Friday, September 29, 2006

Lunch Bowl

So Marcella has been really good at eating her food the past few days, and I have realized it is because she likes to eat with other people. At least breakfast. If I eat with her, then she will eat everything that I fix, but if I try to just feed her she won't eat it, no matter how hungry she is. For lunch though it is another story. She will eat whatever I give her, and today I just didn't feel like feeding her myself, so she got lunch in a bowl. Rice Cakes, pretzels, sweet potato puffs, and dried apples. Sounds pretty yummy huh. Well here you are...





Yep, that is her bowl under her chair with nothing in it, not because she ate everything I gave her, but because if her food is in something all of it has to come out before she can eat it. We are having a fun day nevertheless, and we hope that all of you are as well. Love ya!

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Marcella Bella

Here are just some cute pictures from yesterday. We had a pretty fun day. We spent the day up at Grandma Dougals, so we could buy all the food and things for the wedding. Then while I was cooking dinner Marcella and Daddy played outside. She loves rocks. (oh no, another Miriam! he he) but we have always told her yucky when she trys to put one in her mouth so while they were outside yesterday she would pick up a rock and make a yucky sound. Then she started doing it with everything she picked up, but it still didn't stop her from putting it in her mouth. Then the day ended with a fun bath. It sure is fun being a mom and playing with Marcella. I hope you all have a great day!









Friday, September 22, 2006

Is it Snowing yet?



Since it has been so cold lately I thought I would try on Marcella's coat that I bought for her at the beginning of the Summer, wich I am proud of myself for this purchase. I got it at the Osh Kosh outlet, orignally $49.00, and it was 70% off plus I had a 20% off coupon, so it came to about $7.00. It was a steal!



So I am hoping that it will fit her a little better by the time it snows,but she was having a hard time walking in it etc. hence the crying. Hope you all have a great day!

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Chair Potato

Ok so it had only been about 1 1/2 hours since we woke up this morning, and I already knew we were off to a bad start. I know that all of you think that this little girl-->



Is the cutest thing known to man, and most of the time I would agree, but when she won't eat anything you give her and all she does is put her hands in her food to smear in her hair, she loses a little bit of her appeal...well I guess she just did today, so I very calmly put her infront of the computer with a rice cake and some bread and let her watch Charlottes Web.



Boy did it save me. I was able to sit and relax for about an hour. I am suprised it lasted that long, but very glad. She loves any farm animals, so I was glad I had Charlotte's Web. After that, things went smoothly, but I should have known she had something up her sleeve for after nap....



Yep,I won't go into all the details of the rest of the day, but yes, Marcella Anne Wallin dropped the cordless phone in the toilet. What a day!

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Marcella




Here is a picture of Marcella's first birthday present, given early by Caroline and Jeff and Owen while they were here to watch her open it. Thanks guys! She loves it!!

So a few people have been asking what they could get Marcella for her birthday so I just thought I would put it on here so I don't have to say it a bunch of times.

She needs some levis or any pants and a few long sleeved shirts 12-18 months
She loves looking at books, so any board books or feely books would be great
Any fun toys, she lvoes knocking things over, so maybe some blocks or something fun like that, she also loves animals, so anything with animals she will love
We also have an account set up for her so if you just want to give some money you can do that as well

I hope these ideas help. Thanks guys, I have some other fun pictures I will post later. Have a great day!

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Tickle the Duck

Caroline and Jeff and Owen (and the unnamed baby) sent me a birthday present. It got here late because the post office didn't take care of their business. Thanks guys! Marcella, Kanien and I all thought it was awesome!!!


















It's a cool book. The duck gets mad when you tickle him, but really likes it. When you finally stop tickling him, he's disappointed and tries to get you to do it again.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

The Rest of Our Fun Weekend!



So since a lady comes in to get Grandma up every Saturday Morning, we try as much as possible to not be here while she is. So we all piled into the car at a few minutes to 9 (we did wake up at 8:10 so we made good time) with no place to go. Jon had made us wonderful peach smoothies so we ate that and took our first stop to home depot and then to Cameron and Amie's where we got shocked as you saw in the last post. Then we decided to go to This is the Place Monument. I have been wanting to go for a while now. Well, the last weekend they are open is Labor day weekend, so we missed it! They do let you go in and walk around, so we decided we might as well since we were already there. We went and looked at all the animals in the barn area.



This is one big Cow. It is actually an oxen and that picture doesn't do it justice. I think it was a little scary. He was massive.



Here is a baby cow. He was really cute.





So while we were looking at them this one cow started mooing a ton and then they all took turns doing it. Marcella thought it was great. Now when you ask her what the cow says she says mmmoo, not really annunciating but making the sound it is pretty funny. I hope you all have a great day! Thanks Kristin for staying with us it was fun!

Sunday, September 10, 2006

ShOcKeD!





I hope that you enjoy these pictures. We had a fun weekend what can I say. Thanks for staying with us Kristin we had a blast. Don't these pictures remind you of something you see on a movie when they stick there hand in a shocket and they get electricuted and all of there hair stands on end. I think the ones of Kristin are the best. It was so funny watching her hair stnad up like that. We all had a good laugh. When I did it, my hair was still a little damp, but when I got off it was dry. I think that I should invent something like this for every girl to have instead of a blow dryer.







Now that you have waited in suspense, this was all made possible by Cameron. He made it at work and then took it home to demonstrate it to his scouts. So we got to have a little bit of fun with this contraption Saturday morning. Thanks Cam!

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Say Cheese



Lately when I tell Marcella to say cheese when I take her picture she does this. I think it is pretty darn cute. Man howcome the older kids get the cuter they are?





Here is Marcella's new love. It is quite funny she loves to play the piano and then make sure you are paying attention. It is like she plays a few notes and then looks at you and smiles waiting for you to say what a good job she has done.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Canning Tomatoes

Last night Kanien and I canned our first run of tomatoes. It was fun, and it gave me a chance to break in the best Father's Day present anyone has ever received...my 26-quart stainless steel with aluminum clad base stockpot. If you're wondering how big a 26 quart pot is...I'll inform you. It's big enough to hold our biggest pot inside it and it won't even touch the edges. The handles do, but the pot doesn't. It's big enough that you could do almost 50 pints of salsa in ONE BATCH!!! So we were in for a treat. The only thing Kanien and I do with our tomatoes is make sauces. Sometimes I'll add some to a soup, but sauces are what we do most. Hence, I wondered why I didn't just can the sauce instead of the tomatoes. It might take more time initially, but it would be a lot easier to add some meat, cook it for a bit, and viola--Dinner. So we thought we'd try. We blanched HUGE batches of tomatoes in the stock pot. We peeled them, squished them, and started making sauce with them. If you've ever made sauce with fresh tomatoes, you know that even the Romas we were going come LOADED with water, so you've got to cook them quite a while to get it all out. At 11:50pm we ended up with 15 1/2 quarts of sauce. Here are some pictures of the event.

I'm chopping some Garlic. I used sixteen cloves of garlic. That's the most I've ever used in a sauce. It's 1 1/2 bulbs.



Stock Pot! Oh yeah! That baby is sweeeeet....



But not as sweet as these two!! They picked all the tomatoes...and there were a lot! Marcella got upset at us for not paying attention to her, and not letting her touch the boiling pans, but otherwise she was a great helper.



She loves to point!



There's the sauce after 30 minutes of simmering. It's already gone down a couple of inches from where it started.



Here's the fresh basil I used. We grew it in a planter box outside our front door. It was about 1 1/2 cups of fresh cut basil.

Here's the end product: 15 1/2 quarts of Jon's Genuine Pasta Sauce



Oh yeah...I'll can pasta sauce with anyone who comes out to see us in SLC. I can supply some of the ingredients, but not all. So if you want to can pasta sauce, let me know.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Marcella Walking

Here's a video of Marcella walking and playing toss with me. There are two formats. A smaller file that will only work with Windows Media Player 9 and above, and a larger file that will work from Windows 95 on up.

Windows Media 9 file<--This file will look better. I don't think anyone should have problems playing this file, unless you're still running Windows '98.


Large, nasty MPG file<--This file will take longer to download and won't look as good, but it'll work if you've got an older computer.

Oh yeah...don't forget to check out my racing post below.

Grand American Road Racing

Kanien posted a few pictures of me at the Grand Am race. I thought I'd post some more. I was working as a utility. I was assigned a camera operator to work with, and it was my job to make sure he didn't get hit by cars in the pit. I was also responsible for changing the batteries on the camera, and whatever else might arise.

All the production is done in trailers that are towed from city to city by semi trucks. That way the crew can follow the race to each location. Here I'm coming out of the RF truck. They won't allow any cables in the pit, so the pit cameras are RF (radio frequency) cameras. If I worked race TV full-time, I'd want a job with the RF company...they're sub-contracted by the production company, and they don't have to run much cable at all. Each hard camera has thousands of feet of cable running from the truck to the camera. The longest cable we ran was over 6,000 feet. There were fourteen hard cameras, and three RF cameras on this shoot. The one I did in July had 22 cameras total.



This is the inside of one of the race cars. It doesn't look too comfy. The Grand Am circuit is the most affordable pro racing series to own a car in. In July I was at an American Le Mans race. Those cars have carbon fiber chassis that cost $375,000.00...that's just the price of the chassis. The Grand Am circuit cars have steel chassis...this makes them about 20mph slower (180mph is their top speed), but they're much cheaper.



Here I am on the crew side of Pit Row. This is where all of the crews have their car monitoring gear and tools. They can monitor everything from tire pressure to oil pressure to gas mileage right from their computers. It's all transmitted back to their computers wirelessly. This is the safe side of the pit. If you know a racer, you can get a pit pass, but you have to stay on this side of the pit. In NASCAR, Indy Car, and Formula 1 racing, they won't even allow cameras on the opposite side of the pit, so Grand Am and American Le Mans are unique in their letting us go right next to the cars.



You can't really tell, but here I'm on the opposite side of the wall that separates the cars from the crews. This is where you have to be careful. I'm wearing a headset so the truck can call me if anything is going wrong with the camera. The headset muffles the noise from the cars. This muffling is nice because you can actually hear stuff coming across the radio, and you save your hearing, but you can't really hear any of the cars...so if you're not watching, you could get hit. It's happened before (or so the director told me), and it's not something they like to repeat. That's why I was in the pit...to alert the camera operator of any incoming cars or dangerous situations (tires, wrenches, etc).



Here's a close-up. That's my operator in the background...his name was Schalzee. I don't know if that was his first name or his last name...but that's what we called him.




Here's Cameron. He's the one that got me the job here...anything I've done with TV can be traced back to him...He got me working at the Grizzlies games, and any utility job I've done has been because he's told the production company I'm available.



On one of the first pit stops of the day, this Ferrari caught on fire. When they fuel the cars, a person stand right next to the fuel intake with a fire extinguisher. Their fuel is quite volatile, and if a fire is left burning for more than a few seconds, it can spread to the car and burn it out in a matter of minutes. So....I was walking around this car when all of a sudden I saw some flames come from the side opposite me, and someone yelled, "Fire!" They had about three extingishers on it in a matter of seconds, but the pit crew was throwing people over the wall, the driver exited in about 1/2 a second, and the race officials were running the opposite way. Lucky for me, my camera operator decided to get a closer look, so we walked TOWARDS the flames. Here you can see some of the smoke and the dust from the extinguishers.



Part of the draw of the Grand Am circuit is their specialization in endurance races. Their races range from 2.5 hour sprint races to a 24 hour mega-endurance Race. The race here was a 9 hour endurance race. That's a loooooooong race. They have two drivers, and each driver takes two shifts. Here it's starting to get a little bit dark, but nothing like it was around 8:30. The race went from noon to 9:00 pm. This car (Krohn Racing's #76) is driven by Jorg Bergmeister and Colin Brawn. Jorg won the overall Grand Am championship, but his partner wasn't eligible because he'd missed a couple of races. His partner, Colin, is 17 years old and couldn't race at a couple of races because their main sponsor was a tobacco company. US law says you can't be endorsed by a tobacco company in any form if you're under 18 years old. Anyway...I just thought he was pretty young.



The Krohn Racing team drives a car based on the Ford GT, a contemporary of the Ford GT-40. Ford couldn't really compete in races like these from the late '60s through 2004, as their Mustang engine wasn't really fast enough to compete. The GT 40 was a great endurance racer during the '60s, and even won the 24 Hours of Le Mans four times from 1966-1969. Here we're on the other side of the car...you had to watch out for tires, wrenches, crewmen, and other tools flying around the cars. I got hit by a flying pneumatic wrench in the ankle...that made the crew really really mad...they told us if we wanted to record their pit stops, we had to give them more room. They were the #1 qualifying car, so I can see why they were angry.



You can see the fuel line going into the car here on the left. They have two hoses that go into the tank: One is for fuel, the other is an exhaust hose so air can escape out of the tank. That's how they fuel so quickly.



Here's a night shot of one of the cars....This car was based on a Pontiac GTO. These cars are called Daytona Prototype cars...They've got a top speed of around 190mph. That's pretty fast, eh?


In case you're wondering about getting into racing like this, you've basically got to be a billionaire, or close to it. The guy who owns those green cars, the Krohn Racing cars, is worth over 1.9 Billion dollars. He actually races in one of his two cars. Maybe you don't have to be that rich, but you've got to be pretty darn rich to be able to afford it. If you want something affordable, get into scooter racing.