June 22-27

So I finally signed up for my first-ever triathlon. I've been a lot of talk and no walk for way too long and I decided that the only way to really get back into shape and start pushing myself how I would like to is to just pay the money, sign up and dedicate myself to the task.

While I looked through the list of triathlons happening throughout the state, which were very impressive by the way because they are happening all the time, I stumbled upon the Moab tri that includes trail running and mountain biking instead of road running and cycling. Immediately I knew I needed to do this one.

It is part of the Kokopelli Challenge, named the MXT - Moab Xstream Off Road Triathlon. It is a sprint comprised of:

• 800 Meter swim - Colorado River
  
• 10 Mile ride - Amasa Back trail
  
• 6 Mile run - Jackson Trail

This is a view of the course from the top of the bike ride.

I am uber-excited to finally be doing this and now I've just got to start training to make sure that I can complete this sucker. The elevation gain on the bike is approximately 1,000 ft.! From river to the top of the mesa.

Leslie spent most of the week (Tue - Fri) up at Young Women's Camp near Smith and Morehouse. She loved it and had a great experience... minus some minor details that I'll let her expound on in her own due time, haha.

Aubrey and I spent great time together swimming and at the park. The poor thing had to ride in my truck all week (top's off). Every where we went her hair ended up looking like a rag doll :). She is the greatest thing that ever happened to us! Such a doll!

We took a hike on Saturday up to the Albion Basin at Alta Ski Resort and completely enjoyed ourselves up there. Aubrey spent most of the time in her backpack, but once we got to the top her and I ran all over the place and in the snow. She just explores everything with such fascination. She kept bending over and grabbing handfulls of snow to eat.














Today was Michael's (lil' bro) farewell. He did such a great job and sounds so mature. I couldn't believe that I was watching my little bro standing at the podium in such boldness and calm. He will do an awesome work in Salta, Argentina for the next couple of years. He is scheduled to attend the MTC on July 22, but I'll be in Chicago for work and will miss him.

We ended the day by walking around the SLC Cemetery and checking out the various graves of LDS authorities. We then drove by Nana (Lila's) old place and it brought a flood of memories to me of the great time's spent at her house on the North-West corner of 9th and M Street on the Avenues. She lived across the street of Libby Garden Park.

Father's Day

What a wonderful day to be a father! I woke up to my beautiful wife and daughter smiling like they always do. Leslie made a killer breakfast of Eggs Florentine... yum. We got to church where Aubrey finally embraced nursery, haha... she didn't fuss at all when I dropped her off and ran right over to the toys and the other girls to have fun. I love that little stinker. During the first talk of sacrament meeting she kept saying "Amen" and looking around.

There is a man in the ward probably in his 60s by the name of Jim Bleak (blake) who she just adores. While walking up to the church she says "Jim" over and over again. She just looks at him and smiles and will often run over to him and hop up on his lap and just hang out for a while. He and his wife Annelle are amazing people and we sure do enjoy their taking to Aubrey.

I taught the young men about clean thoughts and speach today... they are hilarious and total space cadettes. We had a great discussion and then one of the boys, Christian Correia, asks a question completely opposite of what we were talking about. Oh well, it happens too much to care, funny kid.

Leslie surprised me today with our first ever camcorder! I love it! She called my co-worker Nick Guido the other day and figured out what camera she should by for us. He is a smarty pants when it comes to technology and she was so smart to talk to him first and figure out what was worth spending that money on. Here is a pic of it:

Now all we need is a memory card to get this baby recording. I feel terrible that we have a bunch of short, low-quality videos of Aubrey and she's almost 2 years old. I need to get more action of her before the little stink bug grows up and we miss out on these memories.

I had a great week at work and it has never been busier. It was ARUP's 25th Anniversary and I had my hand in a lot of stuff including the ARUp yearbook, photo contest, award ceremony and other stuff. Friday night, June 19, was our work party/carnival and it was Aubrey's first taste of cotton candy and the giant bounce slides... she was ecstatic and we loved watching how happy she was.

Leslie had a brilliant idea while we were leaving. We got Aubrey a snow cone without the flavoring so really it was a giant mound of ice that Aubrey just loved snacking on... all without the worry of staining, haha. Leslie is such a smarty to come up with little fixes like that.

Saturday morning I got up at 4:45 in the a.m. to head to Talons Cove golf course out by Utah Lake in Saratoga Springs. Jordan Bloxham, in our ward, has a brother that is the head pro there and he got us on for free, if we made it out there in time for first tee. It was earlier, but just awesome! I didn't have a great game, but we had a lot of fun. I shot an 87 and Jordan shot a 77.

Well, I'm going to hop off now, Leslie is wondering when I'm coming to bed since it's getting kind of late. She will be heading up to Young Women's camp as the director this week. So it's just me and the cutie pants this week. I can't wait to spend some quality time with Aubrey, though I will really miss Les.

Brother's Campout 09

My brother's and I went on our inaugural Brother's Trip over June 12 - 14th down to Goblin Valley. I've decided to try to do a brother's trip every year from now on and this was our first attempt. I think that it was a smashing success and I loved the opportunity to hang with Russ, Robbie and Mike. Unfortunately Dad and Aaron couldn't make it... something about Dad having to shoot a wedding and Aaron being on a cruise in the Caribbean with Emily! Lucky punks!

So no pity on Aaron, however we felt bad that Dad couldn't make it. We drove down Friday after work around 4:00ish. Our stop in Price, UT was for very important items... hot dogs, buns, ice and a wiffle bat and ball (smart purchase, eh). :)

We ended up forgetting the ice... doh! But I'll get to that later. We didn't want to eat chain food for dinner, so we thought we would grab some local grub before the next 1.5 hour drive to Goblin Valley. Our choice was a place called Sherla's or some crappy name like that. It was right across the street from McDonald's (where we should've gone).

The food at Shmerloos was terrible! I got the supreme burrito and it ended up tasting like cheap store tortilla wrapped around old lettuce and cheese with some refried beans out of a can. And it was small... never going there again. Sharla's was gross! As you can tell I can't remember the name to the place... nor do I care to remember.

I drove the rest of the way to our camp site and we rolled in around 8:50 pm... right before dark, phew! We pulled off towards Little Wild Horse Canyon and found a side road leading to a few hoodoos where we dry camped for the weekend. This was the coolest camping spot ever. Nobody around us, loud as we wanted and plenty of room for the dogs to roam. Oh yeah, we took Alta and Mocha along for the ride. This was Mocha's first trip and campout and she did awesome. I felt bad leaving Lucy behind, but I didn't want to deal with three dogs.


We had a huge fire that night and sang some church hymns together. It sounds corny, but we had a great time and the spirit was really strong. That next morning we spent running around Goblin Valley. It is such a neat place and there are so many places to hike and explore. One could easily spend days there and not see everything.

Alta tried to be brave and jumped off a hoodoo that was pretty high and took a nasty spill. She ended up limping the rest of the time. Mocha, aka rugged-mountain Chihuahua, did great and this was a perfect little playground for her.

We needed ice badly to save our milk and hotdogs so we jumped in the car and drove the 20-something miles to Hanksville where we got ice, goodies and dog food. Alta needed it... fatty pants.

After spending a few hours back at camp and shooting Robbie and Mike's .22s we headed out to the slot canyons.

Alta is still limping. We didn't remember how long the loop was but we found out soon enough. It ended up being an 8-mile loop. We began going up Little Wild Horse Canyon which was a long uphill hike full of fun. We waded through water (Alta knocked me in the deep end and got me super wet) and climbed tons of big obstacles. Many of which we had to lift Alta up because it was too high for her to jump.



We came down Bell Canyon and that went really fast. Good times for sure. Alta and Mocha were so tired that they hardly could move back at camp. We played with the wiffle ball and bat by hitting up a hill by our camp and it would roll right back to us... simple pleasures, eh.

That next morning we jumped up and packed pretty quickly to get on the road and head back to SLC. Mike had a meeting at noon and so we had Russell (led-foot) drive home and we pulled in around 11:30. Perfect timing.

Picasa Web Albums and Silver Fork Canyon

Saturday, Jan 31 Greg and I toured from the base of Brighton to Silver Fork Canyon and skied a couple of runs there. It was beautiful! However, because of playing basketball both Friday night and that Saturday morning, my legs were dead... the hiking was fine, but while skiing my quads cramped up on me three separate times!

One run I had to stop and sit down because they were cramping so badly and every time I lifted one leg up to relieve the other, the leg I was standing on would start screaming at me. But I love it :)

The skiing was beautiful and the five-hour tour well worth it. I've changed from Flickr to Picasa Web Albums. Here are my pics and the pics of that day: http://picasaweb.google.com/skibjork

We finished with Canned lighting... kind of... just in Aubrey's room and the Living room, but it is wonderful to have some light in the house now and it get's me more excited to continue with the rest of the rooms, i.e. kitchen, hallway and master bedroom. Here's the play by play:

1) We found out where the center of the ceiling joists were and measured to make sure the light fit. We then took a 6" template from construction paper and drew a circle on the ceiling:


2) Chiseling out the cement "poops" to allow the can to sit flat against the ceiling above:

3) Using the keyhole saw to carve out the ceiling:

4) View of cut hole from the living room:

5) View of the cut hole from above in the attic:

6) Here is the can inserted into the hole w/out the trim:

7) View of light with trim w/out electrical connected:

8) The view from our front door:

The view from our kitchen:

More pics of Mineral Fork

Here is the URL to my Flickr page of more pics of skiing Mineral Fork the other day. Hopefully it works.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15286794@N02/

I've also got an exciting post coming soon about how crappy I am at installing canned lighting and doing electrical work! ugh.

Mineral Fork

Wow it felt great to get up above the smog or as the news calls it "the worst air in the nation." Four of us toured up Mineral Fork in Big Cottonwood Canyon. It was so warm that we were in shirts half-way up. The sun felt amazing hitting my face and the air was pure and clean.

It couldn't have been a better day at a better time. We began at 6,000-ish feet at the street and toured up to the ridge at 9,000 feet overlookoing Lake Blanche in Mill B. Starting at 8 am was a little late, but we summited, ate food, relaxed and began the descent around 12:30.

The snow was crisp on the hike up and we didn't know the pitch or angle to take for the best snow. It was a strange feeling having toured many different aspects and not finding a pitch that the snow felt best. However, when we dropped in and made a couple ski cuts, the snow felt great. It was like nothing I'd had experienced.

We called it Corn Flake snow. Each turn cut through this thin layer of sun crust with a foot or so of pow underneath. There was no grab. Turns weren't effortless, but there was no struggle either.

At one spot we all stopped and looked around in awe of the environment around us. The snow at the bottom apron was glistening in the sun and it looked like water. You could see reflection on the top crust layer, but the skiing was perfect. Definitely different and worth noting in my eyes. Here are some pics of the day: