mom and Dad had put out quite a spread so you know we didn't go hungry.

Lisa also brought her New Years tradition of Lil Smokey's, which were a big hit!

Of course, Nik can't go anywhere where more than two people will be with out pulling out Rock Band. That was also a big hit. This is Lisa on drums, Jake on guitar and Nik on vocals. They played for about 2 hours occasionally switching band members. I even jumped in on vocals a couple of times. My little brother Jeff is a wiz on the drums and helped out a couple times as well. While the jam session was going on my mom and I were playing Boggle. I am not quite sure why I keep subjecting myself to this. My mom is one of the best Boggle players ever...right next to my Grandma. I love playing, but I always get my rear end handed to me when I play mom. Seth came over in the middle of the blood bath and challenged a couple of our words. It was pretty funny watching Seth look up the words on his phone on Google.com.

This is how Dad spent the night. Relaxing. I think. He wouldn't participate in much, but he did observe everything. He was a big help with Boggle though.

After the count down and the ball drop and the kissing, we went out side for some fireworks. Mom must have been stashing them cause there were way to many of them to have been left over. It was a ton of fun! We all got a couple of sparklers and Seth and Jeff lit the magic whips. They were loud.

This is Jake and Lisa, two of the friends that came over. We love them.

Dad played short order cook by fixing everyone custom eggs while we watched the movie Murder By Death. I love that movie. I want to own it very badly. People started going home after they finished their eggs. It was a good night.

This is how Nik and I finished the night. All tuckered out.