Sweet Disposition

In honor of father's day, here's some recent video of Ian's favorite babe:

Bluegrass, Comedy, and Rain

On June 16th we went to see Steve Martin perform with his band, The Steep Canyon Rangers, at Red Butte Gardens. The day before the show was sunny and somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 degrees. The day of the concert was windy and cool which turned into rainy and cold for the concert. We wore our winter coats, packed blankets and umbrellas and enjoyed a picnic of wontons, pasta salad, brie and bread, cookies, fresh berries and wine. Despite the cold we had a fabulous time. Steve Martin was laugh-out-loud funny in between every song and the music was great. We're headed back to Red Butte on July 11th to see Brandi Carlile. We're already looking forward to it.

Late Night Overtime

As most of you know I work for a Water and Sewer company. My job primarily consists of making maps and maintaining our geographic database of all the pipes, valves, manholes and myriad of other things we have in the ground. Every now and then I get the chance to do something more hands on in the company. This month I volunteered for our hydrant flushing program. Basically once a year the company sends out 5 teams to open up fire hydrants throughout our district to help clean all the minerals that settle in the pipes during the year. We have to do this at night to minimize the impact on our customers, since having that many hydrants all open in the same area will dramatically drop the water pressure nearby. That means that for the past week and continuing for the next 2 weeks on Tuesday and Thursday I am at work from 6:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. as normal and then I go back out to work at 9 pm and work until midnight opening up and closing fire hydrants. Then I go back home and wake up in about 5 hours to go back to work. I knew going into it that it would be hard to miss all that sleep, but I knew it would pay off both fiscally (overtime is good money), physically (it's good to do some hard labor every now and then), and mentally (in terms of becoming more well-rounded it's important to learn more about how things work). I also hoped that it would pay off artistically, and it did. I included a teaser clip of an image from a series that will be posted on the art blog Cara created for us to display our creativity, "Creative Exploits" http://creativexploits.blogspot.com/
 

Creative Exploits

We have a new blog in addition to this one. It is called Creative Exploits and focuses more on making art in an effort to enrich our lives. Check it out at: http://creativexploits.blogspot.com/

Hey, we never claimed we were smart . . .

Ever since Aven was born Ian's brother, Brance, has been asking when Aven would be old enough to ride a bike. Now that she's a year old we can safely take her riding in our Chariot bike trailer and to Brance, who is a bike riding fiend, that's as good as being able to ride a bike. So, today we strapped our bikes to our roof mounted bike rack and headed out to West Jordan to go bike riding with Brance. I needed to stop at Whole Foods on the way to pick something up and like idiots we drove right into the parking lot. The one that has clearly marked 7' 2" clearance bars over every entrance to the lot. I'll let the pictures illustrate the rest of the story . . .

Our car looks a lot like this when the bikes are mounted on top.

This is what our roof rack looked like after it was torn off the top of our car by the clearance bar. Amazingly the bikes landed right side up with a very loud and scary sound. The only damage to the bikes was a scratch on Ian's handlebar and a broken reflector.

The factory rack did not fare so well. Luckily, only one side was broken in the accident.

We just happened to have our trunk mounted bike rack in the back of the car and so after much cursing on Ian's part we were able to get going and continue with our planned bike ride.

Despite a little bit of bad luck, we had a great day. Oh, and by the way, happy birthday Dennis!

Memorial Day in Moab

We decided to take a long over-due trip to Moab over Memorial Day weekend. A pretty large portion of Ian's family lives in Moab and since we haven't been to Moab since before I was pregnant with Aven she has come to be known as "the phantom baby". Ian's parents spend a lot of time telling the family all about her but since she had never been seen in person they weren't too sure she actually existed. We showed Aven off to as many family members as we had time to visit and there are now no doubts about her existence. Along with family visits we made time for some mountain biking, sight seeing, and general touristy type activities.

We headed out to Dead Horse Point State Park and let our little rock-crawler loose.

While at Dead Horse we also gazed at majestic sights . . .

. . . tried to avoid the Paparazzi . . .

. . . blew raspberries at the camera . . .

. . . and went mountain biking. Aven LOVED it.

Aven got to meet her cousin, Trinity, who is only a couple months older, but is light-years ahead in the hair department. Trinity liked giving kisses- very cute.

I love this picture- a whole family cuddle. I'm holding Aven, Aunt Pam is holding Trinity and Grandpa Bailey is in the background.

On our trip we learned that Aven is a great little traveler. She loved every minute and we are looking forward to many more trips this summer and to returning to Moab maybe this fall.