There are no better distractions at work than when daughter and granddaughter comes to visit.

I always think sunflowers are happy things. Up close, they don't look so good but I still like taking pictures of them.



This sunflower is over five feet tall. I think the regular ones are always this big.

I think this one is a shy one.

I'm a chicken. Every time we get in bumpy weather, I get scared. It was a very bumpy ride over to Helena on 8/26/09. We got there just fine. For me it was too many minutes of white knuckle gripping the seat belt.

It doesn't help that a couple of years ago we were heading to Helena, albeit in March when we flew into a scary icing encounter. That was when Lee declared an in air emergency and his speed indicator in the Skymaster failed completely. We both thought, "This is it!"

Since then, we haven't really flown much and every time it gets bumpy, I get sweaty.



So it's good to land!

We stopped to get an Arby’s on the way to Michigan.
I think we were just a little bit outside of Alexandria, Wisconsin when we saw this flock of geese.
If they’re looking for water and then I think they were following a clueless leader.


Good thing we have a GPS ourselves.

Here's the proud mama after giving birth to Jubilee Jordan. She was born at 9:30 am. Becky's water broke around 5 am - a fast labor - so way to go! That's quick for a first timer.

You are no doubt wondering where all pictures of the baby are...well you'll have to click this link to see the pictures. No sense in loading this post up...

As you will see, she's a beautiful baby!

It's been a busy few weeks since I last posted. We've done 2 focus groups, dissolved the law office partnership and I got my new (to me) NIKON COOLSCAN negative scanner!


It was a couple of days before I got around to setting up my cool new gadget. Everything went swimmingly.

Installed software - Check
Plug in the scanner to the computer - Check
Turned it on and the computer recognized it - Check, Check
Tried scanning a couple of negatives - worked like a charm! Check Check!
EXCEPT when I tried the third negative - then a dreaded ERROR message.

I spent a couple of days trying to figure it out. Even e-mailed the guy I bought it from. I have to give him kudos - he replied to me immediatedly and told me that sometimes some old negatives would not scan at all and I should try a different batch.

That was the solution. Ever since then, I been scanning like a mad demon.
Guess who this is?

Well, I couldn't wait, so we watched the Chuck episode after their winter break.

I didn't realize that the show was going to be broadcast in 3D until I saw a commercial during the Super Bowl.

Isn't the internet a great place? I wasted so minutes this morning searching on where we could get the coveted 3D glasses and Google didn't disappoint me!


So I sent Lee on a wild goose chase after work today looking for these great things! It was amazing but there were a few left. He found some at the third store (Albertson's) he stopped at.

Who says he doesn't love me? (or is it CHUCK he loves?) :-(

So we went to a "Travel" party last Friday. Lee drove my filthy dirty Infiniti and parked it in Pam's driveway. There were at least 4 if not more cars in the driveway so they must have been checking all the cars there...

We were only there for a couple of hours, but apparently it only takes a few minutes to check if a car door is open.

My passenger door closes hard, so we don't know if I didn't get it closed all the way or if Lee didn't lock the doors. When we left the party, the passenger door was ajar. I thought, "Oh, oh" but a quick look did not reveal anything amiss. We started to drive off and Lee said - "There's still another door open!" (Because the interior light was still on) He got out and closed the rear passenger door and I began to worry...

After we got home and unloaded all the stuff we'd used during the open house, I began looking for the briefcase with the laptop in it. I THOUGHT I had put it in the car but it wasn't there. That's when I began to think we had gotten robbed.

The next day I checked the office, hoping against hope that I had forgotten to put the computer in the car, but no such luck! Yup, the thieves thought to steal a briefcase, but got a cool new laptop in the process.

But the worse thing is all the information that was on the machine. I spent Saturday changing all kinds of passwords and log ons.

And then more time calling the police and the pawn shops.

...and more time calling the insurance companies on Monday and the Bank

....and more time talking to the insurance adjuster and getting documentation...

......and the theives only took a few minutes to create this hassle!

For those of you who's interested here's the slide show I made for our open house at work. The amazing part about the whole thing is not the fabulous photography or effects, transitions or soupy music, but it only took the contractor 3 months to finish the project!

Way to go Hammerquist and Caselegno our brilliant general contractors!

So we're feverishly working on getting the office around for the "Community Open House" here at the Eastside Brick building. For those of you who don't know, the office bought the north end of the building just about a year ago. The "Eastside Brick" was the former Kalispell General Hospital built in 1911 and opened in 1912 with 30 beds. They added on the south wing in 1948 and our glorious north wing in 1968. It was the height of the 60's ugly architecture and when Lee walked through it the first time, he said, "I don't want to buy this building...it's ugly!"

But I saw the swan in the ugly duckling with the help of a bunch professionals we transformed it to IMHO a beautiful office space.

So we're having an Open House this Thursday. Karen and I went on a shopping rampage at Rosauer's and Costco. Lee said get some Champagne - so we bought 19 bottles of the bubbly (and three cases of beer and 6 huge bottles of wine). I sure hope the staff doesn't have a huge hangover on Friday!

We sent out 600+ postcards about the Open House, I hope a few people show up. Our office is not the only one joining in on the open house, I think all of the other businesses are also having the open house the same night so hopefully we'll have a few guests!

So I spent the past couple of days revamping my template. I think all that wasted time on the computer was worthwhile. I didn't get dinner made and I didn't take down my Christmas decorations. If you stopped by my house, my Christmas tree is still lit up.

Oh well the important thing is I learned how to set up this uber cool "Notepad Chaos" template . Here are the steps that I went through - (with out all the stomping and yelling) for the benefit of you template newbies...

Step 1 Find a template you like. I like this site http://btemplates.com/ because it has quite a few nice templates, you can download them directly from that site and most of all it's FREE! The other thing that I like about it is I was able to glean a lot of help from the comments sections.

There are a lot of other sites on the web and if you search for "blogger templates" on Google, you'll come up with a ton of them.

Go ahead and download your fav, download a bunch of them...

Step 2 Login to your Blogger Dashboard and go to the "Layout > Page Elements" tab. Write down which widgets you have and want to keep then head on over to "Edit HTML" tab.

Step 3 BACK UP your template by clicking the "Download Full Template" link. This will download your current template - and you have it just in case you really mess up. Then all you have to do is upload the backup file from your computer and you're in business again!

Step 4 This is the fun part. Browse to the new template file that you've just downloaded and upload it. DO NOT at this point click "Preview" button. All that will do is show you the old template and navigate you away from the Edit HTML page (I know, I've done it a couple hundred times!) Just click the "Save Template" (and if you're like me) you'll probably get this warning:

Widgets are about to be deleted!

What I do at this point is click OK! because it's a lot easier to reinstall the widgets (from the list you made in Step 2) through the Page Elements tab than it is for me to fool around with the html code.

That's it! NOW you can click the Preview button. It'll show you your new template with all the cool bells and whistles but not all the elements are really working until you actually hit the "View Blog" link at the top of the page. (I don't know why!)

Now go out and wow your "Followers" with your uber techno cool template!

This is the beginning of a whole New Year and of course we all have our new year's resolutions. (Actually I don't have any "new" New Year Resolutions, I have the same ones that I'm recycling).

So...what's new this year?

Becky's going to have a new baby.

Lee and I are going to get a new look - we're going to work out and lose weight!

My blog got a face lift ... how do you like it?

Last but not least - Chrissie is going to get a new car!

Oops! This isn't it - this is something we saw in Las Vegas LAST YEAR when we went there with Kagan and Becky.

This is it! A 2009 Ford Foci! Nicole is really jealous!

P.S. These are some really 'crappy' pictures that Chrissie sent me about her hot new ride!

Here's Sylvester wondering what all the to do is about on Christmas morning. Maybe he's grumpy because there are 4 extra people in the house. Chrissie, Josh, Debbie and Andrew. All these strangers...

Or it could be there's a lot commotion and he can't sleep as well.

Or he's saying Meow Christmas!