Mother Of All Zoo Visits

Just a quick reminder that Emily and I are walking to raise money for Breast Cancer this upcoming weekend. If you're interested in donating to the cause, you'll find a link to the right of this blog. Thanks!

Yesterday morning we took Brenna to the zoo, as Emily had heard through the grapevine that Diego was going to be there, live and in the cloth.

We started off looking at the giraffes in the African Savanna exhibit.

They have a neat tower that you can climb to see the giraffes at their level, and Brenna insisted on doing that. Here is a shot of Brenna looking through the netting at the top.

And here she and Emily are coming back down the stairs. Brenna went pretty much on her own unless Emily saw that people were backing up behind her waiting to get through.

There was also a Fisher-Price exhibit there with oodles of toys for the kiddos to play with. Brenna was in heaven for a brief moment, can you tell from her expression?



And finally, the reason we were there to begin with, the epic meeting with Diego. We were worried that Brenna would either be extremely excited to meet him, or would be traumatized for life and never want to see another Diego video again. Thankfully the encounter went very well. Here you'll see Brenna slowly approaching her hero (decked out in her swim suit from playing on the splash pads earlier).

And here she is posing with Diego, and pointing at me while I'm taking her picture.

After meeting him, Brenna insisted on hanging around and watching him meet other children. We probably spent 15 minutes doing this before she was ready to go. We tried to go back through the line to see him again later (per request), but were told that Diego was taking an hour break, no doubt sitting in a bucket of ice to cool off from standing in our 100 degree heat in that outfit.

Etc.

Here is a quick mishmash of the last few days around here.

Brenna wanted to wear my Auburn shirt, so here she is doing just that. She's taken to asking me to wear certain shirts at her whim. Tonight, for example she said to me "Take off your black shirt daddy and put on your red one". We talked about the dolphin (well, it's a whale) on the shirt I was wearing today, and the ship that she kept calling a peacock for some reason. The girl's vocabulary is astounding.

We've started repainting the house. The majority of the living room is finished. In the upper right corner of this picture you can see one area that's not painted yet, this will give you a better idea of the sandy color we've elected to use.

This project in the bathroom is slowly getting out of hand. This hole is only going to get bigger as I make room between studs to build a box to mount/move the box to where our new light fixture is going to be. Wish me luck on this, more pictures to come. Like I know what I'm doing here, ha ha.

Tonight it looked like God had dropped a dirt curtain over the mountain east of our house. This storm, which came out of nowhere, dumped a third of an inch of rain within 5 miles of our house, but all we got was what felt like sea spray from the wind blowing drops from this curtain of rain pictured here.

Ghosts In Unit 114?

Here are a few pictures of my parents and I arriving in Eden, a cozy little mountain town just east of Ogden.

Entering the canyon, here is a drive-by picture of Rainbow Falls.

Here is a shot of fog settling over the lake in the valley where Eden and it's neighoring town of Huntsville are located. This was the view off the back porch of the timeshare.

As we drove into the valley, we were greeted by numerous rainbows, this being one of them.

Here is a shot of the loft in the timeshare from downstairs. That's my dad there in the corner. The first night I slept downstairs on a single bed with a loose headboard. Every time I rolled over that night the headboard knocked pretty loudly against the wall, and every time this happened I could hear a fainter knocking coming from the other side of the wall, almost as if answering me. I assumed at the time that perhaps that wall was shared with the next door unit, and that my rolling over was waking the neighbors up, and they were in turn rolling over in their similary rickety bed. That following morning I looked outside the bedroom window to see if someone was parked in the unit 114 parking spot, to confirm my suspicions. There was no one parked there, and no one was parked there the remainder of the four days I was there. Slightly creepy, no? Needless to say I slept upstairs the rest of the time I was there.

The Return

I'm back from Utah. It was cold there, I miss it already. My parents are still there until the end of the week, I'll upload some pictures of fall colors and snow (yes, snow) in the coming days. It's supposed to be 104 here today. Egad.

Here are some pictures of Brenna from while I was gone.

We're undertaking an insane number of home improvement projects in the next six weeks, the first being moving my office to the front of the house where the abyss (pictured here) currently exists. Emily did a heck of a job cleaning most of this out while I was gone, and we'll move forward with getting an internet jack installed in there next, followed shortly thereafter with the laying of some hardwood flooring (we think). This is just the tip of the iceberg, stay tuned.

Salt Lake City, Salt Lake City Here I Come

This will be the last blog until next Wednesday (and it's not even Brenna related, what a gip!).

I'm heading to Salt Lake City for a long weekend to meet up with my parents who are going there for a week.

I trust that Emily will take tons of cool Brenna-doing-stuff pictures while I'm gone, and I'll be sure to upload them upon my return.

Little Did We Know

The ladies in the church nursery are so good to take these pictures of our little girl while she's playing and we're in service.

Brenna digs the triangle, the maracas, and pretty much anything that makes a joyful noise.

She also enjoys taking care of her babies, as you'll see in the picture in the upper right corner of this second shot, where she's feeding and putting one to bed. Not sure what she's doing with that baby bottle in the middle shot, but I'm sure there was a very good reason behind her investigation.

Please Consider Giving To A Worthy Cause

Emily and I (and Brenna!) will be participating in a 5K walk on October 5th to raise money for City Of Hope.

From their brochure:

Walk for Hope to Cure Breast Cancer is a national family-oriented, noncompetitive walk that raises funds to support breast cancer research, treatment and education programs at City of Hope.

My mom being a survivor, Emily and I are doing what we can through this walk to support this worthy cause.

And you can too!

If interested, please go to the following URL to donate to our walk:

https://secure.cityofhope.org/fundraising/vfs/15287535/5087

I'll also be adding a link in the right margin of this blog for everyone's convenience. Thanks VERY much for your consideration!

Reading

Brenna is enjoying a book that her Aunt Deede gave her via me when I was in Oakland last weekend. Here are a few shots of her looking at it with Emily. Once she discovered that I was taking pictures of her, she attacked me with the ferociousness of a thousand wildebeests.

Thanks again to everyone that's clicking on our ad banners, Brenna is much appreciative! Each payment we receive for these ads we hope to match for our daughter's college fund.

And Yet More Yard Pictures

Here are some more shots of Brenna playing yesterday afternoon. We've moved her back into pants in hopes of keeping the mosquitoes off her legs the rest of this summer.

These are all standard Brenna poses, including:

- The candid "I don't see Daddy taking pictures of me" shot

- The new "I see Daddy taking pictures of me and am going to make obnoxious faces at him" shot

- The "I'm curious to see what Daddy is looking at on his side of the camera" shot

- The "one decent picture out of the lot where I'm being pleasant" shot

- The "I've had too much of this stuff to drink" shot

In The Yard

Don't have a whole lot of time to blog at the moment, so I'm leaving you with a few pictures of Brenna playing with her water table yesterday afternoon. I have some more shots of her out in the yard that I'll upload maybe later today.

I also have some new yard shots for the Hoes blog and will upload those tonight.

Clean Up

Emily took a few pictures of Brenna while she was trying to clean her room tonight. You'll see below that Brenna made sure to negate everything that Emily was attempting to accomplish. The same thing happens in our living room every night.

I think the last picture is what the room looked like before Brenna emptied her toy basket.

What, Still No Pictures?

Well, I'm finally back from Sacramento. It was cooler there, which was nice, and I got to spend a day with my Aunt in Oakland, which was a nice treat.

I'm sure Emily and Brenna did lots of cool things while I was gone, and should pictures materialize from the past seven days, I'll be sure to upload them. In the meantime, my apologies for the lack thereof.

Stay tuned, I'm sure I'll come up with something.

Until then...

A Noble Experiment

I love how I mention Brenna's diaper one time on this blog and now our toolbar at the top is pitching adult diapers. Man, go figure.

Ok, let's try this.

I love llamas. Llamas are so cool. I wouldn't want to eat a llama, I bet they're gamey. Llama's look docile but I hear if you tick them off they'll hiss and spit at you. Llama llama llama llama.

There, if any of you are in the market for a llama, don't fret, there should be a link to a llama farm via our toolbar tomorrow.

Well, I'm stranded again, if I had been psychic I would have flown to Sacramento a day early and trained this credit union while I waited for some files to balance their card activity. Instead I flew in on Wednesday and have spent the last two days trying to reconcile their accounting, and I've yet to train their staff on much of anything. So, as if reliving the glories of last September in Colorado, I'm going to be here through Monday now instead of flying home on Friday night. It seems Labor Day for me really means laboring.

This revelation leaves me with the following chores tomorrow:

- Extending my hotel stay on my way out the door tomorrow
- Calling Southwest to reschedule my return flight home
- Calling Alamo to extend my rental car
- Going to the mall here tomorrow to buy a pair of shorts, some sandels and maybe another t-shirt because all I brought with me to wear were three days worth of work outfits
- Washing my work clothes here at the hotel after work tomorrow

Colorado was a smidge different because Emily and Brenna were with me, and we drove rather than flying. Boy that eliminated so many headaches with our being marrooned on that trip.

So, the next question is what in the world am I going to do over this weekend? Perhaps try and visit my Aunt in Oakland? Perhaps she's reading this, nothing like dropping in on someone when they have absolutely no notice. Either way, I haven't been to the Bay Area in 23 years, so that should be a hoot, I suppose.

This may be also a nifty opportunity to watch the opening Sunday of the NFL season, although I doubt my prefered game of choice (the mighty Falcons) won't be covered here by a long shot. Go Chargers and Raiders, I'm guessing, or perhaps the 49ers, I'm so in the fog on this season I have no idea who's playing whom this Sunday. I caught four snaps of the Giants game in the lobby on the way to dinner tonight and that was by far the highlight of my trip here so far (and that's pretty bad since I hate the Giants and the Redskins).

You have to imagine the fun Emily and Brenna are having together while I'm gone, I have no way of uploading any pictures while I'm gone. If Emily emails me anything, I'll be sure to add that to my busy weekend plans, so you don't have to deal with any more of my rambling. This is what happens when I've drank a double shot espresso and an energy drink at the same time.

We carry on....

One More Before The Road

I'm heading to Sacramento on Wednesday and probably won't have a chance to post any updates on Tuesday. I'll be back late Friday night and hopefully while I'm gone Emily will have taken a zillion new Brenna pictures for me to upload for you all.

Here are a few shots of Brenna dancing over at Aunt Beth's house, posing in a princess outfit, laying on the floor with Rachel, and showing off her big girl panties (Emily's trying to persuade her that these are much cooler than wearing diapers).