Category: photos

At the Dinosaur Museum

These are some of my favorite pictures from our visit to the local dinosaur museum last weekend.

E and his friend L thought these fish were great.

The huge water/sand table was also a big hit.

I thought E looked pretty cute in his oversized smock.

E was terrified/fascinated but this model shark.

Even after we had moved on to the next display E kept wandering back to stare at the shark. I think he wanted to make sure it wasn’t going anywhere.

It’s a pretty decent little museum. E was too little to get anything out of the actual dinosaur skeletons they have, but he really liked the water table and this sand pit where the kids brush sand away to uncover fake fossils. If you’re local and you want to meet up there, let me know. My membership gets guests in for 50% off. I’ll hook you up.

Lucky Girl

It started with the haircut.

I like E’s hair on the longer side but lately it’s been threatening to enter mullet territory so this morning on the way to the gym we stopped at this place that specializes in kids’ haircuts. I was bracing myself for the worst: the first time E had his haircut he cried and almost fell out of the little car he was seated in, the second time he really freaked out and repeatedly tried to to stand up.

But this time E was a dream. He was excited to sit in a little car and watch an Elmo video and graciously condescended to let the stylist snip away at his hair. He didn’t cry once, even when the stylist trimmed around his ears with the clippers. I felt so proud of him. He suddenly seemed a lot older. (By the way, if you go to the local Cookie Cutters ask for Weston. He’s great.)

The beginnings of a toddler mullet–it had to go.

The long suffering customer.

The dapper young gentleman.

After the haircut the rest of the day was a dream. We went to the gym and E went into daycare without fussing. I worked out on the stair machine and read a good book. Then we went home and we ate lunch. E went down for a nap and I folded laundry and watched an episode of Primeval. When E got up we went to the store to run some errands. As we were leaving the store it started pouring rain–it was coming down in sheets. I hadn’t brought an umbrella so I bought one at the store and gathering my bags and holding E I ran out to the car. E thought the rain was super funny and even though my pants and shoes got soaked I was laughing too.

N was already home when we got home and was doing the dishes. E and I played the piano (i.e. he sat on my lap and banged away at the keyboard) for a while and then I fed E dinner. It was N’s turn to make dinner and so he made a delicious kimchi jjigae. While the soup was simmering I did some stuff for work and then we ate and watched a tv show. And then I went to bed.

I know it sounds like a fairly uneventful day. Nothing really newsworthy happened. But all day long I was struck over and over by how blessed I am. I’m writing this down as a reminder to myself for the occasional days when everything seems to be going wrong and I wallow in self-pity: I’m blessed with a wonderful family to love and who loves me. I enjoy a standard of living that 98% of the world can only dream about. I have a healthy body as does my family. I have the means of working for my own satisfaction and to help my family. And I have enough income that if I need to buy a $12 umbrella I can do so without worrying about if I’ll be able to pay my other bills.

Pretty awesome stuff.

How about you? Is there something that you’re especially grateful for today?

E’s day out

I didn’t get a chance to post these pictures yet: last week when Ken and Mindy and their kids were here we went to a local “farm” and then stopped at a park. It was a nice outing.

E anxiously waiting for a pony ride.

E enjoying said pony ride.

E and N saying ‘hi’ to some horses.

E swinging with his cousin C.

We’re looking forward to spending more time with Ken and Mindy and their family: in a few weeks we’re going to fly up to Seattle and stay with them for a weekend and then E and I are going to visit my family for a week while N returns to work. It’s going to be a fun trip–I love visiting Washington. I miss living there.

A seat at the table

E has always been kind of a late mover: he crawled late and walked late and it wasn’t until this last week that he really figured out how to climb up on chairs. But now that he’s figured it out he LOVES siting in the chairs at the dining table. Unfortunately he’s not always aware of where the edge of the seat is and we’ve had quite a few spills. But he’s getting the hang of it.


Lumberjacks!

We first heard about Timbersports on the Colbert Report last year.

I thought the whole thing was oddly fascinating in the same way that I’m intrigued by traditional aspects of small town Utah life like rodeos and parades. I didn’t grow up in Utah and to be honest I don’t want to live here forever. But I like experiencing the local flavor while I have the chance.

And I’ve mentioned before, I’m a sucker for festivals. So on Saturday I took E and went with my mom, brother, and nephews to the wild outdoors festival.

The lumberjack part of the festival turned out to be pretty anticlimactic. They were taping it for ESPN and so there was a lot of waiting around for the cameras to get set up. I was hoping to see the events where the competitors climb up super tall poles or balance on floating log booms but we only saw them chopping logs in half with hand axes. Which I guess is actually pretty impressive, but was kind of meh to watch.

Manly men at work.

The best part of the event were the Splash Dogs, dogs that competed to jump the longest distance into a pool of water. E loves dogs and freaked out in joy every time he saw one jump.

On of the splash dogs in mid jump.

A splash puppy in training.

There were a couple of other things to do beside watch the dogs and lumberjacks.

Cowboy A in training.

J taking a turn at the bow.

Wrapping it up and heading home.

It was fun, but I probably won’t go again unless they drop the price. It was $15 for adults, $10 for kids which was simply way too much. The mechanical bull, the archery station and the splash dogs were pretty much all there was to do and watch besides the timbersports. More than a third of the grounds were devoted to showcasing boats and tents and other merchandise that we weren’t interested in. To be fair, I don’t think we were really the target demographic but I still think admission should have been half the price they were charging.

Maybe we’ll have more luck at some of the other festivals this summer. There’s a Scottish Festival this coming up weekend and tickets are more reasonably priced. Maybe I can talk N into going–we’ll see.

Jumping!

My mom and brother Steven are in town visiting my sister Jan for a while and so E and I went over to Jan’s house yesterday to hang out for a bit. Sadly, E had apparently been traumatized by us dropping him off at Jan’s when we went to the Camera Obscura concert earlier this week because as soon as I pulled into the driveway he started crying, convinced that I was going to leave him.

E’s cousins A and J are really great with him. Nine year-old A wanted to cheer up E and so he built him a rattle out of Legos which was a big hit. But E cheered up even more when we went outside to play. He loved bopping around on the trampoline.

His cousins were really good about making sure E was safe on the trampoline.

J and E.

A and my mom with E.

I couldn’t wait

I just picked up the photos I shot with my Holga at Goblin Valley. I was planning on posting a bunch of them next week but I couldn’t wait to share this one.


It’s one of my favorite shots of the bunch but it was exciting to see how all of the photos turned out. It made me realized how much I’ve missed the surprises that come from shooting with film. I’ll post some more of the Holga photos next week.

Have a great weekend!

Goblin Valley Photos

The trip to Goblin Valley was really fun. Thunderstorms had been forecast but they were supposed to hold off until the late afternoon. The forecast was part right: it poured during the 4-hour drive there but it stopped raining once we got to the park in the late afternoon, which was nice. But the rain had turned the soft red clay dirt into super slippery, mushy mud. We had already invested so much time in getting there that we braved the mud and climbed down onto the valley floor to poke around. The scenery was amazing.



There were a few other people braving the mud.

E clowning around with N.

My shoes after walking around on the valley floor.

The mud was really something: it sucked my shoes right off my feet a few times. We hadn’t brought extra shoes and so we ended up driving home barefoot. We wanted to stop somewhere for dinner so we first stopped at a Walmart and bought some cheap shoes to wear. Before we went into the store we tried to clean off our muddy shoes the best we could but I still felt very self-conscious. It was the first (and hopefully the last) time that I felt under-dressed for shopping at Walmart.

We had one other little mishap besides the mud: we had miscalculated the amount of gas we needed. When we got to the park we were running quite low on gas so on the way back we drove straight to the nearest gas station which was in the opposite direction than our home. It added about 45 minutes to the drive home but I think it ended up being worth since we got to see this place:

Best gas station ever!

All and all, it was a really fun trip. If you go, bring extra shoes and clothes, towels, and a big jug of water to wash up with. (There isn’t any running water at the park.) And make sure you have at least a quarter tank of gas when you get there–learn from our mistakes!