Tanner and Avery


Paul and Les

More Trunk or Treat Pictures

Here are some more pictures from tonight's Trunk or Treat

Trunk or Treat

Tonight was the ward Trunk or Treat. The wards out here are huge, they typically are lasting about 18 months before they have to split. Right now we are waiting for two new buildings to be built so they can split some more wards. Anyways, my point of that is that our ward combined with another ward for the trunk or treat and there were massive amounts of people there. Unless you rob a candy store or take out a home equity loan to buy some candy, you'll run out in about 5 minutes as the hoardes of princesses, ghost, goblins and Napolean Dynamites descend on your car. Avery for once wasn't a Disney princess, she was Tinker Bell.
Tanner was Shrek because that's what was left at Target on the way to the church. Every year I swear I'll get costumes before the last minute, as I'm buying costumes at the last minute.


I'll post more pictures later, and if I can figure out how to, a video of Tanner doing the robot in his Shrek costume

Enjoying a summer day at the ballpark

Here are some pictures I took of the kids this summer on a day where you didn't feel like you were getting cooked alive. Actually this summer was quite mild, way better than last year.

More pictures of the kids

Here are some pictures from a couple of Saturday's ago. Avery and I were attempting to make mom's cheesecake. I think I finally have it down.

Tanner wasn't too interested, he enjoys playing on the computer too much.

Catching up

Due to popular demand, everyone wants to see pictures of the kids, not my Halo screenshots; weird.

Anyways, here are some different pictures from over the summer. We inherited a stray cat last spring that was a pretty good cat because it was borderline feral. It wanted nothing to do with us and that was fine with me.


Well one day Abby tried to take ride in the fan of my truck and didn't fare so well. The kids were devastated. Tanner missed a day and a half of school because he was pretty attached to Abby. So I found a free cat off of Craigslist and now we have Katie.


She's also a pretty good cat except that I think she's going to run away because she looks like an article of clothing on the floor in the middle of the night and frequently gets kicked and/or stepped on.


That and Avery thinks Katie is her baby and tries to feed her, put her to bed, spank her, etc.

Halo 3 is the debil

Some of the crazyiness I mention below has been alleviated by the arrival of The Greatest Game to Ever Grace this Planet - Halo 3. Dustin and I have spent many a late night into the morning wreaking havoc and destruction upon our enemies. We've become quite adept at the "Warthog", and typically bring fear into the other players hearts once we board our favorite weapon. Here's a screenshot of me driving and Dustin laying waste to all that oppose us...

Mid Fall Crisis?

Well I have once again reached the time of year what I think I'm going to go crazy and run away if I don't find some 1.) Mountains, 2.) Snow, 3.) Snowy Mountains, 4.) some crazy adventure. Training for a triathlon helped contain me through the summer, but when I wasn't able to compete in it, I stopped training and have been itching some other adventure.

A friend and I decided two weeks ago that were going to go camping somewhere that had some sort of mountains if it killed us. But we only had one day to go, and we wanted to keep it within 3.5 hours of Dallas. I searched all over the internet and finally found a place in Oklahoma called the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge. There are very few pictures of it anywhere, but we decided to give it a shot.

My friend is a pilot, so he's gone a couple days a week, home a couple days, etc. We set out very early on a Friday morning to make the drive up there. Considering we weren't really expecting to be there much longer than 36 hours, the amount of gear we brought was quite ridiculous; it filled the back of the truck, and I had to fold up one of the back seats to get the rest in.

We hadn't gone more than 10 miles before my friend started feeling cramps in his stomach. By about two hours in, he said we needed to stop and get some medicine because he wasn't feeling well at all. When we were about 20 miles from the mountains (more about the mountains later), he suddenly said, "Pull over now!" which everyone knows means throw-up time. After tossing a cookies for awhile he decided he was fine and we should continue on... he wasn't. To make a long story short, we got there, he was so dizzy and sick he could barely stand so I had to haul the enormous amount of gear from the truck to the campsite, and set everything up.

He was alternating between chills and fever so he decided to go lay down in the tent. I was able to set out and do a little of bit of hiking around and took a few pictures. The mountians were really incredible. Imagine the City of Rocks sitting in the middle of the Oklahoma plains and you get the picture. There are wild elk, bison, and tons of praire dogs. We're hoping to go back with the family in a couple of weeks if it doesn't get too cold. Here are a few pictures I was able to take.

I don't know what to say...

So after reading everyone else's blogs, I once again feel guilty about our lack of communication with the outside world. I have failed to find an easy method to update everyone, so I may try this again. Previously, I was having problems uploading pictures, so I went to the Flickr site. Then I found out the Flickr site only would take so many of my pictures. Then I paid for a membership on SmugMug, which I did because it has tools built in so that people could buy my pictures if they wanted. But it doesn't really allow for any type of blogging features... so anywho, I'll give this a try again and I should be able to link to my pictures from the other site.

More Muddin' pics

Okay, here are some small videos from us climbing in the Samurai the other night, as well as pictures of us all covered in poop mud after I discovered a sewage drain field.

Try it once again

Okay, I've tried a million different things to get pictures up and nothing seems to work very well, but I'll try again. Here are some pictures from the last week. I've got the Samurai #1 running good and we've been taking it to an abandoned golf course by our house. I found out that there are sink holes hidden throught the golf course and had to have another friend in his Samurai come pull me out.

Here's a neat map that shows all the states you've visited. Here's mine:



create your own personalized map of the USA
or write about it on the open travel guide

Picture of Avery from today

Making up for lost time

Avery got an umbrella for her birthday (July 5th) and there hasn't been a drop of rain since early July. The area is in the worst drought in 50 years so the mayors of the six surrounding cities asked our Stake to have fast (over Memorial Day weekend nonetheless); we get two inches of rain the next day. Avery got up bright and early and was waiting at the door to use her umbrella.

More pictures

Avery and her first make-up job she did by herself.















Here are some more pictures from Saturday... Its finally cool enough to swim in the pool again.

Try again....