A flash of light

Tuesday night I decided to lace up my bball shoes and put on my basketball jersey play a game of church ball. I was a little apprehensive on 2 counts. First, I didn't feel that fit, and second the game started at 9:40pm. The 9:40 game is always hard because it is soo late in the evening. By 10:30pm every night I am usually winding down and getting ready for bed, so, to be playing an "intense" game of basketball at 10:40 does not bode well for going to sleep on time. In fact, it usually takes at least and hour or even two before my body is able to settle down into sleep mode.

In the words of Doctor Clark Draney, "I tell you this story to get to the story" that inspired the title of this blog post.

Since I was still wide awake on Tuesday night I was walking around the house trying to decide what to do until I felt tired. Deanna came upstairs and we started to chat around midnight. We were sitting in the kitchen discussing the happenings of the day when there was a bright flash of light that came in our back window. Since we live in a cul-di-sac, we get a lot of flashes of light when cars come down the road and decide to turn around, however, those blinding lights usually enter through the front living room. This was coming from the back yard. Both Deanna and I found that curious and so we peered into the back yard which borders the elementary school. We didn't see any cars, plus, headlights wouldn't hit our house from way over there. Deanna mentioned that it might have been some spot light or search light from a police car. We opened the back door and squinted into the darkness. No police car in view. The school grounds and streets were empty. We shrugged it off and went to sleep.

Yesterday morning, in the newspaper, we discovered what had happened. There was a huge meteor that burned up in the atmosphere at 12:07am Wednesday morning. Exactly the same time we were chatting in the kitchen!

Here are a few of the news reports on the meteor. How funny that we just happened to be awake at exactly that time of night because of my church basketball game.





http://www.ksl.com
KTVB.com

Mormon Whiskey

When I was little, my Dad used to bring home a 2 liter bottle of something he like to call Mormon Whiskey. My Dad would pull out the "Mormon Whiskey" for special sporting events on TV. I remember it being the drink of choice for Basketball games, Football games and Tennis matches. It seemed to be the perfect counterpoint to a bowl of buttered popcorn.



Mormon Whiskey is nothing more and nothing less than a bottle of Grapefruit Soda. I decided to write about Mormon Whiskey because I found myself in Walmart the other day looking for some cheep pop. I usually pick up something like lemon/lime generic soda but something caught my eye. It was a bottle of Grapefruit Soda. I immediately grabbed a couple of 2 liter bottle and took them home with the hopes that the tastes would bring back all of those memories of home. To my surprise, it was exactly as I remember. Sweet, tangy and delicious.

Mormon Whiskey lives again in the Carter Home.

Halloween 2009

I don't know why, but every time I have to spell Halloween I have to sing the song in my head so that I spell it right. Have you heard the song?

H - A - Double L, Oh - Double U - Double E, N spells Halloween.

Anyway, only two of our kids dressed up this year for Fright Night. This year was not much of a fright since our two girls dressed up as a cow girl and a princess.

Here are there cute little outfits.



The last little video that I would like to share with everyone today is our paintings on our front windows and pumpkin that we submitted for judgement at our elementary school.
Last year we submitted a pumpkin entry and received The Grand Champion award, this year, we earned the "Most Complicated". Hummm, they must have been running out of creative awards to give out.

Our window painting lacked a little imagination but we kept up the tradition despite lack of interest and creativity. Enjoy the Video.

Do I look Fat?

I'm starting to feel fat. When I was younger it was always embarrassing when girls my age would look at my legs and say, "I wish I had your skinny legs". Yes, it was very emasculating to hear those types of comments. So, when I got on my mission, I was able to brag that I got up to a whopping 140 pounds. All of my slacks were very tight and I even had to commission some new trousers from a local seamstress in Ecuador to accommodate my growing waistline. However my current situation is getting very grave. My neck and chin are starting to look like the double chin that Glenn Beck is sporting. My belly is growing further and further out over my pants so that I can no longer see my belt buckle. My pants are all a little tight and I can now see my gut when I'm just standing in a relaxed position. I've definitely got to do something about my weight but at the end of the day, I'm just too tired to actually go out and run around. I guess that is how it starts. Maybe I'll participate in our stake basketball program. It might just allow me to get in enough exercise that I don't feel like a complete fat fatty fatso.

So, as of right now, I weight over 160 lbs. Not much over, but I'm over that. So, I'm FAT. I guess I'll start by eating less twinkies and HoHo's.

hijacked

I was sending and reading email from my gmail account the other day when I noticed a very strange thing.  The email I was sending looked a little different than normal.  I checked some settings and then I noticed that the name on my emails that I was sending, was wrong.  The name that was showing up in my email was Horst Gunter.  Who in the world is Horst Gunter and how did he get into my email account?!?  That is when a cold sweat fell over me as I thought about someone getting into my email account and messing around.  My gmail account is tied to about 20 other accounts around the web.  I quickly clicked my way over to my settings page and found the “Change Password as quickly as possible” button in Google.  I changed the password to a very complex set of letters, numbers, characters and umlauts. I included Capital Letters, small letters, commas, squiggly’s, numbers and infinite values.  To make positively sure that this hijacker did not get into my account again, I think I even put in a couple of values of Pi and integrated integers.

After my frantic clicking, punching of buttons and keystrokes, I finally felt secure again.  It sure did scare me to see something changed like that in a very critical area of my life.

After getting home that night, I took one extra precaution and renamed my dog.  His new name is #m%gZ~2.

Am I paranoid?

Christmas List

I know that I probably shouldn't bring up the "C" word this early in the year but I'm going to do it anyway. Every year it is a struggle to find great Christmas (that's the C word) presents for my wife and for our kids. Deanna does an awesome job of finding great gifts but it is much harder for me. So, to help myself along, I keep a list of ideas in my phone. If I see something on TV, or while I'm walking through a store, I quickly just type it into my phone for safe keeping. Now that it is October, it is time to pull out the list and start finding great prices on the ideas I have come up with. Unfortunately there are some items on the list that never seem to make it underneath the Christmas tree. For example, I have had "stilts" on Coby's list for several years. For some reason, the stores are not filled with stilts as gift items. I think it would be a great "teen" gift. Plastic stilts, FUN!

Not only do I jot down gift ideas for my wife and kids, I have also kept a list for myself. It is inevitable that a few weeks before Christmas, I receive requests from various sources for what I want. I used to just ho hum around and try to think of something brilliant at the last minute which means I would usually say, "a new tie" or "new socks". It makes for a very boring Christmas Morning.

This year I'm asking for something a little unusual (and admittedly a little boring). In our garage, we have been trying to keep a good storage of water. We have filled up milk cartons, 2 liter bottles and apple juice bottles with water. We have around 30 of these mix matched containers sitting on the shelf. Every winter, these containers freeze and expand which means they break. So, as the weather starts to warm, we get a really nice natural spring water fall flowing off of our counters in the garage. Don't get me wrong, I love the sound of a waterfall, but this type of tippity tap sends chills up my spine like nails on a chalk board. I tell you all of this so that I can get to the final punch line of my story.

Here it is, "for Christmas, I'm asking for a 50 gallon drum to store our water.

ldsfamily dot net

I am very excited (excuse my while I bounce up and down excitedly in my chair while typeing) to announce that I will be starting a new blog/website called ldsfamily.net If you like what you see, please add a link to this website from your blog.

I came across a foundation called the "More Good Foundation". They are an organization that promotes positive LDS content on the internet. I became very interested when I saw this blog post by LDS Media Talk that talked about adopting a website and providing content. I decided to check it out and send in an inquiry about the program. I was emailed back and was offered a chance to participate. They seemed very willing to give me a chance to help once they saw that I have a Blog, Personal Web page, YouTube Channel, developed a site for a non-profit organization called Charity Anywhere Foundation and a facebook page.

We discussed the types of things I have been posting and how I could promote positive Mormon content on the internet. We came up with a website called simply, LDS Family. I will be posting things about me, and my family. The posts will be about my everyday life, stuff that happens in our family, things I have been thinking about. I'll post stuff about the Mormon church, Mormon beliefs, Mormon standards, Mormon living. I'll talk about what it is like to have an LDS Family. You know, an LDS family is like any other family. We have the same struggles, the same time constraints, the same issues with children, teachers, work etc. I just hope that I can create content that people will be interesting in reading, following, and returning. Hopefully it will create positive content that will be a tool people can use to learn more about the Mormon church.

To learn more about adopting a website, you can go to this page.