He has been sitting like this for hours...

Not really, but he does seem to like the opening credits for Star Trek DS9...

House drawings

I think I finished drawings for the current layout of the main floor of the house. There is no plumbing listed, and I didn't really put in the cabinets and appliances in the kitchen, but those are not expected to change right now. Here is what I have got: (You might have to click the image to really see what it looks like.)


I did a mock up of some of the changes to make on the main floor. It's not exactly complete, but the general idea is there:


I did 2 drawings of the potential 2nd floor, which only sits on the main part of the house. These are missing things like outlets, switches, and air ducts, among other things. I also kind of want to put in a solar reflective skylight somewhere in the middle part above the stairs, to let light in during the day. The first drawing:


I think I like the second layout better, it has a couple of more things we might want, really:


One of the nice things about the second layout is that if we someday decided that we wanted to extend the second floor over the addition in the back, we could just make bedroom 4 a little smaller, and it's accompanying closet space, and we would have a spot for a hallway into over the addition. Right now we are looking for the right amount of space, not tons of space, and I don't think we can really afford putting up a full second floor and also make the changes to the first floor. The thing in the back left corner is a space for the girls to go do their hair, make up, or whatever. It is basically counter space with a giant mirror. (Tara's idea, a good one with the number of girls in this house.) Bedroom 2 is kind of skinny, but for a while it can be used for little kids. And maybe be something else another day. (Like a guest room with plenty of windows, a nice view, that sort of thing.) Comments? Questions? See a room you want named after yourself?

Busy.

Sorry about the lack of posts this week, I have been a little busy. And tired.

I am working on doing a blueprint of the existing house. I have 2 easy rooms and the kitchen to do still. Then I can start making a couple of examples of what I envision happening around here. Still no serious takers on the naming rights for the addition.

Draper Temple open house

We took the girls up to go through the Draper Temple this morning. There weren't too many people up there at 8am when we got there. (No pictures of the temple, sorry, the camera got left in the van.) The kids seemed to enjoy it. Adam was fascinated with things.


Afterwards, we took the girls out for breakfast. (They were late for school anyway, what's another hour?) We went to IHOP, the manager at the front tried to seat us, and took us to a table that had one less chairs than we needed. He asked if we wanted that table or a bench next to it. Give the choice, I figured our only option was the bench, we managed to fit.

The girls all got Jr. Tooties. Tara and I had the Steak and Eggs special. My steak was a little overcooked, but that didn't stop me from eating it.

Adam helped me with my pancake.

Ruth

A fairly non-wild hair moment...

Some pictures I haven't posted

I have a few pictures on my cell phone. I updated my laptop recently, and I can't get my MicroSD card to mount for some reason. Haven't taken the time to figure out why yet.

Pictures on my phone:

1. Biscuits and gravy. The Creamery recently started this back up, Sorrel bought for everyone when he found out, he was so happy about it. They can't call this "sausage gravy", like the old Creamery did, because there was no trace of sausage at all in this gravy. Maybe they are planning to get around to it.
2. Yogurt. (Vanilla) I went back to eating this stuff, because the gut ache tried coming back. Still working on it.
3. Del Taco soft taco. Tara and I went for 3 for a buck taco night on Tuesday. We each had 6 tacos. The meal cost $4. I wonder if they use different, lower quality ingredients for Tuesday night tacos...
4. "Feng Shui" hot wasabi rice crackers. I got these at the store tonight. They seem to have some sort of production problem at their factory. Some of the rice cakes are fairly bland, others make your sinuses implode and head off to orbit. I have nearly eaten the entire 3.5 ounce bag tonight.
   

Taco Night!

You can tell the girls are excited. Just look at the expression on Emma's face...

ihop

I nearly forgot to take this picture today.

I call it "dinner".

The girls didn't really take to well to the rice, it was Zataran's, and was a little too spicy for them. I didn't have any of the apple sauce.

5 pounds of pens

Several weeks ago, I ordered 5 pounds of pens. These are pens that companies ordered to give away, but had typos or other problems with them. 5 pounds of pens is a lot of pens.

This might be a months supply of pens at our house...

Curry in a hurry

Tara liked it. Not so sure about the girls...

Late evening snack

I got out some frozen strawberries to eat. I planned to eat them right out of the bowl, using my fork as a utensil. What I did not bargain on was the strawberries breaking in half every time I put the fork into them. This makes eating them a little harder...

Overdue Restaurant Review

Pasterero
Provo, Utah

On Friday night, Tara and I were headed out to a Stake Education Night, which is a really a good excuse to ditch the kids for a couple of hours. (Education night was good, too.)

Tara had 2 suggestions for dinner, a place called Munchie's, and a place called Zupa's. We headed off to Munchie's but it ended up not being in the place Tara expected it to be. Zupa's was near there, but it is some sort of soup place, and I didn't think soup would fill me up all that well, I was hungry from not eating the right number of meals that day, so I vetoed Zupa's.

We ended up at Pastorero. A few months ago, I decided that the pineapple they put on top of their Tacos Al Pastor kind of upset my stomach, so I didn't get these again. (Tara got them, and liked them.) I got the Mamacita, which is a carne asada dish, and it was tasty. And filling. I wasn't hungry later in the evening, which is what I was headed for.

Cake. Birthday Cake. Not that it is anyone's birthday here.

Last night at 1:30 in the morning, I decided to make a layer cake with a layers of banana cake, chocolate cake, and strawberry cake. Fortunately for me, and for Tara, I decided to go to bed instead of staying up making the cakes.


I ended up making the cakes this evening. The banana cake had real bananas. The strawberry cake had real strawberries. The chocolate cake had chocolate chips. (Real ones.) To please the girls, I put sprinkles on top.


Today is my brother Dave's birthday. Before I let the girls have any cake and ice cream, we called Dave up and sang happy birthday to him. Then they dived into the cake, with some strawberry ice cream. Reviews were very positive. I had some crumbs, which was all I could handle, but what I tried was pretty good.

Happy Birthday Dave. The girls are very glad you were born all those years ago today. I guess thanks also should go out to Mom, who was a little involved that day.

Dinner

I guess you would call this Chicken Marinara with Broccoli, since that is really what it is. It was pretty good, and I made a pot full of chicken and sauce, so there is plenty for a future meal...

Pop Tart

I ate a Cherry Pomegranate toaster pastry for breakfast this morning. I cooked it in the toaster before eating it. The thing was too sweet. I ate it, then decided that I was still hungry, but my mouth was all sugared up, and I couldn't eat anything else...

House addition

We are thinking about adding on to the house by throwing up a second floor. This would very be 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, making a total of 6 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms when all is said and done. (3 bathrooms! Think of it!)

Anyway, if anyone is interested, we are interested, we are willing to sell naming rights to any of these rooms, or the entire floor. For $5,000, you can have a room of your choice named after you. For $25,000, the entire second floor of the house can be named after you. Naming rights include a commemorative plaque, ribbon cutting ceremony, and your picture hung in the room. (Or portrait, if the entire floor.)

Donations accepted on a first come, first serve basis. If someone purchases the rights to the entire floor, we are done. If someone purchases a room, naming rights for the rest of the floor is still available at a pro-rated price. Get yours today!

(Think about it. Someday I can tell Kate to head upstairs to clean the "Adam Scott Payne bathroom" or the "Adam Scott Payne royal throne", your choice really.)

Leaving Dad in charge

Tara went shopping this afternoon, the girls were left with me. I asked them what they wanted for dinner, they decided corn dogs. They also had wheat thins, V-8, and ice cream. I think it was a fairly well balanced meal, if not good for them.

I'm not sure a fan of corn dogs, so I had chicken nuggets. I thought they were fish nuggets until I actually opened the package... I had more chicken nuggets after Tara came home, and I made more than she could possibly eat.

I used the rest of my anchor bar sauce, then dug into the Frank's Red Hot, and then some horseradish...

Ye old standby

Chips and salsa

What else?

Pastorero

Mamacita - Carne Asada

Elementary school talent show

It's more show than talent, really.


Kate and her friends from activity days did a Hawaiian type dance. I'm not sure why they ended up at the very end of the program. The school always dismisses the Kindergarteners after about 10 acts, so we pulled Emma out of line so she could stay and watch Kate.

Non-standard lunch

Wheat thins. I did not eat the entire bag.

Standard Breakfast - when I remmeber to eat it

Peach yogurt today...

restaurant review

The Bamboo Hut
Provo Utah

Bamboo Hut is nearly always good. Unless you talk to the one guy in my office that won't go there for some reason. I nearly always get Ono Chicken and Kalua Pork. When each of these are good, they are very good. I never count on both of these being great every time I go to the Hut, but one of the two usually is. Today, the Kalua Pork was very good. The Ono Chicken was ok, it would have been better if it had been fresher.

Bamboo Hut

I actually had rice instead of the noodles, they got Tara and my plates mixed up. Just pretend the noodles is actually white rice...

Book Review

Solar Power Your Home for Dummies
Rik DeGunther

Last month, on slashdot, I read an article about a guy that bought a bunch of broken solar cells on eBay cheap, and built himself a solar panel that drew 18 volts. It ended up being a fraction of the cost of a commerically built solar panel.

I thought it would be kind of fun to build myself a solar panel, just to do it. Since I have a number of projects I already need to finish, I figured this was something for another day, but I went to the library looking for a book that would have some ideas as to what exactly I would use my home built solar panel for. This is the book I found.

The author suggests as many different solar projects as he could think of, from cheap and simple to complex and expensive. He spent a lot of time talking about how what you really wanted to do was do an audit of you energy consumption, then see where you can reduce. (It makes the cost of any solar project that comes after go down, for one thing.) Other things he talked about were things like solar rooms, green houses, and changing the landscaping around your house to help cool things down in the summer.

I think I will eventually try to build myself a solar panel someday, but not before any of the other pending projects are done around here. I will very likely use it to hook it to an attic fan. I might also get some solar lights for the yard. Then I might think about putting up a green house on top of the new part of the garden that I created with my wall...

If you are sort of interested in doing a solar project, this is a good book to startr with. He has loks for helpful ideas and tips.

Doritos

For lunch, I ate the rest of the back of Doritos that got started last night. I am a glutton, I admit this fact.

9:00pm - Dinner #2

Having missed both breakfast and lunch, that bowl of soup didn't last long. After Stake stuff tonight, I made grits, a sausage patty, 2 fried eggs, and some "hot wings/blue cheese" doritos. Good stuff. And so good for me...

5:40pm - Dinner #1

Healthy Choice chicken noodle soup and Ruffles. A contradiction?

How you know things have gone a little too far...

There was a Stake youth activity tonight, they are getting ready for the Pioneer Trek in the Summer. They had everyone learn to square dance tonight. The caller guy did a pretty good job teaching everyone to square dance, he looked like the kind of guy you would find in a barn calling a square dance.

Somewhere towards the middle, he put a different cassette (or 8-track) into his little machine, and started into a little "disco square dance." I say any time you mix disco and square dancing, you have officially gone too far. Suddenly, I totally could see this guy in a barn, calling a square dance, but wearing an old leisure suit and chains. I tried to contain myself...

Google toolbar

At the end of last week, my firefox browser changed a bit unexpectedly. When I opened a tab, I started seeing thumbnails of the 9 most visited sites I use. To the right of that was the most recently added bookmarks and the most recently closed tabs. It was a little weird at first, but I am starting to like it.

When I open a new tab, I quite often find myself looking at a picture of a site I am headed to. I just have to click on the picture. A couple of times I have found myself closing a tab that I didn't mean to close, but the link is sitting there waiting for me when I open a new tab.

What do I owe these new features to? It looks like it was related to a recent update to the google toolbar. I am starting to really like it.

Random Dinner

Put a bunch of stuff in a pot until you get something that looks like enough to eat. Here we have ground beef, rice, corn, and a bunch of other stuff.

Maybe there is such a thing as a free lunch

Sometime in the past, I bought someone at work lunch. Today, about 25 minutes before a meeting, we were hungry, and went to find food. He planned to buy me lunch to make up the one I got back in the day, so I let him.

We ended up at Del Taco. I like to order the Combo #7 - macho sized by saying I want a "Macho Combo Burrito Combo Macho". This usually gives mixed reactions, rarely does the employee process this as Combo #7 macho sized. The girl taking my oder didn't seem to get it at all. The guy from my office ordered his food, she asked if he wanted a macho, he didn't, and said he wasn't as macho as me. She didn't bite.

I was overcome by hunger, and the draw of the food was too great, I didn't take a picture. What you have here is a picture from the Del Taco website, my meal didn't exactly look like the picture...

Sort of late night dinner

Cherry poptart, Banana, taquitos, and quesadilla with horseradish, Frank's red hot, and steak season. Maybe not the best dinner, but plenty of flavor...

Question of the day

What's better for lunch after a long night at work, and a short morning of sleeping?

My answer - leftover spaghetti and meatballs...

Late night nosh

We spent the night last night patching servers and our SAN infrastructure. Our boss bought some snack food for us to munch on. The food was good, but there was something wrong with the fruit. I ate a bunch of grapes before I decided it was safer to stop...

The fruit was for Emma's benefit, but she slept right through dinner.

I started making mashed potatoes for dinner, Emma informed me that she didn't like mashed potatoes. I asked her what she wanted, she just ran away. Kate picked the green beans, Tara picked the sausage, but got a little discouraged when she discovered the sausage had MSG. Tara has a little bit of intolerance to MSG and has been trying to avoid it lately, but she really likes this sausage, and has some anyway.

2 days after I took my new blender back to the store, the glass on my old blender broke when the thing fell over in the sink. I haven't been making shakes this week due to lack of a blender, but that's ok. I took the fruit that I would normally make a shake with, and added it to the meal.

Is it lunch, or is it a snack?

Chips and salsa.

The breakfast and/or lunch and/or snack and/or dinner of champions!

I wil call it a snack this time, since I only had one bowl of salsa.

More yougurt.

Strawberry this time. The odd shped growth coming out of it is the rest of Lily's banana...

Bananas and Strawberries

For dessert tonight, Tara and the girls had a brownie cupcake with strawberries, bananas, Samoas ice cream, and chocolate syrup. Emma somehow found room in her little body to fit it all in.


I had a bowl of bananas and strawberries. I forgot to take a picture ahead of time, so I staged a couple in the bowl...

Spaghetti and Meatballs

I made spaghetti and meatballs for dinner tonight. The recipe came out of my new little cookbook, and man was it good.


The girls really liked it, and there are leftovers in the fridge. The meatball/sauce recipe makes enough for a small army, so we have some to go in the freezer for later.

A Mexican Combo

The food is even more combo-style after having been mixed all together into a take out container. The container was a little more square before I cooked it in the microwave for 4 minutes. I also had some Ruffles (not pictured.) The drink is not Diet Pepsi...

I thought the food was as ok as you would get at any fast food 'authentic' Mexican places around here. (Betos comes to mind.) One big difference - They had beans and rice, most of the places around here will give you a sort of bean soup, but the beans on this plate were not soupy. I like them better that way.

So there you go, something good to say bout Virg's Restaurant.

Go Dog Go!

This afternoon I took Ruth, Emma, Mary, and Kate to a play. It was an adaption of the book Go Dog Go. The director of the play is a guy that used to be in our ward, not that it means anything.


The girls liked the play, it was 45 minutes long, which was just about right for the attention span Ruth had in her. After the play, they had a 'meet the cast' thing, the girls went down and talked to all the people that played the dogs. Their favorite was the pink poodle, and they got their picture taken with her.

Earlier in the day, I was trying to explain to Ruth what a play was, I finally said that is like a TV show, expect real. About 30 seconds later, Ruth said "Dad, I don't understand that thing you just said. TV is not real?" Then we talked about how Dora and Boots may or may not be real. It sounds like Ruth thinks that there is a possibility that Dora and Boots can come out of some crack in the TV right into the living room.

We settled on the play being done live, right in front of us, but I think Ruth was just humoring me by that point...

Candy!

Aunt Peggy send the kids a little box with valentine's candy. They got it today, and promptly mowed right through it. That was nice of her, and unexpected. We didn't have their current address in the Winter by the time we got around to mailing out Christmas cards, I guess we will need to send the little picture we have when the girls write their thank you letters back...

Restaurant review

Virg's restaurant
Taylorsville, Utah

Tara and I went up to Salt Lake tonight to go out to eat. Our destination was "Red Iguana" up by the airport, but when we got there, the place was packed (good sign) and the wait was a hour or so to get a table. We didn't want to wait an hour, so we went driving around looking for a different place to eat.

It seemed a little silly to me to drive 40 miles just to eat a Chili's or Applebee's, so we looked around for a place we hadn't been before, but we couldn't get 5 minutes from our house. This is not as easy as it looks. There were some possibilities here and there, but a few of them had empty parking lots (bad sign), or really long waits.

After about an hour of driving, we ended up seeing a little diner way back in a shopping plaza. It looked like it was a converted Winger's, there were about a dozen or so couple in there at the time, so we decided to try it out. We could have just stayed at the parking lot of the Red Iguana at that point, having spent an hour in a standard search pattern. We will have to go try again next time we have a reason to head up to the airport.

I got the Club Sandwich. Check out the link for a picture. It was touted as "so big it is almost illegal". Tara had a Mexican combo plate. Tara also ordered some onion rings, but thought they were kind of lackluster. I thought my sandwich was ok, but that was about it, nothing spectactular.

I wouldn't send someone back into the back of that shopping plaza to eat there, but maybe it was just what I ordered. The fries I had were just sliced potatoes that they fried, but they kind of tasted like they needed to be left in the fryer for another minute to crisp up just a bit. The waitress was at times attentive, but also a little slow. There are lots of other places to eat up there, maybe pick one of the places you know what you are getting yourself into, rather than pick this place.

The origonal Virg's is a place in Erda, Utah. Erda appears to be a suburb of Tooele. Having said that, it might just be the best place to eat in Erda, but likely not in Taylorsville...

Sort of ok diner food

"Club Sandwich so big it is almost illegal"

A half order of onion rings. The report is they would have been better if they were not cooked in fish fryer oil.

Tara's valentine's present

I built Tara a wall mount quilt rack for Valentine's day tonight. Like all projects, I have a few things I would do different if I were to build it over again right now, but I think this one will work out okay. (I was basically shooting from the hip, anyway...)

Beef Taco stew and chips

Leftovers in the freezer from last October, a little more tomatoes, onions, and corn. Add some chips, you've got dinner.

Ok, so you get a picture of the leftovers too...

... and there was enough for 3 of us to eat from all the leftovers that were there.