My Autumn Rant

So I haven't posted anything for a while. I guess life has been a little boring and there's not a whole lot to tell about. I've noticed that all of my friends have blogged about the changing weather. So here's my 2 cents about Fall. It's okay. Football season is fun and Halloween should be fun again this year. The leaves changing colors is always nice and I'm enjoying the peaches and all of the yummy apple stuff....But.....I'm still not ready for the cold! I'm not quite ready to trade in my short sleeves for sweaters or my nightly fruit smoothies for nightly hot chocolate. And once Christmas is over, there's nothing to look forward to until April? (unless we have a nice tropical vacation planned in January, which is almost becoming a necessity). Sometimes it would be nice to be a bear and sleep all through the winter and wake up to the nice warm weather! Maybe that's what I'll do. I think I'll hibernate this year. So until spring, I'll leave you with some pictures of the summertime things we haven't posted about yet (elementary school carnival, neighborhood luau, Utah vs. UNLV football game, and Dave's parents returning from their Indian mission.)

The Rest of our Vacation: Chicago & the Amish

After checking out Chicago and deciding there wasn't a whole lot to do, we grabbed a pamphlet from our hotel for a little Amish place called Amish Acres. We thought it would be fun to check it out because neither of us has been to Amish country and it was on the way to Michigan. We were a little skeptical about its authenticity, because the name was trade-marked and the pamphlet gave a telephone # and an email address. Do the Amish use phones and computers these days? When we finally got there at 6:00pm, all the little buildings were closed except for the shop and restaurant. So we bought some Amish bread and peach butter (kind of like jam). We also ate at the restaurant. As it turns out, the Amish Acres is located in Nappannee, IN, which has Amish people there, but the farm is not run by the Amish. I guess you could say they exploit the Amish. But it was still fun and let me tell you, the Amish (fake or not) can cook! They served the food family-style, and it was a lot of food! Check out our little buffet (complete with beef, potatoes & gravy, green beans, bread, apple butter, stuffing, fried chicken, beef & noodles, bean soup, pickles & sweet onions, and don't forget the pie). We were stuffed!

After the big dinner, we rolled ourselves out to the car and finished our drive to Kalamazoo. Here's the rest of the pictures.

The Big Game at The Big House

I'm going to skip ahead in our little journey and tell about the big game before another loss to UNLV ruins it all. Don't worry- I'll let you know about the rest of our Chicago & Amish adventures. On Friday, we finished our drive to Ann Arbor. We were a little bit worried about going into a blue town wearing nothing but red. We know how tense feelings can exist between blue people and red people. Let me just say these were the nicest blue people I have ever met. After parking our car a mile and a half away from the stadium (remember, this is still 5 hours before kickoff), we found the tailgating party. It covered the entire golf course. These people really take football seriously. Here's just an extremely small piece of the tailgating going on...






The U's humble little tent...





At the game, we didn't sit with all the other red people in the endzone 80 rows up. If we're going to travel this far for a game, we're going to sit in good seats. So we sat at the 30-yard line 50 rows up, with all the blue people. We were the only red around! I think the people around us were a little upset we were there, especially when the Utes started to dominate. But Dave reassured them that the Utes would make stupid mistakes and rack up plenty of penalties and blow a big lead late in the 3rd/4th quarters. And in typical Utah fashion, the Utes almost blew it. Luckily, they held on and we were able to celebrate the victory!

We were very impressed with the number of Ute fans that made the trip. We estimated there to be 4500-5000 Utes. I know that only accounts for 4% of the attendance (107,000+), but it's a long way to travel for a football game. For being so relatively small, the Utah section sure was loud! What a fun game! I'm glad I finally got to experience a "real" college football game.

Art?

We didn't have any plans on Friday in Chicago, so we decided to walk around the city. We spent most of our time on "The Magnificent Mile" aka Michigan Ave. After the long ride on the ghetto train, we finally made it into downtown. Interesting place. With all the tall buildings, we were unable to see the sun, so it was hard to find our sense of direction. Thanks to our fine navigation skills, we were able to find Michigan Ave. All along the street, there were these strange pieces of "art." How do you define something as a piece of art? I think my definition is that if you would pay money for it to display it in your living room, then it's art. But apparently, others have a different definition of art. I certainly would not want to display random bodices in my living room...

Maybe I could display these on my porch or in the kitchen...

Perhaps art is supposed to make you go "hmmm." If that's the case, I guess all of these creations could be considered great pieces of art.

Rock Star in the Making

Here's Ryan's version of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. Listen closely.

Here's The ABCs...

Happy Birthday to you...

and the Itsy Bitsy Spider

Birthday Celebration Comes to a Close

Last night, we finally finished celebrating Ryan's birthday. It all started on Wednesday (his actual birthday). We opened presents and my mom and dad came over for some birthday cake. Then on Saturday we celebrated with Dave's family. Ryan had so much fun running around and getting crazy with his cousins. Unfortunately, I forgot to pull out the camera for pictures of this party. Last night, we went to my parents' house to celebrate with that side of our family. We also celebrated my aunt Liz's birthday and my nephew Cooper's first birthday. Ryan hadn't seen these cousins for awhile, so again, he had fun running around and getting crazy with them. They were so loud the gave my mom a big headache. But it was fun. And Ryan and Braden were really excited about the Lightning McQueen party gear. Ry's having so much fun now with all of his new toys.

Happy Birthday Ryan!

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you! Happy birthday dear Ryan, happy birthday to you!


Can you believe our baby's already 2 years old? He's growing up so fast! Here's what he looked like 2 years ago today.

New Look

I decided it was time for a new background. I got so sick of searching through the hundreds of designs and they all started to look the same. So I decided on something seasonal, in honor of Dave's excitement for the Games and all the extra time we've spent watching TV. Go USA!

What you don't want to see when you open the lid to your washer!

I've seen a lot of scary things when looking into the washing machine and dryer. I've seen Ryan's matchbox cars (not too scary), important notes left in my pockets (getting scarier), gum(pretty darn scary), and our new point-and-shoot camera (so scary I almost had a heart attack - and yes, the camera was dead). Yesterday, I found something one step below the camera. So I'm one of those people who washes their darks with the whites. If the darks have already been through a couple of cycles and there's no chance of them bleeding, what's the point of separating them? Yesterday, I thought my red lounging pants had passed the point of no more bleeding. Apparently, I was wrong. I was a quite surprised to see my laundry with a pretty pink hue. I didn't know whether to cry or cuss. (in case you're wondering, first came the *!@%, then came the tears). Unlike the last time this happened (yes, it has happened more than once), we only lost a couple of Ryan's shirts that he had almost grown out of. And I'm sure he won't mind wearing a pink bib, as long as nobody sees him. Thanks to some quick action with a gallon of bleach, I can still wear my favorite pair of capri's and we don't have to replace any pairs of g's. Hooray for bleach!!

The Big House

It is official - we are going to spend an afternoon in the Big House for the Utah-Michigan football game in three weeks. We do have high hopes for the Utes this season, but we are going more for the experience of attending a game at another big time college football stadium.

After this game, I will have been to a college football game at four of the five largest college stadiums over the last three years. Since 2005 I have been to football games in Rice-Eccles Stadium, Sun Devil Stadium, Romney Stadium, Ohio Stadium ("the Horseshoe"), Sam Boyd Stadium, the Rose Bowl, and Neyland Stadium.

Ok, I admit to possibly having an obsession with going to college football games, but I currently have no desire to abandon said obsession. Now I just need an excuse to go to a game at Beaver Stadium in Pennsylvania to complete the five largest college football stadiums...

Of course, I have already seen the best game that I will ever see in my life - Ohio State - Michigan in 2006. Fortunately, this time I will be going to a road game with this other Ute fan:

Go Utes!