Tuesday, June 19th, Happy Birthday to my big sis, Kimmey Wood, also, my cupboard makeover....

Today is my sister Kim's birthday.  Happy Birthday Kimmey!!!! June is a big birthday month for my family. I have nephews and nieces galore with birthdays this month.  My birthday is coming up and is followed by one of my son in laws.  Phew, thats a lot of birthdays...
Anyway, today I worked on redoing my kitchen cupboards and found lots of extra space.  I think I have three or four drawers with nothing in them and several shelves empty also.  One of the things that was so attractive about the condo we bought is all the cupboard space.  It is crazy some of it is still empty.  I am sure I will find something to fill it up with.  I wish I would have take photos before I started the whole project so you could see what actually ended up getting done but I just took a few in the middle of the process.  Here they are:

Before

After

Before

After

 Of course there are many more cupboards and drawers I cleaned out.  I moved all kinds of stuff from one cupboard to another and got out  baskets to help organize things.  They really help things look better.  Happy Day everyone.

Monday, June 18th, Happy Birthday Easton and Getting Ready for our Week With the Grandkids...

Today is our grandson, Easton's birthday.  He is turning 8 years old.  Just to freak out his mother, I made this funny picture of him, that he may look like in say,,,,10 years or so.

I am on a mission to do some funny stuff for the week the grand-kids come in August and turning them into super heroes is part of the fun.  My plan has been to cartoon them into super heroes but I couldn't really find anything I liked on the internet so I downloaded an app on my iPad and had quite a good time transforming my sweet little grand-kids into the beginning of :   
THE FANTASTIC FOUR


                         Meet the ASTONISHING ALI
 

                       

 the STUPENDOUS SARIA
                               

                       

the EXCELLENT EASTON

                              

 and the MAGNIFICENT MYAH

                                   

I still need to do some photo editing, like taking out the long blond hair on Myah, but that shouldn't be to hard.  These are going to be super heroes that make good choices, help others and hopefully will continue to be the best friends ever.  Yeah for the Fantastic Four

PS: I also started a major redo of all the contents of my kitchen cupboards, to be continued tomorrow.

Sunday, June 17th-Potato Salad Success!!!

My mother makes the best potato salad ever.  I just want to say that  the potato salad I made for dinner today was nearly as good as her yummy salad. I am so happy because I have been trying to make that salad for  more than 30 years.  Yes!  I feel very accomplished,  now on to my mom's delicious Christmas candy.....Oh yeah Happy Father's Day to all my sons, son-in-laws, and my sweet hubby!!!!

Saturday, June 16-Temple Trip and Lunch

We decided we better head to the temple this morning as next weekend we are having a whole pile of company, then we are going to be in Sun Valley for a few days.  We live a 5-7 minute walk from temple square.  That is such a nice part of living downtown in Salt Lake City!  After the temple we went to lunch at the Lion House Restaurant, which is right on the way home.  It was nice to have some one on one time with Russell.  During school it seems like we have so much going on that some days we hardly see each other. 

It has been a lovely day! 

Friday, June 15-Colby and Kimber come to town

Colby called a few days ago to see if she could come and do a Father's Day project with me.  I thought it was a great idea so she came on Friday and we got to work.  Well, we didn't get right to work  because we had a few errands to do first so off we went.  We went to the bank for some $, visited Russell there for a while then headed to Michael's for supplies.  By the time we got home, ate some lunch, feed the baby and got her happy it was after 1:00.  Colby's plan  was to make some cute photo blocks with pictures on each side.  I wasn't really planning on making anything but decided at the store to make something similar for Russell as a grandpa gift.  Well, it turned out to be a much bigger project than we thought and she didn't leave for Provo until around 9:00 pm.

We had to sand our wooden blocks, paint them, let them dry, print off pictures, cut them up so they fit the blocks, (that was the hardest part), glue the pictures on the blocks, cover them with mod podge and then let that dry all the while taking care of Kimber who wanted to be part of the fun.  Since we could only do one side of the blocks at a time then wait for them to dry it was a long process.  When it was getting close to time for Russell to get home we decided I better get mine all done so we put Colby's blocks on hold and Colby helped me get my done and put away.  After Russell got home we had another set of hands to help with the baby so that was a big help. He also went and got us dinner from Crown Burger which was yummy!!   Here are some pictures of the finished project.  Hope our spouses don't look at this blog before Sunday, HA!

You can see Colby had set of 6 blocks and I had just two.  Hers were 2x2 and mine were 3 1/2x 3 1/2. One of the pictures I took of her blocks didn't turn out so there are only pictures of five of the six sides. 

The hardest part of this project was getting the center set of Colby's pictures to fit the blocks.  Our pictures were 4x6 and we had to trim off the white edges so they were not quite big enough to cover the six blocks. The center block pictures had to be just a little bit bigger than the outside blocks.  After we figured that out it was all pretty easy.  My blocks were much easier to figure out since I was only cutting up photos to fit one or both.    We each bought one page of stickers to add to the blocks and printed some signage off the computer to add the words.  

Happy Father's Day Every One!

Wednesday and Thursday, June 13 and 14, 2012 CTE Convention in Park City

I spent the last two days in Park City at Park City High School, home of the Miners. I had a Career and Technical Education (CTE) conference to attend there.  My job as Work-Based Learning Coordinator at East High School falls under the umbrella of CTE.  It was nice to spend a couple of days among peers and listen and learn about the great things going on in the state.  I feel pretty fortunate to have gotten this job when I moved to Salt Lake three years ago. It can be very fulfilling knowing I have the opportunity to help kids make life decisions regarding their future and career.

Anyway, it is the last school related thing on my agenda for a while so I am now looking forward to sleeping in a day or two and exploring the beautiful place I live.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012 Historic Walking Tour

You probably can guess by the title of this post that I live among really old people.  Who goes on a historic walking tour????  Well our ward Relief Society did this week and the average age of people in my ward is 76 years old, so we are kind of limited as what our ward activities can be (technically I am a teenager,HA!). Anyway,  I happen to live in a beautiful part of  Salt Lake City.  In my block is Brigham Young Park, City Creek Park and Memory Grove Park, each of which is very historic...so we do things like historic walks in my neck of the woods.  I shouldn't complain about it though, I got lost once in Salt Lake and ended up at Memory Grove and thought it was such a pretty place so when I found I was going to be living there, I knew it was the place for me.

When you look at these pictures you will see many white haired people who are extremely kind, considerate, thoughtful and pretty darn old.   It is a good ward though, never will you find more people who had given so much of their lives to the church: we have emeritus  general authorities, past mission presidents, temple presidents, temple workers, current general authorities, and all around good people.  Plus, we have lots of young people who are college students in our ward.  It is  a pretty interesting ward because we have no YM or YW and no primary.  The younger ward members must leave our ward and go to the family ward when their sweet little children are nursery age, because we don't have a nursery.

You should check out City Creek and Memory Grove next time you are in Utah.  It will be well worth your time and very relaxing and enjoyable.