Go! Fight! Win!

Micah recently tried out for the Sophomore cheerleading team at Timpview.  Yes, I know she's only in 8th grade.  Yes, I know she'll only be a Freshman.  But I guess that's the way it's done.  Micah has told me in the past that she's good at faking like she knows what she's doing in things like dance.  Well, I have to report she's come through again... She made the team.  She was very excited, and we were too because we just didn't think she really had a chance given that many girls have trained for this specifically for many years.  It's cool to see that she was able to put her mind to something, work hard at it in a compressed time frame, and then succeed.  Now I guess we find out if we should've been more careful with what we wished for...

A Quick Visual Update

 My Saturdays and evenings project with MattMax and my Dad ... this is just the first of hopefully many

 Still work to do, but you can now see what the exterior colors will be

 The kitchen cabinets are in.  Countertops, appliances, and stain on the floor will finalize the look

Love the railings

Good Times

I love Spring break. Everyone gets significantly less stressed because there's no school, and it usually means a fun trip somewhere. This year the fun trip was back to Los Altos. We drove out there the Saturday before Spring break so we could go to church at our old ward. That was awesome. It wasn't that we felt like returning heroes or anything like that, we just felt so comfortable with the people who we've known and loved for years and years. We stayed with our friends the Baughs and the Fuchs, with kid sleepovers at the Hursts. Of course we wish we could've spent more time with more people, but we did our best. I left on Wed morning to come back to work, but the highlights for me were: hanging out with old friends, going to church in our "home" ward, the Giants game with Brig and Jason & Jack Hurst (even though they lost), seeing Stomp, and an epic bike ride of 75 miles up and over the mountains and down the Pacific Coast Highway to the beach in Capitola.  As I said in the title ... good times.

Our house is coming along great. As you can see from the pictures, it's starting to take shape and reveal its character. So far we're very pleased with all the things we chose to do, within the context of trying to keep within a budget. They continue to tell us we're right on track for a late May completion.  Nice!

If April showers truly do bring May flowers, then we're definitely going to have a lot of beautiful flowers in May, right before the flood waters wash them all away.

Happy Birthday Brig!!! ... and other stuff

Brig turns 5 years old today.  I know I've said this before - probably most of our kids' birthdays - but he already seemed pretty old to me so it's actually a little weird he's only turning 5.  He doesn't know this yet, but he's going to be getting a brand new bike, which I put together in the basement last night.  He's going to be super psyched. He's such a good kid, and we love him like crazy.  I love it when we hang out and do stuff together - he's definitely my little buddy.

Morgan came home and announced that she took 2nd place among the girls in her class 1/2 mile run at school.  It wasn't until later that I learned she ran it in her Ugg boots... she said she forgot they had P.E. that day, so she didn't wear good shoes.  It makes me laugh to think of her running around the track in big furry boots.  Wonder how she would've done in flip flops...

This Saturday we're loading up the car and heading home to California for Spring Break.  Everyone's very excited to see friends, and to be back in sunny CA.  We've been fortunate to see some CA friends in the few months since we moved to UT, but it'll be great to spend more time with many of them and renew our friendships.

And speaking of friendships, when we were at Conference on Saturday morning, we ran into the Smiths - our very best friends from Texas!  It was so amazing to see them, and we arranged to meet up with them on Monday evening as well.  Great to catch up - it was just like picking up where we'd left off.  We're so grateful for amazing friends all around the country.

House update: base layer of stucco is up on the outside of the house, sheetrock is completely hung and they're just mudding and taping today.  Some neighbors went way above and beyond the call of duty to help me for 11 hours on Saturday (much of which I wasn't even there for) to run tubing and wiring for a central vac system we decided at the last minute to put in.  I'm actually looking forward to being out of town for a few days so lots will happen between visits to the lot.  One thing we worry a bit about though is just being there to catch small slip-ups.  We've already caught a few, like they put our sliding back door in backwards, and they put arches in where they weren't supposed to go (big no-no for Angela), and a couple of other small things.  They're doing a great job, but moving so fast that things are bound to get jumbled.

Pics and Progress

I love this photo I took last Saturday as Morgan and I were skiing the back mountain at Sundance.  She's a nearly fearless skier, and I had a lot of fun taking her on some "daddy" runs, or something a little harder than we'd been doing.  She's good enough that I could say, "meet you at the lifts", and then we'd both just go.  Lots of fun, and we're going to close out our Sundance season tonight as we go night skiing on the final weekend it's open.

A few people have recently asked for new photos on the house.  This is the latest, although as soon as I take a picture they do something new and exciting, so they're almost instantly out of date.  Today they're pouring all the concrete - driveway, front stairs, front walkway, back patio, etc.  They've also stacked all the sheetrock inside, and they'll start that today as well.  We're going to put insulation in the interior walls over the weekend to help with sound.  Electrical is pretty much done, plumbing is pretty much done.  I'll have to start showing some inside pictures so you can see progress while the outside doesn't change much.

This is the back of the house - a view I don't think I've shown yet.  Those five big windows in the middle are all on the high family room wall, and it's going to be spectacular in the morning when the sun shows through!  The back sliding door is now on, so there's no longer a gaping hole, which incidentally is where Brig likes to pee out of every time we go there.  We should probably stop that before long, but then again it might be good for the soil...  There also used to be five dead or dying pear trees that bordered the neighbors driveway in the back - those are gone now too.

We're looking forward to Conference this weekend.  Our whole family except for Brig will be at the Sat. morning session to watch as my Dad speaks - watch for Elder Richards, should be good.  He told me he wrote 18 different talks before finally settling on his final topic.  At least he'll be prepared for anything.

Cheer for ... (gulp) ... Kentucky!

And so it comes down to this.  58 March Madness games complete, and now I stand alone at the top of a fairly large bracket competition - 62 people - with one very cool prize awaiting the winner, an iPad2.

Our auditors sponsored a bracket challenge for many of their clients, and for fun a couple of us from the office entered our brackets (at no charge).  My philosophy is to go with the higher seeded teams except where I have solid reasoning to choose otherwise, but then to pick a couple of substantial upsets to big teams, which, if they actually happen, will tend to separate me from the pack.  This year I chose Kentucky upsetting Ohio State, who was the team most experts had tabbed as the pre-tournament favorite.  I didn't pick them to win it, but I figured that if they pulled the Sweet 16 upset, it would give me a good chance of standing alone.  I was right.

Now with the Final Four set, most brackets are in shambles because all the #1 seeds have been eliminated, and two complete underdogs have made it this far.  That's all well and good, but for me it all comes down to the match-up between Kentucky and UConn.  If Kentucky wins, I win.  If UConn wins, "mike_fozz 2" (whoever that is) wins.  So despite every fiber of my being gagging on the concept ... GO KENTUCKY!!!!!!!!

If you want to pray for me and Kentucky, I'm sure there's some good justification out there, somewhere, to do so...

Make up your mind...

I'm talking to the weather - make up your mind!  I'm SO ready for spring, and we get enough warmish, nice-ish days that it's starting to feel like it's here or on its way.  And then we have rain and gray cloudiness like today...

The house is coming right along, and it's fun to watch it shoot up.  I walked through this morning on my way to work and was very happy to be able to envision what it's going to feel like and look like.  One thing that's starting to stress me out though is our lack of furniture.  I have these grand plans to build a bunch of it, but I'm starting to realize that actually takes time, and we will be moving into the house maybe even as early as two months from now.  Sheesh, I better get started!

It will be fun to see some of the Baughs today as they came to Utah for a funeral.  Angela can't wait to hang out with Amy, and the girls will have fun with their CA friends for a while.  Busy, busy weekend ahead of us.  We're headed skiing for probably the last time (during the day that is, we still have one more night skiing trip planned next week for FHE) tomorrow - we were shocked to learn that Sundance closes for the season next weekend.  I guess they're ready for spring too...  We also have Anne's baby blessing, Micah and Ang are going to the General YW conference, and who knows what else.  I don't have to worry any more about fitting a BYU basketball game in there, although I am sort of interested in what happens in some of the games tomorrow - if Kentucky pulls off a stunning upset of Ohio State, things could get very interesting in one of my pools.

We're starting to find some fun new friends.  Ang and I went to dinner this week with a couple who are fun, and have Bay Area experience.