The House!!!

As most of you know for the past 21 months we have been living in Darin's parents house while they were on their mission to Brazil, well they returned the first week in March and since then we have been living in their basement. Before we moved into their house we were renting one of the apartments that are subsided by the government for low income families (we only qualified because when we moved in I had not yet got a job), it was a small two bedroom apartment and cost us in rent $685. Well both Darin and I work in Ogden and our old apartment was in Layton and his parents are in Kaysville which is about 20 miles away. We thought about living with Darin's parents for awhile and save some money, but with the situation with Darin's girls, our living there has made it hard for his parents to have a comfortable relationship with the girls, being as their mother won't let them come to their house as long as we are living there, this along with the distance traveling helped us make a decision that we needed to move out. Well we did some research and found that if we bought a house close to our work, not only could we save a ton of money on gas each month we could also get a much bigger house with a yard and pay less a month then we would pay for rent. So for the last couple of weeks we have been searching for a house. We found a lot of houses listed for between 75K to 100K that we liked, but we found out quickly after a couple of hours of appointments last week that most of the houses listed as low as 75K had a lot of work to do on them. For those of you who have not been to the older part of Ogden, there are a ton of goregeous homes built at the turn of the last century, unfortuneately if they have not been kept up there is a lot of work to do on them. The house we found and decided to buy is about 104 years old, it is rather on the plain looking side compared to some of the decorative ones in the area, but it has all new plumbing, wiring, water heater, central heat and air, new double paned windows, tile floors, an added bathroom and remodeled kitchen and other bath. With a little imagination we believe we can add some character to the outside of the house to make it look as nice as the inside. We put an offer on the house this morning for 96.500 and had the offer accepted this afternoon, this house was listed for 120,000 originally back at the end of February. If things go smoothly we will be by the end of May, also it is fairly close to Weber State and we both plan on returning to school in the fall!

Service Porch and Back Door

Back Bedroom with view into bathroom

Back Bathroom between middle and back bedrooms

Middle Bedroom with view to bathroom
Front Bedroom and Closet Front Door

Front Room Bathroom Door

Front Bathroom
Kitchen
Dining Area
Living Room

Happy Birthday Kerstin!!!

I just want to wish my sweet Daughter Kerstin a Happy Birthday!!!! Hope you are having a wonderful day! Today I will do my best to find time to talk to you after a straight 36 hour shift at work, I love you!

An exciting week!

I would like to aplogize in advance for these pictures, while they are pictures that I personally took of these two temples in the last year, I did not have my camera this week while visiting these temples so they are not pictures taken at the time of the actual experience.

My week started out fairly normal, but by the middle of the week it was pretty caotic, as some of you may remember just a month or so ago, I had some changes at my other job and got a new manager there, the change had it's challenges, but in the long run I think it will be a good change. Well at this job I am at right now (the one that both me and Darin work at) we had some changes of our own 2 or so weeks ago, out of nowhere we were told that our manager was no longer working, this made things a little crazy, but our regional manager has been great through it all, luckily we still had a couple of assistant managers around to hold things together. For the last couple of months one of these assistants has made life miserble for most of the employees, by undermining our postion with the boys we work with, making it very difficult to work, well on Wednesday some of this undermining came to a head while I was at work and I got very frusterated (almost to the point of putting my 2 weeks notice in), due to these frusterations and some of the behaviors of one of the boys that assistant got into an argument with the regional manager and ended up calling him a few choice things then quiting very unproffesional like, right in front of the boys, which in turn caused some problems. As difficult as the behaviors of the boys may be, the staff has been very relieved and we finally have a work place that is practically stress free. Hopefully by the end of the week we will have a new manager, we could use your prayers as Darin has applied for this position and will be interviewing on Tuesday. If he gets the job we hopefully will be purchasing a home close by here in Ogden in the next month or so. On Thursday I had the opportunity of meeting Matt, Skyler and Seth at the Salt Lake Temple and going through a live session for the first time, this was a very interesting and wonderful experience and I would encourage anyone who can to take that opportunity sometime in their life to do so. On Friday night CC and Joe flew in from Vegas and on Saturday morning I drove them and Matt back to Rexburg, on the way we stopped in Idaho Falls and went to the Temple there, it was an interesting experience too, because it was much like a live session in that you went through 4 different rooms, but they still used the movie, it was an awesome experience also, although it seemed a little smaller then what I expected. After the Temple we went to Red Robin to eat then headed back to Rexburg where we dropped Matt off, then ran to the store for CC and Joe to get some groceries, after I dropped them off I had to head home to make it to work by 10. I think we had a great time and I am grateful for the time I was able to spend with them.

Food can be Art

This week we were blessed to have some extra visitors for a few days. On Tuesday Benji, Tim, and Logan came up for Easter break. unfortuneately we had to both work, so we were not able to spend as much time with them as we would have liked, but really did enjoy the time that we got. On Wednesday afternoon the boys caught the Frontrunner (the new train running between Ogden and Salt Lake) and went down to Salt Lake to Temple Square and the Joseph Smith movie, they had a good time, then on Thursday morning they drove up to Rexburg to pick up Matt, Cynthia and Joe, they drove back that night. Matt left for Alabama early the next morning to visit an old missionary companion and will return on Monday. Friday we spent most of the day with the kids visiting, eating and playing games. The picture is Luke"s representation of our dinner we had last night in Celebration of Easter. We sure hope the kids had as good a time as we did.

Easter Egg Hunt

This year a long time tradition and favorite of mine is not going to happen for the first time in about 23 years. As much as I would like to have my grandkids and others around to share this fun activity for me, living states apart and having no one who lives close enough to come, has made this decision at least for this year a reality. I have had many questions though, from participants of the past and I would love to share my ratio, techinque or whatever you would call it along with the history of my egg hunt with you. About 24 years ago our ward in California had an Easter Egg hunt for the kids in our ward, I was excited along with my two children at the time (Brent and Kerstin), unfortuneately to their dismass neither of them found a single egg at the activity and they were both heart broken, so I went home and decided that I would put on my own Easter Egg Hunt where no child would go home without filling their basket with eggs. The first hunt was realitive small only 5 children involved, my 2 children, my friends 2 children and a boy I babysat, it was a success and thus the Egg Hunt was started. I had a ratio of approximately 2 and a half dozen eggs per child. Usually I would hide plastic and hard boiled eggs and since eggs can be expensive I would have the children exchange their eggs for the prizes. The prizes almost always were quarters, dollars, candy and prizes or small toys. Every year I would assign different eggs different prizes, some years the hard boiled eggs would be the prizes or small toys, other years it might be a certain color of plastic egg, this is entirely up to the person holding the hunt. Generallly for me most of the eggs would be money, with candy and prizes being around the same amount (no one wants an overload of candy before Easter). Sometimes I would get my prizes at Oriental Trading, but most of the time I would watch at the store or go to the dollar store and find small fun items costing anywhere from a dime to a dollar for the prizes. As hard and confusing at times it was to do the prizes or small toys, this was one of the favorites of the egg hunt. I hope this post was helpful to some who have been asking and hopefully not to late in coming....Enjoy and happy hunting!