Snowmen carnage

Beckham loves singing the song that goes, '1 little, 2 little, 3 little snowmen, 4 little...' But we have had to shield his eyes from the snowmen that were dying throughout our neighborhood. This is on my sister's front yard and it looks like a frakkin' snowmen massacre. Snowmen carnage all over the lawn as you can see with the pic on the left. The pic on the right is simpy the scariest snowman in the Salt Lake Valley. Beckham is probably forever scarred by it all.

Bests of 2010

I wanted to give a quick recap of some of the 'bests' that we have had this past year.


Best news of the Year
Brodi having her books purchased by HarperCollins (Balzar + Bray imprint). I have mentioned it before, but she sold a trilogy to HC. It comes out next Winter. And for those interested, she has also sold the rights to various publishing houses in the UK, Australia, Brazil, France and Germany with many more to come. It has been getting a huge buzz in the publishing and writers world, so it should be an exciting year coming up. You can read about how things are moving along for her at her blog, www.brodiashton.com


Best Milestones of the Year
Carter is now in 2nd grade. Crazy. He is now an expert math man. And he loves it. He also scored a couple of goals this Fall for his team and he is playing for the Impact Soccer Academy, which means he is playing about 5 hours of soccer a week. He also just turned 8 years ago.

Becks is still in Pre School. He is speaking more (he continues the long line of Johnson slow speaking boys) and that kid is happy 99% of the time. He scored his first soccer goal of his life and he promptly run over to the sidelines to give everyone a high-five (not that big of a deal considering that he runs to the sidelines to give everyone a high-five even if he just looked at the soccer ball).


Best Trip of the Year
We only took one major trip, but we went up to Seattle and the surrounding areas. I had never been in that area, so it was a good week trip of hiking, driving and seeing and doing things.


Best new restaurants that we had never gone to before
Red Iguana: I had heard about this place since high school and I had never made it down there. We went down with some friends and had a terrific meal (burritos, moles, etc.). I enjoy the Blue Iguana, but the Red was even better.

Katmandoo: New indian restaurant in Millcreek. This new restaurant is from the owners of the Himalayan Kitchen downtown. Terrific. The Butter Chicken, Lamb Tikka Massa and Vegetable Korma are all favorites.

Best TV shows of the Year

Fringe

: If you haven't seen it, then check yourself, and get watching it. It was a pretty good show its first season...a very good show in its second season...and genius in its third season. Well worth watching.

Boardwalk Empire: This is not a recommendation as this show can be naughty. But, it is on the 1920s in Atlantic City with gangsters, prohibition and other shenanigans.

Walking Dead: Zombies. Really not much more to say, but it is a terrific show on the remaining humans trying to figure out how to survive and trying to figure out if there are more humans out there hiding from the zombies.

Sons of Anarchy: Definitely rough and tumble about a motorcycle gang that are gun runners among other things. Highly entertaining.

Best Books of the Year:

It won't be out till next year, but Brodi's new book is tops. After that, I loved the Hunger Games series, the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series and anything by Daniel Silva. My rankings of all of the books is on the left side of the blog and I will be talking more about these books next week.

So, for now, that was a recap of 2011. Thanks for reading this past year.

Carter's special gift

Carter already received probably the best gift he could have asked for...a present from his school teacher that gives him a 'coupon' to turn in place of one homework assignment. He told me that maybe he would save it for 6th grade because homework is really hard in 6th grade. I let him know that it doesn't really work that way and that he will have to use this year.

Merry Christmas to everyone. Party all weekend long.

How many people do you know?

When we moved back to Salt Lake City, I was excited to see old friends and see a lot of people that I knew. I quickly realized how many people that I do not know. I can go to the grocery store in my neighborhood and see 50 people and not know one of them. The new census just came out. There are 308,745,539 people in the United States. That is a heckuva lot of people that I do not know.

Just some other info - Utah is the 3rd fastest growing state and now has over 2.7 million residents. Nevada, Arizona, Utah and Idaho are the top 4. People love the West. Michigan and Rhode Island were the two slowest growing. And to think, just 100 years ago, there were less than 100 million people...in 100 years, the US has added over 200 million people. And final note, this was the slowest population growth (in the past 10 years) in the US since the Great Depression.

Christmas shopping over the world wide interweb

How awesome is Amazon? I say that we buy 80% of our gifts thru Amazon. Pretty much anything you can think of, I have purchased thru Amazon (including toilet paper and tooth paste). Well, we ordered a poster for Carter's bedroom and we received it today. It came in a huge box. Take a look at the pic and you see the black tube on the far left of the box? That is the poster. The rest of the box is paper and nothing. I could have fit about 20 books into that box. Actually, I probably could have fit Carter and Becks into that box. Maybe even a small european car as well. Efficiency at its finest.

Time to honor the Gun

It is good to know that our legislature is hard at work. We all know that we have a State flower (no idea what it is), a State bird (seagull?) and other State things. Well, it is our lucky day because it appears that there is going to be a proposal to have a State gun. Yes, a State gun. How big of a trendsetter is the state of Utah? It appears that no other state has a State gun. Yay for us. Rep. Carl Wimmer has decided that he has nothing better to do than to propose a State gun and he has selected the Browning 1911 model (after Utah resident John Moses Browning who invented it). In a few years, I will be excited to also find out what our new State Cross-Bow is going to be.

Sheesh.

rockin' Thanksgiving

Now for the obligatory Thanksgiving update. As usual, we spent the day before Thanksgiving making stuffing with Brodi's side of the family. Ashton stuffing consists of bread, sage and butter and it is fabulous. The kids love helping and the adults love snacking on it. It is generally a quieter affair with Brodi's side of the family, but we always have a great time.

We spent Thanksgiving with Brodi's family and then that evening we drove to our family ranch down in Central Utah, Castle Valley Outdoors. This has been a family tradition to go down the ranch for Thanksgiving weekend for well over a decade now. It is located just outside of Emery (about 45 minutes from Price). It is a working ranch as well as an executive retreat ranch so the accomodations are fabulous. There is the lodge which has 9 bedrooms and 9 bathrooms...then there are 3 apartments in a house each with its own bathroom and then there is another house with 3 bedrooms and a couple of bathrooms. Plenty of room to handle all of us, which by the size of our family is pretty impressive. The pic on the left is during the summer...while the pic on the right is from late November.




The Thanksgiving dinner is crazy. Though my brother and his family couldn't come...my 3 sisters and their families as well as my other brother and his family - well, lets just say, that adds up to a whole lot of people.









We spent the days hiking, horseback riding, hiking some more, playing games (pool, cardgames, karaoke, campfire games and songs, etc.) and a lot of talking. I can safely say that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.