Valentines Day is of course a day of showing love and appreciation for the people around you. Family is of course the closest people to me in my life. Even more than New Years, Valentines is a day of reflection for me, a day to remember all of the great memories we’ve made together and all the fun we’ve had. I put together a slideshow of 2009 with some of the highlights.

Happy Valentine’s day to my beautiful wife and baby boy. It’s been another amazing year. I can’t believe how blessed I am to have someone who supports me and pushes me to achieve and experience new things all of the time. She is my great inspiration and I know with her I can accomplish anything. I love you two so much.

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Here’s a run down of our 2009 Christmas Holiday vacation:

When flying across the United States it’s either convenient to leave or convenient to arrive.  For this trip we had convenient times of arrival, which was perfect for Christmas time, but the drawback was we had to be at the Boston Airport (which is two hours away from our house) at 5 am. So the original plan was to leave at 2am and get into Idaho Falls at 2pm Mountain Time (4pm Eastern Time). The day before we left though I saw an advertisement online for “stay and fly” packages at hotels. With a little investigation I found a hotel near Boston that would give us a ride to the airport, a night’s stay, and parking for the same price as just parking at the airport. So we booked the room for the night and headed to Boston. One problem however was that I lost my credit card at some point between booking the hotel and leaving to Boston. So the trip began with a lot of stress as I called the credit card company to cancel our credit card, dealing with the hotel room, and the added stress of not having a credit card on our vacation, but we didn’t have any time to do otherwise.

The flight and trip went really well. Other than the roughest turbulence I’ve ever experienced, we arrived on time and everything went as planned. Oliver even slept a lot of the way.

The first few days in Idaho was caught up in a whirl-wind of Christmas, which was absolutely fantastic. Christmas Eve activities were celebrated first at my family’s house with a special story by my father and Christmas video and a nativity set given to each of my nieces and nephews. After that it was up to the Blacker’s home for their Christmas Eve traditions.

Christmas morning was of course a blast. We spent the morning with Clair’s family and afterwords a Christmas lunch. Of course a highlight of the morning was talking to her brother on the phone, who is on a mission. That is always a very special time. My family’s house was a tornado of Christmas with all the kids running around opening presents, playing games, singing along to Rock Band, and partying. With that many kids all celebrating Christmas at the same time, you wouldn’t expect anything else.

The days after Christmas were a lot of fun. We planned a lot of activities with friends and family and had the next few days pretty much planned out. We had a night of games with some of our friends, lots of going out to eat, sledding, a day of games and fun with Clair’s extended family, and in general we just enjoying the company of friends and family.

Things became a little unclear around New Years as activities were not planned out yet, but we did end up doing some things at my parent’s house that evening. It was fun to watch the New Year’s countdown in Time Square knowing that we’ve been there so often this year. How many times have we walked down those streets and I could imagine myself being there that night. The next couple days were kind of a blur as we finished meeting up with friends, family, as well as last-minute errands at the bank and shopping.

Visibility was terrible but the snow was beautiful, soft and powdery.

The whole trip ended with a bang, by going to Kelly’s Canyon Ski hill and going snowboarding. Visibility was terrible but the snow was beautiful, soft and powdery. Going into the trip we weren’t sure when or where we would go snowboarding. At one point we were going to go to Jackson, but I’m really glad we didn’t. We could barely keep up on a half day at Kelly’s Canyon. There would have been no way we would have appreciated a Jackson trip at $100 a person. No, we had a dang good time at Kelly’s. We both haven’t gone snowboarding in many years and this was a very refreshing experience.

The trip back didn’t go quite as smoothly as the trip over. Before it even began we had a big problem with luggage. Clair did an awesome job packing for the trip out, we were not however ready for the trip back. We bought a ton of good stuff, received a lot of things, and recovered a bunch of things we had in storage. I don’t know why but I had it in my head that it would all just magically fit into our suitcases. We brought back 2 extra suitcases, albeit they were small, we still didn’t have the space to fit in everything we wanted. After getting frustrated Clair finally kicked me out of the room and finished the job herself.

Oliver didn’t sleep a wink on the airplane, which of course meant we didn’t get any sleep, as we had to constantly entertain him. But it was such a great feeling as we landed in Boston. I felt great, excited to finally be home. The last two hours went by pretty quickly as we talked about our trip, life in Idaho and Connecticut.

Overall we learned a lot of lessons from our trip last year. That is to plan your time the best you can, that way expectations are clear and minimizes the family time balance debate. I was amazed at how busy we were this time and there were still people we hadn’t visited that I would have if we had had time. We learned some new things too, over time I think we will figure things out to maximize the time visiting out there. Thank you everyone for your hospitality and patience with us. We really had a great time visiting. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone!

 

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I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about New Years Resolutions, this past year, and what I want for the year to come. My thoughts keep coming back to one thing, getting back to the habits and principles of my mission.

This past year has been phenomenal. Clair and I have had so many opportunities and experiences and it is a miracle what we have accomplished with the Lord’s help. I do have a small confession however, despite all what we’ve experienced I have not felt the same joy as I know I’ve experienced in my life before. There were a lot of times this past year where I felt my time was slipping away from me. I had thoughts about how my work and accomplishments weren’t of any real value and I was not really going anywhere.

These past few weeks I have been doing a lot of pondering, praying, and listening and I’ve come to the conclusion that I feel the way I do because I have strayed from the habits and principles I learned, lived, and taught on my mission. Those of you who have been on a mission or have been close to missionaries know exactly what I’m talking about. The consistent scripture study, constant praying, their focus, time-management, healthy living and priorities are the correct principles and actions of a happy life. It’s those habits and guidelines that I want to go back to.

Back to basics. Missionary life isn’t complicated, it’s simple. But it’s the simple things that are sometimes the most difficult to stay consistent with. Things like:

• Daily Scripture study
• Daily Prayer
• Taking time to ponder and reflect
• Writing in a journal
• Fulfilling church callings and responsibilities
• Taking time to plan
• Monthly temple attendance
• Service
• Developing Christlike attributes

That list could probably be added to, but those are the basics I want to get back to.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. This year’s manual for instruction at church is the book Gospel Principals. Normally that manual is used for new members or those investigating the church, but for whatever reason the Prophet and church leaders feel we need to get back to the basics, and I agree. It’s been my experience that the more I get back to the basic principles of the gospel I am happier and other things that I would otherwise stress about will fall into place.

I have a few other things on my New Year’s Resolution list, but this is going to be my focus this year, getting back to basics.

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Another year has gone by, I can hardly believe that it’s gone by so fast. New Years is actually one of my personal favorite holidays. Is New Years considered a holiday technically? I guess you get off of work typically on Jan 1st, I’ll count it as a Holiday.

Anyways, it’s a time of reflection on the highs and lows of the previous year, it’s also a time to look forward and plan for the future. Doing both gets me excited and inspired, like many. I love making New Years Resolution lists and I attempt to fulfill them throughout the year. So I’m blowing off the dust (metaphorically speaking of course. it was just an old blog post, it never actually made it to paper.) from my old 2009 resolutions to see how the year measured up.

2009 Resolutions

1. Read the Book of Mormon – once again, I slacked off considerably in the scripture reading department. I think we almost got through Mosiah.
2. Visit the Temple 12x in the year – Like the previous year I think we got about half.
3. Visit a place on our list Clair and I visited a couple places on our list. We had the pleasure of meeting my parents in Washington DC, Clair and I took a trip to Disney World all to ourselves, and we visited my mission earlier this Spring in Germany, so that’s pretty good.
4. Have/build a website that attracts 500 visits in a single day. (that’s on 1 site or a combined total of as many sites as I have) This was really close, not sure if I can count it or not, but my freeadobeflashtutorials.com site averages almost 400 a day, my Collinsvillect.org site gets about 15 to 30 a day and this blog. The sites I have are maintaining some steady growth. I really enjoy working on my Collinsville site and now this blog.
5. Run 500+ miles and document it on my nike+ system - Pretty big FAIL on this one and the next one. I did a really good job of running through the Winter and Spring, but as soon as Summer hit all my running habits went out the window and of course all the house buying stuff didn’t help that, as we everything was up in the air for a couple months.
6. Actually run the Hartford Marathon and make a plan on how I can qualify in the future for the Boston Marathon - Ditto as previous.
7. Read the rest of the Ender’s Game series and read at least the first 3 Harry Potter books - I didn’t read any more of Ender’s game, but Clair and I did listen to all of the Harry Potter books on tape. So I have now read/heard them all.
8. Read at least 1 spiritual/church book - read in many, but can’t say I finished one from cover to cover.
9. Buy a few stocks – Put off until the very last minute, I did buy myself some stocks for Christmas as well as received a couple as a gift. I’m now the proud owner of 8 shares in Blizzard/Activision and 2 shares in Apple.
10. Pay off the car OR Buy a house/condo OR have $10,000 in the bank by the end of the year. This was certainly the big story of the year, we bought a CONDO! We now have a more permanent place to live and it feels absolutely wonderful. I’d had it in my mind earlier in the year to look into it, but then decided not to. But of course life always keeps you on your toes and the circumstance changed that led us to look again. With the help of a fabulous realtor, a good friend who does home inspections and handy work, we are into our new place.

There was so much more to the year than just the list, but there are lots of other blog posts about those things.

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This story starts way back at the beginning of the year, when some friends of ours asked us if we could house sit for them for a week and watch a couple of their younger children. We were happy to. They are great kids and other than one experience where I got our car stuck in the snow in their driveway, it went great. Out of gratitude they offered us 3 free Disney World park hopper tickets. They expired at the end of the year but we had plenty of time, so we didn’t worry about it and planned on something in the Fall. But life got crazy, as it has a habit of doing.

A couple months later it became apparent that we had to find a new place to live come Fall time. There will be more on that experience in a different post, but our Disney World experience was pushed back until that was all done. In fact it was looking like it wasn’t happening at all. One night we decided we were just going to do it. So we got online and booked flights and a hotel. It wasn’t quite that simple, it never is, but to make a long story short we got 2 hotel nights for just the two of us, as this was a late anniversary celebration.

Our Disney World experience began even as we entered the plane. It was a scene cut out of a Disney World tv commercial. There was a family with 2 young children entering the plane right behind us. We were being greeted on the plane, like normal by the pilots and flight attendants when I heard a little girl’s voice say “Are you taking us to Disney World?” I turned around just in time to see the handsome pilot tip his hat and say, “Yep, we’re taking you to Disney World.” I couldn’t help but get a tear in my eye, it was so sincere and you could tell there was nothing but joy in this child’s heart and equally so in the pilot’s face.

That was just the beginning of the magical experience. In the Orlando Airport as we searched for the shuttle to our Disney Resort I saw another family heading in the same direction and heard there litle boy say, “Hurry, hurry mom I see it, I see it,” pointing the direction of the Disney shuttles. I found myself being caught up in that same magic the entire weekend. For two days I became a child again. Every attraction filled me with a sense of wonder and excitement. I’ve experienced a lot of things in my life, but I’ve never had an experience that took me back to that feeling.

We took a shuttle to the Coronado Springs hotel where we dropped off a few things, took one last look at our Disney World guide book and took a bus to the Animal Kingdom. Disney World is enormous. I had no idea there was so much space there, not really inside the parks, but more in between them. We chose to stay in a Disney World Resort so we could be close to the park, not knowing that it takes 20 to 30 minutes still to get to a different park or hotel.

We had 2 days get the entire Disney World Experience and we took that challenge seriously. We began in Animal Kingdom. Our first attraction was the Dinosaur’s attraction. I didn’t know what it was, but it quickly became and stayed my most favorite attraction in Disney World. We cruised through Animal Kingdom. It was a Friday afternoon, but it was cool and overcast so there was hardly any lines anywhere. A lot of attractions we just walked right on. We did and saw everything we wanted to, including an amazing Broadway style play of Finding Nemo. Next is was off to Hollywood Studios.

Hollywood Studios went by quickly, but was still fun. We got to do the Tower of Terror and Rock and Rollercoaster. A highlight of that park was the shows. We got to see a stunt show based on Indiana Jones that was really cool and an amazing show Fantasmic. It was a Fantasia style production with water, fireworks, video, and a huge set that turned out really cool. As they were kicking us out of that park we headed toward Epcot for Magic Hours. We were there just in time for the fireworks show but we actually missed it because we were starving and had to eat.

I felt the magic of being a child again, where every experience just put me in awe and wonder.

Clair was so good to let us go with my choice of authentic German food. I’d heard bad things about food at Disney but holy smokes this was one of the best meals I’d had in years. The food was indeed authentic. It tasted just like the old women would make in Germany for us. The waiters and waitresses were all from Germany and it was fun to speak with them in German. After the amazing meal we went for a walk through some of the other countries represented in Epcot. We hit some rides and saw some more things and before we knew it the time was over and everything was shutting down. Which was a shame because we had just discovered the giant aquariums with dolphins and a manatee.

It was a lot of fun but we definitely felt it in our bodies, especially our feet. If you’re going to Disney World I highly recommend working out before you go so that you’re in shape and taking really good shoes. Had I known, I certainly would have taken my running shoes.

I’ll try to wrap up the second day for the sake of time, but it was a much more relaxed day. We spent the entire day in Magic Kingdom with a good break for lunch and even sat in the hot tub to recover from the day previous. We found some fun parades and firework shows to go to and caught all the attractions that we wanted to.

The entire experience was so great. Like I mentioned before, I felt the magic of being a child again, where every experience just put me in awe and wonder. I found myself tugging on Clair’s hand saying, “oh my gosh Clair did you see that?” or, “hurry, hurry, it’s right up there.” It was absolutely worth it. and the family for whom we watched their house for at the beginning were so great to watch Oliver during the time we were away. They are such great people. We missed him of course, but we didn’t worry about him one bit.

We were really grateful for the opportunity we had. We will certainly be returning at some point in our lives to take our children and experience that magic again.

 

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There is little that Clair loves more than Holidays and Halloween is up there as a favorite. So of course we decorated the house with cobwebs and pumpkins, took a trip up to Keene New Hampshire for the Jack-o-lantern festival, took Oliver trick or treating a little, and had some friends over just before heading down to the annual Collinsville Big Boo Halloween parade and party.

The costumes at the Big Boo were better than ever. Too bad I couldn’t say the same from the weather. Just like last year it drizzled until right after the parade, then it started dumping water. It was still a ton of fun and gave us a great opportunity to break in the house.

 

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This year we became fans of the Major League Soccer team New England Revelution. Sports is a big deal in New England and there is no shortage of them. There are tons of professional sports teams around. Clair and I are more soccer fans than anything and MLS is a cheaper sport to follow than any of the others, so we picked up a couple four packs to the stadium to watch the games.

We had an absolute blast this season going to the games. We always sit in the rowdy fan section called “The Fort.” At first people gave us kind of weird looks as we always had Oliver with us, and this was even when he was smaller. We got some credibility though as Oliver became a usual and even stole the show on occasion as he began doing the chants and singing along with the crowd. We knew it was a clear sign we were raising him in a soccer crowd when he’d walk around at home shaking his Revolution scarf singing. We knew it was bad when in our kitchen one day he lifted his little hand and said, “ahhhhhhhhhhhhh, uo sck,” and pointed his finger in the air.

Our team did ok, we made it into the playoffs, but lost pretty bad there. We’ve already gotten 2 four-pack tickets for next year’s season and I can’t hardly wait until next season.

 

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Last weekend we went down to Washington DC to visit my parents, who were on a trip there. Washington DC is a fabulous place. It’s a very unique city. Not like really anywhere I’ve been.

This trip really gave me a greater understanding and appreciation for American history. The Revolutionary War, the foundation of our nation, all of the trials and accomplishment that our nation has gone through. There is way too much there to describe in a few paragraphs. There is too much down there than even the few days we were there. I see this as a place we can go back to time and time again. There is so much symbolism in the monuments, so much information in the museums and exhibits. I don’t think even a week would do it. We got to see some of the Smithsonian Museums, a night tour of the all of the major monuments, and a trip out to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home.

Of course the highlight and the whole reason for the trip was to go down to see my parents. We had a fabulous time exploring the city with them and sharing those experiences with them. I think my parents had a really great time seeing the sites and traveling. Hopefully we can keep that up so they can come visit us It was great to see and spend time with them. I think being in a different place really helped too. My parents are always so busy with work and running around when we visit, this helped to get them in a new place where we could talk, have fun, and experience new things together. It was really great for them too see Oliver and have Oliver spend time with them.

The greatest part was showing my parents how to use the metro. Dad especially loved to talk to people on our way to places. We got to meet a lot of great people and hear their stories. It was a great not to have to deal with traffic or parking, but it did require a lot of walking.

 

Click here to see more photos in a slideshow of our trip

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I know we’re about 6 months late on this, but we finally did it. We finally switched out the Idaho license plates for Connecticut ones. Of course it took about a half dozen trips to the DMV, forms, and changing our insurance, but we finally got them switched.

Although I must admit driving around with our Idaho plates was pretty fun. We got a lot of double-takes and a handful of people ask us if we really drove all the way from Idaho. It was a great conversation starter at gas stations. When we bought the car last year I wasn’t sure if it was in the best mechanical condition. But that car has been very diligent since we’ve owned it, with no problems whatsoever. Its driven down the Vegas strip, through Yellowstone National Forest, through the Black Hills to Mount Rushmore, South Dakota Badlands, Chicago, Niagara Falls, Hartford, Boston, Manhattan, down the east coast through Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington DC, all proudly displaying our Idaho plates.

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I’m testing a new mobile app with this post though. If I can find a good mobile app to upload posts I’ll probably post more.

So stay tuned, more good posts to come.

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