Category: Uncategorized (Page 79 of 118)

I have a bit of a problem with money. Spending it.

And car repairs. Especially spending money on car repairs.

You see, I’m a bit of a thrify-nifty (some would call me cheap) and only like to buy things when they are ON SALE. I hate paying full price for anything. I get a thrill out of buying on sale.

There are no sales on auto parts or repairs. If there were, then we might have a few extra alternators or gaskets around because –hey, they were such a great deal, and I will need them someday. But alas, car repair is no place for the sale shopping bargain hunter. When something breaks, it needs to be fixed, and unless you have an extra vehicle in storage, fixed right away.

We have not had the best car repair record in the last little while, with one car and then another in the shop for what seems like endless and expensive repairs. Each time I nearly have a fit when I hear how much we have to pay. Well, Tuesday, the brakes in Ryan’s old truck seemed to stop working. Brakes are something that you can’t really live without, so he took it in to be repaired. After $700 something, he got his vehicle back. ERRG. When I complained at how much money we keep putting into that hunk of junk of a truck, he keeps reminding me that buying a new truck would be much more expensive. Yeah, but then we’d Have a new truck. He also told me in so many words that I need to stop freaking out each time we have to get a car repaired. Freaking out?! I’m not freaking out. Is it too much to ask that the car NOT break down in the very first week of the year?

I think we may need to get a credit card that is only in Ryan’s name that he use ONLY to do car repairs. Then I don’t have to know how much it’s costing us, and then I won’t freak out. He wouldn’t even have to tell me he was taking a car into the shop, he’d just mysteriously need a ride to work, and when I asked where that particular vehicle was, he could tell me it was on vacation. Hmmm. That wouldn’t work, either, because I would demand to know, and he would tell me.

I just need to go to my happy place when we talk about car repairs. La La La, La I’m not listening.

But, on the bargain side, I just found the BEST place to get your car washed. There’s a new Firehouse Carwash right by Target in American Fork. For $6.50 you can get the basic wash ($6.90-ish with tax), but if you are a Costco member (and who isn’t these days?) you get 10% off, so with tax, it comes to $6.21, I think. You get to take the car and the kids through the cool washer thingy (which is very entertaining for the 3 year old crowd, believe me!), then, when you come out the guy DRYS it with a towel. THEN you can use their powerful sucking vacuums for 10 minutes for FREE! It’s a deal. I went yesterday and then went back today with the other dirty car. It was too cold and I didn’t have time to use their vacuums, but I know they are there, so next time I’ll plan beter (you know how you have to pre-clean your car to clean your car? ) So, I’ll rejoice in my small car washing bargain, and block from my mind all repair costs and do my breathing exercises, thank you very much.

Happy New Year!

I missed posting on the first, but I’m sure you’re still in the New Year’s mode on the 2nd, right? Right.

My goals for this year are as follows:

Eat less
Exercise More
Spend less $
laugh more
win more
be a better person

How’s that?

Ryan says it’s not a goal if it’s not measurable, so I guess I should give specifics.

Ok, here are my specific goals.

Exercise. I want to walk one mile every single day. If I miss a day, I’ll have to make it up sometime in the week, so I’ll get in 7 miles over the week.

Since I will turn 40 in the next year (and I’m officially inviting you all to my non surprise birthday party on December 29 (it’s a Saturday). More on that in the future, but go ahead and put it on your calendar now. but I digress. I was actually going to put down my goal to lose 40 pounds by my 40 b-day.

Kindness. I want to do more random acts of kindness. Like take someone a meal even if they aren’t sick or didn’t just have a baby. Or give away tickets and things (oh, I already do that, so I guess I can just do more). I also want to be kinder to my children and husband. I love them dearly, but sometimes I forget to tell them how much they mean to me. Same goes for friends. I think I need to express my love and my gratitude more, and use a softer voice with the kids.

Temple Service. 12 visits to the temple this year. I would say once a month, but I may just feel like going 3 times in one month, and I know there will be months I don’t go, so I’m just going to say 12 in the year. I’ll mark them off to keep track.

I’d like to win another big prize this year, along with some cash. That’s entirely up to me, and I’ll be trying hard on that one, of course.

Social–we need to invite someone over for dinner at least once a month. We did pretty good on this one last year, but I think we can continue to improve.

There you have it. Goals for the year 2007. And a partridge in a pear tree.
Amen.
And, what are your goals for the year?

Happy Birthday, old woman.
I wish I could say I’m spending the day relaxing, getting a pedicure and then going shopping. But due to a family party at my house tomorrow, and the general state of this house because of:

a-the primary cleaner being out of town for a week
b-Christmas
c-my illness earlier in the week, leaving me weak and tired and not really caring about the state of the house
d-5 kids, one husband and 3 birds.

I’m spending the day cleaning the house. I might as well give up, though, because the little people seem to be messing it up faster than I can clean, and there’s mountains of boxes that don’t fit into the trash, along with tons of little pieces that I’m not sure which toy they go to. And I keep trying to send my kids to friends’ houses, but instead we have more and more kids arriving. Right now Cole’s at a friend’s house, and we still have 7 kids here. hmmm.

Why did we schedule a family party the day after my birthday? Silly me. Oh, I know. It was scheduled for the 23rd, but because of someone’s vacation (mine), we rescheduled it. So, I should stop complaining and get back to cleaning. I will, right after a short rest (I haven’t gotten my energy quite back from the earlier illness, you see) and maybe a diet coke.

I was impressed that Ryan actually remembered the birthday and even got me a gift. Nice cozy slippers. AND he got up before me, changed a stinky diaper, went down and helped the kids make me breakfast in bed. It doesn’t take much to impress me. I guess I have low standards. I just wanted the old family to remember without me giving them any hints or reminders (which I didn’t). Thank goodness for the palm pilot so he can put in a reminder about important dates like birthdays.

I know that Ryan posted a link to the billion and one pictures from our Cancun Trip, but in reality, no one wants to sift through all those, so I’ll just post a couple of highlights and call it good.

(All the links are now clickable to the larger sizes –Ryan)

Here we are BEFORE going para sailing, while Paige still feels good and excited about life.

Here we are up in the air. See the pretty colors. See the pretty ocean. Luckily you can’t see Paige getting ill.

Here we are as they reel us in back to the boat. Don’t we look like we had a great time?

Here’s the lovely view we had for about the next hour as Paige lay in a lounge chair becoming un-sick. It looks like a Corona commercial, doesn’t it?

Here’s Paige playing bartender.

Here we are under the Christmas arch–or whatever it was. And Paige with her new amigos.

On our last day there, we traveled by crowded stinky bus to a really nice ritzy mall where I had seen a dolphin exhibit. Kind of like the buffaloes we’ve seen around here locally, but dolphins. We took tons of pictures, but these are some of my favorites.

Here’s a group shot of all the people in our group.

Just a quick guest-post to let you all know that we made it home safely, despite a 2-hour delay on our flight.

I’m sure Paige will post some more informative comments, and I’ll put the pictures up in the next day or two.

UPDATE: All the pictures from the trip are now posted here.

Have a Very Merry Christmas!

Ryan

Today we slept in, exchanged today’s activities for parasailing another day, napped, and basically hung around and read books on the beach all day.

It was nice.

A few full size pictures from the trip are available HERE

UPDATE: All the pictures from the trip are now posted here.

Hola! On Wednesday we planned to be a little more adventurous and go snorkeling. See some little fishies. That kind of thing. We were supposed to go to a certain store in the “Isle Mall” and meet our guide at noon. Ok, so we went about 10 so we’d have time to browse the shops, etc. I think it listed the time as three hours in the brochure, without all that much information. We met up with the FunJet guy at noon, and got on a bus. We met a couple from Romania currently living in Chicago, and she asked if they were providing lunch. I didn’t know, but thought I’d read that they would provide soda. “I should have brought some food,” she said, and I was thinking the same thing. Oh well, if we miss a lunch it won’t kill us, since we’ve been eating so much at all these buffets. The short bus ride turned into an HOUR bus ride, with the last few minutes through windy, bumpy roads. Do you see where I’m going with this? There’s a little thing called motion sickness that I struggle with, and already I wasn’t feeling too great. At the place, they split us into groups who were doing different activities–4 wheelers, fishing, snorkeling, horseback riding. We got into the snorkeling group and waited for our guide, Fernando or something like that. He led us over to a big catamaran and we all took off our shoes and climbed aboard.

Now, at first, sailing is quite fun. You’ve got the wind in your face, the beautiful blue water, the sun, the sunscreen, and it’s quite an experience. But when we sail in one direction for about 20 minutes and then sail right back to in front of where we started, I get a little tired of it. Then they put down the anchor and explained to us how our snorkel gear works. Don’t breathe through your nose. Only your mouth. I should be able to do that; just think yoga breathing only the opposite. Ryan had a little trouble with his mask–he thought it maybe was his large head, but got it on. We donned our flippers and life jackets, put our masks on and jumped into the ocean. After a bit of panic every time I put my face in the water, I started to breathe. At first I would breathe out under water and then lift my head up to breathe in every time. You don’t see many fish that way, however, so I finally got brave enough to stick my face in and keep it there for a few breaths. And, wow! There are fish RIGHT there! I didn’t see Nemo, but I think I saw Dorie and her cousins. There were a lot of yellow and grey fish, some black ones, some brown ones, long swishy plant things–it really was incredible. Ryan’s mask kept giving him trouble and filling with water, so he got a lot more water up the nose than I did, but we stuck it out. I guess we were swimming around for 45 minutes or so, and I was exhausted. It wasn’t nice calm clear water like they show in the brochures, it was hard work.

When we got back to the boat, I pulled myself up and plopped down on the floor and stayed there for a long time. The motion sickness was back and I felt like I was going to throw up. I took a grateful drink of Pepsi and then a water bottle from the guides, and sipping that helped a little, but that boat was still rocking, rocking, rocking! We went to another place, and about 3/4 of the people jumped off to snorkel some more. I sat in my spot, not moving the tiniest little bit, trying to overcome the motion sickness. “I don’t want to be adventurous,” I told Ryan, “I want to sit on my balcony and read my book.” Ryan didn’t opt to snorkel the second time, either. I’m not sure if it was because he was worried about me or because he didn’t want another dose of salt water. He couldn’t find his nose plugs until later, although they were right there in his pocket. We heard from our Romanian friends that the snorkeling was better at the second stop–I guess it was 10 feet deeper– but I really didn’t care. I just wanted to get back to dry land. What a wimp!

After everyone came back aboard, our guides brought out the “spinnaker”, which is a smaller sail that has a rope seat thing. You jump out to the water, situate yourself on the rope seat, and then the guys let some of the rope out and the wind whips the sail (and the passenger) up in the air. It’s kind of like a mini-parasail. Anyone who wanted to “fly” lined up along the side of the boat and took a turn. If I had been feeling well and a lot more brave, I would have loved to try it. I tried to encourage Ryan to do it, but he didn’t want to go, either. A couple of gutless wimps, we too.

We finally arrived at the beach around 5:15, just in time to use the bathroom and then board the bus. I had the plastic bag from the waterproof disposable camera that we bought for a make shift barf bag that I thought I might have to use on that windy bumpy bus ride, but eventually the road evened out and I survived. I was extremely grateful to get back to our hotel!

We had time to shower and change before we met our friends for dinner. We compared stories of our days and enjoyed dinner, then went to the show together. Ryan opted out of the show, and came back to rest in the room. So, although it wasn’t the perfect excursion, we were adventurous. We canceled our trip for today, which would have taken us back to that same place to ride 4 wheelers and jet skis. We maybe should have scheduled that one first. Today we plan to relax here by the beach, hit the market and NOT be adventurous.

A few full size pictures from the trip are available HERE

UPDATE: All the pictures from the trip are now posted here.

Since we had planned on doing a lot of walking and climbing at Chichen Itza on Monday, we left Tuesday open as a day to just lounge around the hotel and maybe go to a flea market or something like that.

We woke up quite late, around 10:00am, and showered and went down to the breakfast buffet at the Albatross. It was good as usual, but by the time we were finishing, they were telling us that the buffet was going to be closing soon, at 10:30. We were done, so we left. We decided that we were first going to WalMart, to pick up a phone card (the ones the tour guides at the hotel sell are $10 / 20 minutes, the ones at WalMart are $10 / 43 minutes, more if you call from a ‘local line’ instead of a pay phone).

We thought that pretty much any bus going in front of our hotel would go past WalMart. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and we got on a bus that after it arrived in Downtown Cancun didn’t go past WalMart. I asked another bus rider about it, and he didn’t know or couldn’t communicate with me well enough to tell me. The bus driver then asked while furiously driving where we wanted to go, and after telling him ‘WalMart’, he said that we needed to get off, go to the other side of the street, and wait for the ‘R2’ bus. We got off at the next stop, intending to catch the R2 to WalMart. There goes another 130 cents! (bus fare is 6.5 pesos per person, each time you get on the bus).

So, we get off the bus, and we are immediately requested by several locals to ‘come to my shop… good things in my shop’… ‘flea market is right over here…’. We were dumb enough to follow one of the locals, who showed us a couple of shops, helped us pick some nice souvenirs (the price wasn’t bad, but we could have EASILY found things ourselves at Market 28, which is a huge flea market we had planned on hitting a little later), and then he expected us to ‘tip’ him after making our purchases. I guess our ‘shopping helper’ did get a nice burrito for lunch on us.

After our ‘shopping and bartering experience’, we went back across the street to catch the R2 bus. Another bus (wasn’t an R2, but it had ‘WalMart’ on it’s destination list painted on the front) soon came, and after confirming with the driver, we hopped on. It wound around the downtown area, and we were totally lost. Paige started recognizing things, and realized that we were close to WalMart, because she recognized the car dealerships that were close-by. The driver told us to get off at that corner, and WalMart was kitty-corner across the street.

In WalMart, Paige shopped for a few items (a ‘sarong-like’ cover for her swimsuit, etc.), and grazed around the store a bit. I kept telling her how much things are in dollars (mostly by covering up the last digit in the price), and it didn’t seem to me like things were that great a price. At the register, the total was $320 or so, and Paige jokingly gasped at the price, and the checker hit a button and magically changed the price to Dollars. It was pretty funny.

After check-out, there were people trying to sell us various things, still inside the WalMart. Very strange. One woman was very insistent that we should check out some sort of non-time-share (which usually ends up still being a time-share), needless to say, we were not interested. She did tell us that we needed to go out the WalMart and to catch the bus on the same side of the street that said ‘Hotels’ on the front. Nice of her, that.

While checking out, we asked the checker about phone cards, and she pointed us to the Customer Service desk, but at the Customer Service desk, they insisted that they don’t sell Phone cards. As we were walking out of the store, there was a kiosk just inside the door that sells them. Apparently, the Customer Service guy doesn’t know about the kiosk 5 feet from his desk that sells phone cards. Heh. As we were heading out the door, the time-share woman approached us AGAIN! We told her that she had just talked to us about it, and she informed us that we had really talked to her identical sister, and indeed, there the first one was, waving good-bye sweetly.

After her earlier bartering to get the t-shirts, Paige wasn’t nearly as interested in going to Market 28, which was somewhere fairly nearby in the neighborhood, but we may go back Friday if we’re not too worn out.

The trip back to the hotel was thankfully uneventful. I tried to convince Paige that we should go get some lunch, but she said that it was still too early for lunch, since we had eaten a few hours earlier. We put on our suits, and went out to the beach. We sat in the sun for a while, reading books and Paige listened to her ‘Donny’ Christmas music. It was nice. We then took a short dip in the pool, and ordered some soft drinks from the poolside bar (another first!).

We had our late lunch at Las Gaviotas (the Seagulls, I think), which is the beach side lunch buffet between the pool and the beach. We sat overlooking the beach, and nearly had to scare off the namesake birds from diving down to our food.

Our dinner tonight will be at the Steakhouse, which is in the same location as the lunch was, but it’s a reservation-only dinner restaurant at dinnertime.

A few full size pictures from the trip are available HERE

UPDATE: All the pictures from the trip are now posted here.