Best $3 I Ever Spent!

A few weeks ago I came across something I have always wanted, or at least wanted for the past 4 years of school, but never actually went out and bought. Yup a George Foreman "LEAN MEAN FAT reducing GRILLING MACHINE."

I found it at a garage sale and bought it on impulse because hey, it was $3. Best impulse buy ever! James and I have enjoyed many a delicious meal from this little baby including yummy hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken, etc. Now every time we use this beauty James and I end up looking like this...
That's why I had to share the news.

Lake Powell

It is that time of year again, not the time of year where we go to Lake Powell, but the time when I actually get around to blogging about Lake Powell.

This year at Lake Powell was pretty atypical because there were no major storms or disasters, oh yeah, except once when the boat overheated.

Overheated Engine Story

So, the overheat story is that we headed out on the ski boat to find a place to camp on our trip. You want to find a place with a sand beach, plenty of shade, that is tucked away from the elements, and its hard to find all of those things in one spot so we just go out and find the best we can. The houseboat comes after us, but it takes an hour or two longer to get to where we make camp.

As we (in the ski boat) were rounding the last corner into where we make camp (or search for a camp area to make our own) the boat set off a warning alarm. We immediately stopped the boat and turned off the engine. As soon as the engine was off we could hear a popping sound coming from the engine. It was the sound of the water in the engine boiling. We tried to radio back to the house boat for help, but they were far beyond our radio signal. My little sister had a cell phone with signal so she sent out a mass text to everyone on the boat saying that we were stranded. Of course, who other than a teenager is going to have their cell phone on them while at Lake Powell. It was probably about an hour before we got a text message back and were able to tell my dad what had happened. He said he would come out immediately on the other ski boat (which is my uncles) so we told them where we were.

While we waited for them to come, we drifted quite a bit off course. We tried to radio them some more, but my dad didn’t have his cell phone so we couldn’t call him. Eventually an hour later they found us. Just as they found us we saw our houseboat come around the corner. So we’d been baking in the sun for tour hours and still didn’t have a camp. My uncles ski boat headed in to find a camp, taking most of the passengers. My dad, my brother Jon, and I stayed to work on our boat.

Amazingly my dad had the foresight to pack a spare impeller on the ski boat. (The impeller pulls water out of the lake and feeds it through the boat’s engine. That’s how the engine stays cool.) The impeller in the engine had actually shredded and clogged so that no fresh water was getting to the engine. Good thing we shut it off. It probably took us another hour, but we finally got it fixed and went in to find where we had made camp. Amazingly they had found a spot with everything you could want. It was the best camp spot we’d ever had at Lake Powell.

Pictures and Video

Here we have Paula on a wakeboard. She did much better this year. Not only could she get up consistently, she could direct the wakeboard and stay up for longer periods of time. Go Paula!

Here is a picture of me about 8 feet up in the air. I’ve just finished my first back flip rotation and am contemplating whether I should make a second one before I land or whether I should instead do a 360 spin. Oh wait, this isn’t me in the picture. This is my brother. Woops.

This is actually a picture of me. So I still caught some air. Good enough I guess.

Ok, here some video links are to some tube wars. If you are unfamiliar with tube wars, check out the post from last years Lake Powell trip in July 2008. You’ll get the run down of the rules there:

Typical – this is a typical tube wars video. It shows what happens on a regular basis.

Flipped Twice – in this video I was flipped twice but held on and rolled it back over. Kind of cool. It’s my sister and me against my brother and a friend of ours.

Intentional Roll – in this video my brother jumps onto my sister’s tube and is trying to pull her off. She intentionally flips the tube, knocking him off, but she holds on under the water until the boat stops.

Blogging without Pictures

Have you ever had the experience where you would like to blog about something, but you suddenly realize that you don’t have any pictures to post with the blog entry? That’s depressing, let me tell you, its like having a black and white TV when everyone else has 1080p HD TV’s.

Well, with that said, I have to tell you the funniest baseball experience ever. JSYK (just so you know [I just made that up, isn’t that grand. It’ll be the next FYI or TTYL]) this was among a group of friends (coworkers), men and women who were all highly competitive but at the same time we were all just having fun. For example, in this form of baseball we had a hard foam ball and a hard foam bat with a plastic core. There were no strike outs, but other than that it was mostly regular baseball. Oh, and stretching to rules was ok in a lot of cases, so it was flexible baseball.

My team was down by a few points and the game was almost over. I looked out and saw that we had people on 1st and 2nd base, and we had two outs. I thought I would be funny, so I walked over to third base (right next to our dugout) and as soon as the ball was hit I ran in to home. All the sudden both teams counted it as another run. I didn’t expect it, but no one from the other team had seen me walk over to third from the dugout. So know I was a bit confused because I didn’t know if I should tell them, but before I could reach a firm decision the game was already underway again, so I just kept it to myself and told two teammates in the dugout what I’d just done. They thought it was hilarious. We ended up in the end, winning the game by 1 run.

So, the next day we all are in another meeting and we make the announcement that last nights game was actually a tie. Everyone is a bit confused, so I tell them what I just told you. Fortunately everyone was laughing and everyone was actually happier that the game was a tie (even the winning team was glad it was a tie). I guess we all just like to have fun and we don’t care about who wins. How cool is that?

Timpanogos Pics!

Well, we have pictures uploaded to our computer and boy is there so much to blog about this month. Hopefully I will share it all with you, but for this post I just wanted to share pics from our ordeal…I mean hike up Timpanogos. (Actually the hike up wasn’t so bad because we were all looking forward to getting to the top. It was the hike back down that got hard. We kept expecting to see the parking lot after leaving each valley only to find another set of switchbacks and obstacles ahead.)

Starting out with the sun just barely starting to come up.

  Dave leaping obstacles.

A beautiful valley.

Mama Moose, Daddy Moose, and Baby Moose! It was fun to see these from a distance. However on our way back down the trail James heard the clomp of a big hoof right behind him as he was the last in our train of people. He turned around to see a giant Mama moose right behind him. She was big and we scrambled up the side of the trail to let her pass. It was quite an adventure.

  

More obstacles.

Even MORE obstacles. These parts were ok, it was when we got to parts of the trail that were completely covered over in rocks or snow that it was hard. We had to climb the snow and rocks using hands and feet to keep from sliding down.

 

Here is a portion of what we climbed. Beautiful. I wish we had gotten pictures of all the wild flowers. There were fields of them and there were so many different kinds too!

Niel enjoying a little PB & J in another beautiful valley just before the hike gets kind of hard and ugly. It was in this valley that I learned the importance of always bringing baby wipes or toilet paper with you wherever you go. Luckily April was prepared and she and I learned in a patch of trees how to really “rough it.” FYI  for anyone who may want to go on this hike, there is one toilet halfway up the trail but it is full to the top and falling over so make sure you have someone to act as a lookout for you as you have to get up close and personal with nature.

Success! Actually this is not the very top. This is the “Saddle” but we decided it was close enough. Getting to the top would have meant climbing over a treacherous trail for another hour and then having to come back down for an hour. We decided to call this good.

Here’s the view looking over one side of the mountain.

Here’s the view looking over the other side of the mountain.

Pioneer Day

So today is Pioneer Day for all of us Utahns which is great because it means a vacation day for so many of us. We decided to celebrate the pioneers by going on an 8 hour hike as a tribute to their hard work. Ok, we actually did it because my brother-in-law Dave called us up yesterday to see if we would be up for hiking Mt. Timpanogos. We were all for it. Little did we realize what we were getting ourselves into. We got up at 3:30 so we could be at April and Dave's by 4:30 am. After piling in the car and a winding drive we began our hike at 5:40 am. (This is the only way to do this hike by the way. Do not try and do it in the middle of the day, it is just not worth the pain you will have to endure.) We hiked about 13 miles total and my body is now so tired. Now that I think about it, this was a great way to celebrate Pioneer Day. I am so grateful for them and what they endured. I don't know how they crossed the plains and came to the Salt Lake Valley except that they couldn't have done it without exceptional faith.

The hike was so beautiful and probably my favorite I've ever done because of the many many wild flowers, rocks, snow, and waterfalls. I wish the computer would recognize my camera so I could download the pics we took, but for now these will have to give you an idea of the hike.

And the Verdict is.....

Ok, I may have to catch a bunch of you up to date before I reveal what in the world "the verdict" actually means. You see I'm super bad at sharing this kind of news but James and I are expecting Baby Speirs #1. I'm 20 weeks along which means I should only have about 20 more weeks to go. So I am sorry for this late notice to so many people that we have not told. I'm more of one of those people who would rather everyone just figures it out on their own. (For some reason I feel awkward telling people this kind of stuff).

James however insists that we tell ya'll now even though I think it would be fun for people to just discover that at some point we had three kids and a fourth on the way.

So once again, I am sorry, but now it makes the wait only half as long for you. :)

And now for the really exciting stuff. (drum roll) We are having a happy, healthy little GIRL. Yup, "Baby Speirs" can now be "Baby Suzzy" or "Baby Gretchen" or whatever you want to call her as long as it is feminine in nature. (As you can tell, we're needing some name help so please feel free to suggest).

Cable and Internet

Anyone who knows me (James) knows that I love computers and I love fiddling (not with the musical instrument, with electronics). For example, I would love to have a smart home some day. That’s the type of house that your can program to turn on your lights and stuff and the house can call you when you’re kids get home from school if your out of town. Stuff like that. Anyways with that small rant, here is what I did just recently.

I cut a hole in the wall of our living room.

You may be thinking, what an odd shape to cut into the wall of your living room. Why not a triangle, or an octagon. Rectangles are so boring their almost, as our parent used to say, “square”.

The reason for the rectangle is because I am wiring up a cable output. Previously the cable (for TV/internet) cam out of the floor itself. See this before picture below, it’s coming out of the floor on the right side of the room. The white rectangle you see next to it on the wall next the floor is not the cable output. The cable is literally coming out of the carpet.

Before I go too far, notice how thick the wall was when I cut through it (2 pictures up). It must have taken me an hour or two to cut through it and here is why:

1. I couldn’t find any studs so I didn’t know where to cut. The reason I couldn’t mark studs is because the wall is too thick for our “deep” stud finder. Seriously, it’s a “deep” stud finder.
2. The wall was so thick and took a while to cut through. (About 1 and 3/4 inches thick.)
3. There were 4 layers to cut through: drywall, paper, plaster, and wood planks.

Anyways, enough stalling, here is the finished product:

What’s that you say, not a cable output only? Of course not. I had to add internet too and while I was at it I though I would add video and audio lines that connected to the DVD player, TiVo, etc in the basement. This the video/audio lines we can watch on the upstairs computer monitor whatever is on the downstairs TV. Nice hookup eh?