Happy Halloween!

Ya! RAH has super fun halloween parties and our clients have some of the awesomest costumes!

A few of us staff. An old co-worker lent me her ketchup costume. And here are some of the participants. There were so many more good costumes but I couldn't post them all.

This girl below is one of our volunteers... dressed up as a Canadian...

Happy Halloween!

Old School

So at work we have an incredible food storage. But sometimes you gotta wonder how often we rotate our food.

I found this in the pantry and all i had to say is "what the...?" There isn't an expiration date on the box so who knows how old it is... or if it's safe to eat! Look at the instructions! That's OLD! On the bright side, that coupon has no expiration date! Too bad no bake chocolate mousse pie is ancient and you can't find it in stores... but 15 cents must've been a lot of money to save whenever this was sold...

And then you compare it to what a non-expired box of No Bake products and then you really see a difference.

And then you see that box of Shake n Bake collecting dust in the back corner and you remember the commercial from 1873, "it's shake n bake, and i helped!" I don't have a picture of what a shake n bake box looks like now, but you know its gotta look more up to date than this!

Ok, so in the last couple of weeks, we did clean out the pantry and all the food is now up to date and we will be managing our rotations much better than before. Rest assured that we will not be serving food that should be displayed in a museum. I can't let go of the chocolate mousse pie though because I'm tempted to make it and serve it to someone one day... so for now it is stored in my food cupboard at home.

Tag I'm It

... sorry Jason. I'm actually not into this whole tagging thing. A few people have tagged me over the last year and I never participate, but this picture thing seemed pretty harmless. So Heather, I'm doing your tag which just goes to show how much i looooove you! (For all you others out there who tagged me and I didn't participate... well, you're loved too)

So, I don't have any picture files because I don't own a computer... But this is the 4th picture that is on my camera currently so it's just gonna have to do. This was taken this year in August. It's my very good friend Rebecca Keller at her wedding reception (hopefully you got that from the dress she's wearing...). Becca and I were companions in the MTC! We never got to be companions in the mission but we finally got to be in the same zone our last two transfers! It was most excellent.

For Jason's sake (and because I feel the same way), I refuse to tag anyone else.

Disneyland!

My first time to Disneyland. And I got paid to go. Whoo hoo!

I got this fancy button from one of the store clerks and stuck it to my bag.

We visited Disneyland and...

California Adventure which is right across the way. We only spent one day over here, and 2 1/2 days at Disneyland. It was really pretty fun. Although the price to get in there is RIDICULOUS. But RAH got a great deal which included a 4 day park hopper pass, disney gift cards that we used for food inside the park, and a breakfast buffet with Minnie and

friends (tigger, eeyore, captain hook, the fairy godmother, the white rabbit, rafiki, chip and dale)

Here is Princess Lilly's castle (my niece Lilly in case you non Tang's are confused). It is a lot smaller than I thought it was going to be.

These are all 15 participants that we took on the trip. It was quite the task to keep everyone together fulfill all their Disneyland desires, get all the souvenirs they wanted, and not get them lost. We rode a lot of rides, saw a bunch of 3D shows, did a few interactive things and spent a lot of time here...

Ok so you'd never see a sign that said Washrooms in the states. The picture was taken in Canada. But still, we were taking restroom breaks every 30-40 minutes. With 15 people, someone is always having to go, and sometimes it's the same people going every time! You might say that we spent as much time in the bathrooms as we did in lines for rides. Truly. But the lines weren't bad at this time of the year. I don't think we ever waited more than 40 minutes to get on something.

Mickey Mouse in his Halloween costume.

Mousekateers!

Anyway, most everyone rode all the rollercoasters and other rides, although we did have 2 people who refused to even try most of the rides, even the easy ones. We got them in things like the bumper cars though, and also to the shows.

These bumper cars were the silliest bumper cars ever... they hardly gave you a jolt when you bump into other cars... plus, ants move faster than these cars did.

Everyone who wanted a chance to drive got to drive around the track at Autopia. If I ever see any of them driving a real vehicle on the streets of Provo, I'm staying off the roads!

We watched several 3D shows but the one at A Bug's Life had the funniest glasses. They do a great job making you feel like you're a part of these shows with smells and things jumping out at you and poking you on your seats and wind blowing at you. I had to convince of few of our guys that what they felt poking them or sprayed at them wasn't real!

This is the Finding Nemo submarine ride. It was pretty cool. My favorite rides included Splash Mountain, Indiana Jones, Soarin over California, and Big Thunder Mountain Train. We actually covered pretty much everything cool in both parks.

Inside California Adventure.

There was this area where they had the streams of water jumping from hole to hole and Cheryl (my boss) told the participants that she would give a prize to anyone who could catch a stream and bring it to her. Oh boy. That was hilarious to watch.

This is the result. They tried catching it in their hands, their shirts, their hats, and one even got a face full of water. It was so funny. Unfortunately, no one got a prize.

On Friday night, it got SO crowded at the park. But we fought the crowds to watch the nightly fireworks show at the magic kingdom. It was much cooler than I expected.

I was told I must get a churro at Disneyland. Well I never got an opportunity until after the fireworks as we were leaving the park for the last time. I saw a churro stand that had no line and stopped the group so I could get my $3 churro. Totally delicious. Totally not worth 3 bucks. But hey, it's part of the Disneyland experience.

Along with my first Disneyland experience, I saw my first ever speed limit sign just outside of a hotel not in an increment of 5...

Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey

Welcome to Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey: THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH!

And a great show it was. It was fun, kinda creepy, kinda cool, lots of human tricks, and some laughter too. Our RAH clients had a blast!

The show included some Chinese acrobats (they were moving so fast, it was very hard to get any sort of a clear pic - my apologies)

These dudes had some super human strength.

These guys had unnatural flexibility.

Other very dramatic acrobats.

Motorcylists (7 of them!) defying death.

This picture just makes me laugh because of the positioning of the lights in the background.

The excellent elephants who pooped a ton during their performance. They were great as always. And I was very impressed with how quickly the crews cleaned up their messes. I'd have to say that we got the strongest reactions from our clients when those elephants did their biznis.

And the tigers! They didn't do anything super amazing, but they were cool to watch!

In the end, they blew tons of confetti at the audience. What a mess! This circus was definitely way more entertaining than the one I went to at UVSC a while back! There was a lot more that went on but pictures don't do justice. These were just the highlights.

Longboarding... Sometimes You Fall...

Oops.

So i fell. Gimme a break. The road around our new complex is awesome for longboarding. Very smooth. Not too busy. I was doing great, getting pointers from my friend Mark (it was one of his boards i was riding... I don't own a longboard and you can see why...) practicing my turns and just enjoying the fresh night air. I turned onto a street that had a slight decline... that got a bit steeper. I went a teeny bit faster... and then a lot faster. Many thoughts passed through my mind in a split second... should I bail? Am I going too fast to jump off safely? Should I try to turn or will that be a disaster? I didn't follow any of my thoughts. But I'm pretty sure that if I would've followed any of them, the results would've been the same. So from what I remember, the board rocked under me, I lost control and balance and went down. Mark told me later that I had too much weight on my back foot... he saw the whole thing happen from behind me and I'm sure I freaked him out. The result: Scraped elbow and knee. Bruised hip and leg and arm. And a whole lot of embarassment. But I was fine really. I got up pretty quick and walked away with adrenaline pumping high and very grateful that I escaped worse injuries.

If any of you remember my incident from 2002 where, at the suggestion of Emily, I naively rollerbladed down a steep hill and took a tumble, this was almost like a deja vu. Except that I was longboarding this time. And the hill wasn't nearly as steep, and I didn't yell, my pants stayed intact (the back of my jeans split way open in '02), and I was not even 100 feet from my front door. So this was like an improvement! And thank you to Eli for helping to patch up my wounds.

Well this little incident probably won't stop me from longboarding again. I'll just be sure to stay off the hills from now on. Apparently, me and them don't get along so well.

As a side note, I went to the Aquarium with RAH last week, and I think these jellyfish were some of the coolest things there. Partially because they were swimming under a black light.

Arizona in August

Alyssa and I decided to take a trip to Arizona to visit her mom and just get out of Provo for a few days before Alyssa had to start school. It worked out perfect because RAH had no scheduled activities for the last week of August so we bought cheap plane tickets and off we went!

We flew over the grand canyon.

While in Arizona we did a whole lot of nothing. It was great. I love vacations like that. Many told me that I would melt in the heat, but the weather was terrific. It was never over 95, it stormed every night, and it was just a little humid, nothing unbearable. We had no real plans, but we did have some things to accomplish on our list... and most of them involved food. Unfortunately on this trip, I was without my camera a lot so I only caught a few of our moments.

We ate at the cheesecake factory. MMMMMM.

We ate ice cream at the Sugar Bowl in Scottsdale.

We attended the beautiful Mesa Temple.

Our friend Mark from our ward up here was also in Gilbert when we were there and he came and hung out with us a couple of times. This night we stayed outside on the porch from about 10p-2a watching this amazing thunderstorm. It was so awesome!

And sadly, that's about all the pictures I have of my trip. The rest of the time we just watched movies, ate good Mexican food, played ping pong, swam, shopped for home decor stuff, and hung out with Alyssa's sweet mom, and her aunt Donna and uncle Ken. It was a really fun time and we were very sad to leave.

Here is the sun setting while we were on the airplane going home. And us on our nearly empty flight back. It's a little dark cuz I didn't want to freak anyone out with the flash...