Did you know that you can HOLD a photo?

Every now and then, I'll get this pang of guilt when I look through the digital photos I have stored on my computer. I love having them, and I'll never stop taking them, but I rarely ever, ever print them. Once in a while I'll have a reason to, like if I'm sending some to a relative that doesn't have internet, or if I feel like changing up the ones we have hanging in frames around the house. But for the most part, they get uploaded, sorted, named and then remain neatly organized in their little "folders" on my hard drive...waiting.

So finally I made the decision that, little by little, I am going to get those puppies printed. We've been taking digitals since Pyper was born 4 1/2 years ago, so I literally have thousands of photos to look through and decide which ones I want to print. Today my first batch arrived in the mail. It was so exciting! I used winkflash.com to print them because they were running a promotion for 6 cent prints. In the past I usually just log into Walmart.com's photo center, where you can upload and order prints, then pick them up at any Walmart photo center. It's convenient, but the quality of their prints is kind of disappointing. So I thought I'd give someone else a try. After shipping was added the price per print passed Walmart's price, making it more expensive to order from winkflash, but the prints I got are really, really good! You can have them printed as matte (which I prefer) or glossy, and you can add a nice white border or have no border. I got mine with the border because it gives them that old fashioned, darkroom-printed quality which I like.

Anyway, I ordered almost 150 prints which only covered from 10/2003 to 6/2004. Yikes. I've got a long way to go to catch up, but I'm ordering some more tonight and hope to be able to start getting them put into albums soon. The kids so enjoy looking at pictures on the computer, and so do I. I'm excited to have something tangible that we can sit down with, hold, flip through and smile at without having to skip over blurries, near duplicates, back-of-the-head shots and such.

During my searching today I came across this picture. It's one Dad took, so you've probably seen it. But it made me smile (along with all the other ones from that Christmas), so I thought I'd post it here, just for fun.

KIMBERLY!

alright we have a problem. mama wants to use the administrative account for her and dad, but you're still using it... so it would be awesome if you could like create your own little account dealie. life would be easier. and you're a pretty smart person, so i'm not going to explain to you how to do it, unless you need me too. anyways... bye! haha

♥

New Meheeko!

hey it's jennifer, and mama talked me into writing a blog... during lunch... so while everyone else is eating delicious Popper-made hamburgers and Mommer-made lemonade, i am sitting at the computer guilt-tripping my mother through the internet.

anywho, we're in new mexico. here are some pictures we took on the way here through some reeeeeally pretty country!



Copycat... haha

we drove for like 10-11 hours, which wasn't too bad. surprisingly, we only watched/listened to one movie the whole time. (National Treasure 2, if you were interested!) we were the first ones to arrive, which was weird for me because i've NEVER been the first one in the bunkhouse. I had a couple hours before anyone else got here, so i just chilled and got settled in. AT about 10:15-ish, the Coxes arrived. Well, the Coxes and a Friddle; Chris, Tricia, Taylor, Ashton, and Wesley.

before they arrived though, we had a little bit of excitement. so i'm in the bunkhouse talking on the phone with my friend (yeah! we have service here now!) when i heard mama hollerin at me. so i went outside, and she was on the steps to the 2nd floor. she said "jennifer, let me see your phone." so i hung up on my friend and handed it to her, and she called mommer and popper. yeah, at their house. she asked them if the cat was in the house, and it was a yes. so then she said "well then i think there's a skunk under the boardwalk." ooh lucky lucky us. a little while later, after the Coxes had been here for a bit, we started smelling something funny. apparently, Pepper the dog decided she didn't like skunks and wanted to pick a fight. guess who won? that dog supposedly had spray dripping from her face and it was smelling up the entire property. awesome. the smell went away after a while though, so i don't know what the deal was with that.

oh, and mom told me to tell you that it is currently raining and hailing like there is no tomorrow. mommer said that they haven't had a rain this good in a really long time. whoo go us, we're magic!

okay well, i'm starving so i'm gonna call this good. have a pleasant day!




Sorry for anyone whose names are covered by dirt... i would've swept it off, but a) it was about to start raining and hailing like there is no tomorrow, and b) i'm a little bit lazy.

♥--Fif

P.S. Team Ashtiffer is back and more alike than ever.

By the way...

That was me, Kimberly. Forgot to say that. >_<

*headdesk*

We were overrun by Boy Scouts. Rude, obnoxious, careless, greedy, wasteful, boy scouts. I think they racked up to about $400 in property damages that they had to pay. Mostly in the Rec Barn, I believe. Several broken pool cues, the ping-pong table (one of 'em just stood up and walked on it, bending the supports underneath), a paper towel dispenser (it looks like someone just punched a hole in the thing), and a swimming pool net is all I'm aware of right now. Then there was the vanadalism, using (or should I say abusing?) recreation equipment (ATVs, the bows and arrows, climbing wall, paintball guns) without a guide, wasting food that should've fed three times their number (that was the complaint I heard the most, understandably. At least they didn't eat a lot of salad. ^_^) and on top of all that, they were paying only 10-20% of what normal guests would've paid; their leaders were friends of the owner. Leaders which, by the way, were just as bad as the scouts.

I overheard a couple of guests complaining to other employees about how they "came here to be at a resort, not boy scout camp" and the employee just agreed. All of the employees wanted to tell them off (one of the girls, after being deliberately insulted, wanted to kick this kid's butt) but none of us really wanted to be fired. So we went through all this crap for about a week with hardly any monetary return. Freaking annoying. But they're gone today, finally.

So yeah, I just had to rant a bit. Everyone needs to do that about their job everyonce in a while, right?

You know what I thought would be funny? If Popper became these guys' scout leader. Ooooooh, would he whip them into shape! And he wouldn't take them to a friggin' resort to stay in cabins when they're supposed to be camping. *grumblegrumble*

Do it!

i put up a new post on my blog. i want you to look at it, if not read it. it is very, very long. i just want you to see the pictures, because they are suh-weeeeeeeet!

♥--Fif

Here's my house

Since none of you have actually been to my house yet, I thought I'd give you some idea what you're missing out on. Some of you may have seen GoogleMap's "StreetView" before, but if you haven't yet, it's pretty sweet. They've got this huge fleet of cars equipped with 360 degrees of cameras and they drive around the country taking pictures every 50 feet. You can see a pretty good view of my house some time last fall on a Monday (trash day). Notice the crusty old Subaru on jack-stands next to the garage. Jennifer, my offer still stands that you're welcome to have it any time you want to come get it. OK, so the roof is ever so slightly caved in, but it still runs like a top. Sort of. I think.


View Larger Map

It's been a good day!!

So today i had photographics society, a softball game, and a frisbee game. In photographics society I found out I won 2nd place in one of our contests. It was the river picture I quite prominently posted on here. I won a 20 dollar gift card to the school bookstore and 30 dollars in cash. Then in the softball game, it was the first game of the tournament and we won 6-2. Our next game is tomorrow at 6. Then I found out why they call it ultimate frisbee. I went up for the frisbee along with about 3 other people. Of course I got it with my freakish monkey arms but someone else nailed my temple with their elbow. Yeah, that felt great. And then later someone cleated my shin. Good times. We ended up winning 12-2. That was also the beginning of a tournament. Our next game is on Thursday. I love this game. Anyhoo...this was an overall good day.

Alrighty Then

Okay, so none of you feel left out of the loop (fif) I figured I'd let you all know I have a girlfriend. Her name is Kristin Wood. She's from here in Rexburg and she's a health science major. We've been dating for a month as of today. If you have any questions you can just let me know.

Look at us!

So, just for the heck of it, I added an invisible StatCounter to this blog to track how many hits it gets each day/week/month. I think I put it on there on... Saturday? Anyway, on Sunday it got 96 page loads! I don't know exactly what that means, but it's kinda cool, right? People are viewing this blog. And yes, I realize lots of those are probably just us, but not all 96 times. It also keeps track of Unique Visitors, First Time Visitors, and Returning Visitors. Well, I think it's cool. And just for fun, here's a video. Hope it uploads this time...

Another P.S.

alright alright it took me a couple of days, but i did finally figure out how to use my own personal profile dealie on the family blog.

i know i know, i am amazing and pretty genius, but please... let's be mature adults and not focus all our attention on how incredible i am. except for most of the time, then it's okay...


ha ha i had you going there for a second, didn't i? okay i'm too sleepy to be safely blogging. my apologies boys and girls!]

♥--Jennifer

One more P.S.
sorry about that last post. it pretty much made no sense about the layout, but our internet is so slow at our house that only the very middle part of the layout shows up. and that was getting on my nerves, and i just barely realized that it was just the computer.

i'll stop now. sorry.

Hey Howdy Hey!

am i the only one who feels like they're getting carpal tunnel just looking at this layout? i never really liked it anyways, i just picked it because dad has this weird thing with the dunes and the sand and the dunes of sand... yeah anyways, i'm not exactly sure where i was going with that thought.

well, i think sarah's plan is a pretty decent one. it seems like i make a list every year, but the only ones who actually see it are me and mama. so i'm all for it.

To Sarah and Bryce:

i don't say ae-pricot or ah-pricot. to be quite honest, i've never even heard of an ah-pricot (so whoever thinks that's how you say it... you're weird.). i was raised in NC, so i say ay-per-cot. so there. :)

okay well, i really don't have a whole lot to say at this point. except that i miss and love all of you!


This is me smiling at you and telling you that i miss and love you!

♥--Jennifer

Addendum

First of all, I was just jokin' about that last post. I mean, the Wish List idea was for real, and the first 3 comments of the "conversation" have actually been said, but Keith- no one hates you. We just hate shopping for you. :) I thought it was funny. Was it not funny? My bad.

Anyway, the only way I can figure to make our Wish Lists here is this:

Sign into this blog (using the family e-mail & password, not as yourself. It won't let you mess around with the Layout otherwise).

Go to Dashboard.

Click Layout.

Click Add a Page Element on the right hand side.

Click Add to Blog under List if you want to write out your stuff, or use Link List if the items you'll be listing are from websites we can visit.

Be sure to click Save before exiting the window.

You'll be back to the Layout page. You should now see your new list on the right with the other page elements that are there. Mouse over it and drag it to where you want it to be (oldest to youngest, perhaps??)

Then click Save at the top.

Okay, so I know those instructions were probably unnecessarily detailed, but I wanted to make sure everyone got it. So, get going on your lists! I've already put mine up there just for fun. Putting them all on the sidebar might start to look a bit cluttered, but I don't know of a better way to do it than that. Any suggestions?

Question

I was going to go ahead and do this, but thought I'd better get everyone's okay first. Would it be helpful to anyone to add a List to the sidebar of the blog of Birthdays and Anniversaries? Maybe Mom could do this since I'm sure she knows them all. Also, I was thinking this could be a good place for us to somehow start building Wish Lists for ourselves for the convenience of others on gift-giving occasions. I think this could be really helpful and would eliminate the following types of conversations:

me: "Hey, Mom, what should I get Keith for Christmas?"

Mom: "Are you kidding? I still don't know what I'm getting him!"

me: "I know, he's so hard to buy for."

Mom: "Talk about a nightmare. I'd almost rather just not get him anything than go through the headache of coming up with something and worry that he doesn't need it or won't like it or something."

me: "Yeah, it's almost impossible! He's so ungrateful, too. I spend all this time and energy and then he's like, "Gee, thanks, that's great." What a punk!!"

Mom: "Can you keep a secret? I'm thinking of disowning him because of it."


Wouldn't it be nice if everyone liked Keith again? I think Wish Lists should be seriously considered, for the sake of our familial harmony. By the way, Keith, I would miss you if you got disowned. ;)

HaHa! Look what I can do

So it looks like there is a setting in the blog that allows you to invite multiple authors to contribute to the same blog. This way, we can each use our own accounts and not have to try to figure out who is writing what. Those of you that already have accounts just go into the settings on this blog and invite yourself. If you don't have an account, just create one, that's what I did.

Sarah actually gave birth to a swedish bodybuilder

If any of you have ever watched the world's strongest man competitions, you'll know that Hakan really looks like Magnus Sammuelson. The only difference is that Hakan is the size of Magnus's calf muscle. Aaron said that if they have another boy that looks like Hakan, they're gonna name him Magnus. haha

Sarah has given birth to a Brittish rock star

Hi everyone. This is Rachelle and Keith. We just read Sarah's entry about Chris Martin...and we were rolling. I'm thinking that if lil hawk is going to grow up to be Chris Martin, then I might just leave Keith after umm....18 years. The side-by-side pictures are priceless. Give that kid a piano.
-Rachelle & Keith

Weirdness

Bryce just brought to my attention a strange resemblance between Hakan and Chris Martin, lead singer of Coldplay. I'd never noticed because I didn't really know what Chris Martin looked like, but he linked me to a picture of him and I've gotta say... it's a little creepy. ~Sarah

Kimberly Here

Well, dang. Am I the last one to post something? Well I feel sheepish (think Genie's voice right there. ^_^)

Uh...not much goin' on with me. For those of you that don't know, I'm back to working in the kitchen at Zion Ponderosa Ranch Resort. It's about 20 minutes or so east of Zion National Park. Still on salad bar. Except we've got a new boss this year aaaaaaand...I don't think he likes me. >_< I kinda said something really dumb at the beginning, something along the lines of "I don't really care about cooking" and what with him being a chef or whatever, I'm pretty sure that somewhat offended him. So I think I'm in the doghouse, so to speak.

In other news! I'm gonna be working on a bunch of new artwork soon. I owe a friend of mine a picture, but once I finish that (in between working and sleeping sos I can be awake for work) I've got several paintings I wanna do. I'll be posting them at my Deviantart gallery (I gave you all the link, yes?) so you can tell me if I'm improving at all! I know I'm nowhere near fabulous, or whatever, even at Sarah's or Keith's levels, but I'm working on it!

Oh yeah, one last thing. Being the fact that I'm still very much single and my 21st birthday is in less than a year, I thought I'd let you guys know that I plan on going on a mission! A friend of mine (who's only a week older than me) is taking this year of school off to work to pay for her mission, so that's kinda made it more real for me. I signed up for a missionary prep class this fall, so hopefully I'll be able to get my butt in gear.

So, yeah. That's my life so far. Love y'all lots!



P.S. A picture of me playing with the snake, Harry. I luvs him. ^_^

Here goes nothing...

ughahum... here i am... typing. This is kind of strange, I don't ever do things like this so its going to take some getting used to. But I think its a killer idea, so I'm going to do my best to keep up with it. Things are going well here in SLC, Rachelle and Molly are alive and well despite my best efforts. We have been occupying our time these past few weeks between work, puppy classes, the farmers market and other simple pleasures. Rachelle's family is comming out for a visit this week, so we are really looking forward to that (not the cleaning part though.) Other wise, life is pretty much the same. Can't wait to see where this little blog adventure takes us, should be a lot of fun. Love you all.

Keith

yo

Bryce and Dena here, just checking in. I don't really have anything interesting to add, I'm mostly just making sure I'm doing this right.

This is a neat idea, I hope I can remember to use it. I think I should be able to...

By the way I really dig the totally rad 80's family photo with Keith's super-sweet flat top. Let's see more of that stuff.

I am going to try something fancy here and embed a youtube clip of me driving my car in an autocross. If this doesn't work, then just search youtube for "bryce wrx" and it should be one of very few results.



Bryce and Dena

Hey Todd

Dad here. When I posted the Wave pictures, I just used the little picture icon on the page where you type in your text, and it worked ok, even without resizing the pics. I haven't tried the tinypics place that Jennifer talked about - I'm going to have to ask her about that one. And once I got them in there, it did let me move them around a little in the text, although it wasn't fast or easy. Enjoy Rexburg - it's in the mid-90's here now. Dad

guess what? little toddy learned something new about the blogs. lesson to the rest of you (in case you couldn't allready tell) resize your pics before you post them.

Here's a little update from everyone's favorite big headed Anderson. I'm still at school up here at BYU-I in Rexburg. Thankfully it's finally warming up above 50 degrees. It's actually in the 70's right now. It's freakin amazing. I got to play softball on Tuesday (we won) and frisbee twice on Wednesday (we won both). It felt so good. I entered into a photo contest this past week and I'll find out on Tuesday how I did. I'm gonna try and figure out how to post them on here. If I can't....don't send me any hate mail. grrrrrr.

BTW

I think this family blog is an awesome idea! I'm always wondering what's going on in the lives of the siblings I don't hear from often enough *ahem, Keith *cough, Bryce*, so I really hope everybody uses this as a chance to keep us all informed and in touch. EVERYBODY!
See how I did that? Quite noticeable, no? :)

Hey, Bryce, when are you guys going to come out here to see us?

Purple toilet paper & crunchy bubble gum

I've only been blogging for a couple of months, but in that time I've come across lots of glitches and hiccups that happen when writing a Blogger post. If something comes up let me know, I'd be happy to try and help. Some things I've had to research to figure out, like how to move a photo to where you want it once it's been uploaded to your post (you can't just drag and drop like I wish you could, and I've never used tinypics.com). Blogger's "Help" section isn't terribly helpful all the time. This is a really good blog to browse if you want to figure something out yourself. Just do a search within the blog for whatever you're wanting to know.

What I don't know is what would happen if two people were logged into this same blog at the same time and simultaneously tried to post something. Instant mother board meltdown? Irreversible hard drive wipe? Nuclear holocaust?

And because it bugs me to post without a photo, here ya go.

Dad' first effort

Hi Guys! Thanks for the interest in this project. I guess it's mostly for my benefit - I've just really enjoyed Sarah and Jennifer's blogs and thought this might be a good way of keeping up with everybody better than we have before. I don't want to put pressure or a guilt trip on any of you. But if something cool happens that you'd like to share with the rest of us, feel free to do it this way. By the way, something cool happened to me this week. I got a chance to hike out to the Wave in the Grand Staircase/Escalante National Monument. The BLM only allow about 20 people per day to hike in there, so passes are pretty hard to come by, but a couple of weeks ago, a guy at Coral Pink offered me his pass (his plans had changed and he wasn't going to be able to go on the 16th). The pass was only for 1 person, so I had to go by myself. It's about a 3 1/2 mile hike in (and about 10 back out, it felt like), but well worth the abuse (as you can see from the picture above). It's an amazing place. We need to try and get those of you who want to go out there some passes and make the trip. It's about an hour and a half drive from Coral Pink to the trailhead, so it's not too bad.
I've seen a lot of slickrock in my day, but I think this is probably the coolest place I've ever been. If you want to go, we probably need to try and plan it out fairly far in advance and try to get the passes if we can. They issue 10 per day on line and 10 more the day before you want to hike. If we can get them online that would be the best, because the day before process is not a sure thing by any means. You have to make the 1 1/2 hour drive to their ranger station, fill out an application, get your lottery number and wait for them to roll their little cage and see if your number pops out. If not, too bad, try again another time. The time I went out and tried it, there were 32 numbers and only 3 numbers got passes (because they had groups of 6, 3, and 3). I was less than happy. But maybe the online process will work better if we can do it far enough in advance.
Well, that's probably more than enough for a first effort. Looking forward to hearing from you when you get the chance. Thanks for the Father's Day thoughts and things. Love you all. Dad

The First Entry

Well congratulations to us, we joined the world-wide club of Family Blogging. I don't really have much to say about anything right now, i just felt like doing the first entry because well, i can. :) we mostly wanted to do this i think because Mom and Dad felt a little out of the sibling-communication loop. so anyways, i'm pretty sure we're just gonna use this here blog so that everyone can keep up with us. For the information of anyone not in our family, this blog includes Dean/Dad, Pam/Mom, Bryce, Sarah, Keith, Todd, Kimberly, and me (Jennifer) and possibly Bryce and Sarah's spouses if they want. Well, i think that about wraps it up for me. i'm out.

--Jennifer


A favorite family picture of mine... Todd's smile just kills me. Haha


The family at Casa de Campo.


A moment in history. All the Anderson kids playing Nerts for the first time!


Sarah and Keith


Todd & Rachelle