Alison at 38 weeks pregnant

Here is a picture of Alison at 37 weeks pregnant. Doesn't she look ready?

Side View


Front view

Camping at Pineview

This last weekend was a good one. We went camping at Pineview Resevoir (east of Ogden). It was our annual ward campout so the food and games/boats were provided by them. We had a beautiful campsite right on the water in the Anderson Cove campground which is on the south side of the lake. We were a little nervous about how well Alison would be able to sleep. She is eight months pregnant you know :). We had an air mattress, warm sleeping bag and every pillow we own, and it turns out that she slept pretty well. It got a little chilly during the night but otherwise the weather was absolutely perfect.
We spent our time playing volleyball, waterskiing, eating and playing other games. The waterskiing early Saturday morning was especially good. I was awake at 6:00 waiting for Bishop Moffat (our old Bishop - leaving soon to serve as mission president in England). He was there but the gate to the campground was locked until 7:00 bummer. The water was still pretty good at 7:00 am though. The Salt Lake Marathon was also today. A guy in our ward was running the marathon and his wife needed a ride home. We decided to leave a bit early to try and get her to the finish line in order to see her husband (DJ) cross. It just so happens that we got her there about 1 minute before he crossed - lucky day, eh?
Work has been going well. I am still doing the same thing that I have been doing almost the whole time that I have worked here. We are almost finished though and then we will start some different projects. I am looking forward to that. It will give me an oppurtunity to learn how to use a few more programs. It's a good job.

Sheesh, Where Have I been?

Hooray! School's Out! (It's acutally been out for 2 weeks now, but I can still get excited about that right?) Things here are going very well. This last semester was a busy one (as you can probably deduce from the lack of posts), but it also turned out to be a good one. I got the best grades that I've ever gotten while here at the U. I should take a full load with a pregnant wife, time-consuming church calling and change jobs in the middle of every semester. It seems to work out well... I will give a rundown of my grades below:

(MEEN 2300) Thermodynamics - B+
(ECE 3530) Engineering Probability and Statistics - A
(ECE 5720) Analog IC Design - A
(ECE 5221) Micromachining - A-
(RUSS 4900) Slavic Folklore - A-

GPA = 3.77

I'm pretty proud of myself. This will definitely boost my cumulative GPA.

After school had finished for the semester, I could finally buy what I had been looking forward to buying for a long time. For almost a year, Alison and I had been saving up for a new computer. I toyed with the idea of building one myself but, for various reasons (mainly I couldn't find a tower/case that I liked and had all of the ports that I wanted accessible on the front). We shopped around a bit before settling on an HP Pavilion model m7470n. It is a Media Center PC - so we don't have to buy a Tivo or a DVR now and it has pretty good specs.

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor 4200+
Memory: 2GB PC3200 DDR SDRAM
Drives: Multiformat DVD+RW/CD-RW drive, double layer support, lightscribe capabilities
Hard Drive: 300 GB SATA
Also: TV Tuner, 9-in-1 media reader, ATI Radeon Xpress 200 graphics, and all of the usual stuff.

We also bought a 19" Samsung LCD moniter to go with the computer. We are set now to be able to do just about anything that we want. I would definitely like to upgrade the videocard to one with a TV output, to be able to watch recorded TV on the TV. I'll probably do this in a few months.

Alison is looking good. More and more pregnant every day. Look for some pictures to soon follow. Less than two months now until the baby's due date. How exciting is that? She has had a couple of showers already and we have gotten some good stuff. There's a ton of stuff you need though.

I've got a new job since I last posted. I now work for Pacificorp (Utah Power). I got an internship there and started on March 13. It's a really good job. During the school year I worked 20 hours a week and once summer started I upped my hours to 40 a week. I have been working 4 10-hour days in order to have a day off each week. I work 6:30 AM - 5:00 PM. I have been taking the bus in order to save money on gas and have a chance to read. The main thing that I have been doing at work is FeederAll updates. This basically consists of taking the Autocad maps of the circuits for a substation and using these maps to update another program (FeederAll) with the correct circuit. The updated circuits in FeederAll can then be used for various studies. It sounds exciting doesn't it? You won't find me complaining though because I'm getting paid for it!

It's A Girl!!!

Well, It's official. Alison and I are having a girl! We found out on Tuesday morning at Alison's 16 week ultrasound (an extra one for a study that she is participating in). Granted, unless you're a doctor, sonographer, or you have experience deciphering the ultrasound photos below, they may not mean much. I still think she's pretty cute :). Check out how different she looks from our first ultrasound.

16 Week Ultrasound Photos:

Front View


Her Foot


Her foot


Her Head


Her Hand


Her Foot #2


It's a Girl!!!

Alison at 15 1/2 Weeks

Here is a picture of Alison showing off her pregnant belly of 15 1/2 weeks.

Happy Birthday Jordan!

Howdy. School starts again and everything goes to pot (my schedule at least). It’s been pretty busy since school started again. It’s turning out to be quite a semester.

Today is Jordan’s birthday. He’s still in St. Augustine Florida. Today is also his P-day so he was able to write. It sounds like he is beginning to see some great success. His letter from today is found here. Alison and I haven’t sent him anything for his birthday yet. We were planning on sending him some socks, but as was mentioned, life gets busy when school is in session.

Now onto school. For the most part things are going pretty well. I haven’t missed any homework yet or really come up against any brick walls. I’m not sure what my favorite class is yet (or what my worst class is either for that matter). I do know that the three classes that I chose to take (Micromachining, Analog IC Design, and Slavic Folklore) have been much more exciting than the two required courses (Engineering Probability and Statistics and Thermodynamics). This isn’t to say that the electives are easier, because that is definitely not true.

I have really enjoyed the Micromachining lab. We’ve only had one “real” lab so far (we had a safety session first) and it was really interesting. We were given a silicon wafer and had to measure the curvature of it with a special machine. After that we cleaned the wafer by rinsing it with methanol and another similar chemical and then rinsing it in de-ionized water and drying it in nitrogen gas. After that we soaked the wafers in a sulfuric acid/hydrogen peroxide solution and then in a hydrofluoric acid solution. After the wafers were clean and dry we put them into a furnace for 1 hour at 1000 o C. This was to grow a silicon dioxide layer. It may not sound too exciting to you, but this semester is exciting because I am finally doing things that can be applicable in real life. The first few years of EE were spent solving circuits. I still get plenty of that but we’ve branched out now.

My calling as the Elder’s Quorum President has kept me busy as well. It seems that I find out virtually daily things that I need to be doing, but haven’t been. It’s so far been a learning experience.

Alison and I got new phones a little while back. We showed them to Alison’s younger sister Abby who took the following pictures with the camera on my phone. I warned her not to take them – now they are accessible to anyone at anytime…


We are now signed up with Sprint. It’s so far been loads better than Verizon was. The biggest reason is because our phones now work in our apartment. Before, we couldn’t use our cell phones in our apartment because we couldn’t get service. The phones are really nice. They are LG pm-225. They are red, with 2 color screens and cameras. I’m excited to have a camera with me everywhere I go. I hope that I’ll be able to take a lot of interesting photos.

Well, life is good. Maybe I’ll tell you more about it sometime.

Lazy Sunday

I saw this SNL skit on the internet the other day and I just knew that I needed to share it. Here is Lazy Sunday about the Chronicles of Narnia.

School's in Session!

Let the fun begin. School started yesterday and now I’ve had a chance to go to every class. It looks like it will be a “good” semester. Not without its challenges, of course….

My weekly schedule is shown below.


My first class is ECE 3530 – Engineering Probability and Statistics. It seems like it is going to be a pretty tough class. From what I am told by those who have taken it, it turns out to be really difficult. We have a big MATLAB project that I am not looking forward to.

My next class is ME EN 2300 – Thermodynamics. This class also looks to be a pretty tough one. If it weren’t required…

I am also taking ECE 5221 – Micromachining. This class is about how tiny devices are made. It think that I am going to enjoy it.

I also have ECE 5720 – Analog Integrated Circuit Design. I think that I am going to enjoy this class. We end up designing our own chip – with the opportunity to have the chip built over the summer.

I have been purchasing my books lately. I bought some of them at the Bookstore, but if I could find them cheaper online then I did that. I think that I have all of them that I need and I ended up spending around $340. I hate having to spend so much on books, especially when one of my books was $147.50. It’s nothing special. Hardcover - yes, full color – not a chance. At least the publishers are getting rich off of students like me that have to take out loans to be able to even go to school.

Well, today was a long day and I am getting tired. Time to feed the fish!

Last Week Off

It was sure nice to have another week off of school. It was a good week too. On Sunday night, Alison and I went up to Jacob Priest’s cabin on Bear Lake. It’s just over the border on the Idaho side. It’s not really a cabin, but a home. It’s right on the lake (if the water is ever all the way up to the bank) and it has 6 rooms upstairs and a master bedroom down. There is a big family room up and down as well as a kitchen and dining area down. We were only up there for Sunday night but it was still a lot of fun.

On Sunday night we played one game of Scene It and one game of Shout About TV (Better than Scene It). After that we watched The Truman Show. That really has got to be Jim Carrey’s best “serious” film. I don’t even know if he has any others. I really like the film.



The most fun part of the whole trip was Monday morning. Sean and I (with whom we rode up) went out on the four-wheelers. We went out onto the frozen beach and were just riding around. I didn’t expect to be out for that long, but it was a ton of fun and we were out there for almost 2 hours. Poor Alison got stuck reading the whole time we were gone. We would do donuts on the ice sheets and then we had a lot of fun going up and down a frozen creek bed. Don’t worry, we had out helmets on.

After we had our fun four-wheeling we helped clean before heading home. Today (Monday) was also the day of most of the big bowl games. We missed most of them, but we were able to see a bit of the Fiesta Bowl (Ohio State beat Notre Dame) and the Sugar Bowl (West Virginia beat Georgia). The next day was the Orange Bowl (Penn State beat Florida State) and then the best game of all, the National Championship Rose Bowl. In that game undefeated Texas met undefeated (for 3 years) USC. Texas won by overcoming a 12 point deficit in the last 5 minutes. It’s too bad the BCS is such an unfair crock.

This week I went with Alysia and Dad to see what was inside Mom and Dad’s safety deposit box. There was mainly a lot of silver coins and junk silver coins. It was cool to see. Alison and I will have to get one eventually – as my coin collection continues to grow.

The rest of the week was full of work and a bit of reading. Other than that – school starts soon…

Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

Alison and I spent New Year’s Eve at Spencer’s house with her family. We played a few games, Alison and I tried to defend our title as Trivial Pursuit Champions. Unfortunately, we were unable to win the game. We usually do pretty well as a team, but tonite just wasn’t our night.

Before we went to Spencer and Korrin’s house, Alison and I went to the Jazz game. They played the Philadelphia 76ers. We didn’t think that the Jazz would be able to win but they were able to pull it our in the end. It was an awesome game, and we had great seats. One of the fellows that I home teach was able to get tickets from his work. He’s not really a sports fan so he offered them to us. We’re both glad that he did. J

The other big news from this week is the trip that I took with my parents to San Francisco to watch the Utes play in the Emerald Bowl. We left early Wednesday morning and made the long drive to Sacramento. When we got to Reno we had planned to take I-80 over Donner’s Summit, but after calling Scott he advised us to take highway 50 through South Lake Tahoe. It was snowing pretty hard over the top and it took us quite a while to get over the summit. When we got to the Rees’ we saw on the news that it was good that we had taken highway 50. The top story on the Sacramento news was the bad weather on I-80. A plane had crashed right off the interstate and they had mudslides all over the place and the interstate was down to 1 lane.

That night at the Rees’ we watched the movie Fantastic 4. It was ok. Pretty much like all of the rest of the comic book movies.

The next day we left for San Francisco and got there in about 2 hours. We parked the cars at the San Francisco Marriott Hotel and then just walked to the game – stopping at an Italian restaurant on the way. The game was at SBC Park – which is where the Giants normally play. The Utes were slated to play Georgia Tech (#24 in the nation). Nobody expected the Utes to do very well, and we were going to the game to have fun – definitely not expecting a win. Nonetheless, the Utes put on a show we will not soon forget. They ran all over the Yellowjackets and won 38-10. Here is a press release on the game.

Of course we were thrilled to see a great game (in our opinions). After the game, I will admit, I “stormed” the field to celebrate with the team (the real reason was to find out if the turf was “spongy” like Fenway Park… see Fever Pitch).

After the game we walked back to the hotel to celebrate by eating at a crappy Chinese restaurant. We stopped by the Cheesecake Factory to get some cheesecake for dessert. We walked through a few stores – but no major shopping for us.

The next day we spent the morning at the hotel (ate a wonderful buffet breakfast – normally $18) and then went to Pier 39 for an hour. While there I browsed a couple of stores and then watched the Sea Lions for a bit. After the adventures at Pier 39 we got on the road. We had originally planned to stay in Sacramento tonite (Friday), but the weather was stormy the whole drive and we were afraid that it would only get worse. We decided to try and go over the top on I-80 so we had to buy chains. We had heard all sorts of things about how bad it would be, but it turned out to not be that bad. It was rainy and a little snowy the whole way until we got to Reno. We decided to drive as far as we could and we made it to Elko before we felt that we should stop.

It turns out that we were very blessed to have gone over the pass on Friday, rather than waiting until Saturday. There was a 1000 foot mudslide at Truckee (near Donner pass) which shut down I-80. Added to that the interstate was underwater at Vacaville (between San Francisco and Sacramento). Northern California has had record flooding from the storms that have been coming through.

All in all it was a great trip. We didn’t expect the Utes to win but they did so that was exciting. It was a fun night with the Dickson’s to celebrate the new year. 2006 looks good. I’ll let you know!