Vacation in review

After my week vacation coming back to work is not the fun part. I enjoyed a vacation at home. I liked waking up in my bed every morning and having breakfast when I wanted to. I enjoyed coming and going and being with my friends. We had a busy week and I hope that they enjoyed their time with us.

Sunday we took our friends to the mountians. It was a beautiful day. After a short hike we found snow and they were able to throw some snowballs and play around in the snow till they got too cold. Our friends are from Australia so they haven't seen snow in a long time.

Monday and Tuesday I took them to Moab, UT. We visited Arches National Park and Canyonlands. They were amazed at how big the area was and how many natural wonders we have in such a small space. The nights got REALLY cold so I was glad that they agreed to getting a hotel instead of camping.

Wednesday we ran errands in the morning/afternoon and later that night we went to a Utah Jazz game where they barely won in the last few seconds of the game. It was alot of fun.

Thursday we toured downtown Salt Lake. We took Trax, then walked around. I tried to show them some of the sites that they would find interesting. It's hard to do that in a city your in every single day. We toured a couple of the buildings and overlooked the smog from the church office building (our tallest building in Salt Lake). It was fun being a tourist in my own city.

Friday I took them to Antelope Island. We saw the buffalo, did a few hikes, visited a working ranch and even saw a couple of Antelope on a hilltop. That night my mom took us all out to dinner. She wanted to thank our friends for the great time when we visited them in Australia.

Saturday they flew out to San Diego where they will begin their 5 month bike ride through Mexico and parts of South America.

Canada is an adventure

This weekend my sisters and I drove to Canada for a family reunion. We've driven to Canada before without the husbands but this is my first time driving and taking my own car. I was so excited to be the one that could drive into Canada (usually I'm the passenger).The drive up was pretty normal. We left home around 3:00 pm and made it to the border at exactly 1:00 am.

We had a good time at the reunion with just few hiccups.

* I locked my keys in my car. It would have been alright if my spare key wasn't 10 hours away in Utah with my husband.

- what happened was I unlocked my car with the clicker. Then my sister asked if I would pop the trunk; so I pressed the trunk button on the clicker as well. Then I threw my keys onto the seat and went to our tent. My sister then asked why I had locked the car. WTF? I guess my car automatically locks when the trunk is popped open. Why? I have no idea. Therefore my car was locked with the keys inside and the trunk open. We couldn't find any way to push the seats down from inside the trunk but my cousin did figure out he could fit his arm in between the seat and if he had a stick (or arrow in our case) he may be able to press the unlock button. That actually didn't work but the idea was great. We did however figure out that if we had a wire hook on the end of a stick we could pull the handle on the door and open it from the inside. So thanks to a hot dog roaster we were able to finally open my door.

* My stepmom was able to alienate yet another child from the family. Already her three kids don't want anything to do with her. My brother moved into their house for a while so he could find an apartment that he could afford and she basically kicked him out (he lived in his car for a month -- even though we all said he could stay at our house). So he won't have anything to do with her or my dad. I won't really go into details because my stepmom could probably be an entire blog all by herself. But to sum it up, she said some things to one of my cousins about me that pretty much pissed me off. My dad was sitting with her and do you think he'd stand up for me... nope. So basically I will have nothing to do with my stepmom or my dad.

* We went tubing on a river and my arms hurt so bad. I figured tubing would be getting into the tube and letting the river take us down. Not so much. We had to dodge rocks, make it over the white water parts and basically paddle to keep up with the group. The inside of my arms are rubbed raw.The drive home was what became the interesting part of our trip. My youngest sister and nephew stayed in Canada with my dad so it was just me and my twin sister driving home. We were pretty low on gas but figured we could make it to the next town to fill up.

* Normally we go this way to get to Cardston (see the orange line at the bottom). By taking this way we drive through at least 3 towns before we get to Cardston (all of which have gas stations). But my uncles/dad/and grandpa said it would be faster to go this way (see the pink line at the bottom).

We weren't suppose to take the Port of Del Bonita border crossing; we were actually aiming for Milk River and crossing the border at Sweetgrass (like we always do). But we were completely out of gas when we got to Port of Del Bonita and it was another 65 km (just over 40 miles) to get to Milk River. (we had already driven 25 miles with the gas light on before we got to Port of Del Bonita) So we stopped at the border hoping they would have gas; lucky for us one of the security guards had a large gas can in his garage for his BMW and he gave us enough to get us to Cut Bank, MT .

* After barely making it to Cut Bank, MT we filled up and headed back to I-15 to get on our normal route. Only to be pulled over for speeding. The women cop was very pissy with us and wanted to know why we didn't pull over immediately when we saw the flashing lights.
a) we had just barely seen the flashing lights
b) the lights looked to be very far behind us and we weren't even sure it was for us in the first place
and c) we had to slow down in order to pull over which at 85 mph takes a few seconds.

So my sister (who was driving) got the ticket we had to pay $40 right there and I couldn't find my registration for my car.

Grr our trip home had not started well. Luckily we made it home at 12:30 am without any further incident.

And that my friends is our trip to Canada.

The good and the bad

Good idea playing with your friends
Bad idea playing paintball with your friend


* First off I can't add a title, why? Stupid blogger! *


Okay really playing paintball with friends is fun. I'd rather play with friends then with the twelve year old kids at the paintball warehouse that play every single day and are vicious. I never thought I'd actually enjoy running around shooting each other with paint but I really like it. I especially like playing in the forest where there are trees to hide behind and logs to bunker down behind.


These are the bruises that I have from the paintballs.



This one isn't from paintball it's a bruise I got a week or two ago. But it just adds to all the bruises on my legs.

I also have a bruise on my arm as well but couldn't get a good picture of it. I was also hit in the neck on skin that hurt like a mother _____ but that one surprisingly didn't bruise at all. There is barely a red mark and I'm surprised it didn't break skin when it hit because it hurt bad enough to.

The funny part of playing paintball with friends, especially the girls, is there are a lot of apologies, we get to see the aftermath of the game.

Houston Pictures

These are pictures to go with my previous post about my weekend vacation. See this post for the update.

Welcome to Houston

Pictures from the Astros -v- Rangers Baseball game we went to on Friday, May 20th

Pictures of Sami Sousa

I take a lot of these type of pictures. The husband is a good sport for me.

Friday we did wedding stuff. These are just a few pictures that I took.

This is the Houston Temple where my cousin got married. It's different then the temples in Utah so I like this one. Plus the area that it's in -- holy cow those houses were HUGE!

The Groom's Cake. I'm not a fan of chocolate but the chocolate covered strawberries were yummy. I didn't try the cake though (chocolate - yuck)

The Wedding Cake. The top layer is Yellow Cake, next two is Carrot Cake, next one is Yellow and the bottom is Chocolate. This cake was yummy.

This is just a picture of the Husband and I outside the temple watching the bride and groom get pictures taken. Plus it's a cute picture of us so how could I resist.

Sunday and Monday we spent in Galveston.

I'm usually the one taking pictures so I have a lot of self taken pictures of myself.

This is my cousin swinging from a lamp post. I see a new future here.
We saw dolphins. It was getting dark so the flash wouldn't work so this is the best I could do.

These are a collage of some of my beach pictures. That's it I'm out.

Planning is stressful!

This weekend a group of friends and I (including husbands) are going to Vegas. We decided to rent a house instead of getting hotel rooms. This way we would all be in one location, we'd have our own pool/hot tube , we'd have a pool table, and we wouldn't have to choose who's room to hang out in when we weren't on the strip shopping or gambling.

Since I have a lot of time at work in the mornings I volunteered to make the house arrangement and pay for it (everyone paid me back). Yesterday I got a call from the vacation rental company that we used. They said that the house that we rented was taken back by the owner and was no longer available. This is less then 4 days before we were planning on leaving for Vegas. I've already used all the money that my friends gave me to pay back the credit card that I charged the house to. They want to "upgrade" us to two townhouses. That means we wouldn't have our own pool or hot tub, we wouldn't have a pool table, we wouldn't be all together in one house and I'm pretty sure the pool has hours which is NOT what we wanted. So now I get the fun job of trying to find a last minute rental that is still available in our price range so we can still have the Vegas weekend that we all wanted! The women at the rental company did say she was trying to move people around and would get back to me, so we will see what happens. I'm not happy at all about this. I signed a lease agreement, you'd think that the owner of the rental would have had to sign the same type of lease to insure this wouldn't happen. I could understand if a few weeks ago they wanted to pull the plug on the deal but 4 days before? I'm pretty upset and I feel responsible because I'm the one that booked the house. GRRRR! I'll have an update later I'm sure... let's just hope it's a good update.