No, I’m not referring to a movie with Will Smith, I’m talking about the day we commemorate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence back on July 4, 1776 when we declared our independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain! There are so many great things about the way we celebrate Independence Day such as fireworks, parades, barbecues, and carnivals. I have always enjoyed fireworks on the Fourth of July, growing up we would sometimes get on the roof of our house so that we could see the fireworks that were shot in downtown Wichita. Luckily things are pretty flat in Kansas so it is easy to see for long distances without much trouble! Now Jodi and I try to get to as many shows as we can. We have found a few regulars that we like. The Canyons in Park City has a show on July 3rd that we like a lot and always make it to and we always go to Kaysville for the Davis County show on July 4th with a lot of the family. We also like South Jordan’s fireworks but they did them earlier this year than normal so we missed them. We usually find enough shows to be able to make it to 3 or 4 every year. We planned to go to West Jordan’s show on July 5th but I was not feeling well so we didn’t make it.

Our morning consisted of the Centerville parade and celebration. Lindsey and Aaron have some pictures from those on their blog. There is a bunch of carnival type food and stuff going on at the celebration but we usually just go and hang out for a bit and then go somewhere to eat so we can get some good food and not pay out of our noses for it; the past two years we have gone to Bajio. It was so hot and muggy this year so we didn’t stay long and couldn’t wait to get indoors! After lunch we went and saw the new Indiana Jones movie with Jodi’s parents and Jake. Jodi and I had already seen it but it’s good enough to see a second time.

The Fourth of July is one of my favorite holidays. Not just because of the fireworks, parades, barbecues, and carnivals but also for the reason we have the holiday. I am so thankful for our country’s independence and for all who have lost and risked their lives to protect it. I thought it was great that everyone at the Centerville parade stood and clapped as the troops walked by.

Last year Jodi and I did the Triathlon at the Utah Summer Games in St. George. We had the idea to train all winter and do lots of triathlons this summer but so far we haven’t done much training or any triathlons. Jodi and her brother, Josh, signed up for a few swimming events at Summer Games in Cedar City, it was my first time ever going to a swimming competition and I thought it was pretty interesting. The competition was at an indoor olympic size pool at SUU, it was nice being indoors instead of outside in the sun all three days! They seemed well organized and had people from all ages swimming. There were swimmers from 20 to 81. We only went to the adult competition but they had a separate one for people under 18. One of the guys that swam in several events only used his arms when he swam and had to scoot himself along the floor to get to his lane. He walked with a brace on one leg and a cane but he swam very well! I’m sure he could beat me in any swimming event and I have two able legs!

Jodi and Josh did well, especially for not training much at all. They both earned some medals and Josh set a couple of records. They both use to swim competitively in high school but haven’t competed since then, I think summer games rekindled their love for competitive swimming! They were both talking about doing it again next year. The only problem if Josh does it next year is and if I chose to compete he would be in my age group which would pretty much guarantee that I wouldn’t do so well.

We all had a good time and it was good to take a few days off work (yes, it’s true, I didn’t work at all while we were down there!) We made it down to St. George one day and went to In-N-Out for lunch and then Jodi and I went shopping while Josh, Sabrina, Harrison, Kelley and Kathy hung out with Sabrina’s sister in their pool. Harrison had his first swim, Josh was so excited to get him in the pool he almost didn’t wait for Sabrina to put her swimming suit on before getting him out there. We also got to see our cousin, Lins, and her fiance while we were down there for a minute at dinner. It was so hot in St. George, 110 degrees!

We have been busy working on a few miscellaneous home improvement projects the last couple of weeks. We found a pretty good deal on some knobs and pulls for our kitchen cabinets and drawers. We decided it was time to do some patching on the walls, we had a few dimples from recessed screws and some dings from carrying the bed up the stairs. There were also a few dings and dents that were in the walls before we bought the place that we discovered after we put a fresh coat of paint on the walls that we just filled in and fixed. An end of one of the hand rails for the stairs was rubbing against the wall so I took that off and fixed that up. We also framed and hung our college degrees and my Eagle Scout award above my desk in the office. And we finally put up the valances on our blinds! We pulled them all down before we moved in so that we could paint everything and in the process I broke a lot of the valance clips. We finally decided to go looking for some new clips and got the idea to use Velcro instead which worked out very well and ended up looking nicer too since there isn’t a visible plastic clip holding the valances on! Our list of things left that we want to do while we’re here is getting smaller and smaller!

Jodi and I went to the annual Scottish Festival at Thanksgiving Point again this weekend. We have been three years in a row now I think. We always just go for the Friday night festivities: the strongman competition and Tattoo (not the kind where you get ink permanently inserted in your skin). Our favorite is to see the guys throw heavy stuff like dang big rocks, metal balls and kegs! We haven’t ever seen them toss cabers; I think they do that on Saturday. There are a few different ways to throw each item and they all make it look pretty easy but I know I wouldn’t stand a chance trying to compete. The guy in the picture above is tossing his keg in the double handed, over the head while exposing his belly method. We noticed this wasn’t the best way to get it the highest, the best was to spin around and throw. One of the guys that tossed the big metal ball did a spinning toss for his first time ever so the audience was warned to be ready to duck or run in case he let go too early!

They also sell some awesome kettle corn and have a couple of good bands, we always enjoy the Wicked Tinkers! Our favorite song that we’ve heard them play is Wallop the Cat. It is interesting to see how much Scottish pride there is in the area, we often see the same people year after year. I was surprised that my sister didn’t even know the festival was going on since she basically considers herself part Scottish since she did a study abroad there last year! I guess we do have some Scottish blood in us, we are from the Wallace Clan.

Jodi tagged me a few days back and I decided to actually act on it this time! The directions of the tag are:

1. Get the nearest book to you, or one you’re reading that contains over 123 pages.
2. Go to the 123 page
3. Find the 5th sentence
4. Post the 5th sentence
5. Tag five people

Book: Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

Sentence: “An object that can be used as a prototype, such as an instance of Wall, must support the Clone operation.”

I tag whoever wants to be tagged! I know, lame. I am not much of a reader, and when I read I usually either read religious books or computer related books. I recently started using Goodreads to keep track of what books I have read and what I want to read, if you like to read you should check it out! It also helps share your reading suggestions with friends and family.

Nintendo came out with a new “game” that is a combination of fitness and fun! We got a copy of Wii Fit last week (we pre-ordered it on Amazon.com a couple of months ago, good luck trying to find it now) and have trained with it almost every day so far. The Wii encourages more movement than other gaming consoles but Wii Fit is really the first game that is really focused on helping improve fitness. It comes with a balance board that is able to measure weight and balance and it helps the system to track progress to a personal goal. The board is very sensitive and works well. There are yoga poses, strength training, aerobic activities, and balance games. I have never had any exposure to yoga before but after doing a few of the poses on Wii Fit I think it will help me with strength, flexibility and balance. The strength training exercises are fairly basic but well rounded. The aerobic activities don’t replace going for a run or something like that but they are able to get the heart rate up and get you to sweat. The balance games are the most fun and make me a lot more aware of how I stand and balance my body.

The only thing I wish Wii Fit did differently was guide and suggest the activities that I should be doing. It does a little bit of recommending about what activities go well together but very little to try and suggest what I should work on. It does a pretty good job of knowing how well I am doing with individual exercises and sometimes provides tips on how to improve. It also rates how well I did on an individual exercise and after a few good attempts it allows me to do the exercise faster, longer, or more.

I think Wii Fit is something just about everyone could notice a benefit from. Someone that actively trains and exercises may find some of the exercises on Wii Fit to be too easy and basic. The other nice thing about Wii Fit is that it is just so easy to do, don’t have to go to the hassle of driving to the gym, finding equipment to work out on or any of that. Plus it makes exercise fun!

Beautiful, white fridge especially well suited for smaller areas, about 15 sq ft! This fridge has cooled our food and beverages for over a year and has worked well for several years before that! Why buy a brand new fridge when you could continue using ours that has a great history of working?! Oh, but wait, it isn’t just a fridge, there is also a freezer on top. Want some ice? Just fill some ice trays with water and you’ll have ice in no time without all the hassle of an ice maker. No need to worry about all the space those huge things take up or trying to figure out how to hook it up and make sure it doesn’t leak. This fridge may not be Energy Star compliant, but it doesn’t waste energy with an unneeded light bulb in the freezer like some of the others on the market. How useful are those anyway? Once you fill it up you can’t even tell that a freezer has a light in it behind all the frozen food and ice cream. With this freezer you don’t need to feel guilty that the light is on back behind your frozen peas and hamburgers. This fridge also encourages buying fresh produce on a regular basis because it only stays good for a few days at a time. Who wants to eat fruit that was purchased over a week ago anyway? With this fridge the fruit will be so rotten after a week that you won’t even be tempted to eat it! This fridge also has some wonderful character, stains and smells that are very unique and can remind you time and time again of its wonderful years of use. Prefer not to relive those moments? I’ll throw in a box of baking soda to help capture some of those smells for free!

All of these wonderful qualities about this fridge may make you wonder why we are willing to part with it. Well, it was a very tough decision, but it is being replaced by a new, larger fridge. I know, I know, how do we know this new fridge even works as well as our old one? Well, we decided to take our chances. The new fridge matches the other appliances we have been buying lately, stainless steel. Plus when you come across a new fridge that is being offered for 50% of its retail value it is hard to pass up! How did we get such an incredible deal? Well, I wish I could say I was just that good at working the salesman, but actually he gave us that price right away! It just happens that the specific fridge was a floor model and had recently been discontinued; they were almost giving it away!

If you’re interested in the gently used and loved, white fridge, let me know! It is currently scheduled to be picked up by Rocky Mountain Power on June 2nd and they are paying us $30 for it! What a deal! Want it more than they do? Sweeten the deal and this wonderful piece of modern engineering can be yours! Take a look at the old and new fridges side by side below.

Our kitchen sink has been a problem since we first moved in to our house a year ago. It was not sealed anymore so it was able to move around a little and if we splashed or spilled water on the counter it would leak under the sink. We finally got around to taking care of this over the weekend. The easiest and cheapest option would have been to just take the sink out, clean the counter of the dried silicone and then re-seat the sink and hook it all back up, but of course we didn’t choose this option.

We have never really liked the sink or the faucet; they were both dirty, stained and scratched. The faucet use to leak but we seem to have fixed that, at least for the time being. We also have been replacing our old, rundown appliances with stainless steel ones so we thought it would be good to get a stainless sink as well. We decided to get a single basin sink and install it ourselves. I have a book that described the process pretty well and decided to go ahead and give it a shot.

The old sink came out pretty easily, first I shut off the hot and cold water valves under the sink and detached all the drain pipes, then I took off the water supply pipes going to the faucet. When I pulled out the last drain pipe that went in to the wall I could not believe how bad it smelled! We have had a rank smell in our kitchen some mornings and I usually will take out the trash and spray some 409 down the drains to get rid of it, never really sure what it is, but I think I discovered it! I wiped out the pipe in the wall and hopefully that will keep it from getting that smell again. I was surprised at how easy it is to remove a garbage disposal, just need to take a screwdriver and slide it in a hole where the top of the disposal meets the mount under the sink and push it counter-clockwise and then it just drops right out! I just assumed it would be held in by more than that. After I unhooked everything under the sink I was able to pull the sink out (with Jodi’s help, it is a heavy sink). It came out easily because it was no longer attached to the counter.

I felt pretty good about things at this point, everything had gone smoothly and without incident, but that sure changed. Before we started pulling everything out we had already purchased a new sink and faucet from Lowe’s. We decided to wait till we were working on the project to deal with getting the pipes so that we could drop the new sink in the hole and determine what we actually needed; we wanted to replace all of the pipes, especially after we saw how dirty and smelly the old ones were. We also decided to replace the disposal after pulling it out, plus that way we wouldn’t have to worry about a new mount not working with our old disposal.

The first problem I ran in to was the hole for the sink was a little too small for our new sink to fit. This was better than having the hole be too big for the sink but it still presented a challenge. The sink directions suggested getting a keyhole saw to make the hole larger and I figured I might as well do that instead of getting a power tool since I probably wouldn’t have much need of a jigsaw anytime soon again. I used the $6 keyhole saw I bought for about 5 minutes before I realized I would most likely be working on making that hole larger for the rest of my life so I went to Home Depot and found a great deal on a cheap jigsaw, $10! I bought this and finished the job in much less than a lifetime and got to fill the kitchen was sawdust while at it.

The next problem I had was I used a different brand of silicone caulk than I had before and didn’t open the container properly and ended up squirting caulk all over the back of my caulk gun, since the caulk wasn’t able to come out the front it came out the back! This wasn’t a big deal and was solved with me running to Home Depot again to buy another tube of caulk and opening in properly.

The next problem happened after I dropped the sink in with the silicone caulk around the rim and discovered that I could not get the fasteners on the underside of the sink to fit in 2 of the sides. I put the ones in that I could and figured out a way to kind of get the others to work, so hopefully the sink doesn’t come out one day because it isn’t as securely fasted as it should be from under neath. The problem was there was not quite enough extra counter space in the front and one of the sides had a wood divider so there wasn’t quite enough space for the fasteners to sink their teeth in to. In the future this will be something good to keep in mind if I ever try to replace a sink again.

After finally getting the sink in the hole and fastened in it was probably around 9:30pm, the project had started around 2:30pm. I started putting the drain and disposal mount together and discovered that plumbers putty is very similar to playdoh, its interesting stuff. That all came together pretty well, but I wasn’t really sure how good I did it so I was a little nervous it might leak, luckily it hasn’t!

The next problems were my own fault and were easily solved. I realized that the disposal doesn’t come with a power cord, just wires to hook up to, this was easy to fix by going to Lowe’s again and buying a power cord kit. The problem was that I didn’t discover this until the store was closed so it got put off till Monday. The next problem was I put the p trap pipe in backwards which meant the drain from the disposal didn’t quite reach, so I decided I needed another short pipe, another thing that I could resolve on Monday when the store opened again. The last problem was I missed the step on the disposal where I needed to punch out the dishwasher drain plug so that the dishwasher was able to drain, this was easily solved by looking at the instructions again, finding out I needed to do that and then dropping the disposal back out, punching out the plug and putting it back up.

After I finally got it all put together I had a small leak where I had attached my new extension pipe to the p trap pipe. I took it apart and figured out if I turned the p trap pipe around I didn’t need the extension pipe and everything fit together much nicer, without leaks! Finally, the project was complete only about 48 hours after it started!

We kind of figured it was good that we weren’t able to use the sink on Sunday and Monday morning because that way it made sure and gave everything time to dry so we weren’t tempted to run the water and possibly ruin the silicone seal. Now that I have completed the project I think I could do it again without nearly as much trouble, although I don’t have it on my list of things I would like to do again!

Last night we saw the new Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, at the Megaplex 20 at The District. This was another movie that we heard some mixed reviews of and a lot of talk about it not living up to the hype, kind of like the new Star Wars movies, but I thought it was good. A lot of stuff that happens in the movie is unrealistic, but that is how all of the Indiana Jones movies are. Harrison Ford did good as an older Indiana Jones and Shia LaBeouf also did a good job.

There was a little bit of drama at the theater last night. We pulled up at the theater and saw lots of people exiting the building but just assumed a big movie must have just ended but as we got closer to the front door we realized there was a lot of people just standing around not going inside and not leaving. It turned out that there was a small fire at the Mayan Express in the lobby and the fire alarm went off so they had to evacuate the building. This meant that our movie got pushed back 40 minutes, but that is better than having it interrupted or canceled because of the fire. The Mayan Express is actually where we ate last week when we saw Prince Caspian. I’m not sure why we went there, I’ve been to the Mayan restaurant before and the food isn’t that good, the place is cool and they have divers, but at the Mayan Express you don’t get the atmosphere or the divers, just the food with a higher price tag. It still wasn’t good and maybe it’s a good thing they had a fire, keeps other people from eating their overpriced food! It didn’t look like there was much damage so I’m sure they’ll be open very soon again.

Jodi and I saw The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian at the Megaplex 20 at The District last night. I heard some reviews that the fighting in the movie went on non-stop but I didn’t think it was overwhelming at all. I haven’t read the book before so I’m not sure how true the movie stays to the book but I thought it was well done and the special effects were excellent. This is definitely a movie that we plan to buy when it is available. It looks like they are already working on the next one, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader!

We use to see quite a few movies on the big screen but lately it seems like we only make it to the big blockbusters. As much as I like watching movies on the big screen with the state-of-the-art sound system I don’t like having to deal with all of the people at the theatre sometimes. It seems like we always end up sitting around people that are talking or giggling, or there will be a crying kid somewhere or else someone near us will reek of body odor. I swear someone near us last night at the movie hadn’t bathed for days! We also don’t make it to the theatre as much because of the cost, the prices seem to go up every time we see a movie, and if ticket prices don’t go up the food prices do. We also have a nice TV, it’s no huge theatre screen and we don’t have the movie theatre sound system, but I’d choose it over going to the theatre most of the time.

We did already get tickets to see the new Indiana Jones movie on Thursday, but we did get a later show so that hopefully we can avoid some of the reasons we stay away from the movie theatre.