Spiderman!

I almost got into work early this morning. 9:00. I was trying to make up for work that I was going to miss in the afternoon. I'm so close on having the support web site ready. But then my computer crashed and wouldn't recognize the system hard drive for a few minutes and I got sidetracked for a few hours making sure the hard drive wasn't corrupt and backing up the data in case it was (I put it in CVS. But if the hard drive hadn't come back up, I would have lost several weeks of work). For lunch I tried Carl's Jr.'s low-carb six dollar burger. I had a coupon. It's just kind of weird not to have the bun. And messy. I did like having a lot of lettuce though. Way too much mayonnaise. I've got to start asking them to hold the mayo. Then I went to the 3:10 showing of Spiderman II in American Fork with the company (it was our semi-annual "training film"—the company pays for everyone to go). I brought Angela with me, and she had to go in at 7 this morning to get the afternoon off. I don't say this very often about summer action flicks, but it was really good. I only saw Spiderman a few months ago and up until that time, I had been very skeptical of the whole comic-book movie enterprise, but they did a great job both in the first one and in this one of exploring society's need for heroes. And also of exploring the self-sacrifice necessary to be one. Reminded me a little of Unbreakable in that regard. Beyond that, character development is about as good as movies get, with Peter, MJ, and Harry. The tension between Peter and Harry is great, and I can't wait to see the third one. Oh, and complex bad guys. I liked this one even better than the least one—especially the opportunity to redeem oneself at the end, as opposed to what could have been a very tedious and prolonged fight scene. Yeah, there were parts where I almost lost my suspension of disbelief, but the plot kept me suspending it long enough to ignore those parts. Anyway, cool movie.

Meanwhile, Frisbee was fun tonight. The quality wasn't the best (though I was on top of my game, even though I was barefoot because I forgot my orthotics—yes, that's part of what caused me to need orthotics in the first place). Very few of the really good regulars were there, but we've got a lot of newcomers, so that's good (there was an older guy named Jon there from Southern Utah—he's a biologist down there for the summer, and had heard about our games. Apparently there's not anything down there). We played until almost 9:00, the latest so far this season. I was afraid I'd gotten there too late because of more traffic (Center street was closed for the parade rehearsal). I didn't start until 6:30, but of course they started at 5:00. After that, I came home and lifted weights. I was still pretty sore from Monday, but I think I'm right back where I left off at as far as weights go. So that's good. Aerobically, though, I think I need some more training. Theo and I watched Newsradio as I did that. And then I burned my finger from steam from my soup when I went to uncover it after cooking it in the microwave. That kind of hurts. And wow, this is a long entry. Hopefully that means July will be a good month for journal writing. Good night.

Posted 11:16 PM | Comments (1)

Liver and Onions

Well, work was kind of boring. Hardly anybody was there and I got a lot done, but I also spent a long time instant messaging Wayne and Becky and Katie about starting a Rees family website. I took off around 4, because I was close to the last one left. I made plans with Angela for dinner at 6, then came home and did a little more work. Geoff, by the way, informed me that he will be staying here after all. So I don't need to worry about a roommate after all. We went for dinner to some place called Mimi's Café on University. It was alright. I think I probably just chose the wrong meal—liver with bacon, onions, and mushrooms. It sounded adventurous at the time. Oh well. I also wasn't feeling too good. We ended up doing a puzzle of some Redwood forest and watching some John Wayne movie about Alaska and solving a puzzle. Jared Taylor came over as well. We didn't finish until about 1:00.

Posted 11:23 PM | Comments (1)

Third = Fourth (in Utah)

This morning I woke up and tried to get to Kiwanis to play Frisbee. But with the parade going on, it was nearly impossible to get to that side of town. Everything south of about 300 was blocked all the way from the mountains east to Freedom. And by the time I realized this, I had wasted 20 minutes trying to find a shortcut. Anyway, it took me 45 minutes to get around everything, but it didn't make much of a difference. We only had 4 people when I arrived at 11, and we finally got enough to play 5 on 5 around 11:30. Naturally, we got exhausted quickly, but it was fun. I had way more dives than usual, and sometimes I even caught them. I guess it's because I've been trying to play more of a deep lately. Then I came back and worked out for a bit—boy my arms were sore, but I still got in some good weight training. I chilled over at Lori's pool for a while with her an her nephews. I say chilled because it was a little chilly, actually, because some clouds had rolled in. After that, I came home and started working on my talk. Then around 8 we all headed over to Juaquin elementary to BBQ with Mike and watch fireworks (he used to watch from there all the time as a kid because his grandmother lives across from the school). Angela and Heather and I threw a frisbee for a while. The fireworks were great. Afterwards, we came back to my place and watched "The Man Who Knew Too Little" while I sort of tried to do my talk, only I ended up spending most of the time on the couch watching the movie.

Posted 11:30 PM | Comments (1)

Fourth of July Party

Angela, Tina, Heather, and Company Picnic in Our Backyard

It's been a pretty enjoyable day—the part after church, at least. I woke up at 10 this morning and frantically put together pieces for a lesson. I basically decided to do an overview of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But it wasn't very well organized. I had too many long quotes and I neglected to think about the ability of my audience to understand those quotes. I should have just summarized them in my own words. Plus, with committee meetings at 4:15, I didn't have a long time for the lesson at all. I think a few people in the audience who really like their history enjoyed the lesson, but I think I put most people to sleep. Anyway, Ruston and I re-organized home teaching and planned the campout for Presidency meeting at 11:00. Ward council was short, and sacrament meeting was surprisingly well attended, but everyone left after that. So thankfully not too many people got to watch me make a fool of myself. After church we finished getting ready for the BBQ. And then a ton of people showed up around 6—way more than I was expecting at least. People like Jonathon and Mark's band members showed up, as well as Becky and Wayne and lots of people from the ward (including Mike and Jared). We just barely had enough food, but it was all good. Mark did the dogs and sauerkraut thing. Krista made a German style potato salad, while Heather did her own potato salad. Both were delicious. We provided the hamburgers and salad (thanks to Theo's shopping efforts—and to the very large quantities of random food items we found in our fridge as we cleaned it yesterday—5 bottles of pickles and ketchup, unclaimed cheese and vegetable items, assortments of juices, and so on). All and all it was a very successful BBQ event, and we have the added advantage of a much cleaner fridge. We laid around and talked until ward prayer, and after that we came back and shot fireworks. Only the cops came after two bottle rockets and made Mark douse all his fireworks in water. These were expensive fireworks that he had purchased in Wyoming. So that was sad, but luckily, Theo hadn't brought his out yet (he had purchased an even larger quantity of fireworks in Wyoming), so after the cops left we cautiously lit those. We were thinking we'd only have a short window of opportunity before the cops came back, but they never did. We figure he had a quota or something and we were just unlucky because we were on a main street with a ton of people in wide open view. And we lost some spectators because of the whole incident, so maybe he decreased the risk of something going wrong with a large crowd of people. Anyway, Theo's fireworks provided more than an hour's worth of entertainment, and pretty much all of the neighbors were out in lawn chairs watching us. There was even applause after particularly well-orchestrated combinations of fireworks. Tons of fun. I stayed out of the way for the most part, spending most of the night either filming or safely out of the way on a blanket (which wasn't that safe, I guess, because some of the firework shrapnel actually came back and hit Angela and me) but it was still fun. And the weather was perfect. No bugs at all—even though we spent the entire evening outside in our backyard. I can't tell if it was the smoke or my bug spray efforts from a few weeks ago. It was a really great way to spend the fourth of July.

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Posted 11:36 PM | Comments (1)

Birthday Celebration

Happy Birthday to me!

I'm 27 years old! That's so old. Angela, Becky, and Wayne helped me celebrate turning ancient.

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Posted 11:34 PM | Comments (1)

EQ Campout

EQ Campout

Pictures and video from our Elder's Quorum Campout this weekend. Nothing like sleeping on concrete and eating 2 packs of bacon in the morning.

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Posted 04:33 PM | Comments (1)

White Pine Lake Hike

White Pines Lake

What better way to celebrate Pioneers Day in Utah than to hike? Angela, Elena, Ruston, and I went up Little Cottonwood Canyon to hike to White Pines Lake. It was a fun hike--a little rough for the ladies, but they survived. Ruston and I had a little off-trail adventure trying to scare them on the way down, but we almost got lost instead. Fun fun fun.

Oh, and I met Angela's family for the first time this afternoon, but of course there's no pictures of that.

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Posted 11:11 PM | Comments (1)