Weekend in review

We had a busy few days and this is the first chance I've had to post for a bit. Saturday morning Cerra and I dropped mom off at the airport. She took a trip to Salt Lake City to visit the family. We came home and poked around the house. Cerra played with the animals and tended to some chores while I tinkered with the computers. About 3:00 we headed out to meet the Panike family and go boating at a nearby reservoir. Linda (Mrs. Panike) was ill and stayed home, which was disappointing because Cerra and I just love her. But we were pleasantly surprised to find that Hayden (the Panike's son) brought Kimball and Carlie Palmer along. Kimball and Carlie are from another great family we go to church with, and Cerra teaches Carlie's Sunday school class. Chris (Mr. Panike) was at the helm of his bass boat most of the afternoon, whizzing Cerra and the kids around the lake on skis, knee-board and tubes. Toward the end of the day, Cerra took the helm and dragged Chris around the lake for a few laps. By 7:00, about when we pulled the boat out of the water, everyone had been towed a few times and had their fair share wipe-outs.

Early Sunday morning, we were awakened by the sound of the five kittens Dweezle had given birth to while we slept. Great, more cats... anyone need a mouser? I wasn't feeling well and reluctantly stayed home while Cerra went to Boise to attend church with Doug Craven's (Cerra's dad) family. The reason for attending church in Boise was a farewell for Devan, Doug's step-son, who is going on a LDS mission to Singapore. Coincidentally, Linda Panike was born and raised in Singapore, and it's likely that Devan will meet some of her family and friends there. I spent Sunday recovering from a long week, and my dear wife was home by 6:00.

Monday and Tuesday were pretty uneventful work days. The only thing of note was Mom's safe return from her trip to Utah yesterday evening. Cerra picked her up at the airport, and it sounds like she had a really fun time with Nolan, Alan, Ani, all the kids and the kids' kids.

Flowers

Today is such a beautiful day in the country, not a cloud in the sky. The flowers are looking especially nice. I was outside today taking pictures and I couldn't help but take tons of the flowers. This sunflower is growing in our garden and is about 8 or 9 feet tall now and just barely blooming. The wild sunflowers were a pleasant surprise for me this year. I've been wanting some around and only seen them at the neighbors'. The little blue and gold flowers are in a dense cluster of flowers that is about 2' x 2' in our garden. I think Kathleen just dumped the seed packets in a pile and started watering. :) They sure are cute little flowers though. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
I absolutely love the color combination of yellow and blue - if you couldn't tell. I especially like that combination when it's a brilliant yellow sunflower in front of a bright blue sky... mmmmm preeeeeettttttyyy. Notice the picture of the three wild sunflowers on the top right. I really like how this picture turned out with all three in the picture at different focal points. I think it has a cool effect.

The penguin has landed...

Time to geek out a bit. Cerra and I spent some time yesterday getting a Linux system up and running. We used an old Pentium III 450MHz system that was gathering dust. Cerra slapped in a new DVD-ROM (the optical drive had been cannibalized some time ago), we made a boot floppy (yup, the motherboard is too old to support booting from CD), installed from the CD and shazam... we have Linux. We chose to use a distribution called Ubuntu (based on Debian) because of its stability and robust support cycle. I've installed Apache, MySQL and PHP and now have a nice little testing server on my LAN... and I just wrote this post from the new server. How fun is that?

I think I'm in love... again

As far as love goes, Dillon is number one... but a close second has come along. ;-)

Seriously though, this animal is incredible. Her name is Star. She came with that name and it's perfect. She looks like a fairly tale story when she runs. Her tail streams behind her like a proudly soaring flag while her strong neck stands erect. She whinnies to me whenever she sees me. We run around the corral together, and she shakes her head in excitement as she follows me.

I have never met a horse I have liked so much - most of them have been geldings though (neutered, male horses - for you city folk), and we all know boys are harder to deal with.

When I first saw her, I wasn't all that impressed; she was cute but nothing to right home about. Now I think she is the most gorgeous horse to walk the Earth, so I think her personality has a lot to do with it.

She is a three year old appaloosa and mustang (they think) mix. She was an accident. The people who had her before said that her mother escaped, came back and then 11 months later she came along. She is green broke (just barely trained to ride) but very malleable - she aims to please.

She is supposed to be pregnant now and due to foal in April. Her stallion is a beautiful black one. He's impressive without getting to know his personality.

We share apples and hang out together. I love this horse!!!!

Still Madly in Love

Today is Dillon and my anniversary. We are still so madly in love. This has been a great year for the two of us.

Straight-jacket anyone?

Friday morning and I've just finished my daily "web-crawl" (email, news, online job search). I've been strategerizing how on earth I'm going to budget enough time for the five web site projects I need to tackle. Couple that with the time spent fixing Windows for friends this week and my anxiety over finding a good job, and we get a serious case of stir-craziness. Cerra has spent a lot of her free time this week glued to "The Sims 2". We need to get outside!

Fortunately, we're slated to spend some time next Saturday boating with the Panike family, some good friends from church. In the mean time, I'm hoping that next week proves to be productive. Productivity always relieves stress and makes me feel better.

Welcome to our blog!

Hi all! Dillon and I have created this blog to keep our family and friends up to date on our lives. Please comment on any of our posts - we love to hear from all of you!