A wee piece of Ireland-- children's accents

One of our favorite tastes of Ireland, and you don't even have to be here. Plus, this will teach you about St. Patrick, one of Ireland's most famous heroes.

There are several other videos with wonderful re-tellings of the bible stories.

Fingers Crossed

CNN's reporting the Volcano has finally ceased spewing up ash! Fingers crossed. We're at less than 3 days until we're on the plane!

(This is not a picture of the dormant Volcano, it's just that the active pictures are much cooler!)*

*And this is not photo shopped

Super Transformation

In the continuing Saga of our home remodeling, we bring you the story of Cubby. Since we started working on my (super)office, we long thought that a bunch of little cubby shelves would be the best way to store all my junk stuff. Ikea's a bit expensive, and so is DI around here, so I made do with what we had. Then, last Saturday, we were going to go tag saling, but it was pouring. Nicole suggested I look on KSL an we found this for sale:

Perfect!

It was in SLC, about 40 miles away, but it seemed totally worth it. I cleaned out my wagon and headed up. The place actually had 4 of these for sale, but I just ended up getting two. They're really really solid 4'x4'x1'. After I paid for them we went to load them into the back of the wagon. Little problem: the wagon was too little! Necessity being the mother of invention and all, I said, "I do have this rack on top, I've never used it, but maybe we could strap them on?"

Another problem was that I didn't actually have any straps, but the nice people actually has some extra ties and let me use them. I'd never really used them before (they were the kind with a cinch to tighten them) but they seemed to work pretty well. I'm not expert, but I thought that they should have put some of those ties side-to-side and not just front to back. I decided to take side roads home from SLC (I used my new phone with "google maps" to avoid the highway).

A few miles down the road I saw a Wal-Mart. Remembering that we needed some travel umbrellas for Ireland (and thinking some extra rope would be handy), I pulled in. The very act of turning 90 degrees caused the stacked pile of shelving on my wagon roof to slide over two feet off the car! It didn't fall; I stuck out my arm to steady it, but could tell that that didn't help. I drove very slowly over to some empty parking stalls and very carefully got out of the car. Miraculously, the shelves never fell off. I recentered them, bought the rope (and the umbrellas, they're forecasting rain in Ireland this Friday) and lashed them up pretty good. While a plastic clothes line and a nylon multipurpose rope probably weren't the best selections, they were all I could find and seemed to get the job done. It was an extremely tense, hour+ drive (at 20 miles per hour) back to Provo, but I made it. We got right to work painting them. The thing about cubbies is it's a lot of surface area. I calculate about 136 square feet (we didn't paint the tops of each cubby) so it was still a lot of paint (I still have some silver on my hand two days latter).

And now, presenting the cubbies alter-egos, Super-Cubbies! Not a bad transformation and we've already started filling the 40 cubbies...

New House!

So the carpets came and got installed without a hitch. Now pretty much every room in the house looks brand new (except our bedroom, which is storing ALL the junk from every room that had a carpet replaced). Turns out we have nice wood floors under the carpets in our offices and bedrooms, who knew?

But truely making the house new was yesterday's arrival (last day of 4-6 weeks) of our new sectional! Ta-da! (shown with added pillow power)

AND our downstairs apartment remodel is all finished, furnished, and ready to rent (now accepting applications)

5K

Nicole and I "ran" a 5K last week at her work. It was generally pretty pathetic. When racing less than 4 miles, I don't think it's fair to be sore for 4 days afterwards. However, the pain and humiliation was well worth it; they raffled off a bunch of different prizes afterwards (at least one for everyone) and this is what I ended up with:

So I went home pretty darn happy. It only made it sweeter when I found this next one at DI for $3!

Nicole got a water bottle for her raffle. She likes it. She actually prefered it to a Nerf gun. Some people have the strangest priorities...

An ominous portent plus a happy ending

Now's probably not a good time to mention this news article to Nicole: IAA forced to restrict flights in Irish Airports

On another note, they said that our new carpet that was supposed to be installed this Thursday couldn't come till next Monday. We were very sad. We called the nice people at Home Depot. They said, "Don't cry, but that cheap carpet you wanted takes longer to order." But we were really sad, so they said, "Ok, ok, we hate to see a pretty lady cry [they were talking to Nicole (on the phone)]. So here's the deal: we can get your carpets installed this week IF we order the more expensive carpet to replace it for the same price as the cheap ones." We said, OK. Nicole wasn't sad anymore :)

Go Jump Off a Cliff!

...OK, don't mind if I do.

This actually started off as a surprise adventure that Nicole arranged for me a few months back, but the wind was going the wrong direction the day of the jump. So instead, we took the gang for a jump to get our minds off of not being in Ireland. I think it worked, but here's the pictures so you can decide for yourself.

Utah Valley from the air. (This post is about parasailing if you haven't already figured it out).

Nicole took this, her chute's shadow and myself are on the ground. Marie's in the next chute over.

My Mom shot this from the ground and features the same players as the last one.

Nicole came down and I gave her a high five while she was kinda hovering low. Then the dog came and said "Hi."

Just flying along in a paraglide chute...

My launch. Remember superheroes in training, always put on your helmets before going up, up, and away.

Learning the Ropes

We did some fun stuff around Provo when we got back from New York. First up was a really neat ropes course in Provo www.clasropes.com/provo.html . Here's some pictures and captions.

Balance work. She gets these skills from life.

Here's a tip: If you go to a ropes course, shorts might not be the smartest choice, especially, if you're wearing sandals that are a little too long and so they don't quite fit into the holes in the pole you're supposed to shimmy up. However, if you would like the unique experience of getting a have a dozen slivers in your thighs, than that's how to do it!

In this metaphor for life, you have to work as a team to get across a series of ropes that are 6 inches off the ground, but everyone pretends it's a lot more serious. Also like life, it's important to look cool while doing it. Shades can help with that. (This is my brother Seth in the foreground, he introduced us to this place after doing it with his MPA cohort).

Continuing the metaphor of life, sometimes your family needs to find an additional rope for you to hold on to with your hands to strike just the right balance or pose.

This is actually 20 feet in the air, but we zoomed in. It's also one of the few pictures of one of us in a harness that actually looks good.

They had this giant swing and you could even do flips on it, well, some of us could ;)

Nicole zip lines.

I might post some videos later. Besides Seth, Marie and Mom and a pal from Connecticut did the course with us, but I figured I'd better get their permission before posting pictures of them in a harness (there's just not a way to wear them that is really complimentary) or falling off a rope, or something, but we do have some videos...

Welcome Home

Just to recap: Because of this:

We didn't get to go to Ireland last week. We did get a few hours in New York City, where in a sleep deprive state I bought 10 I <3 NY T-shirts (only 20 bucks total!). Nicole's ably blogged about that already. To help alleviate any lasting tension, we made it home the next day, safe if not sound (we were REALLY tired by then). Marie's Mom had cleaned, detailed, and gassed our car AND brought us welcome home balloons (how sweet was that)!
We went back to work (after a few days of goofing off and jumping off things, to be blogged about shortly). Some co-workers paid enough attention to express their concern and inquire what happened with our Euro-plans, others just asked "How was Ireland?" They were sincere, so I tried not to respond with "Thanks for pouring salt in the wound."

Seriously though, after a few days to reflect on our change of circumstances (and grading 300+ papers), we made our (relative) peace with the new plans. After speaking with our respective bosses, Nicole and I both were able to secure additional time off to attempt to schedule a return trip. It won't be with Mom and Marie this time unfortunately :( However, after a half hour on the phone with Delta's people, we were able (without any additional cost) reschedule our trip for a warmer month (end of May/beginning of June)! The new trip, had we not had to reschedule because of the volcano, would have actually cost twice as much for the flights (more of the travel season) so that's a plus. Everyone around us (Delta service people and family and friends alike) have been super supportive and as my Mom would quote Laura Ingalls Wilder's invocation of her Ma (who I suppose got it from the Bard) "All's well that end's well."

Online Education

For those who like Twilight, Mormons, or Sex, the following is an interesting and informative read on the intersection of those topics. Good history lessson too, for Mormon Public Relations (and, I guess, Vampire public relations, but less so).



100 Years of Sexy Sexless Mormon Vampires