http://wordle.net/

Now here is a fun little exercise. Connect to http://wordle.net/ and input your blog address and it will give you a quick summary of words that are used the most in your blog and then arranges them in a cool little pattern. Give it a try.

Here is a Wordle of my Blog.



Here is a Wordle of my Family.

Halloween 08

When I was a kid, we used to get out all of Mom's acrylic paints and paint the front window in our house. We had a huge front window which consisted of one large paine and 2 smaller windows on each side. Rachael was our artist in the family and it seemed like every year she would draw a design on the window, with a crayon at first, to outline the images we would paint. Then, we would paint over the crayon markings with black paint to give detail to the pictures. Then, the fun part. We filled in the blank spaces with all sorts of colors. We really loved painting the front windows.





I decided one year, to give it a try on our front windows. I am definitely not an artist and everything I draw has to be plagiarized, but the kids really enjoy painting our front windows. Here is a sampling of our work.


Fun Looking Monster

Pumpkins and Trick or Treat (which I had to write backwards to look correct in the window)

Cat and Pumpkin

Ok, so the pictures are not great and the camera that took the photos were from my cell phone so they look very very rough, but I think you get the cut of my gib. (a quote from Dennis Miller)

Savanna Published on LDS.org

I have been following a blog called LDSWebGuy for a few months now and he always has some interesting "tech" information about the Church. One of his posts a few weeks ago announced a place where the Youth in the church could comment about how they felt about General Conference. I liked the idea so I sent the link to all of my kids to see if they would comment.

Savanna was the only one that picked up on it and typed something up. I wasn't sure if they would use her comments or not but when I looked today, her post had been published on the LDS Website. She typed this all by herself without any help from her parents. In fact, I asked her yesterday if she had written something and she said she had but didn't remember what she had said. I think it is awesome that they added it to the youth comments.

Here is the LINK to that page. Great Job Savanna!

Lift Where You Stand

I wanted to write something about General Conference that we had in October. Here are some of the talks that I enjoyed.



I'm not sure why but the talk that sticks out most in my mind from the Conference weekend was President Dieter F. Uchtdorf's talk during the Priesthood Session of Conference, it was titled, Lift Where You Stand. I really liked the idea that everyone, whatever the calling, needs to "lift" where they are standing. Whether that be the ward greeter or the Bishop, you need to do your best to lift the ward where you can. The story goes that a number of men were trying to lift and move a piano. They had tried every configuration of men at the front, at the back, on the sides, on the legs but they just couldn't move the piano. Finally, one of the men said, "Lets all stand as close together as we can around the piano and Lift where you stand". After trying this idea, the piano was moved into place. There are many great lessons that can be learned from this parable.

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The second talk that I really thought was good was by Elaine S. Dalto Young Women General President called "A Return to Virtue". I think I enjoyed this one because we have been talking with Coby about these very issues in his life. The best quote out of the talk actually came from President Monson that counseled: "You be the one to make a stand for right, even if you stand alone". Coby has already had to make this decision in his life. We know that he will be blessed for these decisions and that in the future, he will be looked up to by his piers for making correct choices.

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And my last quote was mentioned by President Thomas S. Monson. He stated in his talk, "Brother Hess wrote—and I quote: “These things are important: temple marriage, mission, college. Press on, set goals, write history, take pictures twice a year." I am now justified in taking photos of our kids every year. Now, we just have to work on getting those family pictures taken a little bit more often.

Professional Photographs

Every year we try to take photographs of our kids so that we can go back through their life and see how they have grown and matured. We have found that the normal school shots don't quite cut it as a good photo of our kids. Last year we gave it one more try to see if the "school" pics would be nice enough for our yearly pictures of the kids but the they turned out to be horrible. They were blury and out of focus and too far away to see their faces. So, we went back to Kim Critchfield to have their pictures taken. We got them back on Friday and they look wonderful. The only complaint we have is that they all look too old. They are growing up too fast. Out of all of our children, I think Coby has changed the most.

I also feel justified in taking these "expensive pictures" because it was mentioned by President Thomas S. Monson in the October 2008 General Conference. He stated in his talk, "Brother Hess wrote—and I quote: “These things are important: temple marriage, mission, college. Press on, set goals, write history, take pictures twice a year."

So, there you have it. I'm now justified in taking pictures of our kids. Now, we just have to work on getting those family pictures taken a little bit more often.


Kate Carter 2008


Savanna Carter 2008

Coby Carter 2008

Andrew Carter 2008

57 hits?

I was nonchalontly parusing my Google Analytics to see if anyone is visiting my sites when I came across some very interesting data. On Monday the 14th I had 57 hits to my blog. Now, to most of your this may not seem like much, but if you look at my hit counter you will see that I normally average around 11 to 20 hits per day.



Where did all of those hits come from you might ask? Very good questions. I did a little research and found that the hits came from 19 countries.



Hummm, I wonder what countries have hit might web site? Here is a map of the countries that have visited. 19 Countries?



Here is the best one that I could find that visited my blog.



Riyadh, Saudi Arabia!! What! Now who in their right mind would visit my blog from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia? eh?

Simpsonized

I was browsing around the internet looking for some friends that are on the interent and I ran across a new friend's blog. His name is Clark. On his website it had a "Simpsonized" picture of himself. Fortunately, he had placed a link on his blog so that you could try it yourself. So, you guessed it, I clicked on over to http://simpsonizeme.com and this is what I look like SIMPSONIZED!

BYU Game

I don't know why but over the last couple of weeks I have been totally jazzed about going down to BYU for the Homecoming game. I don't normally get that excited but this time, I was really animated about the idea.

Last weekend we packed up all of the kids and headed down to Utah to go to BYU's Homecoming. We stayed in Bountiful with my parents and then got up Saturday morning and headed to Provo. It was slated to be a chilly morning but we were up for a good time so we packed all of our warm clothes and headed for the south side of BYU Campus. As we drove up the street we were going to hang out on for the Homecoming Parade, we noticed that the police escorts were just passing by. We had managed to arrive at the exact right time to see the whole parade. The kids loved watching the different colleges, bands and cheerleaders walk by and enjoyed picking up the sprinkling of candy.

After the parade, I had arranged to have the kids take a look at the student housing at Heritage Halls. We were given a quick tour of the girls student dorms. After leaving the dorms the girls mentioned that the apartment was really small. The bedrooms were smaller than there current bedroom in our house.

We wandered over to the Wilkenson center where we browsed through tons of BYU toys, clothes and gear. We ate lunch at the Cougar Eat. (I don't know if it is still called that or not). While everyone was sitting back and enjoying the meal, the kids started getting restless so I decided to take them to Kimball Tower to drop coins down the stair well. The kids loved it. I was actually able to drop a quarter 6 stories before it caught a rail and stopped its fall.

Be broke up after lunch and the girls went shopping the guys went to the game. BYU had a mediocre game but it was good enough to put a W on BYU's game column. Here is a picture of the boys and me at the game.

Global Cooling

It is official, at least in my book, we are now witnessing global cooling. It has been reported that Twin Falls Idaho will get snow Friday October 9th. Yes, that is right, SNOW!!!!


Our family has been planning on traveling down to Provo Utah this weekend to attend the BYU Homecoming game. Now we are having second thoughts because of this nasty storm system that will be traveling our way Friday and Saturday. Of course, it has to come from the Gulf of Alaska. It has been predicted that we will get snow accumulations up to 2 inches. So, do we stay or do we go?

We had such high hopes for this trip to Provo this year. The BYU Cougs should be fun to watch this year since they have had an incredible winning streak.

We normally head down to the south side of campus to watch the Homecoming Parade but now, it looks like there might be 2 inches of snow on the parade route. That just doesn't seem fun. I guess we could bring our skis and inner tubes and try to make some fun out of the miserable weather.

I'll let you know what we decide. I guess if the weather is really bad, maybe it will be so bad that it will be a trip that we NEVER forget.