In Memory of Oreo

Oreo was my neice, Mikkele's cat. Oreo got very sick a couple days ago and had to be put to sleep. Mikkele is very sad and sent me an email that said that she had been crying all day. How sad for a little girl to lose the first pet that she really remembers and took care of. Poor little girl. They were good friends and she is the only one that Oreo really liked. So, on behalf of Mikkele, Oreo will be missed, but we know that he will be taken good care of in kitty heaven. Goodbye, Oreo.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY WONDERFUL, SWEET, BEAUTIFUL, TALENTED, AMAZING, FABULOUS, RADIANT, BRILLIANT, AWESOME, FANTASTIC, MARVELOUS, SPECIAL SISTER!!!

April, here is your huge, awesome shout out that I promised you the other day when you were complaining that I didn't give you a birthday shout out with everyone else! I just wanted to make sure you felt special when you got YOUR VERY OWN shout out for your birhtday!!!

Anyway, I really hope you have an great birthday and I hope you're not too bummed that you're almost 30. Just one more year. :( Then you'll really be old! Just kidding! You are going to have a great 29th year! It can only get better from here on out!

HAPPY BIRHTDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SO EXCITED!!!!!

I don't know if you can tell, but I'm getting pretty excited for the expo this weekend!!! I'll be leaving tomorrow after work and then I'll go and hook up with April and my Mom. Can't wait! This is just one of those things that only happens so often, but it is so much fun and I always look forward to it.

So, here's to all the scrappers that will be there this weekend! It's going to be a blast!

Here are some pix from previous expos that I got off the web site so you can all see kind of what it's like.

Rock Crawling in Moab

Albert's Rock Crawler

Albert has an obsession with cars, trucks, and basically anything motorized. Well, a few years ago, when we had our old Mitsubishi Raider, he got into rock crawling. He had a lot of fun with the Raider, but it eventually wore out its usefulness and we bought this 1985 Toyota 4-Runner for him to play with. Last year, he modified it a little with bigger tire and whatnot, but alas, that was still not big enough or bad enough. So, this has been his ongoing project all winter long. Our garage is no longer a garage, but a work shop for the crawler.

Here is what the 4-Runner looked like last year.


This pic is of Albert and his friend Will in our "garage" when they were in the middle of the demolition process.

Here is Albert sitting in his "Redneck Mobile".

He actually drove this thing down the road like this to our friend's house to use their shop-vac to clean out all the shards of metal and glass. By the way, they did most of this with a Saws-All.

This is the finished product. Looks slightly Hummer-ish, but I think that was intended. We took this down to Moab with us 2 weekends ago to try it out. Thanks again to Jeremy for the sweet tires! This thing is practicaly unstoppable!

I'll try to post a video of Albert going up some rocks in Moab. If it doesn't work, I'm really sorry. Maybe I'll have to call my sister for help again!

I'm a jerk.

I "forgot" to shout out to my wonderful sister, April, for helping me with my freaking long post yesterday. My computer is stupid and was not letting me arrange all of those pictures the way I wanted them to be. So, April, kindly and generously and lovingly saw that her sister was in a pickle and offered to help me out. What a gem! So...

THANK YOU, APRIL, FOR HELPING ME WITH MY POSTING LAST NIGHT! THANK YOU FOR HELPING ME WORK THROUGH MY IDIOCY AND FRUSTRATION! THANK YOU FOR ALWAYS BEING THERE FOR ME WHEN I NEED YOU! THANK YOU FOR BEING THE BESTEST SISTER IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD! AND MOSTLY, THANK YOU FOR JUST BEING YOU!!!

Oh, and she wanted a shout out for her birthday, but she's not going to get that one until it's a little closer. Mikkele, Papa John, Sid and Audrey's birthdays were all either last week or coming up on the 17th this week. So when it gets to be your birthday week, I will give you a shout out. Don't you worry! ;)

FINALLY! I know...

I know, I know... it's about dang time i finally got my act together and posted something new. It's been, what? The end of January? I will be the first to say it..... I AM A SLACKER!!! But, in my defense, I have been seriously busy the last 6 weeks and have really only been home during the week and sometimes not even then. So, the only problem now is that I'm not really sure where to start..... Okay, here you go....


I will start by asking a question. Do you all like my new background? Here's the story - About a month ago, I went and found a background that I thought I liked and changed, right? Most of you probably saw it. Anyway.... when I saved it to my blog, the new template erased tons of the stuff I had on here - pictures, my music, my contact list (which I was the most upset about).... anyway, I was so ticked off that I had no desire to go back and fix it all. Excuses, excuses. Call it whatever you want, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it. So, I just downloaded this new one, and I really like it a lot better. I really love Easter lillies and I like the look of the black. So that's that.

Last week I was in Anaheim, California for a nursing convention. That was really fun, minus a few little things, like how the trip started out and how it ended. But don't get me wrong, the middle parts were great fun! My friend from work that went with me, Jen, called me at 0830 the morning we were supposed to get on a plane to tell me that she had rolled her Expedition right by Strawberry Reservior while driving out in the terrible snow storm that we woke up to. Thank heaven she was not seriously hurt or killed. People die on that road all the time it seems like - it's a pretty dangerous highway. So her vehicle was totalled, and long story short, she finally got to our hotel about midnight. The trip ended with us finding out at the airport the morning we were to fly home that the airline had canceled her flight home because she didn't make the flight there. Once again, long story short, everything turned out alright and she was able to get on our flight on stand-by. So, in the meantime, we did have fun and we learned a lot and found lots of really cool new products. Here are some pictures!

Jen and I went to the Medieval Times jousting dinner, which was tons of fun! I've always wanted to go to one of those things. The food wasn't that great, but it was pretty entertaining, anyway!

Here I am with the Yellow Knight and the Black and White Knight. They both suck because they lost, but it's still cool to get a picture with a "real knight".

Jen is so lucky!! She got her picture with the White Knight and he won the jousting competition.

One of the booths in the exhibit had this cool giant Operation Game. Get it? Operation Game at a surgical nursing convention? Very clever....

This booth we got charicatures drawn. It was really funny because the people at this booth would sit there and make fun of you while you were being drawn. We had a good laugh.

Disneyland was way fun! This is the Matterhorn in the background.

Of course, we had to get a picture in front of the famous princess castle.

This is probably the coolest mohawk I have ever seen. It was probably like a foot long, for real!

Let's see... what else has happened? Oh, I went straight from the airport when we got home to Moab for the rest of the weekend. Albert wanted to try out his rock crawler (I will post some pix of his crawler on here soon so you all can see just how redneck we are out here in the Basin!!!) and some friends of ours were down there for a volleyball competition, too. It was great fun until I got food poisoning the night before we were supposed to go home. I haven't puked like that since I was a kid. It was horrible! I was sick for like 3 days.

I need to shout out to my cute cousin Suzi a huge congrats on your new little boy! He is a doll! Also a congrats to Mike and Camille on your new arrival! And good luck to Andy and Kelli who are expecting another baby in October! Good grief. Babies everywhere!! Congrats to Kathleen and Drew on your wedding. Sorry we couldn't be there.

What else has happened? Hmmm... We're going to Texas the second week in May. Albert has an insurance conference and I mostly get to just hang out with my mom and dad for a week! I'm so excited! I signed up to run in the Wasatch Back Relay Race in June and I am planning on doing the mini triathelon out here in August. I needed some goals and motivation to keep working out and just be consistent with my exercise in general.

Adam comes home very soon and Aaron and Brittay and their cute kids are coming over from Germany for a month to visit and all sorts of fun stuff! I am so excited to see my family all together again. That will be very cool!

Girl's Camp is early in June this year, so it will probably be pretty cold. I know, I'm a dork, but I love camp! It's such a cool time that we can bond with the girls and get to know them a lot better other than on Sunday. Hopefully it won't snow on us again. We went this same week 3 years agon and we got 6 inches of snow. Yuck!

Last, but certainly not least, this coming weekend is SCRAPBOOK EXPO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Only my sister and I and a few other people I know truly understand what scrapbook weekend really means. I seriously look forward to this weekend so much and I can't wait for Friday!!! April, Tina and I will be going into the VIP section (thankx, mom and dad!)on Friday and I'm way stoaked about that! VIP pretty much means that we are the coolest scrapbookers that will be at the expo. I know, you are all jealous, so you can stop drooling. OH! One more thing....

HAPPY BIRHTDAY MIKKELE, PAPA JOHN, AUDREY AND SID!

Okay, now I will shut up and I promise not to be such a slacker anymore.