Halloween 2008

One of our friends sent this to us, oh how telling it is.

Halloween is gonna suck this year.

A Lazy Sunday on the Alpine Loop

This past Sunday after Church we decided to drive up AF canyon and have dinner up the Alpine Loop and go to Cascade Springs. It was a BEAUTIFUL day for doing it, the air was crisp, the temperature just right, and the leaves were still very vibrant in their colors. We went with Michelle's parents and her brother Brian and his family. It was a good time. I love getting to the outdoors and reminding myself how marvelous a world we live in.

Here's some pics to feast your eyes on...

Michelle with the kids @ Cascade Springs

Dad and Ella

North side of the canyon @ Sawmill picnic area - gorgeous.

The grandparents and grandkids... so cute.

Books from the National Endowment for the Arts

I saw this post on Michelle's cousin's blog and thought it would be a good way to remind myself that there are MANY great books out there and that I should probably put a little more Classics into my diet. And, now that I've seen what Amber has read, I feel like a redneck.

Here’s what you are supposed to do:

• Look at the list and bold those we have read.
• Italicize those we intend to read.
• Star the books we LOVE.**

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
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 Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler'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
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 (top 3 favorite all time)
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 - Kazuo 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
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

See how you fare...

The Three Stooges

AKA... Conner, Easton, and Ella

The Ham-Bones. Picture Posers. Camera Cuties. Kodak Kids. Fake smile on demand. Basically, these kids have been throwing poses and grins the camera's way since they popped out into this world. There are just daily occurrences at our home, just chillin' and grinnin'.

Ella and Conner playing on the floor.

Conner and his nice cut on the eye. Why does he have a cut you ask? Because Easton threw Rocko on his face.

Easton waiting for someone to pull out a piece of his electrical chewing gum. (It really shocks, and hurts!)

She's either very mesmerized at the moment, or someone told her she'd get taffy if she stared into the camera.

Allen's Big 6-0 Birthday Party

Howdy y'all - just a quick update on how it's been since last post.

The weekend went very well, we relaxed, cleaned out the garage and watched some great football games. Then on Sunday we had Michelle's dad's birthday party at our house. It was his sixtieth and he took it in fair stride (as he always does). Here's some pics of the party.

Grandpa with all the grandkids. Is that eye cream Preston is holding? ;-)


Paula and Allen... keep smilin'.


I wonder what he's wishing for???

Let's try and get together more often...

Me and this blog, that is. Trying to get this to a weekly thing at least, and if you're lucky, more often.

Let's see... nothing new really happening this week. A new exception for this week is I'm coming out of my cave to sell on eBay again. About once a year I list a few things just to refresh myself on the ins and outs of how to do it. Oh, and to make some $$$ of old stuff lying around. It's a win-win (win).

Rocko is being a little turd lately. He's decided that it's OK to pee on the porch when we let him outside instead of walking all of the way to the grass. Oh well, he'll learn... or he better. Here's a little more recent pic of him with some of his facial hair out of the way. He still looks like an Ewok.



And, going through our pictures from the summer I saw this one that made me think of how easy it is to doctor a photo to make a bigfoot. Or, in this case, a baby bigfoot. All you'd need to do is cover Easton with a fur shading and voila - there it is, right in the mountains of southern Idaho.


See ya later, until next blog.

Been a Long Time Since I Rocked this Blog

So, what's up my peeps in Blogsville? What's new with us you ask? Well, if you can tell by the lack of blogging... not much. We're happily content with our boring lives, doing little during the week and on the weekends and have no exciting announcements to make in our lives. The closest thing I've got is my little brother's life, and he's getting married.

Small news since late July-
>> Rocko is bigger and behaving and learning well
>> We canned salsa and jam (raspberry and strawberry)
>> We went to Park City for a weekend (that was fun)
>> I'm in a new position at eBay (lots o' fun and lots o' math - you really DO use it in real life)
>> Kids are back in school again (again)
>> Planted more stuff in the yard

Well, that's about it. Not real fantasmical around here. Perhaps something will strike me and I'll post it. Other than that, I'm a slacker with a capital S.