Another week gone

Whew! It's been over a week! Where has time gone? We started our movie blitz and have watched the following in the last week: Vantage Point, Get Smart, Pure Country (I know...), We Are Marshall, Casino Royale (we'll talk, Julie and Bryan), and I got The Prestige in the mail today. We bought Iron Man and Kung Fu Panda at Walmart yesterday (Black Friday!) for $9/each. No, I didn't get up at 4am to get those and no, I didn't stampede anyone. We showed up at 9am to get toothpaste and noticed the videos still on sale.

Anyway, we've had a busy week. The Thanksgiving break has been a nice diversion from work. Having said that, last week was the first week in seven (!) that I was actually in the office for 5 straight days. It's been a busy fall.

We were planning on having Thanksgiving dinner with Jen's parents but on Tuesday, with my brother's health wavering (do they take him to PCMC or do they let him stay home??), we figured it'd be nice to invite my parents up to dinner with Jen's parents, too! So my entire side of the family that was in town and my parents all came up to SLC and we enjoyed a Thanksgiving dinner with 23 people. Not by any stretch the biggest dinner we've had, but still sizeable. Great food!

We've had a lot of little projects around the house recently. A few weeks ago I noticed some sagging ceiling sheetrock on the second floor, indicating a leak in the roof somewhere. I climbed in the attic and on the roof and noticed a broken roof joist and old, weathered shingles. This area was directly below our swamp cooler. I ripped up the shingles, fixed the sheeting and roof joist, replaced the tar paper and shingles, and breathed much easier (finished product shown here). That all only really took a few hours. It went much faster than I anticipated.

Last week while I was putting the Christmas lights up, I noticed another potential problem. One of the vent pipes coming from the kitchen through the roof has a rubber collar around it to keep water out of the attic. The rubber collar was cracked and would easily allow water into the attic. So...back to the roof repair job. All this one required was a $8 collar and shingles (left over from my first repair job). The incomplete project is shown here.

I think my roof is now ready to deal with winter. I wish we had new windows so we could save some money on our heating bill this winter, but the $$$ just doesn't make sense right now to replace.

I got some new church responsibilities last week. I've been the Ward Mission Leader, which means I basically help coordinate the missionary work in the ward. I was relieved of those duties and handed the responsibility of Young Men's President. I now get to coordinate the slow, painful deaths of ~20 young men ages 12-17 and the ~7 adult leaders helping. Wish me luck...

I promise I'll put a web album up of all our Hawaii pictures but I've had to consolidate the 1,130 pictures (~4 GB) the six of us took. It'll come eventually. This picture has no other purpose besides to show my cute wife.