Another this 'n that post.

Haven't been keeping up with the 'blog the way I'd like to lately. Time is just getting away from me. I've been so involved in the kids' school this year, being room "mom" and all. And then there's work. Work is, well, work, and there's been a lot of it lately.

So this is another this 'n that post...

First up, our big night out on Saturday. Let's just say, WOW! We had such a great time. Went to the Warren Miller movie. It was good, not great. Not enough humor, IMO, and it's just not the same without Warren to narrate any more. Then it was off to the first bar... saw a great band called Swagger. You really should take a moment to listen to them. We really enjoyed their set at The Star Bar. They're going to be playing all over Park City this winter, so hopefully we'll get to see them again. Their fiddle player, especially, was something else!

Then the Main Street Music Crawl marched down Main Street to the Miner's Park and listened to another band there. I didn't catch the name of that band, as it was just a little too cold to relax and enjoy. Next up was Shabu, one of my favorite restaurants. By then it was 10:00 and the after-eating restaurant had a little jazz trio. A little too sleepy for that point in the evening, but a good trio.

After that we headed over to The Sidecar, the bar with the best pizza in town. I don't remember the name of the band there, but it was a rocking blues-type band with a couple of killer singers. They were pretty good too! I know, I know, some band you've never heard of that I can't remember the name of, just trust me, they were good!

All night we kept running into people we (mostly Daddy-J) knew from the "old days"... and a few other parents who had a pass for a night out! We closed out the night at a swanky bar whose name escapes me at the moment. Turns out we know the manager there, and I may have a new skiing buddy for the winter!

We ended up getting home about 2:30 and falling into bed. Poor Daddy-J had to get up with the kids (we made a deal; I got up with them on Saturday) at 6:00. He looked better than I felt: like I'd been hit by a truck.

I guess these old farts can still party like rock stars, so long as we have about a week to recover afterwards!

Up next... my new camera! I'm so excited to finally get a DSLR. I've wanted one for years and years, but just couldn't ever seem to justify the expense at any given moment. I have a perfectly acceptable Sony Cyber-Shot point-n-shoot that takes decent pics (all the pics on this website, pretty much). But there have been so many shots lately that I've missed because of the darned shutter delay on the point-n-shoot. And I want more zoom, and better control of white balance and aperture and f-stop, and ...

So I wound up taking my birthday money (thanks Dad!) and buying myself a Nikon D40 DSLR, as well as a nice 55-200 Nikkor zoom lens. This great website by Ken Rockwell is such a terrific resource on all things DSLR. He has terrific camera reviews and is really knowledgeable about lenses and all kinds of other stuff. I spent hours there last night figuring out exactly what I wanted to get. I've been looking at the D40 for ages, but couldn't decide if I should get that, or move up to one of Nikon's other DSLRs.

Anyway, I'm hoping that having the camera will inspire me to get better about taking photos and maybe even better about posting to my 'blog! Well, we can hope.

What else? The SparkPeople thing is still going well. I've realized by tracking my food that I had gotten really sloppy in my eating, just shoving whatever, whenever, in my mouth. After tracking everything, I've been able to retrain my appetite to want less and to want more healthy stuff, so I'm making better choices and seeing results.

The exercise thing isn't going as well. I am still running, and I've done SETS a few times, but not as much as I'd like. Every day, I recommit myself to getting more exercise, but it's just hard to find the time and motivation. Hopefully it will get better!

That's about it for now. The kids had their Halloween party at school this morning. All the kids were just adorable, with great costumes! I got a few pics, but haven't uploaded them yet. We're off now to my friend Kerry's house to celebrate Halloween some more and go trick-or-treating in her neighborhood (total waste of time to try that here -- hike for miles and miles only to find no one home.

Should be fun!

Out on the town!

Mama V and Daddy J are going out on the town tonight!

First up: this year's new Warren Miller movie: Children of Winter

For anyone who doesn't know, every year a guy named Warren Miller (actually, now it's his company) puts out a new ski movie. It's basically ski porn. Two hours of watching people do really cool skiing in various random places. It always comes out this time of year and tours the country, revving up excitement for the coming ski season. Going to see the new Warren Miller movie each fall is a bit of a tradition in this ski town (and probably most ski towns).

Daddy J and Mama V have not been to a Warren Miller movie in quite some years. I happened to think of it last night and looked up this year's movie, and it just happens to be playing here in Park City this weekend. So at 6:00 tonight, we will be enjoying a kid-free ski porn movie!

But that's not all! Tonight is also the first Mountain Town Music Crawl Apparently, in our fair city this evening, there will be people pub-crawling up and down Main Street and into our City Park, listening to live music until the wee hours. Daddy J used to catch a lot of live music in his single days... not so much in the last 8 years. So when Daddy J said he wanted to go to this, Mama V organized a sitter (two, actually) and bought the tickets and ... off we go.

Hoping for a fun night on the town... if I can stay up that late!

This story just broke my heart.

You know I don't cry easily, so if I tell you this story actually brought tears to my eyes and made my nose all stuffy, would you be surprised?

This post at OneOfThoseHorribleMoms' blog is almost two years old, but it breaks my heart just the same. I can see my girls in little Etta. What is wrong with the world? And don't think this could only happen in Manhattan.

A little bit of this, a little bit of that.

Sorry, no big, exciting post from me after taking a week off. I had good intentions, every night, I swear I was going to write a post, and then I just... well... didn't. That's the way it goes, though, huh?

I had the same good intentions when I started the SETS training last Monday. And then... oh who cares what really happened... let's just say life intervened. Something about getting a beastly cold, something about doing a huge amount of work all of a sudden, something about trying to get on top of my pig-styish house. Blah blah blah.

So anyway, Sunday night I finally got back on track. I did my Couch to 5k run at about 8:40 at night. I actually felt great, even while I was doing it. That's a motivator for sure!

Then I also joined SparkPeople

"What is SparkPeople?" you ask? (And yes, I know the question mark inside the quotation marks is wrong, but it just never looks right to me with a comma there). Well, SparkPeople is a really cool website that lets you track your eating and exercising. It has a handy meal-planner, that will plan out all your meals for you, including giving you a weekly grocery list. Or you can just eat all the same foods you always eat and track them by entering them yourself. And then it will set up an exercise program for you, or you can enter your own, and track the whole thing.

You earn points for doing various things on the SparkPeople website. I don't really know what you get to do with the points yet. I'm still getting to know the site. But I have been tracking what I eat and it's really helping me to see what my ratio of protein/fat/carbs is, how many total calories I eat in a day. And if I enter my breakfast and lunch and it looks like I'm overdoing it, I can see that and just have a light dinner. Or vice versa, if I eat light for breakfast or lunch, I know that and can have an extra glass of wine.

For someone who's never tracked calories before, it's pretty cool. Even the Stouffers frozen chicken enchiladas that I made for dinner tonight were already in the SparkPeople database, so all I did was enter that I had one for dinner and it took care of the rest. Nice!

So why am I doing this? Well, I just want to get back into "fighting" shape. Since I had the kids, I haven't done much for exercise or eating right, so this is my "me" thing right now.

This post is titled a little bit of this, a little bit of that. So what else? Well, today I hired a new nanny/housekeeper. Her name is Carmen, and she's from Colombia. She will be coming on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, to watch the kids while I hide in my office and work, and also to help me keep up with the housework that seems to suck so much of my time every day. She's a really neat lady. She was a lawyer in Colombia. Her two daughters live right here in Silver Creek, so my house isn't too far out of the way for her.

She's also going to be speaking Spanish with the kids, so that should supplement the Spanish that they're learning at school. Miss D already had to show off to Carmen that she could count to 11 in Spanish. I think Carmen was actually a little impressed.

And while Carmen works on her English... she's been in the US five years now... I'll get to brush up my Spanish. We had a lovely afternoon cleaning out the twins' closets while we practiced the different vocabulary words having to do with clothes.

What else? I've started a new book, called The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon. I think Grandma Libby gave it to me a while ago, but I never started it. My BookSwim shipment hasn't come yet (I read all three books before I remembered to send any back, so I've been without new BookSwim books for a while now), so I grabbed this off my shelf last night and have been enjoying reading it. It does have a lot of foul language in it (even for me, and that's saying something), but the narrator's voice is very interesting.

No pictures this week, really. No, wait:

Daddy J did take a couple with his phone while he and the girls were out hiking this weekend:.

Don't Hudson and Miss D look so cute hiking together?

Oh and then there's this, from Soccer:

We should be getting the "real" team pictures sometime soon. But this is pretty much what it's going to look like!

Ski Exercise Training System -- wish me luck!

So, after seeing some pictures of me in my bathing suit at Lake Powell (no, I'm not going to share here!) I decided that I need to get my butt in shape before ski season starts at the end of November. Last year, my skiing abilities really took a big step forward, but my fitness level was such that I had a hard time taking advantage of what I knew how to do.

This year, I'm determined to get into better shape for skiing. I petered off my mountain biking a little early this year (not for any good reason, just got lazy, and now the trails are too wet :-( ). I decided to get a ski conditioning program off the 'net that I could do at home.

So I got the Ski Exercise Training System (or S.E.T.S.) program. I downloaded all the components (four different phases), and started the first phase, Adaptation Optimizer, this morning. It's a tough core workout to start with. I'm going to do that three times a week, at least, for one to three weeks before moving on to Phase II, Base Builder.

Being probably overly ambitious, I'm also going to start back up with my Couch to 5K running program on the treadmill on the days I don't do the SETS.

So, wish me luck! And post comments every once in a while to keep me accountable, willya? I'll try to post at least once a week about my progress, if I remember.

Happy ski season!

Update: Mission accomplished today. 1 SETS. Run: 5:00 minute walking warmup; 20 mins. of alternating 1 min. running, 1.5 mins. walking. So far so good!

Photoshoot at Red Butte Gardens

So yesterday was Friday, and because we decided not to send the girls to school on Fridays, that's our day to go and do something fun. Yesterday, we decided to head to Red Butte Gardens. I hadn't been there in many, many years, back when they didn't have any buildings and the entrance was off a dirt road by the university.

Wow have things changed! For some reason, though, the light was interesting and the girls had cute jackets on and their hair was decently done, so we ended up taking a bunch of photos. This post includes just a few from the first batch that I've edited.

(I played with K-Wiggle's photo a bit because I really liked her expression here, but it was ever-so-slightly out of focus. I added some texture, and I think the B&W version looks kind of like a newspaper photo. I don't really like the color version, but I added it here for comparison to the B&W).

So I lied... we do have some photos from our Lake Powell trip.

Apparently while I was... hmm... what was I doing? Who knows? Anyway, while I was doing something else, Daddy-J was snapping pictures of seemingly random things from our trip to Lake Powell.

I uploaded pictures from the camera today after the girls and I took a trip to Red Butte Gardens (more on that in another post some day!), and lo-and-behold, there were Lake Powell pictures. Now I know that I personally did not snap a single picture at Lake Powell. And I know that the camera battery was dead before we left home to GO to Lake Powell. So I will have to inquire of Daddy-J how it was that he managed to charge the camera battery and take pictures, all without my knowledge. Well, actually, who cares? At least there are pictures!

This was our campsite, viewed from the water. You can see Grampa Larry's motor home, our giant red tent, and my car (I think this was taken after Kerry & Scott had already left on Sunday).

This is the spot Daddy-J left Grampa Larry fishing on Sunday morning while Daddy-J came back to get all of us (of course, by the time Daddy-J got out into the channel, it was pouring rain, so that plan didn't work out too well...). If you look closely, you can see the blue speck in the bottom middle of the photo -- that's Grampa Larry. Gives you a sense of the scale, no? If you look even closer, you can see the waterfall coming off the rocks -- that's from the rain!

A closer shot of Grampa Larry and the water coming off the rocks.

This is Daddy-J on the boat, with a larger waterfall in the background. Again, all that water is rain coming off the rocks above.

Here's a shot of the girls and Grampa Larry at the campsite. You simply cannot even imagine how flipping dirty they were by this time... this was late Sunday, when Daddy-J and Grampa Larry were getting ready to drive out of the campsite (Mama-V was driving the boat to the ramp for pickup).

Speaking of which... here's a little video of Grampa Larry driving the motor home out of the Stanton Creek "primitive" campground where we stayed at Lake Powell.

And here's a photo showing the entrance to the area we were camping in.

And just in case you couldn't read that sign in the last photo, here's a closeup of the sign that says "Four Wheel Drive Recommended."

Ah well. All's well that ends well. No harm, no foul. And besides, we had a grand ol' time!

New York - Take 1 - Part 2

So, getting back to our Labor Day weekend trip to NYC...

After going to see Mamma Mia, we walked the NYC streets for a bit and stopped at a really great deli (sorry, it's a famous one, but I don't remember the name of it!).

Daddy-J ordered this enormous pastrami/corned beef sandwich. Seriously, this thing must have weighed 5 pounds!

Of course, Mama-V helped Daddy-J with his sandwich, and just couldn't resist this 5 pound piece of cheesecake with cherries on top! I think I ate about half of it, and then started feeling very ill from eating 5 million calories in one sitting. But it was a terrific New York style cheesecake!

The next day, we saw more tennis. . .

. . . and then went on a pub crawl through Chinatown, Little Italy, and SoHo. (Unfortunately, the pub crawl rendered Mama-V unable to take photographs, so you'll just have to imagine what it all looked like!).

On our last day, we took a lovely walk through Central Park before taking the subway back out to JFK (an adventure in and of itself), getting on an airplane, and winging our very tired (and slightly hung over) way home.

A rainy, windy weekend at Lake Powell.

We haven't been to Lake Powell since Miss-D was about 6 months old. This weekend, we finally bit the bullet and took the kids to Lake Powell. We bought a big, HUGE, tent (really, the thing has three rooms!). Grampa Larry came along in his motor home. Our friends Kerry and Scott and their three kids (Ian, Emma, and Nora) came too with their popup camper. It was quite a crew!

We left early Friday morning and arrived in time for a lovely evening at our designated camp site. We stayed at the Stanton Creek primitive campground near Bullfrog Marina. Daddy-J and Grampa Larry launched the boat and found a campsite where we could have the boat, the RV, the popup trailer, and the tent, with plenty of space for everyone.

We had a good dinner and some of us went for an evening cruise. We lit a campfire and roasted marshmallows and made s'mores. (For the record, all three of my kids informed us that they do not like s'mores. Who ever heard of such a creature?!).

Then we all went to bed Friday night and it started getting windy. Let's just say that our big, HUGE, tent is not well-equipped for wind. Poor K-Wiggles woke up in the middle of the night with what could only be described as a night terror. For at least 45 minutes she just screamed bloody murder and could not be comforted. She hit me, kicked me, punched me, and all but bit me. And then she was done and she just melted into my arms and went back to sleep. Poor baby. Nobody got a lot of sleep Friday night.

Saturday morning was cool and breezy, but at least not raining. The kids had an awesome time digging in the red dirt that was everywhere. Daddy-J made a boatload of pancakes for breakfast and the kids chowed down!

By lunchtime, though, the sprinkles were getting heavier and none of us were up for staying in the tent/camper all day. So we loaded everyone into the cars and took a tour of Bullfrog Marina. We stopped at the Lodge and had a nice lunch.

Saturday was Baby-Nora's 2nd birthday (I'm affriad the poor child will be "baby Nora" -- or Baby Dora, as K-Wiggles still calls her -- on her wedding day!). After a short fishing cruise for Kerry, Daddy-J, Emma, and Grampa Larry, we had a good dinner and sat by the campfire some more. The kids went to bed pretty easily -- the bigs watched a movie on a sheet that Scott and Kerry brought for their projector. Mama-V went to bed early (and apparently was talked about for it ;-)

Then it started really raining. It rained on and off, heavy and light, pretty much all night. As unequipped as our tent is for wind, it's even worse in rain. Let's just say that all of our camping pads were "floating" by morning. Luckily, most of our sleeping bags were dry and we all slept relatively well, all things considered.

But by Sunday morning, we'd had enough. Daddy-J, Scott and Grampa Larry went fishing while Kerry and I made breakfast for the kids and grumbled about the weather. When the guys got back at noon, Kerry and Scott packed up and headed out.

Of course, the minute they left, the clouds broke and the sun started shining. By then, our camp was half packed up and we just couldn't decide what to do. So we took the kids out on the boat for a swim and some more fishing. We had a lazy afternoon, then decided to make a break for home.

Daddy-J took the kids home and Grampa Larry and I pulled the boat home with the motor home. It was a long night, but we made it home and spent today unpacking and cleaning red dirt out of everything.

While this doesn't sound like the greatest camping trip ever, it was actually a lot of fun. It was good to know that we actually can go camping and have fun, the kids will sleep, and they're big enough now that we don't have to watch them every second to make sure they're not going to kill themselves! They were pretty much self-entertaining, and there were very few disputes to referee.

I had a great time, but I'm totally exhausted. We took not one single picture -- dead battery, rain, you name it, but pictures was not what I was thinking about. You can see a couple of shots of where we camped and some pretty Lake Powell red sandstone canyon walls on Kerry's blog.

All in all, we'll definitely be doing this again, just hopefully without the rain!

New York - Take 1

Over Labor Day weekend, Daddy-J and I went on a lovely trip to New York City, courtesy of one of the local television stations that Daddy-J advertises with. We arranged a sitter for the kiddos and flew off early Friday morning on a direct flight from Salt Lake to JFK. The main attraction for this trip was going to see the U.S. Open tennis tournament!

We stayed in Manhattan, right on Central Park South. On Saturday, we rode the subway out to Flushing, New York, and entered the U.S. Open tennis complex. The ride out there took nearly an hour, I think, but it was interesting to see various parts of the city and how easy it was to get around, even a long way from Manhattan.

The first day, we saw Venus Williams, then Rafael Nadal (pictured above). We left before Serena Williams played her match that day.

After taking the train back to Manhattan. We gussied up and went to see Mamma Mia! We had no idea what it was about, other than it had Abba songs in it, but the show was terrific! We had so much fun!

Before the show, we indulged in a couple of genuine NYC street-vendor hotdogs! Yummy!

That was it for the first day. More on our trip to NYC in my next post.