My new hopeful hobby....

Thanks to my friend Bethany, I have been wrangeled into the craft fair world. I was really excited when Bethany invited me to share a booth with her, and I was hopeful it would go really well and that I could make some extra money. So I decided I would make a bunch of cards, and bundle them together for a good price. I bunkered down for the next three days and totally busted out some pretty cute cards in my opinion. I was ready to sale and make some money!! Unfortuately, to my dismay, the fair totally sucked! This craft fair was on the weekend of the first snow, so no one showed up. Sad sad. A lot of people stopped and looked, but none bought. I got a ton of great complements, but none bought. I had people pick out a bunch of bundles, but NONE bought. So, so frustrating!!!

But, I am going to try again (mostly because I have so many cards left over) at the CSI craft fair in Nov, as well as selling them through this blog. I am really hoping this goes much better, I am crossing my fingers. If you love personal, homemade cards, but don't have the time to make them...you can buy them from me! I know most of you are talented enough to make these on your own, but again if you don't have time, I am the gal for you. So here are some pictures of the cards I have made and I am totally willing to make something else if you have a specific idea.

I am selling them in bundles of 2 for $3.00 or bundles of 4 for $6.00. As you can see, I have christmas cards, and a bunch of generic cards that are either blank, say thank you, or happy birthday on the front. All cards are blank inside. These cards can be sent in the mail with normal postage. Please pass the word on if you like my stuff or think someone else will!

little things I enjoy

A few times a year there is an event on TV that makes my DVR work overtime. It's the Barrett Jackson collector's car auction, and its aired on Speed TV. Usually the big daddy of them all is held in Scottsdale, Arizona every January over a seven day period, but here and there they will hold a smaller three day event. Luckily, for my viewing pleasure, one is taking place right now in Las Vegas. Being a big car guy I just love watching these gorgeous cars rolling across the auction block. Its also really fun to see how high the bidding goes and seeing the type of people buying them. Overall I just day dream and think which of the cars I would purchase myself. Anyway, I just got done watching today's 4 hour installment and I thought I would share the few cars I picked out as my favorite and ones I would buy if I was filthy rich.

Probably number one on my list was this 1973 De Tomaso Pantera customized by the man that originally designed the car back in the 70's. Beautiful car.


Number two would be this 1955 Jaguar XK140 roadster. I love this car for how classy it is. If I owned it I would totally drive around speaking in a British accent wearing a scarf, a monocle, and pretending to smoke a pipe.


And third I would buy this 1962 AUSTIN-HEALEY 3000 MARK II Roadster for Kimmi. She really likes them and I promised her I would get her one some day. Plus it doesn't hurt that Kimmi would look pretty dang cute driving this thing around.


Since I am not filthy rich yet I'll just have to keep my day dreaming. But maybe one day I'll be there bidding for real!!!!

House party...Ahhhh the memories..

Man I'm the blogging fool today!! Three new posts has got to be a personal record. Anyway, I found this picture on a friends facebook page and I thought it would make a good post.

I was never one to join into too many extra curricular activities through out my 12 years of public education. I was in the play/musical "fiddler on the roof" when I was a sophomore in high school, but that was about it for pretty much my entire high school career. However, at the U, I got pretty involved with the Alumni Association. I was on the Muss board for a number of years and also on the board for the SAA (Student Alumni Association). I had a great experience in both and enjoyed almost every minute of it. Even when I had to wake up at the crack of dawn to go and stand on the corner of Foothill Boulevard next to the institute building in order to wave signs encouraging people to wear red the next day (I have a picture of that too... I'll have to find it and scan it into the computer). Anyway, every year the alumni association would throw a party called "house party" and the entire student body was invited for food, fun, games, and usually a band. As you can see below I was in charge of the cotton candy machine. I loved that job and I made sure I was assigned to it every year. Mostly because who doesn't love cotton candy! Therefore, I was always very busy. The only disadvantage of the cotton candy machine? As you can see by the picture, I was pretty much wearing a good amount of the stuff by the end of the night. I do have to pat myself on the back though, my technique was amazing. Check out the amount of cotton candy I've got on that stick!!!

Bluegrass?????

Ok, so I have to post this little odd tidbit about myself. As most of you know, I love my music. I guess you could say that my genre of choice is "emo" but its sometimes hard to narrow my likes just to one genre. A few of my favorite bands include Dashboard Confessional, Mae, Jacks Mannequin, Jimmy eat world, John Mayer, and lots lots more. I was even on quite the little concert kick back when I lived in SLC. I think I was going to a couple concerts a month! Well anyway, I'll come clean... for a bunch of years now I've also enjoyed listening to a Bluegrass group called Nicklecreek on my Ipod. Not often, but usually on long drives at night I would enjoy their music. It's not exactly something that fits the mood while driving through rush hour traffic. Anyway, I recently discovered Pandora Radio online and after plugging in Nicklecreek under my latest radio configuration I have been discovering some other really good bands in the same bluegrass genre. And I'll tell you what, I like what I hear! Since then bluegrass is just about all I listen to whenever I get on the computer. In fact that's what I'm listening to right now! We shall see how long this little kick lasts.

P.S. If you haven't heard of Pandora Radio at www.pandora.com you should seriously check it out. I love it. Whenever I'm at home and just mulling around the house I'll have it playing through my computer speakers.

Mission Reunion

Probably one of my favorite parts of the weekend in Salt Lake (only second to my next and final post of this large installment of posts) is my mission reunion. Ever since my generation of missionaries got home from the good land down under 4 years ago, we have had a yearly reunion on the Friday night before conference weekend. Its always an extremely fun event. I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but I've always seemed to head up the publicity side of the whole event (aka spreading the word and trying to get a head count as to who is coming). Anyway, this year was really cool. My mission President has a part ownership in this sweet hotel up in Park City. He reserved a big convention room and had a full on, sit down dinner! It was really good! Most of all, I just love spending time with all the guys I became so close with for 2 years. I've tried to make it a real point and do my best to stay friends with a great number of my companions and mission friends. As I see it, these guys are pretty much my family for 2 years and most of them I talked to almost on a daily basis. Too many missionaries come home and sweep that portion of life under the rug by getting too caught up in post mission life. I really hope to be friends with these guys for many years to come. Thanks to all those that made it! Here are a few photos from evening.


This is the cool cake President Overton had made for the party. The lady who made it spelled Melbourne wrong...but hey look who's talking, I cant spell to save my life!


President made all those who were in the mission choir at one point sing a little song. None of us had sung together in years, so beforehand we decided to sing a few run through's to shake out the mothballs. It was kind of funny practicing "Lord, I Will Follow Thee" in the lobby of this fancy dancy hotel. We got a few puzzled looks.


A few of the guys.


Swapping war stories after the party ended.

Our weekend continued...

Body Worlds!


I found out that Body Worlds would be showing an exhibit during the long weekend we were in Salt Lake, and Mark was nice enough to buy us some tickets! I was totally looking forward to this part of the trip because I have always wanted to go, but have always missed the exhibits by like a day. So Mark, Alex, Leigh, Josh and I loaded into the car and headed downtown, where we also met up with my sister Lindsey and Patrick. I was so amazed by this exhibit! It was so fascinating and entertaining. Unfortunately, Mark hated it, but I am so happy he put up with me for a couple hours.

The exhibit was arranged according to the major systems of the body, the nervous, reproductive, digestive, cardiovascular system, etc. They use full body specimens as well as individual organs and body parts for all the presentations. Some of my favorite displays included the nervous system which started with the brain and continued with the spinal cord and the nerves branching throughout the body all the way to the fingers and toes. Another was a dissected camel! Amazing! It was huge and so cool to look at, they even had grass inside the cut open stomach. Last was the arteries, veins and capillaries of the head and brain. They just had a head in the glass case that was just made up the the blood system, there was nothing else holding it up! I wish we could have taken pictures, but it was not allowed. So check out the Body Worlds website! You can see some pictures there, as well as see how the whole process works!

Again, a special thanks goes out to my amazing husband for being willing to take me somewhere he didn't want to go, and keep a smile on his face the whole time. I know it was a fake smile, but I love you for doing it!!!

What a weekend!!!

Man, conference weekend just plain FLEW by and I'm telling you right now that I'm not going to be able to get the whole thing blogged about in just one sitting. So I'm going to try and break it up into manageable chunks. We'll see how it goes. First, I think I'll tell you about one of my favorite parts that truly without fail it needs it's very own post.

The Tour of the Tabernacle

My mom was nice enough to arrange a tour of the old tabernacle. Apparently the Young Women's presidency got to go on a tour little while back and since then my mom wanted to take the whole fam. She got her opportunity this weekend seeing everyone was in town from their respective state. I think I liked it so much because I find it amazing that most of the church buildings around temple square resemble the likeness of an iceberg. We normally only get to see the tip but underneath the surface there is a whole lot more we never know exists.


As most of you know the organ at the tabernacle is a spectacle in itself. If I remember right there are over 11,000 pipes that need to be fed air from somewhere. The air is all pumped from this room, where a few MASSIVE pumps are housed to supply all the air that is soon turned into music.



The whole fam. My sister and her kids were in town from Connecticut and my bro with his wife was in from North Carolina. Fun times.



This is Alex Dalman, she was a sister missionary in my mission (probably the only one I truly liked). She and her husband Leigh, along with their cute son Josh came up from Sydney, Australia for a little tour around America. They actually started in New York and did all the church sites until they got to Missouri. Then they flew to Salt Lake for Conference weekend. Kimmi's mom was nice enough to let them stay at her house while they were here. Alex is a very well trained opera singer who led our mission choir that I was a part of. Her dream is to sing in the Mo tab so we gave her a sneak preview and made her sing a verse of "God be with you till we meet again" while we were in the tabernacle. She did an awesome job and she even had some tourists sitting in the pews as an audience.




This is actually inside the roof of the tabernacle. They wanted to show us the old architecture of this place. It was amazing to hear about the old techniques that the builders took to build this place. As you can see a lot of steel has been added to help keep it stable in the event of an earthquake.



This is a spare pulpit housed once again in the depths of the tabernacle. It has two major uses. First, the general authorities can come down to this room where its all hooked up with cameras, teleprompters, etc. in order to practice their talk. Another use is that in the event of a threat on the conference center the general authorities could carry on with general conference and give their talks in a safe location without any interruption.



This is one of three really cool organs they have under the tabernacle. These rooms are used as places to practice as well as a place for Mack Wilberg to come and compose his music. Very cool organ even though I wouldn't know the difference between a good organ or a bad organ if it hit me in the face.

It's up to us

Hello all...It's Mark....Now I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the most politically minded person in the world. I don't put to much thought into politics most of the time because let's be honest, it's just plain frustrating and in most cases you can't do much about it. You just learn to live with the stupid laws that are made without their asking for our two cents. But that's neither here nor there, in about a months time we do get to do something about it. Its time to vote! My friends Dan and Carrie had this video on their blog and I liked it. Enough even to add it on my blog as well. It's just a nice motivator for all of us go vote... and for those who aren't registered, its a nice motivator to actually go register to vote. I don't care who you vote for. Obama, McCain.... the third party dude running in this election....whatever. I'll still be your friend either way. Just make it a point to have your voice heard this November. Anyway I'll get off my soap box...my name is Mark Dibb and I approve this message.

p.s. I hear polar bears can swim!