Has it been a week yet?

I think it has been about a week since the last time I blogged, so I better get another one posted here.  Ok, I know it has been longer than a week and I haven't done as well as I wanted to at blogging every week, but I just never seem to have as much time on Sunday evenings as I think I will.

In my mind it seems like Sundays would be the perfect day to do this because theoretically I am just hanging around resting and what not on the day of rest.  But it never turns out that way in practice.  We have church from 1:00 to 4:00 so I am never in a hurry to get out of bed, and then when I finally do around 9:00 (or sometimes even later), I sit around reading a magazine or the news for a little while.  After that I do my Sunday chores.  It is my job to wash the towels and also to wash Molly's and my clothes.  And that usually gets done on Sundays.  I should probably try to find time to do that on some other day so Sundays aren't so busy, but I never seem to get to it during the week.  So I do laundry.  It is also my job to do the dishes on Sunday and to make dinner.  Usually the dishes from Saturday night are still waiting for me so I try to get those done before church.  Then if I am on top of things I might start some dinner before church. Though lately Molly has been doing a pretty good job of taking over the dinner duties on Sunday, so I don't usually have to worry about that these days.

And then there is church choir practice from 11:45 to 12:30.  That time is a pain because that is when most of the action takes place Sunday mornings at my house.  The kids just sit around until about 11:45 when they start getting hungry and then they have lunch and get ready for church.  Or I should say, Molly or I get the kids some lunch and get them ready for church, or make sure the older kids are getting ready.  Normally this is the time when I kind of take control and get the kids their lunch and make sure they are all getting ready while Molly is doing her face and hair.  But that doesn't work very well if I am at choir practice.  So I am thinking about not doing choir for now until the time changes.  Because when I get back from choir practice now, Molly seems really stressed.  And the kids don't like having their hair done when Molly is stressed.  I thought when we first had Zoe that I would be the kind of dad that would be able to step in and do the girl's hair whenever it needed to be done, but it didn't really turn out that way.  I can do a ponytail all right and I can pull a brush through their hair as well as anyone else, I suppose, but that is about it.  I do know how to braid hair, but it never looks as good as Molly would want it to look.  And the girls don't really like it when I do their hair because it takes longer and isn't as gentle as when Molly does it.  And I think Molly doesn't like me doing their hair because it doesn't look great and people will think that it was her that did it.

Boy this blog post is getting boring.  Boring enough that I am starting to get sleepy writing it.  I can't imagine anyone reading it and not being bored.  So enough of that. I guess I was just saying in the most long winded way possible, that Sundays are always busy and I don't have as much free time as would be nice.

So anyway, what is going on with my life now you might ask.  Well, I have a new job.  Or it was a new job two months ago.  Now it almost seems like an old job.  Which is good I suppose.  It means that I mostly feel comfortable there now with what I am doing and how things work there.  I left the good folks at Salt Lake County Engineering and Flood Control and began working at Ensign Engineering on April 23rd.  It was pretty hard to leave the government job benefits and sad to say goodbye to the people I worked with there, but I want to be a structural engineer, and that just wasn't possible at Salt Lake County.  So when the people at Ensign asked me if I would consider going to work for them, I had to really think about it hard, and in the end decided that giving up a great retirement benefit at the County for the opportunity to work close to home and to be able to work with other structural engineers was worth it.  I have to work with under a structural engineer for three years in order to take the 16 hour test to become a structural engineer, and there are no structural engineers at the county.  There are several at Ensign though.  So now I work in Tooele and don't have to commute anymore to Salt Lake.  I work four nine hour days and on Fridays I work four hours and get to go home at noon or so.  I really like that.  And I get to do a lot more structural design than I did at the county.

I haven't really gotten into the rhythm of the new job yet and I don't think Molly likes it much at all.  At the county job, I left home at the same time every day and got home at the same time every day.  Molly loved that consistency.  At Ensign, I haven't really had a very consistent schedule.  I am supposed to work 8:00 to 5:30 Monday through Thursday with 1/2 hour lunch and then 8:00 to noon on Friday.  But that really hasn't happened much.  I have a hard time keeping my lunch to 1/2 hour and so I am always trying to make it up by going in early or coming home late.  And even on the days when I plan to leave work at 5:30, I have a hard time doing it because someone always wants to talk about something right as I am leaving.  There are only four of us that work for Ensign in Tooele.  Well, five if you count the surveyor that is never in the office, but four of us that are always there in the building, so it is not a very big office.  And I am the only licensed engineer there.  There is an engineering intern named Jacob Clegg, a draftsman named Roger Fish, and the office manager and partner in the company (who is a surveyor) named Doug Kinsman.  So when someone is leaving, everyone notices and they all want to chat or have one last thing looked at before I go.  And I am supposed to go to the Salt Lake office every week or every other week or so.  So on days when I do that, I lose two hours in driving time, which I also have to make up on one of the other days.  So for Molly's sake, I am going to try to come up with a more consistent schedule.

I really like working there though, and think that in the long run, even though I won't have a great retirement benefit from the county, that it will have been the best choice for me and the family.  I still will get 10% of the salary I was making at the county when I get to retirement age, and I am trying to put more money into my 401k to make up the difference.  Unless the markets disappear and money is worthless and the world dissolves back into a goods trading economy that will probably work.  And I always have my tiny garden if the monetary system disappears.  That should last me.  Ok, not really.  My poor garden is hopeless.  But I keep trying every year, so maybe if the time ever comes that I really need it, it will be a great garden.

I guess I am getting tired and even though I haven't written about anything fun yet, I think I will end this now. They say that in learning about history it is the seemingly boring minutiae that is the most revealing, so in 1000 years this will probably be the most exciting blog ever.

Maybe I will add one cute picture of Ethnie and a chicken.  This little chicken did something naughty (I don't remember what) so Ethnie put it in time out.  She held it there for several minutes until the chicken had learned her lesson.

Blogging again

I have decided to try to blog about something at least once a week.  But blogging that often will probably mean that my posts will be more boring overall.  If I add a new blog post just to do it even though I don't have anything interesting going on, who is going to want to see that?  Well, it doesn't matter.  I am going to do it anyway.  Maybe.  If I can stick to it.

So what should the subject of my post be about today?  Well, a month or so ago Molly and I were laying in bed at about 6:00 in the morning and my alarm had just gone off and I was considering getting out of bed, when there was this scratching noise that sounded like it was coming from the walls.  I asked Molly if she could hear it or if I was just imagining it and she said it sounded like mice running around in the walls.  Well that is what I thought it sounded like too, but I did not want to hear that she thought the same thing. So I just kept listening and that is the only thing I could think of that would make that sound.  But it didn't make sense, because the walls are full of insulation and I didn't think that those little mice could be making such a racket on such soft stuff.  Well for a week or so, it was the same thing every morning and I just wasn't sure what I was going to do to get mice out of the walls.  I didn't know where to put traps or poison that would even get to them because they were in the walls.  So I was thinking I was going to have to start ripping into the walls.

But then I started noticing a lot of bird activity on that corner of my house and it got me wondering if I had accused the wrong guy.  So I decided to look a little closer and sure enough, it wasn't mice at all.  It was some birds building a nest inside the dryer vent duct.  They had propped open the louvers with some sticks so they could get in and out and that duct was stuffed full of dry grass and twigs and stuff.  So I reached in and pulled it all out.  And those birds got mad.  They were squawking at me like crazy.  But they didn't have eggs or anything yet so I didn't feel too bad about it.  Well, I figured that was that, but then next day they were back at it, replacing all the stuff I had pulled out of there, only this time much further back into the duct so that I couldn't reach in and pull it out.  I had to get a 20' piece of small pipe and reach all the way in there and pull it all out again the next day.  Then I put a metal screen over the covering so they couldn't get back in.  I felt a little bad about it, because the poor things just wanted somewhere safe to start a family, but I didn't want my house catching on fire.  So I had to evict them.  I thought I had a picture of the nest sticking out of the dryer vent but I can't find it. Oh well.  Just picture in your mind a white plastic dryer vent with three louvers that flap open when the dryer turns on, and now add a bunch of sticks and grass poking out.  See, that was almost as good as a picture.  But now that metal screen I put on keeps filling in with lint and I have to keep cleaning it off.  So that is a pain.  But at least I don't have birds living in there making me crazy every morning with their hustle and bustle.

Let's see what else is going on?  Well, I guess I haven't posted about anything that has happened for almost a year, so I could probably go on and on about a lot of things.  There were all the holidays and birthdays for example.  I bought myself a hammock for my birthday that I hung in the corner of my fence between two posts and I really like laying out there.  The kids like it more, but I take it down when I am not using it so they can't ruin it.  And I bought myself a scary video game that I thought would be fun.  It is Resident Evil 4 for the Wii.  I haven't gotten very far but I guess you just go around killing zombies.  Like I said, I thought it would be fun, but I am just not very good at it because you have to do a lot of hand fighting and stabbing and there are always people trying to cut me with axes and chainsaws and stuff, and I just can't handle it.  I thought it might be fun to having a shooting game, but this one is too up close and personal and a lot less shooting than I hoped for.  So I think I am going to have to get rid of it.  It just makes me tense worrying about whether someone is going to jump out and swing an ax at me.

So I turned 35 this year.  That seemed a lot older 10 years ago than it does now.  35 was pretty far off not that long ago.  But you know, everyone my age is 35 so it isn't so bad ;).  Zoe is turning 12 this month, which I think makes me feel older than knowing that I am 35.  Actually, I don't mind being 35 and having a 12 year old.  What I don't like is just how fast time seems to be going.  I swear I was just 25 a year or two ago.  Somehow I hit a wormhole that is moving me forward through time and space at an increasing speed.  If I keep going at this same rate, I will be dead by next week.  I guess I better make the most of the coming week.  It is so easy to get complacent and not do anything fun or different though.  I could probably come home from work and sit in my easy chair and surf the internet on my laptop until bedtime every day and then look back in twenty years and say, wow, I haven't done anything.  So I will try not to do that.  Most days.

Ethnie turned 4 in March, Lila turned 10 in April, Luke turned 6 in May.  No, wait.  Ethnie turned 3 in March not 4.  Let me see if I can find some pictures.  Ah yes, here we go:

Here she is looking at some chalk that one of the kids gave her for a present.

She loves the movie Tangled and was happy to get a Rapunzel costume and wig.

And Molly made here a beautiful Rapunzel barbie birthday cake.

I thought the cake turned out great. Molly did a great job with the fondant dress.

And here are some pics from my birthday.  Here I am looking at the hammock.  The kids were pretty excited.

And here is Ethnie testing out the hammock to see if it worked.

Lila had a movie birthday party with her friends.  Molly made all sorts of cute movie things and the kids got to get candy and popcorn and soda from the concession stand before watching the show.  They thought it was pretty fun.

Those cupcakes have white and yellow mini marshmallows on them that have been twisted a bit to make them look like popcorn.  Molly made little food carrier for the kids to hold their goodies in.  We drilled holes in the lids of those water bottles that they could stick straws in so that it would be harder for them to spill their soda on the carpet.

Here are the girls at the party.  I don't know their names.  Well maybe I can get them.  Starting at the top left is Lila, Mary, Bella, Zoe.  Then on the front row is Megan, friend A, Alex, and Leisel.  Ok, so I got most of them.  I can picture the parents of friend A but can't think of her name.

And then we get to Luke.  Luke got to spend his birthday at Disneyland this year.  He didn't think it was that great to have a birthday there because none of his friends could be there.  Look at this tough guy!

Now look at the tough guy riding splash mountain.  The look on his face cracks me up.  Afterword he said he wasn't scared, but I think he might have been a little nervous.

Here is a good birthday picture of him.  What a guy he is.

He got a pin on his shirt that said it was his birthday and the whole day, the workers at Disneyland were yelling, "Happy birthday Luke" every time the walked past.  And he would politely respond, "Thank you."  It was fun.

Well that is all for now.  Maybe if Molly doesn't get to it, I will post a little more on how much fun we had on our trip to Disneyland.  My mom came with us and that made it nice in a lot of ways.  So more on that next time.