Our house is the new place for family gatherings… and I love it.

When my wife and I were looking for houses, one of our pre-requisites was: “Can we have Thanksgiving here?”.  My family is large, even by Utah Mormon standards, and so it was important to us that we could have enough room for everyone to enjoy an afternoon comfortably, without feeling squished.

We looked at a lot of houses, and many of them met some of our needs.  But most of them couldn’t meet that one requirement.  So, when we finally found the house we have now purchased, it immediately felt like we could fit the extended family here.  There are plenty of places for people to sit, relax, and talk.  The kitchen is large enough to accomodate a gathering, and plenty of counter space for food.

We’ve already put this to the test, especially with my family’s love of volleyball (or just the competition such a past-time provides).  The big back yard has enough room for babies to run around in, and eventually, the kids will be old enough to seek solace in the treehouse. It also gives the grown-ups just enough space to make fools of themselves on the grass.

Inside, there is just enough room to have an impromptu game of Pictionary when the weather does not cooperate for outside activities. The split-levels give opportunities for people to find their own niche to hang out, either downstairs in the theatre room (with the Xbox and the potential of some Rock Band good-ness), or up in the office to play on the Mac and update your Facebook status.

My mom is a self-confessed hater of large gatherings, although I believe she secretly enjoys them.  But, with the new place acting as the family hub, there is also enough for people to spread out.  So, when Thanksgiving comes, I don’t think she will have much objection to getting the whole clan in one place… even just for an afternoon.

First off, yes I know it’s been a long time since I’ve written a post.  Somewhere between shopping for a new house (might have one), growing two children (while keeping them healthy, safe, and mostly sane), and working… my blog tends to get sidelined.  But I’m here now, so just be quiet.

I have to say that it’s been a bumpy 18 months since my wife and I decided to move to Utah, and in that time we have gone through many, many challenges.  We have moved once since then, and are planning to move again soon (knock on wood).  I have changed jobs three times, and we have added to our little family with another adorable son.

Sometimes I really miss Denver.  We had a large network of friends there, and I had a pretty active role in the stand-up comedy community there.  It has definitely been an adjustment, especially for my wife who left her family, her friends, and the place she had lived pretty much her whole life.  We have had challenges going through the transition to living in “Zion”, and she has been a Super Soldier through them all.

My family has been very, very helpful to us throughout the transition, and I’m so happy to once again be close to them all.  I couldn’t have asked for a better support network, and it seems like there is always someone there, whether it’s with the kids, a family function, or just to come and hang out.  They are all the lifeline we’ll ever need.

Now, my family has replaced friends, and Father has replaced Comedian in my life.  I don’t have the opportunity to get out and do stand-up here, and the comedy community and sense of camaraderie that I knew in Colorado doesn’t exist here.  But that’s OK.  There are other things in life that are more fulfilling than telling jokes.

I’m now very blessed to have found a great company where my skills and experience are of value, and the people I work with are pretty cool.  After having worked for a couple of companies led by self-proclaimed “visionaries” who seemed very proficient at preventing their own success, it is refreshing to be with a company that works.

What does the future hold?  I’m not sure… all I know is that whatever life throws at us, we’re going to be ready… or as ready as we possibly can.

We’re looking for a new place.

When we moved to Utah from Colorado 18 months ago, we had to sell out house.  Because of the economy and the slump, we were able to find someone to buy the house while we financed it, so while we technically still have a house… we really don’t.  So, we have been renting for the last year-and-a-half.

My brother was kind enough to let us rent from him for the first 6 months we lived here, but his house was too far South in the county for our liking.  So in the summer of last year, we moved up to a house closer to Salt Lake, and up on the Eastern hills, by Timpanogos.  We like it up here for the most part, but we are homeowners at heart.

When we moved into the house, the previous tenants had a dog that peed all over the carpets.  Dealing with a landlord has never been my favorite past-time, and trying to get anything done in the house has been a challenge, even when that something involves either the heat in the winter, or the air conditioning in the summer.

I was in the Army Reserve way back in the day (when I was more impressionable and MUCH skinnier), and therefore I qualify for a VA loan.  This is something I had never used, because the house my first wife and I bought was a partial gift from her parents.  And then when my wife and I were dating, she already owned the house we sold in Colorado.

So, now we are starting the process of looking for houses.  In this unfortunate economy situation, right now is just about the perfect time to buy a house.  I feel kind of bad for all those people who have lost homes, but I look at it as I am helping some unfortunate family get out of a debt they can no longer afford.  Heavily discounted, of course, but nonetheless… hey, I have to sleep at night!

So, while this means that we have to, yet again, pack up our shtuff and move it (third time inside of two years), this will hopefully be the last move we make for a very, very long time.

Let’s just hope I don’t take a face to the couch that requires nine stitches on the tip of my nose this time.

OK… it was more like five stitches.  But it hurt like hell!

2009, here we come!

Christmas was pretty awesome.  The family all pitched in to get my Mom (commonly known as “Grandma”) a new MacBook Pro Aluminum.  Although she protested that we should not have spent so much money, she is now converting from her brick of a Compaq and loving the new machine.

I got The Dark Knight on DVD and Fallout 3 for the XBox, so I had a very nerdy Christmas.  Hunter got way too many toys from Santa, and Connor got lots of cute clothes (because he’s too young for any good toys, anyway).  Carina got Leopard for her iMac, and some stainless steel pans to replace the old teflon ones she’s been using forever, along with some silver necklaces and other good stuff.

New Year’s Eve was fun, if not a blow-out party thing.  My sister came over and we played some cards, and lit off 3 fireworks from my July 4th stash before all of my BBQ lighters went out on me.  At this rate it will take me 3 years to get rid of all those fireworks!

Now that the holiday season is officially over, it’s time to get back into shape with 2009.  So, we’re still hitting the gym (of course), but we’re back on our nutritious diet, eating lots of veggies and staying away from the unhealthy stuff (basically everything we gorged ourselves on from Thanskgiving to Christmas), and we’re trying to get our stuff organized from our move last May (still).

One of the big things we’re doing is organizing the kids’ toys and decidiing what goes, what stays, and what we’re going to keep until later.  This is a big job, because HP has way too many of them.  Carina wants to find a good charity to give the “donation” pile to, instead of giving them to Deseret Industries… she wants them to be used and enjoyed by children, and not just resold.

I’m hoping at some point in time she and I can get back to playing World of Warcraft – we want to join back up with our friends from Colorado, but she doesn’t have a toon high enough level.  I would like to spend a couple of weeks getting her a character that can get up that high, but there are frankly too many “real-world” things that need to get done before we can justify wasting evenings in front of a monitor.  And, after working on a computer all day long, it’s hard for Carina to want to sit down in front of a monitor again for another 2-3 hours.

But for now, we are just enjoying the fresh calendar.

… than me.

I gotta talk about the D&D session I had last week with my brother and brother-in-law.  First off, I was really nervous because, as I have posted before, these guys love to make fun and tease and mock.  And here I was, letting them into my inner sanctum of nerdery (a real word?) and exposing them to my newly-made nerd friends.

It all started when we were out a PF Chang’s for dinner, and we ran into one of my gaming buddies.  We talked to Jay and his wife for a bit, and came back to the table.  They all wanted to know who our friend was, and so we told them he plays D&D with us.  “He doesn’t look like a D&D nerd”, my brother-in-law Mark said.  Scott, my brother, said he was offended that we had gone off and made a gaming group without including them, and they both wanted to play.  Mark, legendary for being Scott’s crony and “me-too” guy, said he wanted to play also.

I put them off for months, successfully fending off their (mainly Scott’s) repeated requests at joining in.  Then, when the family met my friends James and Terry at my Halloween party, Scott started talking to them about it and got James to agree to host an introductory session.

I scheduled an evening where everyone was available, sent out an e-vite (always a required part), and actually got everyone to agree.  Well, actually Mark initially said “no”, but Scott blackmailed him into it by making his participation a condition of letting my niece Briaunna (Scott’s daughter) fly out to Boston to watch my other niece Danielle (Mark and my sister Stephanie’s daughter) graduate from pastry chef school.

My worst fears had been realized.  I told myself “we’ll just do the one night, they won’t like it, and then I can go back to business as usual”.

How shocked and surprised I was, then, to find that not only did they enjoy themselves and had fun, but they actually want to play it again!

Mark came into my house and said “I want to play a paladin” (I didn’t know he even knew what a paladin was… come to find out he heard it from one of his fellow nerd friends).  Luckily enough, I had a dwarf paladin all rolled up for him.

When Scott showed up, he brought the quick-play rules I had gottent to him earlier in the week, and wanted to play the Human Wizard, whom he called “Snarfblat” (A little Mermaid reference… don’t ask).  He decided to play a wizard, because apparently they “get all the chicks”.

James played Dungeon Master and prepared an adventure.  We all sat down and played a very basic, straightforward dungeon.  As the story went, we were adventurers sent to the village of Lilcrest to address a recent infestation of a dragon(!) south of the town.  We journeyed a small way outside of the village, and found some stone stairs descending into the darkness…

Since Mark was our default defender, he ended up getting “kicked in the crotch” (as he put it), by being the guy who engaged in melee.  Scott’s wizard Snarfblat stayed behind the lines, throwing spell after spell, really dishing out the damage.  Terry played a really great Leader, as always, with his halfling cleric healing people and making sure we all didn’t die.  I brought my Elven Ranger Swift into the mix with his mad archery skills, and the air sang with arrow after arrow.

We killed goblins and huge rats, battled the black dragon and withstood his acid breath and forced him to flee, and cleared out the small lair where they had been hiding out and planning their next evil attack on the village.  The heroes were successful, and gained the accolades and praise of the entire hamelt of Lilcrest!

So… what I thought was going to be a blow-off night might just now turn into a full-blown campaign!  Scott has already said he’s in for another session, and Mark has also said he is in.  I’m already looking at multi-classing my Ranger with some Rogue skills for detecting traps and unlocking chests.

My wife had Stephanie and my sister-in-law Melyssa over for a girl’s movie night while the boys were downstairs playing.  My sister got a real kick out of the two of them emerging from the downstairs, arguing over who did more damage to the dragon, and which powers were more effective.  Scott’s wife Melyssa even had to lean over to him and ask him to “stop talking like that”.

We have created a couple more D&D nerds – Huzzah!