Getting Ready For The Green Desert



After a little pizza at Brewviews and Mark's little Geek podcast we decided to work on signs. I think they turned out very nice. This part of the show is going to be really fun. Here are some pictures. Click here to watch a funny movie I like to call "Don't Film me While I'm Dancing Like a Sissy" that I snuck while we were painting the signs. The festival show is on September 19th kinda far but I think they're planning on playing some more shows (or any shows)sometime soon. So stay tuned and I'll let you know.

One of these things is not like the other

 

This was a real cart that was behind me in line at the market, I had to ask to take a picture.

Life is pretty tiresome. Despite efforts to be responsible Daniel and I continue to be hit by annoyances. We worked really hard to get out of debt and build an emergency fund and it is now depleated. It's just been one thing after another this Summer. Thankfully we don't have anything but the house on payments so we can get by (thanks to Dave Ramsey's influence) but it's just exhausting. It seriously is just bad luck. It's like every (very expensive) thing we've had has died (some more than once) and inspite of research and getting professionals to pipe in on purchases we still have drama. We had a pretty good attitude at the beginning of all of this (hey that's why we had an emergency fund right) but not it's just so frustrating and tiresome now. And really I think we're fine money-wise (we can pay for it all) it's just dealing with everything and knowing that we aren't saving for a bigger place.

I started up school (I really like my students this time around) and I've had a couple of large RaeGun orders so I am extremely tired and Daniel is trying to juggle writing music for other people, getting ready for a show and changes in job stuff.

And I know that in the grand scheme of things we're still really lucky and things are good but it's still tiring and I find myself feeling bad about feeling bad because other people are having to deal with way worse.

Here you go the pictures are in

The baby is here

All the info I have are in these two emails from my mama, no pictures yet.

baby lanna anne was born this afternoon, bangkok time around 3:30 p.m., don't know exact time yet, and she weighs around 3.6 kg, but don't know exact weight yet, and have no clue how long she is.... hope to have more info tomorrow. lanna is beautiful, fair with dark hair, waiting to see what color eyes she has. good set of lungs, keeping all those black hair yellow skin babies in the nursery awake with her cries!!

tanya doing well, much better than the first time around in california.

will send pictures and more info tomorrow. we weren't allowed to take pictures of the baby through the nursery window and we left the hospital before they brought the baby to the room because tiraya was getting upset about seeing tanya in the bed and not being able to get in the bed with her, she had been at the hospital with us all day, so she was pretty tired and cranky.

will email more!!

Like Heidi my first thought was how is that pronounced...and this was the reply

"lah nah," means plains and rice fields, so in other words, abundance.... (actually kind of like lana turner, but we didn't want the rednecks calling her lay nah...)

she's so cute, we're going to the hospital now. wah wah woke up this morning and said "go" and when I asked her go where?, she made a gesture like rocking a baby and said 'baby" so i think she wants to go see tanya and the baby.

we're having a civil unrest at the moment, not a military coup d'etat, but a civilian take over of t.v. stations and government buildings... i'll keep you posted!!

After we confirmed the pronunciation Daniel immediately started singing

She's Lanna
From Tijuana
sits in the sauna
She drives a Honda
She's Lanna

I'm pretty sure none of those things are true but I have not meet her yet so I cannot be sure.

p.s. civil unrests and coups aren't uncommon in Thailand so don't freak out but I suppose prayers in their direction never hurt.

Some quotes I collected this week


"What's that guy about?" Daniel when he saw Chris Murphy (pictured above) looking bumish on the grass at Ava's birthday. He didn't know it was Chris and said it in front of a bunch of his family members hahaha.

"I think the customer will understand." 99cent store rep on TV speaking of raising their prices. No I don't think I'd understand.

"It's a big fat sausage, how is it swimming?" Daniel about the hippos pictured below

"Had I known I'd be around this many people I'd have gotten a Mohawk" Ebay after explaining that the barber at his black barbershop was trying to talk him into getting a Mohawk earlier that day

"Mrs. Fischer I poked my eye with general grievous." a new kindergartner, while rubbing his eye, to Cathy after church where he was playing with an action figure

Daniel Said, "Do you want to see something cute?"


And this is what he showed me.

happy birthday Ava
 

Hope you have a great birthday!

Enjoying the Olympics



Daniel and I are really enjoying the Olympics. I have the VCR set to record all the gymnastics and the diving. Apparently Daniel has never seen synchronized diving so that is pretty fun...that reminds me we've got to look up synchronized swimming and I didn't see rhythmic gymnastics, do they not do that any more? Any ways the gymnasts are fun but our favorite has to be watching Bob (Uptown) Costus and Bela Karolyi in between things. Bela is not shy at all that he thinks that the Chinese are using underage gymnasts and that there is cheating going on. And it's fun to see how Costus handle's Bela's super harsh remarks. If you haven't seen it you should look it up, it's pretty funny.

Well thank goodness it let me type this we've had major computer drama which I posted about on the raegun blog, but I'm mostly used to it so I don't want to ruin my decent mood by posting about it here.

What's going on



We've been super busy, overwhelmingly so and things keep on breaking adding to our already stressed days.

Here's a review of the week...
1. Finally got over to the Murphy Abode to meet baby Stryder who is reported to sleep less than Ava (yikes). I guess he'll handle 30 minutes and then wake himself up. So those guys are tired. But he definitely is cudley. Daniel found himself doing the chick dance with Ava as you can see in the video.
2. Nada Surf at Gallivan where I saw the infamous Jose. I guess they flew him in to do guitar tech stuff just for the day.
3. We did pool and dinner with Heidi and Daniel which was lots of fun. And I tried a new recipe...tollhouse pie, I really liked it. It's here if you want to peek (I halved the butter and added a tsp of vanilla).
4. Our car was in the shop twice this week yes I think that's a total of 5 times over the last 3 weeks.
5. The computer is on it's last leg to get power it likes the plug to be completely hanging out, so only balanced and it keeps shutting down without warning. So we bought a new one and what did they have there...a wii fit. So we got that too. It's nice not to have enough money to charge things but I guess it helps that we don't spend that much to begin with, but yeah so we had a big spending day which was a bit stressful.
6. We're successfully jugglying the one car in spite of Daniel's yucky new schedule that they forced onto all state workers. It's supposed to be 8:30 am to 7pm M-F but from what I see from the parking lot most people aren't sticking to those schedules and I haven't meet one person who doesn't complain about it. Daniel reports that many people are seeking other means of employment. It doesn't look like the State thought through this decision very well.
7. Lots of meetings, sewing, pushing the video, grades were due, all of that normal stuff. So we're good but we've been non-stop and battling little fires.
8. Oh and we've had lots of fun watching So You Think You Can Dance, especially Tabitha and Napoleon's choreography, but we totally disagree with America's voting through the whole thing.

A Snippet

Today as I was driving through a neighborhood with my windows down I heard some squealing. When I looked out my window I saw two naked babies giggling and running through the sprinklers. too cute.

The Video Is Finally Done!



Please let us know if the video doesn't load for you (we're not getting it to work for us). Click here to watch it if it's not loading in the blog.

We'd appreciate any passing of this around and posting where ever you can. Here is the direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7he_vSW1wuY&fmt=18 if you want to email it.

If you have blog or myspace and want to post the video on your site you can used this code (for the high quality version).

<object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/7he_vSW1wuY&amp;ap=%2526fmt%3D18"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/7he_vSW1wuY&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Mama Mia

Daniel's mom and I did the last of our summer lunch and movie outings. We went to the dead (usually empty) theatre by their house. First we walk in to a good number of older ladies filling the seats. The movie was fun (I think Meryl Streep was super annoying in the first 1/3 but everyone else was great and by the end I liked her by the end). The movie was super fun but the reason for the post is the odd behavior towards the end of the flick. When the movie was obviously winding down, but before the credits were up, some one whipped out a tambourine, yes a tambourine. At first I wasn't sure if it was in the movie but the tambourine sound was a bit off and sounded right behind me. Yeah one of those weirdos had brought a tambourine to the theatre and thought it was appropriate to start playing it -poorly- during the film. Yeah it was very bizarre.

Last Week
 

So last week was a combo of pretty frustrating stuff and some fun. In no particular order.
1. We made the decision to junk Daniel's car instead of pay 1000$ to get it running again.
2. Went to the twilight music series with Kelli and Mark at the Gallivan center on Pioneer day i.e. Fourth of July Part II i.e. Happy Mormon days i.e. just a day off of work. At the show there was a really obnoxious drunk guy who kept on leaning on everyone. A quote from Daniel to the annoying guy.
"We are not friends. I need separation" about five minutes later and very loud with a hand motion where his hands spread apart "Space, I need space, just back up"
3. The window on my car decided not to roll up...and then it decided to storm. Too many hundred dollars later and a couple carless days it's working again and we're juggling the car.
4. America let Will the best dancer of the season leave So You Think You Can Dance
5. I had fun with Heidi playing on Friday.
6. Daniel finally got to golf Thanksgiving point.
7. A quote from some kid at church that I thought was funny
Kid gleefully to some tall guy: "Hi, Dave"
Mom of the kid: "No [and I thought she was going to make him call the man Mr. or something], No, it's Steve"

A Picture From Daniel's Birthday Night



Yeah we don't know these people. He was in a bit of an outgoing mood...yeah I know Daniel, outgoing huh!

Catching Up

Okay this is what you missed as I slacked on this blog
1. Daniel making more music
2. Me making more baby clothes
3. I became obsessed with making homemade soup and bread from scratch
4. We had Easter lunch at Rodizio
5. I've kept herbs alive for a good 2 months
6-9. I played dress up with my creations with Ava and Jana
10-13. Daniel and I went to Vegas where I literally slipped on a banana and we stopped at all the thrift stores in between, at one of the stores a lady put on finding nemo for me to watch while daniel when through the records
14-16. Band practice with all the babes where Elecktra vacuumed Mark's head
17. Aaron visited
18-20. Daniel discovered estate sales and that Harley was definitely a hoarded, and much of his hoarding was records
21. I started collecting "pin toppers"
22-23. Melissa's b-day in Vegas
24. I bought an ice cream maker
25. more playing with the cool Ava
26-27. Kyle visited again
28. We watched ummm I forget what it was called but it was good and daniel got "Sweeded"
29. Fourth of July in Heidi and Daniel's newly purchased house that is awesome
30. Tanya told us she was 27 weeks pregnant and with the time that's passed since then that means only a couple more weeks until Tira has a baby brother or sister, and yes they are still in Thailand

Things not picture:
31. baby stryder was finally born (yesterday woohoo!) so ava is a big sister
32. marissa's car died in may
33. daniel's car died today and is still parked outside of barnes and nobel
34. I've been sick more than once
35. Daniel passed out in a very scary way and we had a trip to the emergency room
36. Rotten musicians filmed a video see post below

I think that's most of it...okay now I'll try to update more often

I know I know I need to update

 

...but I'm not going to right now, but really quickly here's a shot from this weekend's music video filming. It was tons of fun working with the live action role players who actually act out dungeon and dragons. We're really busy and so much stuff is going on and I've got old pictures I should post too so I'll try to get to it sooner than later. But here's one picture for now.

A few shots
 
We went to lunch with Glenna and Travis McCrimmon today and after coming up with disturbing names for thoese faceless statue angel things and looking at the nursing dog (I'll post that video later) Glenna and I got the boys to put on these Santa and Frosty hats.


Me doing the taxes in my most recently finished dress. This is one of those dress I started a long time ago and when it got cold I lost my motivation but it's finally done and I like how it turned out. The taxes on the other hand are still in process.

Video Games Live

We went to the Symphony on Friday: Video Games Live. It's it's show that uses the local symphonies to recreate music for video games. There was a wide range of old classic songs like Super Mario, Punch Out and more that game geeks (not me) would know as well as new stuff like Halo, Final Fantasy 7 (which was beautiful musically) and The Legend of Zelda Twilight princess (which Daniel has devoted many many hours to). Over all it was fun, I think for the nerdier gamer kids (like the two ummm 12/14 year olds sitting in front of us who jumped out of their seats multiple times in excitement) it would have been cooler (just because I didn't know many of the newer songs). But it was definitely great fun. They played some interactive games with a twist with the orchestra playing the music as audience members tried to beat classic games on a huge screen. Oh and they had the video game pianist there: awesome (that will take a whole blog post of it's own). It was definitely a different scene than normal for the symphony and but it was lots of fun and really made you realize how intricate the compositional work in these video games now-a-days.

Here's a sneak peek. Someone filmed their intro medley piece. Between the laughing (yes it was like that for us too) you can hear the music. When we first got there I was afraid that it would be like trying to hear the music at a dashboard confessional concert but after the medley things calmed down and it was only the occasional outburst.

Happy Birthday Wah Wah

 

Happy 1st birthday Tira, special for your birthday a chicken dance!

Fun Times With Kyle

 


We've had some fun with Cristy, Sergio and Kyle this week. I've got lots of pictures from their visit and the rotten musicians band practice but no time right now. I felt like I should update this so here. Hopefully next week I'll take the time and post some of the fun pictures and videos we taken over the last week.