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When Grandma and Grandpa came over at the beginning of the month, they left us with some NuSkin products. Among the products was some hair gel. Sam was the happy recipient of the hair gel and wanted immediately to get spiky hair. I think grandpa tried to spike his hair, but it didn’t work too well. So a couple of weeks after that Sam came up to me after taking a shower and put the gel into my hands. I got the message that he wanted me to spike his hair. I did the best I could and this is how it turned out.

He liked how it turned out and spent most of the day looking in the mirror. The only bad thing is that his dad just cut his hair and now doesn’t have as much hair to spike anymore.

Yesterday Luppin made a big achievement in her preschool life, she got her Alphabet Crown. After a year and a half of preschool Luppin finally has mastered the task of identifying all the letters in the alphabet and repeating the sounds they make. BYUFan and I told her(as we did for all of her siblings also) that if she got her alphabet crown we would take her out to dinner. Emily and Anne persuaded her to pick the Training Table and Texas and Sam tried to persuade her to go to McDonalds. In the end the Training Table won. Now all she has to do next is get her blending badge and then she can go to McDonalds.

BYUFan has been on my case ever since the end of last week when I picked half a bucket full of green beans to get them canned. I don’t have a pressure canner and on Saturday I went to a couple of stores to try and find one, but no luck. Finally on Tuesday this past week I called a lady from the ward who is in charge food storage and emergency preparedness for the ward in hopes that she owned a pressure canner that I might be able to use. Luckily for me she did, and she said that she could actually come and help me that afternoon. After I hung up the phone I had to scramble and get everything ready for her to come over. I had to get our quart bottles from the basement, wash them, pick the green beans from the second row of beans, run to the store to pick up lids, and then to wash and cut the beans all in one and a half hours. Luckily BYUFan was working from home that day and he stayed to help me. I couldn’t have gotten it all done without his help(he also had to take the girls to piano lessons). Thanks BYUFan!!!! So when our preparedness lady came over we were almost ready to can. She showed us how many beans to put in the bottle, how much salt to add, and how high to fill it with boiling water. We then put the bottles in the canner, got it up to pressure, and cooked them for 25 minutes at 14lbs of pressure. I took them out after the pressure abated and they all sealed and are now sitting in my cupboard ready to be used. I am grateful for good neighbors and good husbands.

Now, what would be a good thank you gift to give for my neighbor who lent me her canner? Any ideas would be great!

These are the the bean plants we grew this year

Canning is a messy job

The finished product

We’ve had a pretty decent garden this year given the fact that we planted beans and corn so late. I’ve definitely had my fill of corn on the cob and Nancy was giving fresh corn away to the neighbors. Yesterday she went out and picked a bucket full of beans from one of the bean rows. We’re going to try bottling them today. We still have another bean row left that needs to be harvested but it’s raining all weekend. Tomatoes have been good but not great – enough to eat and make salsa from but not enough to bottle. I tried a new method of pruning and staking them this year and it was certainly a learning experience. Carrots weren’t that great but we did dig up a few. Strawberries and raspberries made it through the hot summer so hopefully we’ll have a good crop of those next year.

One of our neighbors is a landscape designer and I think he chuckles at what he probably considers our crass and ugly landscaping. When he came into the backyard he noticed our garden and said, “Wow, that’s a nice garden, where did you get your topsoil from?” When he got closer to the garden he realized it wasn’t top soil but just plain old South Jordan clay and he was surprised that we could get the harvest that we did.

Starting to look like fall

The best crop of all this year was pumpkins. We have a lot of empty space in the backyard that we haven’t landscaped yet and pumpkins so we planted two pumpkin plants on the north side of the house. Nancy tended and watered them all summer and we ended up with several nice pumpkins from the two plants. One for each of the kids to carve for Halloween. Thanks to Nancy for taking care of the garden during the hot summer months. I get gung-ho in the spring but then lose steam as the summer starts to get hot. Nancy keeps the garden going throughout the summer until I start to get interested again around fall and think about tilling the garden and composting and ordering seed catalogs and such.

We’ll let you know how our canning operation goes. Beans have to be bottled with a pressure canner – they are low acid so you can’t use the hot water bath like you can with tomatoes. Nancy went off on a shopping trip to get the supplies she needed and I’m pretty sure I’ll be pressed into spending all afternoon into snipping beans during the second session of General Conference.

BYUFan is gone yet again on another business trip. He says after this he doesn’t have to go anywhere for three weeks. It will be strange to have to start cooking normal dinners when he gets back. This week is full of things to do. Yesterday I had Presidency meeting for primary and then after school I had to take the girls to piano lessons and then I had to turn around quickly and take Emily to stake standards night. I think she had a lot of fun because she didn’t get home until 9pm. Today after dropping Luppin off to preschool I spent two hours at the tire place spending BYUFan’s hard earned money on new tires for my Toyota. I probably could have gotten away with only replacing two tires, but I thought since I was there I might as well get them all replaced so I wouldn’t have to go back anytime soon. It seems that when you think you have lots of cash to go around things like car repairs takes a big chunk of it away. It will be crunch time soon and I will have to buckle up. This coming Sunday is our primary’s sacrament meeting program so late afternoon on Friday we will be having our final run-through. Only two of my kids have small parts so luckily I don’t have to worry about helping them memorize too much. I did however teach the senior primary how to sing the first verse of I am a Child of God in Japanese, so I will be leading them in that at the beginning of the program. Last Sunday when we practiced it the kids seemed to have memorized the song pretty well. I will have to report how we did next week. Next week there is not much going on so it will be nice to get some work done around the house for a change.

Within the past two weeks Sam has lost two bottom front teeth. He was so happy to have money from the tooth fairy because he wanted to be like his big sisters and buy a soda from the soda machine in front of the grocery store. First he wanted to take all his money and spend it, but I reminded him that he had given the lesson in Family Home Evening on Monday about Tithing and that we needed to put ten percent of his money into tithing. At first he was not happy but then he realized that ten percent didn’t mean all of it. So yesterday while the girls were at piano lessons I took him to the store and he went and bought himself a sprite.

This is a picture of Sam after he lost his first tooth.

A couple of weeks ago Luppin was helping me water our garden, when I noticed a praying mantis on the lawn. I pointed it out to her and she thought it was the coolest thing ever. I told her that she should not hurt the big bug because it was a good bug that ate the bad bugs. Every time Luppin would go to fill the watering can she would walk past the mantis and say, “mommy, look, Mr. Mantis is still here!” or she would point out that she was being careful and not stepping on him. I thought she was being really cute so I took a picture of her and the bug.

The comments and broken links should be working now. I’m not sure what the problem was but I just upgraded to a newer version of the blog software and that seemed to fix it.

Also, I’ve been getting mad at Nancy because she’s not pulling her weight in the posting department. Her last post was over a month ago. She has pictures of Sam losing his first tooth, Luppin chasing a preying mantis in our lawn, and our last BYU football game that she is supposed to post about. Everyone bug her to post them!

Last week Toronto, this week Honolulu. Our company has a contract with a Hawaiian government agency which will involve an estimated 14 man-weeks here in Honolulu. All of my staff wanted to come for this project but I keep telling them that it’s going to be all business with very little time 7for play.

Luckily, Delta has a direct flight from Salt Lake to Honolulu which makes the trip out here not too painful. The only problem is that the direct flight back leaves Honolulu at 9:00 p.m. and arrives in Salt Lake City at 7:30 the next morning. There’s nothing I hate worse than red-eye flights.

The government office is near the Mariott Ko Olina resort on the west side of the Island. There aren’t a whole lot of reasonably price hotels around there so we’ll probably mostly end up staying in the tourist areas of Honolulu/Waikiki. This trip I’m at the Waikiki Beach Marriott Resort and Spa. My balcony is a “beach view” but that really means if I crane my neck around the edge of the wall I can see the water.

Waikiki

Tonight I took a stroll down Waikiki. The last time I was here was as a 12 years old. I remember it being a dirty, touristy, cheesy place – not nearly as fun as the hotel on Kaanapali Beach in Maui where we also stayed on the same trip. This time; however, Waikiki was fun and interesting. The most fun part of it was the people watching. There really was “one of each color jellybean” as somebody I know is fond of saying. There were street performers (magicians, statue guys, artists, etc.) native Hawaiians on the beach for the Labor Day holiday, Japanese tourists snapping photos, European tourists smoking and wearing speedos and bikinis, and even homeless people pawing through the garbage cans. If you like people watching then Waikiki on a holiday is the place to be.

Unfortunately, people watching isn’t nearly as fun by yourself as it is with a friend. I kept thinking it would be fun to have Nancy with me so we could sit on a bench and chat and point out interesting sights. I really don’t plan on spending the whole fourteen weeks of the project here – that would mean I’ve failed to build up a good staff – but I wouldn’t mind coming over here at least once more. The hard part will be finding someone to watch the kids so I can have Nancy come with me.

I spent last week in Toronto. We’re partnering with a Canadian company on a forms processing deal that would be the biggest deal in the history of our company. We flew to Philly on Monday night, spent the night in the airport hotel, and left early Tuesday morning for Canada. We worked on the RFP response Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday and then spent Friday flying home.

Looking out from my hotel – Lake Ontario, the Rogers Center (where the Blue Jays play), and the base of the CN tower

Toronto was an interesting place. The Toronto area has about 5 million people and the city itself had a very cosmopolitan feel. I enjoyed walking down the waterfront on Lake Ontario and watching the dinner cruise ships (“booze cruise” is what the locals supposedly call them) set sail, walking through the “entertainment” district with theaters and restaurants, and gazing up at the CN tower out my hotel window while trying not to get dizzy. The CN tower was the tallest structure in the world until the Burj Dubai passed it just last year.

Looking up at the CN tower

Our Canadian partners were pretty good to work with and I chuckled to myself each time I heard an “eh”. We got the RFP response done on time so the trip was productive. I’ll probably have to go back to Toronto in a couple of weeks to do the final pitch to the customer but it’s definitely a city I wouldn’t mind visiting again.

After buying Grandpa Kent’s car we had three vehicles and only two drivers. Time to sell the Saturn. Nancy and I bought the Saturn in 1996 just after Emily was born. At the time, Nancy was pregnant with Annie. Nancy had been driving a little Ford Colt that she brought to the marriage. It was so small that I couldn’t even fit in behind the wheel and thus had never driven it a single time. Nancy’s pregnant belly forced her to put the seat all the way back and Emily’s baby carrier on the passenger side in the rear. In that configuration there wasn’t even enough room left to carry a load of groceries. My Honda, inherited from Aunt Lori and Grandpa Kent, didn’t have any air conditioning so there was no way that pregnant Nancy would even consider driving it. The solution? Buy a new car.

I think a friend had recommended a Saturn to us and Nancy and I headed to that dealership first. We liked the cars, like our salesman, and liked the fact that Consumer Reports rated that particular model year as a “recommended” car. That was good enough for us. I don’t recall that we even looked at any other car models. We ended up getting the deluxe model – leather seats, sunroof, CD stereo, fog lamps – the works! It was the first car I had ever bought on my own and was the first car I had ever driven with leather seats. The leather proved its worth and has survived countless kids with their accompanying spills and barfs. To this day I don’t regret the decision to get leather seats and will never own a car without leather. Nancy drove the new Saturn while I suffered with the no-air- conditioning Honda until the birth of our third baby after which we couldn’t fit two car seats and a baby carrier in the back and were forced to buy a minivan. I then drove the Saturn for another 7 years up until last week.

I hate buying and selling cars. The act of trying to figure out what your old car is worth is such an ordeal. Back when we sold Nancy’s little Ford Colt, you couldn’t just get online and look at Edmunds.com or KellyBlueBook.com. You couldn’t go to a website that specialized in local car sales like KSL Classifieds or Craigslist. Nope, you had to call up the bank or go find a Thrifty Nickel to figure out what cars were worth. Fortunately, we’ve come a long way since those days. Selling a car is much easier with the Internet but it’s still a pain in the rear.

First we had to decide whether to get the problems fixed or to sell the car with all its warts. The radiator was leaking, the windshield had a huge crack that would never pass inspection, the sunroof was broken, the front fender was cracked, the CD player didn’t work, and the back passenger window would just slide down and not roll back up. I agonized about whether or not we would be able to recoup our repair expenses. A Saturn of similar age and miles sells for scrap/parts for about $450. Saturns without major problems were selling for about $2300 online. I was facing about $1000 worth of repairs. In the end I just did the math and figured it was worth the cost of repairs. Nancy did the leg work in getting the radiator fixed, the windshield replaced, and a new emission/inspection certificate. I decided not to repair the fender, window, or sunroof and just list those problems in the ad. Nancy also did the hard work of cleaning and vacuuming the inside of the car until it was spic and span. Thanks Nancy! I wanted to get rid of the car quickly so I priced it a couple hundred dollars below what similar cars were selling for (even though it had amazingly low miles – only 108,000 for a 12 year old car). Our asking price was $2100. I figured that I would let someone negotiate down to $1800 but I wouldn’t go below that; otherwise, I would have been better off just scrapping it without the repair hassles.

I placed the ad on Saturday night and had my first bite on Sunday afternoon. The guy came out to look at the car and do a test drive. He was pleased with it and said he wanted to buy it but needed to get the money. He wasn’t much of a negotiator on the price. He said “That cracked bumper will cost me some money to get fixed – could you knock off a hundred dollars?” “Sure thing”, I said. $2000 it was. I don’t think he has any intention of repairing the cracked bumper (Saturns have a fiberglass body so they don’t dent – they crack) because you can’t really tell it’s cracked unless you get right up close and look at it. We shook on the deal and he spent the next several days coming up with the dough. He finally coughed up the cash on Wednesday night and I signed over the title and handed him the keys. In retrospect I probably could have listed it for $200 – $300 more and still gotten a few bites on it but I’m just too impatient and nervous and would rather drop the price and be assured of a quick sale than sit on it for several weeks and wonder whether or not it will sell at all.

The only problem was that when he tried to register the car the next day, the DMV told him that the title was messed up and still showed a lien by the bank. Of course we had paid that Saturn off years ago and had a letter from the bank releasing the lien and even had a new title that showed no lien holder but the DMV computers still showed a lien. As far as the DMV lady was concerned, if it was in the DMV computers it was Gospel truth. We had to submit an application for a reissue of title and fax it to the bank and mail it back to the guy and blah blah blah. Fortunately, Nancy is managing that part of the transaction and we should have the title issue cleared up sometime next week.

In the end the car selling experience wasn’t nearly as painful as I thought it would be. That’s probably mainly due to the fact that Nancy did all the leg work and cleaning and hassling with the red tape. I probably never would have gotten the car sold if it hadn’t of been for Nancy.

So, to the 1996 green Saturn SL2 I say:
“You served us well through five kids, a trip to Houston, Texas, a trip to San Jose, CA, and innumerable daily commutes. Although you drank oil like a sand dune, your clutch never failed and most importantly your AC never failed. No hard feelings about the time your alternator died and stranded me on the Bangerter Highway. After 12 years and 108,000 miles I believe I got my money’s worth. So long, old friend.”