My travels

Hello, it has been a little while since I have written but a few significant things have happened. First, the sad news. My uncle passed away a few weeks ago from cancer. He was my mom's younger brother and had a great sense of humor. I got to go to the funeral which was nice. Unfortunately, when the doctors first discovered the cancer a year ago, it was already at stage 4 so he was fortunate to have the one year he ended up having. We will all miss him.

The funeral was in Utah and while I was there I saw a lot of cousins that I hadn't seen for a really long time. That was a lot of fun to catch up with many of them. I have somewhere around 30 on my mom's side of the family (not counting their spouses). It is a lot but it still is much smaller than the 52 from Rachelle's mom's side of the family. One of the cooler things I learned was that my cousin Andrea's brother-in-law is the founder and CEO of a company called Skull Candy that makes cool headphones. What was funny about this was that Rachelle had just purchased some Skull Candy headphones but complained that when she used them, she couldn't hear anything but what was playing on her iPod. This was bad for her because she wanted to be able to hear our kids while she was listening to her books. I didn't have that problem so we traded headphones and I discovered that those headphones actually did shut out a lot of the surrounding noise. In fact, on the plane flight to Utah, I didn't even have to turn up the volume to hear my book (I was listening to The Hunger Games which is a great book by the way). Well, I was really excited to hear that it was my cousins brother-in-law that made these great headphones.

Something else I got to do while in Utah was climb to the Y on the mountain near BYU. Despite having gone to BYU, I never actually went to the Y. I always seemed to have something more important to do. That was the also the reason I never went skiing or snowboarding while going to school. Now that I look back, I am sure I missed out on a lot of things because I was just too busy with school. I couldn't have been THAT busy. Anyway, I finally got to do it and it was pretty fun. While there, I stayed with my sister Megan and her husband Alex. They were fun to stay with and it was good to catch up with them a little.

One other thing I should mention is that I finally updated the look of our web site. I took out some of the stuff on it (including the link to my blog) but it still retains most of the information with what I hope is a much better look.