Newbury Foray #5: The Story of Mankind

I recently "finished" reading "The Story of Mankind" by Hendrik Willem van Loon, the very first book to win the Newbury Medal.  And I have to be honest, if more of the books are like that one its amazing the award has lasted this long.  I mean, it's a book written for children, but I don't know if the children would appreciate it. :)  Basically the author decided to write a book giving all of known history, for his children or grandchildren, maybe.  And it doesn't exactly end up being a history of all the world, mostly just the Middle East and Europe with a little bit of America thrown in.  But yeah, it was long, and for the most part slow moving, as history tends to be.  And I say "finished" because since the book won the Newbury Medal back in 1922, the author and then his son and now another guy have kept adding history to the book to keep up with...you know...history. Except that all of recorded history up to the 1920s took 500 pages, and then the last hundred years took another 150 pages. Since my main objective was to read Newbury Medal winners, and all that was added after the book won the award, and I'd already been slogging my way through it for 3+ months, I didn't feel too obligated to finish the additional chapters.

In any case, this was by far my least favorite of any Newbury Medal winner I've ever read. I would NOT recommend that you read it unless you have some kind of weird goal to read all the Newbury Medal winners.  I guess I should say that I did learn some new stuff about pre-20th century European history, seeing as how that's something that I've never known or learned much about.

A few photos from Utah's Red-White scrimmage

Took these photos just over a month ago, and since I haven't really posted anything since then, I figured today was a good a day as any:




It was kinda fun to capture both ends of this TD pass from Jordan Wynn to Dres Anderson so well.


I mostly liked this picture because it was a nice view of the west side of the stadium where we sit, but it also got a fair number of view on Flickr because someone posted it on BYU's fanboard as a look at how many people showed up for the Spring scrimmage. Our season tickets are way up there below the word "THE", in the shady portion.


Because our seats were pretty good for the scrimmage, I was able to get some nice shots looking down the line-of-scrimmage.

More photos here.

Looking forward to the season. Its only a couple months away  now.

Who is Ken Jennings?

A couple weeks ago, I went to my first ever book signing.  Ken Jennings (of Jeopardy! fame) has a new book out ("Maphead") and he was in town to read a bit of the book and then be available for signing of said book.

My friend Kathryn agreed to accompany me to this nerdapalooza and it was kind of fun to hear part of his book and then participate in a bit of a geography trivia contest.  He threw out Smarties to whoever yelled out the correct answer first and then after a while had some of the top Smartie gatherers come up for a one-on-one-on-one faceoff with the winner getting a free book.  I got 3 packages of Smarties and was probably on par with whoever the last one he asked to come up was, but I can afford to buy a book, so not a huge loss, I guess. :) And when I finally got to the front of the book signing line, he did mention that I had done pretty well and maybe he should have had me come up.

Anyway, I am not the proud owner of a (yet unread) signed copy of Maphead by Ken Jennings.

It feels like he's looking right at me!

with Ken

Family Staycation 2012: Day 3

Our third (and sadly, final) day of staycation started with Natalie heading down to Provo for some work and housing-related stuff (she's moving back to Utah!).  So we had to get by without her.

We ate breakfast and cleaned up the house and packed up our stuff and then we headed down to the Gateway to spend some time at the Children's Museum (or Discovery Gateway or whatever it's called).  With 3 small children and a baby, it was probably for the best that we had 5 adults on duty.  Can't imagine being a mom taking the kids there alone.

Anyway, I spent most of the day playing with Austin.  His favorite part by far is the ball tubes right when you come in. You can drop balls through tubes, send them up through tubes with air power, crank them up a hill into more tubes, etc, etc.  Elise and Lucy joined him for a while, but eventually headed off to other parts of the museum. And after a good long time, I finally convinced him to check out the other parts as well.


Elise enjoyed gathering bins of balls of all the same color. In addition to this orange one, she also did purples, and maybe yellows.

He enjoyed working at the construction site, playing in the water area, hauling hay on the farm, driving the jeep, and loading his cart with groceries.


Driving the jeep


Hauling some hay to the farm truck

Then it was time for another trip back to the ball tubes, and finally I got him to go upstairs with me (mainly because I wanted to see what was up there) with the promise that there was a helicopter to look at.  But really the balls were his favorite. :)


He just has so much enthusiasm. Watch his fingers and tongue.


More of the same :)


Flying the helicopter

Family Staycation 2012: Day 2

For our 2nd day, we decided to give the zoo another shot. And while it was still pretty crowded, we were at least able to find parking in or near the zoo parking lot, so I guess that was an improvement over Monday.  Mainly because we got there a little earlier in the day.

It had been a couple years since I was at the zoo last, and I was a little disappointed in some of the animals that seemed to be missing. No bears, no lions (there were tigers, but they were sleeping).  And of course the sea lions and penguins I remember from my childhood have been gone for a long time. There was a fair amount of construction going on, so maybe that was to blame for some of the animals being missing.  Just this morning I checked the zoo's website and it turns out that a new exhibit is opening in June that's supposed to have polar bears, penguins, seals, and sea lions. So I guess we just weren't there at the best time.

All that said, we still had a good time at the zoo.


These colobus monkeys were probably the most entertaining part for me.  They'd climb the net surrounding their pen and then swing on it until they could get close enough to the trees outside the net to grab some leaves or buds or whatever they were trying to eat.

They still have some good gorillas, which the Phoenix zoo didn't have any of.

Got good pictures of an elephant eating.

Saw a rhino up close.

Rode the zoo train.

Finished the day off with some artsy reflection shots on the waterglobe

After the zoo, we headed back up to Draper for sandwiches for lunch, and then had a fairly lazy afternoon, playing games, watching cartoons, Easter egg hunting, and just relaxing.


Austin hanging out on the back porch

George made some tasty pork steaks for dinner and then we spent a little time in the hot tub, before calling it a night.

Family Staycation 2012: Day 1

As we've sometimes done in the past, we recently had a family vacation to....Utah. :)  Kimi was coming into town with the kids for about a month for a bunch of family stuff, and the George was coming out for a week, so my mom found a nice place for all of us to stay for a few days out above Draper (near Suncrest), and Natalie was able to come out as well, so we were all together (minus Elder Ben) for the first time since last July.

We started off Monday morning at the new City Creek Center mall downtown. I'd been there once before (the night it opened) but I think I was the only one.  We wandered around for a little bit (Elise pretty  much wanted one of everything at the Disney store) before getting an early lunch at Kneaders.

Was just trying to get the temple in the shot, didn't realize George and his family were showing up at the time

Not sure what Kimi and Lucy are talking about, but it seems pretty intense. :)

Most everyone finishing lunch while Lucy and I were getting warm on the sunny side

With the nieces

After lunch, the plan was to hit the Hogle Zoo, but when we got up there the parking was overflowing and even street parking was hard to come by, so we decided to go bowling instead (originally planned for Tuesday) and try the zoo again on Tuesday.

Bowling was fun, with bumpers and whatever you call those metal ball launcher things for the kids.  I remember being pretty young and bowling at the 49th Street Galleria and just kind of running up there and falling down and letting the ball go.  Today's kids have it so much easier. :)

We ended up bowling two games a piece (though Elise let people bowl for her most of the 2nd game), with Natalie barely edging me out (132-131) in the first game, and mom dominating the 2nd game.  I probably finished with the best overall score, but mostly we were just there to have a good time.


Austin found some other ways to have fun while waiting for his turn to bowl


And soon everyone wanted in on the fun


Look at the form! :)

After bowling we headed up to the house and settled in a little bit, and then we were back in the cars loaded up to meet up with the Hardens for dinner at Chuck-a-Rama.

Elise showing her affection for Col-ay

View from the back porch

After dinner we headed back up to the house, got the little kids and grandma off to bed and then the rest of us stayed up playing Dicecapades.  Lucy was on my team until she had to go to bed halfway through, but we still ended up winning.

Phoenix in February is Fun: Day 4

Monday was to be the last day of my trip to Arizona and as it was yet another fantastically warm and sunny day, Julie suggested we head to a nearby waterfowl refuge/walking area/there's a library there too/ place, called Riparian Park (or Riparian something or other).

Anyway, it was great to enjoy the nice warm weather, and we also got to see quite a few cool birds. My favorites were the great blue herons, who we saw several of. The first one flew right near us and landed in a nearby marsh.  I thought it would be fun to get a picture of one in flight, and Julie was a good enough host to walk around to where it was and make it fly. :)  Thankfully it didn't come to having to throw pebbles at it to get it to fly, as that might have been frowned upon at a refuge, I imagine.  We spent a while there walking around, seeing the herons, ducks, egrets, etc.


Pre-Julie's visit to its neighborhood


Post-Julie's visit


Pretty looking duck

Afterward we grabbed some lunch at Jack-in-the-Box (since we don't have those in Salt Lake), and then hit up the yogurt ranch so Julie could get some nutella fro-yo. 

After lunch and dessert we drove out to an outdoor shopping area where we just window shopped and enjoyed more time in the nice weather.

Then Julie drove me back to the airport which was a little busy with youth soccer teams heading home after what must have been a huge weekend-long tournament, but I had no problems getting through security and to my gate in time for some Wendy's dinner.

Got home on time, and took the shuttle back to my car.  It had snowed while I was gone, but only a tiny bit remained on my dashboard. Just enough to remind of how nice it was to be somewhere warm. :)

Thanks again to Julie for hosting me. :)

Phoenix in February is Fun: Day 3

What's that you say? I went to Phoenix over a month ago and I still haven't finished blogging about my trip? Well I guess its a good thing that I haven't done anything else interesting since then. :)

Sunday of my trip, I didn't even take my camera out, so you'll just have to bear with me as a paint a picture for you with my words.  I apologize in advance. :)

It was a pretty typical single Mormon Sunday, really.  Went over to Julie's house in the morning. Ate some cereal.  Went to her singles' ward.  Mix and mingled, lingered longer, etc.  Then back to her house where we ended up having people over to play games (Kinect mostly, plus puzzles).  At this point, that's all I really remember from Sunday.

I'm an efficient word painter, ok?