Ashley's First BYU Football Game

Earlier in the week my neighbor Bryan took me to the Utah-TCU game. It was sweet. I am not a Ute fan, but I root for them on occasion. Ashley was mad that I even went to the Ute game and actually started to cry because she thought that I liked them more. I had to smooth things over by taking her to the BYU game (tickets provided by my other neighbor Dave). I owe my neighbors BIG obviously. Ashley's first Cougar game was awesome. Matt Payne, former BYU kicker and co-worker of mine, took me and Ashley on the field. We saw Will Nixon there who is probably on the field the whole time, every game. Anyway we saw Cosmo, Mitch Payne the kicker, and of course cheerleaders. We stayed on the field when the team entered which was cool and we also went to center field when the team did their Polynesian cultural center dance. It was sweet, plus they won the game.

Mitch Payne the kicker

Cosmo and Ashley

Ashley enjoyed watching the cheerleaders (so did I).

BYU enters the stadium!!!

First Family Pheasant Hunt

Today my bro-in-law Nate invited me and the girls to go pheasant hunting at a pheasant ranch. We took out twelve pheasants and brought home 10. It was cool. The girls had fun. The guide's dog that came with us found a pheasant and caught it rather than flushing it out. It chewed the hen enough that it couldn't fly, so the kids ended up naming it Checkers and took turns holding it for the entire hunt. They eventually got bored and made a nest for Checkers. When we got back to the truck, Kolton who is six rang Checkers neck and we will be eating Checkers tomorrow for lunch. Kaitlyn started feeling sick and puked 20 minutes after we got home. I told Tara that know I have provided food for the family by sea, by land, and by air.

Heading out to hunt in the back of the truck.

Looking for pheasants down the wash.

Ashley holding Checkers the hen.

The nest the kids made for Checkers.

Megan holding Checkers while Kaitlyn tries not to puke.

Mighty hunters.

The Cradle of Liberty

"One if by land, and two if by sea," or so the tale goes. We just got back from a little trip to New England. We have never been and we loved it. The weather was good, much better than SLC anyway. We walked the Freedom Trail and saw the graves of Sam Adams, and Paul Revere. We also visited Paul Revere's house and stopped at the spot where he was apprehended by the red coats on his way to Concord. It was all very historic.

Where "the shot heard around the world" took place.

The Old North Bridge

Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond

Buckman Tavern where the minutemen met before being shot down by the British at Lexington

Tara and I had finished sightseeing for the day, but we still had the use of the rental car. So I told Tara that we should drive up to New Hampshire since we'd never been there before. So we drove up and decided to keep driving because we'd never seen Maine before. We stopped in Maine for some freshly caught lobster then drove back to Boston.

26 Miles and 385 Yards

Yes, that is the distance of a marathon or 26.2 miles is close. Pheidippides, a Greek messanger, ran from the battle of Marathon to Athens to proclaim the Greek's victory of the Persians. Pheidippides burst into the assembly in Athens and yelled "we have won" before falling to the ground and dying there on the spot after having run, non-stop 26 miles and 385 yards. Obviously Pheidippides should have eaten less salt, less carbs, and worked on his cardiovascular training more. Nevertheless, we now run marathons in his honor, sort of.

My sisters Dianna, Dorianne, DaNae, along with my brother-in-law Ben and myself ran the St. George marathon on Saturday. We all finished. I am glad to have participated, but it totally sucked more than anything could suck. It was cold and rained the entire time. Most of the course was downhill, and it was downhill for a long, long, painfully long time. Luckily I wore band-aids on my nipples to prevent nipples hemorraging like this dude:

I was slow, real slow, but I finished and I didn't die on the spot. I am sore enough though right now that death doesn't seem like a scary option. Atleast Pheidippides didn't have to go through the recovery stage after a marathon. If you are thinking about runnin a marathon, think long and hard about it. Maybe even try a half marathon. If you think that sucks, a full marathon is doubly sucky. Here are two of the dudes that beat me by over an hour:

I am HUNTER

I hunt, therefore I kill. Actually, this was my first successful hunting experience. My past hunts I would go out for the morning and hope to get lucky. This time we hunted for four days. Funny thing is that I actually got something and it was still on the first day. This is the first time that I have shot at a deer and the first time that I have missed. Also the first time that anyone in my party shot an animal, the first time that I have actually seen an animanl shot (my own), first time that I have seen an animal cleaned (my own).

I saw the buck later in the day and dropped him with a shot in the neck. It was a downhill shot through trees and limbs about 80 yards away. After I shot, the buck fell immediately and didn't get up. That's how I like to hunt, pain-free for the animals, unlike my brother-in-laws who wound the deer and then never end up finding them.

Getting my first buck was awesome. I was ridiculed because of its size, but I like my meat tender, like veal. Seriously though, it is a small buck, barely a 2 x 2, but you can't be picky when you've never shot anything. By the way, if you read this blog, and have shot a bigger buck with a muzzle loader let me know. One of the hunters up there asked me why I was shooting fawns. A lot of laughs up there at my expense, but then again, I am bringing home food for the family, they just wasted there money.

McCall, Idaho

We went to McCall, Idaho for Labor Day weekend. It was great. We've never visited McCall before. It's a couple hours North of Boise. It was nice weather the first couple of days and then it cooled off quite a bit. We swam, hiked, rode horses, swam in the hot springs, and played some golf.

Probably the most memorable part of the trip was church on Sunday. There are two wards in McCall and they both meet in the same church. There building is being renovated and one ward has been having separate meetings between four houses and the other ward has been meeting in a barn. We thought it would be most exciting to have church in a barn. Well, it had been in the high 70s on Saturday, but on Sunday morning it barely reached 50 degrees. We didn't care because we knew church was going to be in a barn. We expected the barn to have walls and a closed doors, maybe even a big, fancy barn with heaters or something like that. We dressed warmer, but not warm enough for the barn we met in. It had no doors or walls in the front or the back. It was like meeting in a freezing, wind tunnel. It was dirt floors and there were two horses in there with us. We expected around 100 people to attend, but since it was a holiday weekend in McCall, there were a lot of visitors. 650 people attended church in the barn that Sunday. We froze, but heard some good talks from the local missionaries. The church services were suspended several times until the generators could be restarted. It was a memorable experience. I don't always remember what happened in church the week before, but we will all remember church in the cold barn in McCall.

Twenty-Six Point Two

Some may know that I am foolishly preparing to run the St. George Marathon with my sisters. I don't know if I can do it, but I am going to give it a shot. I need to lose a few pounds and learn to run a little faster and longer. My goal is to finish the race before they close the course after 6 hours. It sounds easy, but I run so slow, I wouldn't make it at my current pace. On Saturday, my sister and I ran a 5K. That was my first ever race. It was fun, but painful to see how fast some people run. I guess that will give me some motivation to keep pushing myself. I ran it faster than normal and finished in 31 minutes, but I was tired. I prefer a 12 minute mile. The guy who won the race finished in 16 minutes. That's cruising. So if you see me running around Riverton and I look like I am going to die, call Tara and tell her to bring me a hotdog and a TAB or Diet RC Cola for nurishment.
I am also taking contributions. I decided to run this race for a cause. My cause is the Aerosmith Guitar Hero video game. I need it and thought it was a worthy cause. If everyone donated $10, I would have enough for the game after the first 8 donations. Any extra funds will be donated to a video manufacturing company of my choosing.

The Night of the Gigantic Flying Creature

A couple of nights ago I woke up to a weird beating sound. I looked at the clock and it was almost midnight. I usually stay up most nights to about 11:00pm or midnight, but on this night I was out at about 9:30pm. Maybe it was because Tara hit the sack at about 8:30pm. She wasn't feeling too good being great with child and all.

So I check the clock and it's midnight. I hear this beating and bumping sound above me. I flip on the lamp next to the bed and through my half asleep, glazed-over eyes I see this thing flying at the top window of our bedroom. We have a vaulted ceiling in the bedroom and this thing was pretty high. Earlier in the week we had seen some humming birds flying around the flowers. Then I remembered that Hondo across the street had a humming bird in his house that he had to catch. I don't deal with animals well. I am sort of not fond of animals or as Tara more appropriately says, "you're a wuss Dave." I can't argue too much. I'm not afraid of a humming bird, but I don't want to touch it or pet it, or even deal with it.

I woke Tara up to show her the humming bird and told her that I was going to call Jeff. I can call the Jamiesons at any time of night. They are up late, two or three in the morning kind of stuff doing who knows what. Anyway, I am about to call Jeff and the flying beast drops from the ceiling coming right at us and lands on the lamp. I look and this thing is a huge, Jurassic park moth.

Okay, I am totally freaking out now. The Incas used to make poisonous blow darts from this moth. It was yellow and black with huge fangs and crap. No way am I going near that thing. Every step we took closer to this thing and it starts flapping it enormous wings. I feel that you may not understand what this thing looks like. Imagine that Satan created a moth. Now imagine something much worse. Seriously, this thing was evil. It even hissed a couple of times. Tara is the one who gets rid of the spiders in our house. I'm not so much afraid as I am disgusted by little creatures. Okay, maybe a little afraid, but I was not going to call Jeff to come over and take care of Lucifer's moth. Instead, I made sure that Tara was wide awake to take care of it.

Honestly, I tried to kill it or at least stun it. I threw a wet wash cloth from a considerable distance and hit it directly. It didn't even phase it, it just flew around at us spitting acid. Tara was ticked that I made her get out of bed to kill a moth, Satan's moth, but when she saw it, even she was a little concerned. It didn't help that she is eight months pregnant, but I thought that she could take out her pain and anger on this moth. She grabbed the flyswatter when she should have grabbed a shotgun. This thing was bulletproof. Here are some short video clips of our midnight experience with death.


Scene One: Finding Courage

Scene Two: Flirting with Death

Scene Three: The Moth Won't Die and Dave is Tired

Final Scene: Regroup After Failure, A New Strategy

Tara ended up stunning the creature with repeated and violent flyswatter blows. Then she grabbed it with some toilet paper, totally suicidal, and flushed it down the toilet. I even flushed the toilet several more times to make sure it wasn't coming back. I still can't use that toilet.

They Used to Call Me 'SLOTS'

I related this story to some of my neighbors and Jeff demanded that I post it. It is embarrassing, humiliating, and gross. Plus, as a public service announcement, don't let your kids put coins in their mouths. I am warning you in advance, the following is way above 'G' rating, so continue at your own risk.

Anyway, a couple of years back, Tara and I bought a family season pass to Seven Peaks Waterpark in Provo. The park is cool with lots of slides that go straight down. These slides are popular, but if you have ever gone down one of the slides you will understand the meaning of ATOMIC WEDGIE. Seriously, you get going so fast down these slides that they have a landing strip of water that is flat along the ground for about 50 yards. Every person that stands up from those slides has to take a moment to re-adjust if you catch my drift.

So, on this particular day I brought my 12 year old cousin with my family. We decided to go down the super steep slide. She went first, but as she was about to go down the slide, the lifeguard made her take off her homemade board shorts. Apparently, there is a rule at the park that you can only go down those steep slides with actual swimwear. Her shorts were cut off sweats that they thought would get damaged by the high speed. So she took off her shorts and held onto them on the way down. Now it was my turn. I shot down the slide faster than I have ever gone. When I hit the bottom of the slide and started to slow down, I felt a sharp pain in my derriere. Obviously I was realizing the pain from my anticipated ATOMIC WEDGIE. I stood, re-adjusted, and jumped off the slide. I noticed that my cousin went back to the slide. I looked and she was picking up coins from the bottom of the slide. She had lost the change in her sweat shorts as she went down and wanted to retrieve her loot. I told her to get out of the way before she got hit by someone flying out of the slide.

The walk back to our beach towels was painful. That ATOMIC WEDGIE must have done a number on me. It hurt to sit down and I didn't go down one of those steep slides for the rest of the day. We stayed at Seven Peaks for another 5 hours that day before we started for home. The ride home was also irritable. I just couldn't get comfortable in my seat. I even wondered if a slide-induced ATOMIC WEDGIE could leave permanent damage to my body.

It was a long day, so we got home, threw the kids in the tub, and put them to bed. I smelt like a mixture of chlorine, sweat, and sunscreen, so I jumped into the shower as well. As I opened the door and stepped into the shower (remember I am completely buck at this point) I heard a "clink clink" on the shower floor. I looked down only to find that I had dropped a quarter from some mysterious place. It ends up that when I went down that slide, after my cousin had dropped her money, that I picked up a souvenir along the way. This explains the severe pain I went through for about 6 hours and I may be the first person to have experienced an EPIC & POSSIBLY TERMINAL -THERMONUCLEAR WEDGIE (several grades more severe than the famed ATOMIC WEDGIE). Let me make myself clear, do not under any circumstances let your children place coins in their mouths!

Coeur d'Alene

I played golf at the Coeur d'Alene Resort today. All I can say is SWEET! It was 75 degrees with a light breeze. Perfect! The Coeur d'Alene Resort is famous for its floating green. I pared the the hole. Last time I played it my ball found the water. I have some cool pictures of it. You actually have to take a boat across to get to the green.

Here I am with my Dad and Brent, my brother-in-law.

This par 3 was especially challenging. The green is shaped like a three leaf clover, surrounded by rock and a lot of sand. The flag was snuggled up tight to the front of the green. Tough hole! For you ladies that are reading this, golf is when you hit a tiny, white ball into a hole with a club. The lower the score the better, like mini-golf.

When Clothing is Optional, Clothes are Still the Best Option

I have now found the courage to tell a humiliating story, one of embarrassment and shame. Since my last post, some have encouraged me to relate my "clothing optional" story.

A couple of years ago, I was working out at a gym in South Jordan called Marv Jensens. It's on Redwood road and has been around forever. After I finished working out one day I decided to hit the hot tub and relax for a few minutes. When I finished my refreshing tub I went into the locker room and noticed that there was a steam room. The steam room sounded like a good idea. So I went into the steam room and there were four dudes in there naked. I was wearing swimming trunks and I felt like a total prude. See, for guys, if everyone is naked and you are not, you're considered an idiot. For example, guys use community showers. Yes, in men's locker rooms, ladies, there are a bunch of naked dudes showering together. I know, it sounds sick, and it is, but that's just how the world works. So, if a bunch of guys are showering together and someone comes in and showers with their trunks on, the guy is considered a total loser and if you are friends with that person you must sever all ties.

That was a little background information just so everyone can be on the same page. So anyway, I went and worked out a couple of days later and again, went to the hot tub to relax. Upon my return to the men's locker room, I decided to visit the steam room once again. But this time I was not going to feel the shame that I had previously felt. So I stripped off my shorts and walked naked into the steam room. As the steam cleared I noticed that I was completely naked standing in front of four dudes that were wearing swimming trunks. Hopefully you can feel my pain. The embarrassment level went up 10 fold. I even had to say "excuse me" to find a seat in the steam room. It felt really awkward sliding in between two clothed men when I was in commando mode.

Sorry for the long story but the moral of the story cannot be any clearer: if clothing is optional, clothes are still the best option! Certainly less shame will be the result.