Valentine's Boxes

Jonah's Microwave Box

Mason's Snowboard Box

Ellie's Dog Box

Rear View

This was the first year my kids have made valentines boxes for school.  Years past they have always made an envelope in their class.  I thought they were very creative and they each did them on their own.

Hawaii Trip

Jeff and Steph at Waimea falls.

My lunch from Grass Skirt Grill in Haleiwa, Ohau. One of my favorite places to eat. We enjoyed it a couple of times while there. I was so hungry and the food looked so fabulous I just had to take a picture. Kind of nerdy I know but how delicious does that look!!?? This is grilled chicken teriyaki. I love their grilled fish also.

A large sea turtle at Laniakea beach Oahu, AKA turtle beach. We enjoyed snorkeling with many large sea turtles. When three large ones surrounded me. I panicked and surfaced. I still feel uncomfortable under water with large sea life around me. I guess I need a few more trips to Hawaii to overcome that fear :)

The LDS Hawaii temple. I took this picture after Jeff and I did a session there one evening. It was beautiful and wonderful to visit that temple.

Haleiwa beach. Jeff heading out to surf. Hard work, but so fun.

Jeff and I on Ke Iki beach a few hours before we headed back home. This picture was taken about one hour before the great earthquake in Japan. The house we stayed in was just off this beach. So beautiful.

Large waves at Ke Iki beach. The night we left, the waves here were about 15 feet high. They were just crashing on the beach. The earthquake happened shortly after, hmmmmm, coincidence?

Jeff in our rental car. He loved driving a convertible. Pipeline is in the background.

Plant with large leaves at Waimea falls gardens. The picture behind a large leaf with the question of any clothing on is a family joke.

Sunset from Ke Iki beach.

Jeff at Waimea falls. It was a fun swim over to the falls. It is so refreshing to be in fresh water after swimming in the salty ocean all week.

Overall a wonderful vacation.  It was rainy season so we swam when it was raining and laid on the beach when the sun was out.  We enjoyed a trip to Pearl Harbor, shopping at the swap meet, biking to Ted's bakery for breakfast, eating at so many wonderful places, eating Malasadas and Haupia Chocolate pie, waking to Sharks cove and the wonderful snorkeling, driving through pineapple fields with the top of the car down while listening to Ukulele music and so many more wonderful things a great vacation brings.

First day and a half in Hawaii

A view from the Pali lookout, China man's hat and the upper east coast.

Jeff and I at the top of Diamond Head over looking Honolulu.

Jeff in our rental car heading up to the Pali lookout. The convertible was so fun!!

One of my favorite views from the Pali lookout.

View of Honolulu from Diamond Head.

We are having so much fun.  Soooo relaxing.  We are enjoying our stay up on the north shore where the pace is slow and island life is real.  We can walk to many of the beaches, the grocery store and great food places.  We are planning on snorkeling, surfing and sunning the next few days.  Oh, we love Hawaii :)

Daddy Makeover

Oh the joys of Christmas and the break that goes with it. This is a couple of days after Christmas. We had time to play with our new things and relax. Jessica was wanting to do makeovers. So after I received my makeover, and not wanting to go through it again, I suggested she makeover daddy. He obliged thinking he would get a face massage and some TLC. I don't think he anticipated the mass amount of sparkles on his eyes and lips that he would receive. Jessica loved spending this kind of time with her dad.

Midway Ice Castles

On a smoggy Saturday in January we headed up to the clear air in Midway, UT (by Heber) to see the Ice Castle. They are a man made ice structure, using a wood type scaffolding, PVC pipe and sprinklers. After the beauty and awe had worn off, Jonah and Mason could only think of how fun it would be to smash them. Typical boy thinking. We told the manager if they ended the season with a destruction day to call us. It was beautiful and slippery :)

Update

I have many things to post about, a little more time to do them.  My computer crashed a couple of weeks ago.  We have two laptops that are not working and our main computer not working.  They have all died over the last 6 months.  I'm posting from Jeff's work computer but I am unable to upload family photos due to it being his work laptop.  So watch for more posts and pictures to go with them one we figure out the computer issues.

We had a great Christmas.  Even better once Jeff and I finally got over our 2 week cold/flu illness.  We recovered quickly once Christmas was over and we were going to bed early and able to take naps during the day.  Amazing how sleep will heal a body.

January has set in as a particularly cold and depressing month.  I think we have gone into hibernation.  The inversion was horrendous the first couple weeks of January.  We have frequented the Park City area on the weekends to get some fresh air and sunshine.  We have enjoyed sledding in Park City, shopping of coarse and visited the beautiful Ice Castles in Midway (I have great pictures of those to post). 

We have enjoyed Jonah and Mason's basketball games every Saturday and Jeff has been able to work from home during this month.   So our January hibernation has been quite nice.  February will bring back Jeff's busy work schedule across the country. 


Well, all for now.  I hope to have some of our Christmas and Ice castle pictures posted soon.

Maybe I'll Jonah write a poem describing our dreary January :)

Are you literary?

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Bold those books you've read in their entirety.

Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt. (Mine are highlighted.  When I copied this from my sisters list I couldn't get rid of the italics)


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte(I don't remember much of this however.)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen {what is wrong with me? I haven't been able to get into Jane}
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazu Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams(Never read the book but had nightmares from the movie when I was little)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo




I have read 13 on the list.  Double the amount predicted.  I must admit many of these I only read because of school assignments.  Many of them that I started and didn't read were also because of school assignments.    Overall I find it an interesting list of choices.  I'm sure if all of the Twilight books were on the list many people would be over their 6 books.  Ha, ha.