Today's blog is brought to you by:

the

Land of the Lost

No, not the upcoming movie, the original series from the 1970s. And if you want to see some hard core, no joke realistic animation... check out the trailer.

Seriously, check this out!!

A weekend at home

For memorial day weekend I packed up my bags and left Mike to spend some time at home in Chicago. Shaylin was graduating, so I went out to see her there. My parents and I were way overdressed for the ceremony. And I mean overdressed in that we had WAY too much fabric on our bodies. I wasn’t aware that we were supposed to be scantily clad in a close to lingerie dress… oh well.

I also got to see Ashley march in her first parade which made me miss marching band a little bit. Even their junior highs out there have color guard! Sure, they basically just waved their flags around, but I was still impressed. And I longed for a flag in my hand… but Ashley did fabulously. We made sure to embarrass her by yelling her name and snapping plenty of pictures.

We did a lot more than just those two things. We went bowling where my dad got an impressive six strikes in a row, we played Deal or No Deal in the arcade and I had the five hundred tickets in my case but I settle for a ninety-nine ticket deal… stupid. We went to the new aquarium and watched beluga whales; my sister and mom and I went shopping on the Miracle Mile where we cleverly escaped some over-anxious perfume saleswomen. We played Killer Bunnies and watched a Land of the Lost marathon. We had a picnic in the rain and a barbecue in a downpour. All in four days work. It was a great trip, but it is nice to be home with Mike. Oh yeah, and I made sure to get a good blackmail picture.

Love ya, Shaylin! Keep our car safe, or we will release this to the media!

What a day!

Today I woke up and I thought…well, I didn’t think anything special. But I should have thought to myself, “Today is going to be a good day,” because oh, was it ever.

Why was today so good? I’ll tell you! There are many reasons; if it's alright with you, I’d like to start with number two.

2. Kris Allen won American Idol. I like to think that it was my votes that counted.

3. I dealt with an angry dad today at work. I was so good; I calmed him down and helped his son realize just what he had to do to improve his grade and they both left as happy campers. My boss was very impressed; he thought the dad was a overreacting a bit and that I dealt with it wonderfully. I said, “That’s my job!” but secretly I was being proud of myself inside.

4. I stopped a frustrated student from quitting her BGS degree. She was so stuck in her English work that she wanted to give up getting the degree all together (the course that she is in is required for the degree and there is no alternative). After talking to me, she too was a happy camper.

5. I turned in my pain-in-the-butt scavenger hunt assignment and I swear I will never look at another joke book again.

1. I helped not one, not two, but seventy some-odd people get paid for something they originally were doing for no pay. Here’s the story: Mike found out earlier this week that APX Alarms screwed up with the payroll and he and about seventy others needed to go down to Salt Lake to fix it. At first, this was no big deal. But then I found out that they weren’t getting paid for it. I thought that was a bit shady, but it wasn’t bad enough to do something about. Then, after Mike was down there for six hours today, I thought, “There is no way that they cannot be getting paid for this.” It just seemed too shady and almost illegal to force workers to do something for work without getting paid. So when I got into work today, I went to a website that was my old friend in high school: findlaw.com. It was here that I found that I could go to the Department of Labor website and use their handy tools to learn about the FLSA (Federal Labor Standards Act). While I was here, I learned that it basically was illegal for them to not be paying these employees. I figured that APX had probably found a loophole where they didn’t have to pay, but I thought I’d forward the information on to Mike anyway. He thought the same thing as I, but he forwarded it on to his supervisor. Again, his supervisor thought that APX had found a loophole, but he forwarded it on and then that got forwarded on and so on until Mike got an email informing him that he would be paid for his trip today. So I cost APX about $5,000 dollars and got seventy people their fair pay. I’m so proud of myself!

Another Update

It has come to my attention that my mother is the reason that Mike is so relentlessly making fun of me. Did I ever mention we had a dog named after Geordi? Well, we did. And did I ever mention that when I wrote about this dog would have been the only time that I ever would have spelt Geordi's name? Well... this dog mislead my knowledge of Star Trek in a few ways. First off, it looked like this:

Not the black dog you'd expect (forgive me for not being politically correct there... the *African American* dog you'd expect).

Second off, his name was spelt like this:

Thanks, mom.

Wilderness Fiskes

This Saturday it was nice outside so I planned a hike and a picnic for Mike and I. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the hike that I planned on taking him. Turned out later that I was on the right road but I chickened out before we ever got there. It was a just big enough for one car road that crept up the mountain side with a cliff that you could fall off at anytime. Plus, you couldn’t see around the bends so you just had to pray there wasn’t a car speeding down the mountain in the other direction. So, I was a chicken driver. But, we did see a trailhead on our way up so we went down to park and hike. It was a rather misleading trailhead, though; there wasn’t any clearly labeled trail for us to follow. So I took first pick at which lightly trodden trail we would take. I made the wrong choice because this is what we found.

How was I supposed to know that we were following the trail of death??

So, we turned around and Mike got to choose the path we took. This was the start to Mike’s path:

Regardless of the somewhat scandalous entry to his path, it actually ended up quite nicely and it followed a river for quite some while. It even opened up to some lovely views.

So, we ventured down this path a while and then turned around and headed to a picnic area that we had seen along the way and ate the picnic lunch of Caesar salad wraps and watermelon and other snacks that I had packed. Our table looked like this:

It was a a lovely, adventure filled afternoon. And here are the cool pictures that I couldn’t fit into the storytelling: