Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Festival of Trees

Along with my "band", MC6, we had our first show of this year's holiday season at the Festival of Trees fund raiser at the Banner Gateway Hospital in Mesa. The crowd was, well, sparse (see below)


so we decided to use this as an opportunity for a dress rehearsal. If you'd like to see a clip of the show, please check it out at the MC6 blog at http://mc6acappella.blogspot.com/. On the clip I sing a lovely rendition of Eclipse's "This Year".

Monday, November 19, 2007

Little Elves


Here's the link to my little munchkins' dance. http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=9549730449

This is pretty fun. Try it yourself! http://www.elfyourself.com/

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

FHE smackdown

When I was in Prague a couple of weeks ago, I received an email from my son that said the following:



I received this on Thursday. I was 1/2 a world away, as the REM song goes.

Ends up it was a pretty minor mishap involving too much dancing and "twirling" during FHE and a resultant head-smacking against the coffee table.

Apparently, there was some blood and some crying; but a little TLC and a head bandage from Melanie that would have made a WWI field medic proud, and Kate was all smiles in no time.


I never did hear how the FHE went after the incident, but I imagine Kate was begging for dessert and fighting with Collin over who would get the yellow ice cream bowl in short order.

She seemed fine when I got home 4 days later. Crazy as ever.

Thursday, November 8, 2007

TAG! I'm it!

I was "tagged" by 2 people, my sister-in-law Erin (http://eringsmith.blogspot.com/) and my wife's cousin, Kelly (http://diversifiedbeeson.blogspot.com/). After the first one, I thought maybe I could skate by and not actually have to pass on the chain-type letter, but once I got tagged a second time, I figured there were people out there that really want to see my answers, so here goes.

The rules:
1-Link to your tagger (like I did with Erin & Kelly), and also post these rules on your blog
2-Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird
3-Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs
4- Let them know they are TAGGED by leaving a comment on their blog

So, 7 weird, yet interesting things about myself...

1. I always have wanted to be a pilot. It started out in jr. high - I wanted to be a Navy pilot, flying fighter jets off of aircraft carriers. I actually was not far away from attending the US Naval Academy (I had 2 congressional nominations), but my eyesight had already begun to fail me, and pilot training was then no longer an option, so I went to BYU and studied Finance and pre-med. I never did go to med school either. Nor do I work in Finance anymore. Funny how life throws curve balls at you sometimes. BTW - I still want to learn to fly. I see those fighter jets from Williams field flying over my house all the time, and I can't help but grow wistful at what cool jobs those guys have.
2. I'm somewhat anal about the family checkbook (see Finance degree mentioned above). I reconcile that dang thing at least once a week. I have to write down EVERYTHING that affects that account, and then enter it all into Quicken, which I never actually do analyze for relevant trends, etc... Melanie, on the other hand, could go YEARS without writing down any expenses, wads of receipts slowly taking over her purse. I figure there's got to be a happy medium, but I haven't found it yet.
3. I LOVE music. All kinds of music. Except for Top 40 Pop (Britney Spears, Beyonce, anything American Idol-esque), gangsta rap, and speed metal. I have over 45G of mp3s on my computer, and only a 20G iPod. You can imagine my frustration.
4. I was on my high school varsity basketball team. I never played, except in blow-out wins (or losses), but I was there, and I rarely broke a sweat.
5. I absolutely can't stand reality TV, with the lone exception being The Amazing Race. It would be so much fun to be a part of one of those races, but who really has 6 weeks to take off from work to do that?
6. I have a weakness for pistachios. My favorites are a brand called Zenobia, which are Turkish pistachios. They are smaller than the California nuts you see at the grocery store, but much tastier. I think you can only get them on-line now, ever since CVS dropped them a few months ago. I'll eat them until I make myself sick. Then I'll eat some more.
7. Both of my parents are the youngest kids in their families, my Dad by 10 years, and my Mom by 11 years. I am the youngest kid in my family as well. I have two uncles old enough to be my grandparents - they fought in WWII!

OK, so now I'm supposed to "tag" 7 people and pass this along as some sort of blogging chain letter. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if I know of 7 people, who blog, who haven't already been hit by this bug, so there may be some redundancy here. maybe I'll just tag some randoms and see where it leads?

1. My sister, Laura (http://minetap.blogspot.com/)
2. My wife, Melanie (http://minipearls.blogspot.com/)
3. Laura Gunn (http://lauragunn.typepad.com/paintinmyhair/)
4. My bro-in-law, Daniel (http://boonersmith.blogspot.com/)
5. My bro-in-law, Davey (http://dgsmith.blogspot.com/)
6. Jake (http://diversifiedbeeson2.blogspot.com/)
7. My bro-in-law, Ben (http://thebionicblog.blogspot.com/)