Dallas 2007 - Day 3 & 4

We had breakfast with some reindeer at the plaza of the Americas.

Of course, you need an ice rink inside your hotel/mall.

It must be fun to be so beautiful.

Come take a ride on the trolley. . . It's free.

Yep, that's an HKS project.

Nope, not an HKS project. Philip Johnson, famous architect.

HOK ripped off the idea and used it for the RLDS Temple in Missouri.

Still a cool idea.

We had a blast at the Saturday evening party. . . as you can see, Sadie was into it.

This was the result of the party.
(Or maybe she was just excited to get back to the room)

Dallas 2007 - Day 2

Day 2 in Dallas was fun. It is hard not to miss the kids. Marthe got a bit bored in the morning, but we had lunch together and then they had a shuttle to the Dallas Galleria Mall for the afternoon. She and Sadie walked around and had fun there. Below are some pictures of the 4-story christmas tree and the ice rink at its base.

I had meetings in the morning and in the afternoon. The last meeting of the day held quite the surprise. A lot of awards were given out. Two awards were given out for excellence in sustainable design. I was surprised when they called my name. I'm not designing much, but I'm doing a lot of nagging about how we can design green in the firm. I have been working on a tracking/navigation system for projects that may help in the way HKS decides to direct its future. It is fun to be involved even if none of my ideas are used. Anyway, they appreciate the help. I guess I was surprised to see how much they appreciated it. Another guy I've been working will from Dallas won the second of two awards for excellence in sustainable design. Hopefully in the future it will be very hard to pick winners for this award because everyone is excelling at sustainable design. That would be the real achievement.

Dallas-2007 Day 1

Traveled to Dallas today. Sadie came with us. The boys stayed with Grandma Lael. . . they're having too much fun to miss us.

Anyway, Sadie slept through the plane ride and we're now staying at the Fairmont hotel in downtown Dallas.

We had some time to do whatever we wanted to today. Tomorrow will be my company training stuff and an evening party. Saturday will also be a free day with a party in the evening. We'll be coming home on Sunday.

The Dallas Museum of Art is right by our hotel. We enjoyed looking at pictures you read about in textbooks. This one is by Jackson Pollock. It is similar to one in an Olivia book that Tommy likes to read before bed every once and a while. Olivia says she just doesn't get it and that she can do that in about 5 seconds and when she gets home she tries.

I enjoyed seeing some of Piere Mondrian's (spelling probably wrong) work.

Very simple, yet interesting.

There was some work by Kandinsky and others of a simlar time period too.

Kristen wasn't here to see some great paintings by Monet. We enjoyed them for her. The are quite wonderful. The photo of the painting tends to make it look more like the scene than just looking at it in real life.

The one below is a Van Gough. It was also very good. There were lots of interesting things including a mummy coffin that they took out a peice of the coffin so you could see the mummified feed of whoever was in the coffin.

Anyway, we're having fun. We had dinner with some of the people from the office. We ate at a mexican restaurant. We ordered things that we would typically order in Utah, but they were way to hot here. . . so Marthe had some oatmeal when we got back to our room. Good thing we're prepared.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's post.

Funny Elves

My friend Maasa at work showed me this web site.

It is great fun. Hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1125235315

Thanksgiving Activities

We had the family over for thanksgiving dinner.

Everyone "slept" over and so we all were pretty tired for Thanksgiving.

But everyone had a fun time anyway.
We took the kids over to the park while the womenfolk made the dinner.


Oh, and here's one more picture of Saide. :)

Need We Say More?

Need we say more?

Still Good Friends

We had a fun get together with some old friends the other day.

Jared's kids are getting big. Mike and Sarah's kids are big too.

It was fun to see Mr. Niemann and Andy as well. The next get-together

will be at the ward christmas party in December.

That will be fun.

Baby Feet

Here's something for you folks who like baby feet.
She's pretty cute isn't she?

Happy Halloween People

So Halloween was fun. The boys. . I mean Spiderman, Dash and Lion had a lot of fun. And the pea-pod couldn't tell the difference, so she had fun too.

People at my work dressed up, so I decided to be a Lion Contractor. Some people got it, others did not. But it was fun.

Anyway. Here's the photos.

Happy Halloween!!

We had fun making pumpkins for Halloween today. Marthe was the most ambitious.
Have a great Halloween tomorrow!

It's always fun to update a few pictures, even if I don't have a lot to say. Marthe and I are getting a bit of sleep here and there. I have decided that I'm just in a constant state of almost-awake which probably equals a full nights sleep. . . eventually.
She's worth it though.

A few more fun things before going back to work

We took the kids to the local pumpkin patch on Monday to get some pumpkins. They have tractors there that the kids like to sit on. We got a bunch of pumkins for 6.00. It's a great deal and only a couple minutes from the house (behind the movie theater). It was a nice warm day so Sadie even came along.

Yesterday (Tuesday) I was still off work so I could take Tommy with his preschool class to HEE HAW. It was a fun trip. Tommy and Spencer enjoyed walking through part of a corn maze, going down slides, seeing a 1000lb pig, going on a hay ride and picking out some more pumpkins to take home.

She's Here!!!

Sadie Ann Henderson was born at 12:37 am.

She weighed 6lbs 12oz.

She was 19.5" long.

She has strawberry-blonde, slightly curly hair.

She has Tommy's eyelashes (now we won't have to hear about the lashes being "wasted" on a boy. :)

Mom and baby are healthy and doing fine.

The boys are hanging out with Grandma Lael and are excited for the new addition to the family.

Mission Reunion

I enjoyed going to my mission reunion the other day. To the right of me is Raymond Waldon and to the right of him is Carson Howell and to the right of him is Moroniah Walden. All three of these lovely folks were serving at the same time I was serving. It was really fun to see them. The Waldens have two beautiful children and the Howells had two cute ones as well. Carson's little girl was very cute and was very social. My boys enjoyed running around with the Walden kids and Carson's son.
Elders Beene and Hall got stuck in traffic and were not able to make it up. That's ok, it just made it easier to tell jokes about them. :)

Canstruction - The iCan

Ok so I am trying to upload more pictures but the site is giving me a hard time.

I was able to upload one image at least.

I worked with others at my work to participate in this year's canstruction event for the Utah Food Bank (http://www.csc-ut.org/).

We raised money for the cans and the idea for the design just kind of landed on me as I was driving home one day. It was a fun project and although we did not receive any awards, it was very worthwhile.

It took more time than I expected, but no one wanted to head it up. So it was either Dave's in charge, or we just won't do it this time.

I have a hard time passing up opportunities to help the homeless and hungry people of Utah.

So there it is. The iCan. I designed the board to look like an advertisement for an iPod.

The sculptures will be on display for a couple weeks.

Ok, I'll try and upload another picture.

Oh good. It worked. Now you have 2 pictures to look at.

Enjoy!

It was bigger in real life

This was my view as I arrived at work the other morning.

The moon was huge, however the photo does not make it look as big as it seemed.

Anyway, I thought it was cool enough to take a picture.

Ok, I enabled the commenting. . . I think

So after 99% of the small group of people who view my blog have complained about not being able to comment, I have enabled the comment feature.

The picture to the right was taken a few weeks ago. We took the canoe out on the lake by our house. The boys had a lot of fun. . . Marthe was grateful to be back on dry land. :)

We enjoyed the snow yesterday.

Tommy was yelling to me that it was snowing and I kind of said, whatever.

Then I went and looked, and sure enough, it was snowing.

We'll not much else to say for this week.

Stay tuned for the Canstruction event pictures next week.

I'll explain in the next posting.