Happy Birthday to me!

Well It's that time a year again my birthday! It has been a good day it went by fast which was nice because I had to work an 11 hour day. When I got to work it made my day when I walked into my freshman class room and my students had got me a way cute cake and card. It was so sweet of them. They are such a great class! I took a picture of the cake but as you can see I took it a little to late lol

It was yummy! don't worry I didn't eat it all myself. When I got off work a little after 8 I met Jeff at Chile's :) It was delicious. Then I came home to some beautiful flowers. I have such a wonderful husband. I love him so so much and I don't know what I would do without him in my life!

So these next pictures are late but I still wanted to put up pictures of the milk snake that we found in our garage a few weeks ago. It was surprising when we came home one night at like 12:30 we opened the garage and this snake went inside. I thought Jeff was going to run off screaming cuz he HATES snakes lol But he actually helped me catch it. I called my dad because he loves snakes and so does Logan (he already has one snake). They came right up to grab it. We got it into a box before they got there by using a hot dog roaster stick to lift it up and put it in the box. I still can't believe that Jeff got that close to a snake, my little boy is growing up lol I am use to snakes, since I grew up with one and other odd pets.

Teknik Campout 2009 at Crystal Hot Springs.

Man has time flown by. The third blog we wrote was about the Teknik Campout last year in 2008. In that blog I wrote about it being extremely cold because we stayed up at my friend Allen’s cabin in the Uintas. Because of that we looked forward to planning the 2009 campout earlier in the summer so it would be warm at night.

Well fast forward a year now. The yearly Teknik campout didn't happen earlier in the summer like I had hoped last year it would. Infact it ended up taking place the exact same weekend and nights (Sept 5th-6th) as it did last year.

This year however we didn't go up to Allen’s Cabin. I was in charge of it so taking all local camp resorts into consideration we decided on Crystal Hot Springs in Honeyville, Utah. Its about 10 miles north of Brigham City. I remembered going there as kid and having a lot of fun. In addition the mineral pools they also had waterslides. It was only $15 bucks a night for a campsite and swimming would only cost $5 (or $10 if you wanted to do the slide) so I figured this would be a great place for the campout.









Check in for the campsite was at 2 p.m. So naturally Kiera and I didn't get there tell right after 3 lol. Luckily however we were still there before anyone else was. Everyone else was there by 5:30 so we all got the campsite's set up and relaxed and chatted for awhile before deciding we wanted to go down to the pools. We all changed into our swimsuits and headed down. This is when we realized how ghetto the place we were staying at really is.





There’s no easier way to say it. This place is bad. It is very beat up and run down and very very ghetto. The main lodge felt like it was falling apart. The locker rooms were probably the nastiest ones I’ve ever seen. The pools were also very dirty and nasty. There Olympic size pull looked like there was mold growing in it and they didn't even bother cleaning any of the mineral pools so it had a ring of rust around it. The waterslides had to be a safety hazard. The building looked like a hillbilly shack in the middle of nowhere constructed of whatever scrap piece of wood or plastic that they could find. I seriously felt that if you stepped in the wrong spot you would go crashing thru the floor to your death. I also never saw any adults working there. None. Only a bunch of 16-18 year old girls who looked like they could care less what was going on. The girls running the waterslide just sat in a little shack the whole time chatting to each other. Not watching anyone making sure things were safe. With all that being said though the hot mineral pool did feel amazing. Just don't get the water in your mouth lol. And the slide was a lot of fun. But overall the water park portion of the resort needs a lot of help.











After getting back to the campsite we got the fire going and decided to start roasting hot dogs for dinner. Surprisingly the Campsites were pretty decent here. They were large and had plenty of room. The only complaint about the campsite it self was how small the fire pits are. They were very large as it was. But then to add to it they have like have the pit covered with a grill type thing. We made it work though. After dinner we moved on to cooking some smores as well.















After dinner and the Smores the drunkenness in some of the guys really started to come out. Between the yelling, flaming marshmallow fights, spraying beer everywhere, and late night trek over to the railroad tracks to lay around $6 worth of coins on the track I’m surprised they all didn't get yelled at by another camp site sooner then they did. (which was at 1 in the morning BTW).



















One thing about the campsites though that contribute to the ghetoness of the resort is the bathrooms. Or the lack there of. They have portapotties. These being really dirty and gross. But don't expect the ones in the lodge to be much better. They were probably just as nasty as the portable ones.

























After a few games of Catchphrase (which none of the drunks could figure out) it was off to bed. Those train tracks which we laid the coins on were only about 200 feet from our campsite. During the day and that whole night we were awake we only saw 1 train go by. So of course 3 of them had to come by in the middle of the night. It was bad. Seriously it felt like the train was going to come right thru our tent. It was so loud. And then of course we couldn't fall back to sleep afterwards. It also started raining as well early in the morning so that kept us up with splating of the rain on the tent.







The next morning when we got up Kiera made some amazing pancakes and eggs for everyone. Then it was time to pack up and head back home. Unfortunately my camera died early in the morning so this is the only picture from breakfast (your all probably pictured out anyways after reading this). Overall it was fun being with the crew and spending time with everyone. Its not very often anymore that we all get together like this. Even though the place we stayed was ghetto we still had a lot of fun being around close friends and enjoying one another’s company. As I said last year I look forward to next years campout again. This time I wouldn't mind it being the same weekend again. Just in a much nicer and less ghetto location.





On one final note it was awesome to see BYU win the game on Saturday and pull the upset against Oklahoma. I'm a huge BYU fan so it was great to see them get off to a great start this season. I think we are in for some exciting Collage Football this year. Especially within the Mountain West Conference. Go COUG'S!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Updates around our House

We just passed our 5 month mark that we've been in our new house. When I originally made the post about our new home I said that there were a few things we would be changing. Well I haven’t shown any of those updates yet so I thought I’d share with you guys how the house is coming along. There’s going to be a lot of Before and After pictures so just giving you the heads up now.

So far many of the changes we have made have been minor. Things that you probably wouldn't even notice unless we pointed them out. We have changed out all of our light fixtures (except one cause its over the stairs) in out hallways and bedrooms. We picked up the new fixtures for very cheap at the Smiths Marketplace as well as at Lowes and they just look so much nicer then the old ones.

Hallway Before:


Hallway After:


Next to Each Other:


And me being the little handy man that I am LOL:


And here are the pictures of the bedroom fixtures.

Before:


After:


Another small project we've been working on is our door handles. When we bought the house it had the cheap and ugly gold door knobs and hinges. We changed out our front door and rear door right away so we could have new locks on the house. We changed them to a much classier set of handles then the basic Gold that were there before. We also started switching out the door knobs in the house as well to the better and classier looking design and silver color. I just need to go get the silver hinges and our downstairs doors will all be switched over.

Front Door:


Back Door:


Kitchen Pantry Before:


Kitchen Pantry After:


Knobs side by side:


By far the largest project we have done so far though is our Bedroom painting. We bought a few sample colors a couple months ago and painted some squares on the walls. We decided which we liked best and picked up the rest of the paint and last week we started on the project. Because of how dark the walls were it required us to do 2 coats of primer before the actual paint. I never realized how big of a pain painting can be. But I guess its worth it in the end when you see it finished. We aren’t done with the bedroom yet but we are almost there. We just need another day when Kiera and I are off work together.

Bedroom Before:


Bedroom After:


And some random pictures while in the process:












We also got blinds to put in all our upstairs windows since none of them had them before:


In our Garage we installed an automatic opener so Kiera could park her car inside and not have to get out to open and close and lock the garage every time she wanted to pull in there. I also got some shelve and hooks to organize everything somewhat better:




There hasn't been a whole lot going on outside the house in our yard other then regular mowing, edging, and watering. We had a few broken sprinklers when we moved in so Tyler came by a couple months ago and showed me how to fix or replace broken sprinklers. So now all of them are working good and our front yard is looking great. We are going to be ripping out the little area in front of our house where the pond currently is. It all looks like crap so we are going to dig it all out and put a flower bed there. Kiera already bought her bulbs for it. Now I just need to stop being lazy and get it ready lol. I just need to get with Tyler again to set a date but we talked about finishing our back yard at the end of the month. He just needs to come over to till the ground up and then we will dig the sprinkler trenches, put the sprinkling system in, and throw seed down for the lawn. I will also be building 2 garden boxes to have a small garden behind our garage.

Our patio is almost complete as well. We bought a Patio set from my work to go along with our grill so now all we need to do is finish the back yard and we will be set:


So that’s pretty much where we are at now. Almost all the little changes we had planned are complete and now just the large ones remain. We still plan to finish painting our room, Doing a complete makeover to our Bathrooms with new Paint, Tile, Light Fixtures, and Counter Tops. We will also continuing the wood look Prego flooring that currently in our Family room into the Kitchen and doing a lot of touch up painting. I would also like to paint our hall ways to match the Bedroom and Bathrooms better as well as the new carpet to come further down the road. All this in addition to the yard project which will hopefully be done before our Vacation in October. Anyways we will update this again when we add more stuff. Thanks for reading.