How could I forget about this!

I'm all over the place with my timeline but lets talk about the fourth of July! (I cant believe I never wrote a post about it) Oh well, regardless we had a fun day. We've recently started on a quest to try to get Beatrice to like water. Mostly I want to see if she would like swimming. We thought we would start easy by getting her a kiddy pool to play in. As you can see in the picture she was reluctant to get even close to the little pool.

Plan B: we thought we'd take her to a larger body of water. The Snake River. Once again she would have nothing to do with it. Oh well, either we need to just throw her in water somewhere or come to grips with the fact that we just don't have a water dog.


Kimmi and I then decided to have a little BBQ before we went to watch the fireworks.

Twin Falls has a great fireworks show just north of the local college. We got as close as we could because I'm the type that likes to "FEEL" the fireworks. You know the kind where they explode and you can feel the explosion? Here we are relaxing in the grass watching the pretty colors.

Yeah for the Aspers

Our first guests that came and visited our newly remodeled basement were the Aspers (I'm sorry guys for taking so long to write a post about your extremely entertaining visit). Kendall Asper was one of my companions on the Mormon mission and he just so happened to marry one of Kimmi's kindrid spirits. Those two are like BFF's now. Megan also is the freaking cool girl who got us the hook ups allowing us to buy "Wicked" tickets WAY before anyone else. Here are some highlights from their trip.

Most native Twin Falls folk would run me out of town for admitting this, but for the first time since moving to Twin Falls we went and saw the waterfalls. TALK ABOUT AWESOME! I was extremely impressed. The water level was high and just plain looked cool!


Then we went and watched people almost jump to their deaths off the bridge. Luckily they were wearing parachutes. Its actually a weird sight when you first move to twin and while driving across the bridge you see people standing on the railing getting ready to base jump. Not something your used to seeing every day. The only down fall is that when people are actually planning to jump off the bridge to commit suicide no one seams to notice. This actually happened the other day. A guy was about to jump to his death for real when one of probably many drivers that sped past finaly stopped and tried to stop the guy while her daughter called the cops. The cops actually didn't believe the daughter at first. They just kept saying "its probably just a base jumper. Did you look for a parachute?" The lady took it into her own hands and pinned the guy to the ground until cops finally came after much convincing.

You most likely cant see it, so I drew an arrow pointing out the guy jumping in this photo.

We also went to the Temple open house! Extremely gorgeous. I'm stoked that now its open we can go whenever we want and we don't have to drive more then 5 minutes!!

The guy we asked to take this photo was the first person I have probably met that doesn't know how to use a camera. Believe it or not this is the best and the least skewed of the 3 photos the guy took.

Thanks for visiting guys it was a blast!!! It was also really fun to hear that you're having a baby!! Congrats.

Beatrice and her favorite summer activity

This is too funny not to post, and I have been meaning to do so for a while now. I have been waiting to get a really good picture to document. A few summers ago, Mark bought me a wonderful porch swing for my birthday. I love swings of any kind, and I have ended up spending many hours on this one reading, sleeping, etc. Well, it seems Beatrice loves this swing as much as I do. She loves to be outside in the warm weather and bask in the sun. And her new favorite thing is to swing on my swing. We often find her just sitting on it looking around the yard, pondering if you will. She takes a running leap onto the swing, sits down and actually swings for a while. Once it stops moving, she lays down and takes a nice nap. It is pretty funny to watch. I have to say that we never encouraged this behavior (I hate dogs on furniture), she just figured it out on her own. Its sad to say, but I doubt we can break her of the habit. Believe me, we have tried. I guess I will have to share my swing with someone other than Mark after all.

Flying update

As I posted about a month or so ago, I have started a life long dream of getting my pilots license. I just thought I'd give a quick update. As of now, I have taken about five or six lessons accumulating about five or six hours of flying time. Its been very exciting learning and nerve racking at the same time. This last weekend we had one of my mission companions and his wife come visit us from Ogden (a post exclusively about that event is in the works). Anyway, I had my flying lesson on Saturday, so I had Kendall tag along. As my instructor says, "hey its your hour of flying time. If you want people to sit in the back seat and watch, you are more then welcome." I hope Kendall had a good time. It was his first time in a small airplane. I'm sure he was a bit scared at times because in this lesson all I did was practice taking off and landing. We did eight touch and go's in all, and in most of them my instructor just made me do everything without any help. Needless to say I had a few harder landings, but hey that's how you learn right? Kendall was nice enough to take a photo of me in my complete focused/serious state. As he put it afterwards on our way home "man, I've never seen you so intense!"

Lets all go to the lobby???

Tonight Kimmi and I went to see the new Batman movie (great flick by the way....except for the part when that beautiful Lamborghini was smashed to smithereens) Anyway... we were sitting there, enjoying this stunning piece of cinematic entertainment and "BAM" the movie stops! And up comes a sign for intermission!!! WHAT!! do we live in the 60's??? There's no intermission in Batman!! Did people protest? NO! Like lemmings, everyone stands up and leaves the theater to fall for the marketing ploy and buy more snacks. Well you know what I did??? I'll tell you what I did. I stood up....walked out of the theater....and bought a bottle of two dollar water...sigh...hey, if you cant beat them... join them. Anyway, after a short break, the movie began again and we got to watch the final instalment of the greatness called Batman. I just thought it was funny they actually had an intermission. Gotta love Idaho!

always a good laugh

Probably my favorite comic out there is called "Pearls before swine." If you've never heard of it I'll post a link so you can read it daily like I do! http://www.comics.com/comics/pearls/ I like it because its more of a comic for grown ups. Sometimes the characters even cuss! (exact words blocked out with "*$#%#" of course) anyway I just thought I'd post a frame from Todays strip. It made me laugh.

Gummy bear heaven...my happy place

You call that a wrench? THIS IS A WRENCH!!

So, as you know, since nice little mormons boys stray away from the "typical" bachelor party before they get married they have a substitute. It's called a "man shower." Typically, or at least in my case, this consisted of a get together with my male compadres, dinner, and the exchanging of gifts. But not just any gits, no no no. We get TOOLS!!! I can honestly say that I have used every single tool I was given at that event.....all except for one..... THE WRENCH OF DEATH. A few of my friends pooled their funds together(you know who you are) went to harbor freight tools and purchased pretty much the largest wrench they could afford. Honestly and truly it was the largest wrench I have ever seen in my life! I'm pretty sure if I were to ever use it as a weapon, I would easily kill my opposition with a single swing. However... sadly I said to myself when I recieved this wrench "when the crap am I going to use this thing?" But don't fret, I kept it because on the other side of my brain I realized, you know?...one day you are going to have a task that I'm going to say "Hey I have a perfect tool for that!!." And guess what? A little over two years later.. that day arrived! This last Monday was demo day on the guest bathroom in our house. I got it all done except for two tasks that I just couldn't complete! 1. The stupid old spigot on the tub wouldn't come off. 2. The line supplying the toilet with water was just not going to leave without a fight! So in my last attempt to get my jobs done I grabbed my mega wrench and with the ease of the butterfly fluttering in the breeze the two tasks were DONE! I was very impressed and very thankful that I had such a tool. So thank you all who participated in getting me this great gift.