BoomFlag

Seen on a billboard in Wyoming:

I love email. With email, I never feel lonely. I just got up to pee, and when I came back to my desk I had three emails from clients. That’s pretty much how it goes: head out for lunch, and twenty are waiting. Leave for a three-day trip, and there are a few hundred. Whee!

We just returned home from our trip to Utah to visit Laralee’s family. Of course it was fun, and featured such highlights as…

A visit to the Salt Lake Temple. La’s brother Doug was sealed to his wife Jen in a wonderful ceremony.

A guided tour of the BYU campus, where La struggled to remember what the buildings were, and what apartment complex she’d lived in. (In her defense, it was 20 years ago.) We did find the Marriott Center where she’d worked for a few years.

Unfortunately all of the doors were locked, so we couldn’t get in to see anything… until we ran into La’s old boss Dale, who actually remembered her after 20 years. He not only let us in, but gave us his key ring so she could take us all over. We saw the main basketball court, of course:

We also poked around the restricted areas, like the team locker room (freshly renovated, and apparently nicer than most NCAA schools):

Driving around campus, we spotted the fateful stop sign where La was ticketed by campus police for failing to stop. In her defense, this is at the bottom of an enormous hill, so you’re cooking along at a good clip on your bike and hardly want to stop. On the other hand, the sign is pretty clear. She still gets worked up about it if you mention the incident.

After BYU, we headed over to Saturday’s Waffle. This is a small business started by my nephew Colin and two of his friends. They park a little trailer at a strip mall on Saturday mornings and sell… waffles. But these aren’t just any waffles. They’re loaded with everything from chocolate and marshmallow (the S’more) to biscuits and gravy (the Lumberjack) to bacon and eggs (the Benny). These guys had a wild idea, put it together, and now they’re famous. There was a huge line. They’ve been voted Best Waffle in Utah (who knew there was such a thing?) and apparently receive a lot of calls from investors and people who want to franchise. They’re thinking of quitting their day jobs to sell waffles full-time. Awesome.

Oh, and I saw this cool license plate:

On the way home today we stopped at Little America for some 50-cent ice cream cones…

… And a chance for Laralee to try on some cowboy hats and tell me how she doesn’t look good in them.

Good times all around.

We went out to eat at Red Robin the other night. While walking to the restaurant, Kyra and I were amused to see this establishment across the parking lot:

I’m waiting for a conference call to start, and the hold music is– no kidding– some country singer wailing about how he’s on a conference call, and he’s sitting on hold.

“Where have my friends gone? Where could they be while I’m waiting on this conference call? I’m holding on the liiiiiiine….”

Now that Alex is driving, our insurance rates just caught up with us. They’re almost three times what they were before he was driving. Ouch.

Conversation with a client just now, as we attempted to set up a conference call:

Client: How about 10am next Wednesday?

Me: Sure, that’s great. Talk to you then.

(five minutes pass)

Client: That’s not going to work. How about 2pm Wednesday?

Uhh…

Pandora needs a “meh” button. They have thumbs-up and thumbs-down, so if you really like (or hate) a song you can make sure it comes up again, or never comes back. But sometimes there are songs that are sort of “meh”… they’re not terrible, so you don’t want to rule them out forever, but at the same time you don’t want to hear them too often either.

Kyra played in her last symphonic band concert of the school year. The entire concert lasted about two hours, which was pretty long, but there were five different bands playing and an awards ceremony.

It’s so refreshing to listen to high-school bands compared with middle-school bands. The kids are at a whole different skill level, and the music is actually pretty good. Those sixth-grade bands, where the kids only picked up an instrument a few months before, can be kind of painful. Kyra’s come a long way with her flute.

Things I’m thankful for:

1) Not having to wear a suit, tie, or even “business casual” clothes at work.