I've Been Found!!!

I know that at least one of my elderly nieces checks out my blog looking for old photos. By old photos she means the 80's, which is really NOT old. Old is clearly from the 70's! Anyway my long lost friend Steph found me!!!! Yaaaa!!!!! This is Steph at Girl's Camp in a French mood. This is unusual, since she was usually in an English mood.

I also dug up a photo of me w/ Steph's Mom. She always had the BEST hair! Anyway, I'm way excited that Steph found me after 20 years!!!! We're trying to figure out a peach expedition, since she lives near a peach source.

Last Saturday was a big day -- Peter was baptized! Yaaa! We also got up at the crack of dawn to see the balloons. The crack of dawn is anything earlier than 9 am, but this time we were out of the house by 6! All of us!!! Anyway, the balloons just sat around because there was absolutely no wind for about half an hour. It was hilarious -- a bunch of giant balloons all bunched up together like ginormous grapes. Then when the breeze picked up a bit, it went West instead of East so the balloons started going the wrong way!

Peter doesn't like cake or ice cream. Ice cream is too cold and squishy and the frosting on cake is too squishy. He has texture issues w/ squishy things. In past years, I've made some pretty elaborate cakes. At one of his parties, Rachel asked me if Rob made the cake or we bought it......I'm choosing to take that as a compliment. Anyway, so this year, I thought it was silly to make a cake for a birthday boy who doesn't like cake. So, we made an Indiana Jonesish Rice Krispie birthday structure. Tasted good but looks funky. I used marshmallow fluff for the glue. There were a couple of treasure boxes filled w/ caramel chips. The cousins only found their way into one of those.....insert evil laughter here.........Grandma Snyder made a tiki statue that looked like a lava sculpture Rob's Grandma got in Hawaii around the beginning of time. Rob made a giant boulder and other assorted pieces. I made the 8 looking thingy. I probably should have thought out the structure a little better -- Rice Krispie Treats are not as structurally sound as they look -- the 8 kept tipping and sagging. And the marshmallow fluff glue dripped everywhere! It's hard to see in the photo, but trust me, it tasted good. I think most of it has been eaten now -- and NOT by me!!!

Peter had a great weekend! He loved getting baptized, seeing all the cousins & getting tons of attention at Primary. He gave a talk on Sunday too!

Life Moves Too Fast!!!

I feel like I'm driving the Red October through Red Route 1 straight for Thor's Twins....."too fast, Katrina, too fast!!!" Why is there less than a month of summer left already? How did my Peter Peanut get to be 8? And did Jeremy really grow 3 inches in the last week? At least they had navigation charts on the Red October! (hum men's chorus music here......)

Rob has been working with Peter on his final Wolf requirements. For their outdoor cooking requirement, Peter cooked steak & hot dogs! They were darn good! Spiderman helped Mom supervise the operation. Actually Dad was supervising, so Spiderman must have been managing. That makes me Vice President, which works out fine because Vice Presidents never have to do any real work.....

Hey -- we are going to Boston in a couple of weeks -- anyone been there? Got any ideas about stuff to do? I've got software training for a couple of days, but I'll have a couple of days to see sights. Hopefully Rob & Beryl won't get lost or tossed in the harbor while I'm in the blasted training classes.....

I don't want to disappoint, so I do have a gripe for the week. Actually, I've got several this week, but I don't feel like writing about all of them. So here's the funny one. We found this magic flooring -- it's inexpensive, looks good and easy to install. Plus it just came out in a couple of new textures/colors that look really, really good. So, we thought we'd get that for the basement. This is the same flooring of the mother-in-law relay post. We put in all the flooring we got in Utah and needed more. Our HD was supposed to have it in last week on the 15th, then the 21st, then 22nd.....then they said we might want to go to Cheyenne or Gillette! Crazy -- yup! So yesterday we got up WAY too early & took off for Gillette sometime before sunrise, bought two pallets of the magic floor, loaded it up in the car (NOT the gas guzzling suburban) and got home about 9:30 am. The folks in Gillette were nice enough to knock $50 off the price, since our store could have had HD transfer the magic flooring down here at no cost to us! Anyway so we've got all the magic floor we need now -- it is really, really fabulous! So, our HD needs to keep the magic floor in stock and learn how to do a store transfer for gosh sakes!

I tried to get Jeremy to do some Kung Fu poses, but apparently SpiderMan doesn't do that. Oh, if you are wondering, these photos were NOT all taken on the same day. Right now Jeremy is usually Spiderman or Batman, sometimes with a light saber. After all, the light saber is the weapon of choice for the modern superhero, no matter what the comic books say!

Are We There Yet?

So, last Tuesday we had the great Mother-in-law relay!!! Rob's brother brought Beryl up to Salt Lake & we drove down on Tuesday to pick her up. The idea was that on Wednesday we'd have a nice leisurely trip back. We did make it down right on time Tuesday, had dinner w/ Nate & Amy, the boys swam in the pool at the hotel & we picked up Beryl late Tuesday.

Wednesday, we slept in a bit. I was up late working on some reports that had to be emailed by 8 am. We ate breakfast downstairs & made it out of the hotel by 10am. Since we were staying downtown, we thought we'd drive past the Temple. Then since we were there, we thought we'd get out and walk around a bit. Oh and our Home Depot was out of the flooring we wanted for the basement, so I looked up a store close to the 15 so we could stop there. Apparently, our flooring choice is very popular & they only had one box. But they told Rob of another store that had tons, not TOO far away.....so the flooring thing ended up taking an hour +. By this time, everyone was hungry for lunch, so we stopped for lunch. Then, we headed north on the 15, because I wanted to get some cherries & maybe raspberries. We did find some of both -- Yaaa!!! By then we were almost to Logan. On the map, it looks pretty easy to keep going North, catch the 30 and get into Wyoming through Kemmerer. If they hadn't been doing construction all over that route, it might not have been too bad. By the time we got into Wyoming around 5:00, Beryl wanted to know if we were close! Once we got onto the normal route, we made pretty good time. Rob thought raspberries were going everywhere -- only partly true! Just when we were at the Goose Egg, this giant deer appeared in the middle of the road! Beryl woke up to the car swerving & Rob swearing. Luckily, the deer went to the other side of the rode (and probably got squished by the semi coming the other way). We finally made it home about midnight. So that's 14 hours for a 7 hour drive, all without any mechanical difficulties or weather delays! Oh, and we took my little greet hornet, so it was nice & cozy all 14 hours!

Friday am we golfed, bright & early! Here's some sounds effects: Rob -- "Where did it go?", "Where did that one go?", "Where is Jeremy's driver?", "Splash", "This isn't my ball out here!", "I'll never find it!", "I'm going to start using Jeremy's balls since I'm out", "Splash". We made it through 9 holes, but I've only included sound effects for the first 4 holes. It's really easy to tell when Peter hits a good one -- you hear this little "hee, hee, hee".

I've also decided that I'm not required to post current photos. So this time, I just picked a couple that go along w/ the car theme.

Title Companies are still evil

Hallelujah the title company just figured it out! The loan is closing today! Yes!!!! They are still evil. And stupid. And we will never use that company again!

Read at your own risk

This is the Jedi Cowboy Stormtrooper custom outfit by Jeremy.

So, last week Rob was at Scout Camp. No big deal, I thought -- I'll just work from home. Ha!!! Then I realized that the biggest loan I've ever done is supposed to close while he's gone. We had one fluff day (today) and if it didn't close (hasn't so far) the project costs go up by $1 million. Yup that's a $1 w/ six zeros.

Cousin Dean (Jeremy does NOT think he's "Little") helped out watching Peter & Jeremy last week -- yaaa!!!! They had the best time. Peter showed Dean how to play Lego Star Wars & Lego Indiana Jones. They saw Kung Fu Panda & Indiana Jones again, and they played at Bev's a couple of days. One day w/ Lylli & Layla. They were so tired every single day! That part went well.

I thought my loan was going OK -- the normal ups & downs. One doc got overlooked that had to be signed by a third party -- ACK!!! But miracle of miracles we got it signed! Things were looking really good Thursday afternoon for a Friday close. Between the time when I picked up P&J from Bev's and got home, everything went to HECK because some doofus brain at the title company is an idiot! Things got worse Thursday evening. I won my own "OK Parent Award" (named after the "OK Driving Awards" Paul gives out.) Peter was frustrated w/ the LEGOs. I had to tell him that when he's playing with LEGOs, it is NOT OK to use the words Mommy uses when she's working........

We thought we were there Friday am, but it got worse. Sigh! I have never worked so hard on something to have it fail so miserably! By the end of Friday, we'd done everything we could, everyone at my company, our partners, our law firm, everyone was working on only this loan. End of Friday I gave it a 15% chance of making. Friday night I ordered take-out for dinner, hey -- on Sunday I made dinner, frozen pizza! Saturday am, I woke up crabby & stiff, the results of too much stress. I started my one Advil every hour routine and by the time we picked up Rob @ 2 pm I was feeling better.

They had showers @ Scout Camp so Rob smelled better than I expected. No loss of limbs or major injuries, so it was a success. P&J were really happy to see Dad. We managed to keep the house mostly clean, but we didn't get any golf in & the yard looked like the Munsters had moved in...

Nothing happened on my loan Saturday......or so I thought. The emails started flowing on Sunday. Someone at the title company realized that they look like a bunch of idiots and found someone more senior who can hopefully fix this mess, but only after getting a bunch of letters from us, our partner, the contractor & our attorney. Oh and they needed all the financial docs resent....grrr!!! But the loan is $1 million under market, so we got all that together yesterday. And now, we wait..... It's 8:30 and I've been at my computer for 2 1/2 hours already. By the way, if the title company doesn't get it figured out, we've got to try to get and extension from the bank (won't be at the same $1 million under current market) and substitute in a different title company. Or we could just can this loan we've been working on for 15 months and start over!

Sigh....Rob took the boys to get milk. We're all out. I meant to go to the store, Friday night or Saturday am, but it didn't happen. I found a web-site for coupons for organic milk, but I forgot to show Rob....sigh! I can not believe how expensive organic milk is -- or that Rob talked me into the organic milk craze! We took the Surbaban into the shop before Scout Camp, so they'd have a whole week to fix the HVAC and a whole list of other stuff. Friday afternoon I took off for a few minutes to go get it, but the darn thing wouldn't start. They are putting yet another fuel pump in it. Hopefully it'll be done today, since we are supposed to drive down to SLC for the mother-in-law relay. Beryl will be with us until mid-August. No, I don't have a good plan B for what to do if I need to be working on this stupid loan tomorrow!

So, if you are wondering what I do for work, I send emails and talk on the phone mostly. Sometimes I do some accounting, write a few checks, etc. Sometimes I analyze deals -- can't have too many new deals! That's where the money is.

It's almost 11 am Florida time and we haven't heard from the title company -- I don't think that's good. Drat! I have noticed that we get a lot of birds in the back yard early in the morning. I think Friday & today are the only summer days when I've seen the sunrise since we moved here.

This photo is Peter on track day. He's having a great time! He obviously has my hair and look at that tan! You can't tell it in this photo, but he's way behind the rest of the kids in the race. This is how I've felt for the last week -- running as fast as I can and not making much progress. I keep checking the emails every other sentence, nothing yet. I guess it's time to get dressed. I'm sure that as soon as I walk away from the computer, the whole loan is going to blow up!