Halloween Day

Today is Halloween. I love Halloween! Yay! I was reading about someone who did not see the point for Halloween and because of that she did not like Halloween. I guess in a way she is right, Halloween on itself has no point... But I can see why to commemorate it seeing that Halloween serves as an excuse for us to be with friends and enjoy one another throughout the many activities that go on Halloween day.

Halloween gives us the chance to go to Haunted Houses. I doubt that I will go to a haunted house this Halloween season, but I did do to the Castle of Chaos last year, and although the Haunted House as an attraction was not good I had a blast from watching all those around me getting scared by the many traps the Haunted House had.

Halloween gives u the chance to play around and interact with others by dressing up as our favorite character. how funny is that? It allow us to go shake ur booty on the many parties going on and also to make the kids happy and hyper by providing a long deserved break from mommy's no-candy rule.

This year I dressed up as: (drum roll)...

Waldo from "Where is Waldo?"

Check out the comparison pictures below:

My costume was "stitched up" with the help of a few people. I went to DI (Deseret Industries) and bought the camera, the cup, the sweats, the swimming googles, the beanie and the backpack. I made the binoculars out of the inner tube of two toilet paper rolls and the shovel out of cardboard and the wooden rod from a plunger. Justin landed me the sleeping bag and the snorkel. I bought the "hammer" (meat tenderizer) at Smith's and the teapot and cane at Walmart. I initially thought about painting the white stripes on the sweat shirt but it did not work out, so I had the idea of asking Morgan Crawford to sew the white stripes on the sweat shirt. She kindly accepted the task and dedicated a good 3 to 4 hours of solid work to it. Thanks Morgan!!

Here is a picture of Morgan working on my Waldo striped sweat shirt:

We had a costume contest at work and I won second place. Yay! I lost by one vote, can u believe that? Especially considering that the winner works on this huge department where most likely everybody would vote for him. Well... somebody had to win right? Like I said I won second place and the prize was a Megaplex gift card worth $15.

Here is a picture of my prize:



Later I went to our Annual Ward Trunk or Treat carnival. It was awesome! Our ward has made Trunk or Treat a tradition in the family community in the Avenues. The ward members from my ward are really involved in decorating their cars and being there for the kids who live in the Avenues and surrounding vicinities. Chris Breedon brought Indiana Jones to life with "Indy's" theme song playing and all, Lacie and Becca frightened us with her body bag again but this time as vampiresses and Chery Terry was hilarious dressed as a chicken in the chicken coop. Chery won the best costume prize and Lacie and Becca won the best decorated trunk prize. My prize was that for some reason Chery Terry had a gazillion bizillion banana Laffy Taffys and I love them, so she gave me them all.

After the Trunk or Treat we had a dance. It was nice. I was able to help make it happen seeing that Jackie was fairly overwhelmed with the Trunk or Treat and carnival that she ended up not dedicating time to get things arranged for the dance. I contacted the stake and one of the wards and I was able to get sound going and I DJed for almost all the Dance when finally Spencer Gibbs got there and he offered to help DJing with his laptop. I'm glad I was able to help and allow everybody to have a good time.

I guess I'm even happier because Christa arrived safely in Orlando and has started enjoying the Special Olympics... I think this one of the many awesome things that she does. Her servitude serves as an example for all of us because I think we all should be involved and engaged in something like this, something that will benefit other people rather than ourselves. We're here to serve others and this is a selfless opportunity to accomplish that. So u know, the Special Olympics World Winter Games will be held in Idaho in February of 2009. Here is the link if u'd like to volunteer:

http://www.2009worldgames.org/volunteer/volunteer-process

Frustration... >:-\

I was finally able to finish this project at work that I have been working on. To accommodate our forecasted end-of-the-year demand, we have purchased all the hardware we need to help us accomplish that. The project was to get all the computers, print servers, plotters and everything else set up, configured and tested.

It was a very frustrating experience... It also was not a one-day task neither. I had to be at the warehouse for a few days in order to finish this project. Although I could have had it done on my own, in order to be more effective I requested some assistance... I guess I need to be more grateful I was able to obtain assistance because otherwise this project would have taken much longer than I wanted. The things I asked them to help me with were not hard things at all. I promise I did not ask them to build a space shuttle with duck tape, straws and a 9 volt battery. They were really simple things like: move this from point A to point B. Yet things got messed up, hardware and cables got placed all over the place, items ended up missing... It was chaos. I needed to be focused in order to have all working properly, because there are a lot of things than can go wrong and they make the whole set not work, but it was hard to get concentrated when I also had to focus on finding things and getting things organized.

I needed to be an example for my co-workers rather than lose it completely and be unprofessional and rude. I needed to constantly be reminding myself that although I was upset with all the disorganization... that I needed to be patient and treat all around me with all the professionalism and respect I expect to be treated with.

I had to remember a quote by Elder Neal. A. Maxwell I have in my cubicle that reads: "Patience is tied very closely to faith in our Heavenly Father. Actually, when we are unduly impatient, we are suggesting that we know what is best - better than does God. Or, at least, we are asserting that our timetable is better than His."

Here is a picture of the quote on my cube:

After all the headaches and stepping stones, it was gratifying to look back on my way out at all that was done and to obtain this feeling of accomplishment despite all the roadblocks I had to deal with. I guess this is an example on how Father have this plan developed for us. He only poses a challenge we can handle, we face the obstacles (opposition) and ultimately if we endure till the end we can taste the sweet flavor of victory.

Here is a panoramic photo of our warehouse's mezzanine where we have our plotting pods:

Wall-E (Robotic Voice Impersonation)

When I was heading back home Justin wanted to go watch a movie, so I met with him, Cindy, John and Jules and we went to watch Wall-E. I really wanted to watch that movie because I liked the preview and because I've heard so many good reviews about it despite the fact they say that there are no dialog in the first half hour of the movie (which I found to be incorrect... at least if ur paying attention). So there I went to watch Wall-E... but I was so tired... I had such a long day... One of them days... Wall-E seemed to be sweet, touching and funny and I was enjoying it a lot, but I was so tired that I was not being able to appreciate how good the movie was so I left the theater in the middle of the movie. My friends understood. :)

Here is a photo of one of the scenes of the movie when Wall-E tries to hold Eve's "hand":

Pumpkin Carving Night

Today I went to a dinner party at Jann Nishimoto's house. There I was able to meet some nice people and I was also able to have some awesome food too. :) I had some BBQ chicken, potato salad and a delicious chilly that Cindy Conlin cooked. Yummy! After dinner we all started carving our pumpkins. It was a very nice, relaxing and entertaining activity and each one of us carved a design on our pumpkins. After we all finished, we placed all pumpkins in Jann's new porch, and as it was very dark outside, it was really cool to just see the light from the candles radiating thru each one of the designs.

Here is a video of all the designs:

I carved a winkle emoticon design on my pumpkin and it has a beautiful meaning behind, but that meaning I will keep it private ;) Here is a picture of the pumpkin I carved:

Jazz vs. Trailblazers

I went to the last pre-season home game for the Utah Jazz. We stunk up the place on the first three quarters. I don't know what happened, but whatever it was, the Jazz returned for the fourth quarter with a vengeance!!

The come back started with Korver getting all them 3 pointers in. It was awesome. Below is the video of how it all started:

We won 100-89. Yay!! After all the frustration of the first three quarters it was all worthy for me to have stuck around to witness the end of the game.

Here is an overview pic of the game from Section 105 row 9 seat 1:

Ok... Do you want to hear a funny and embarrassing fact? The black dude on the pic bellow: He is a local tv game analyst... His name is Thurl Bailey, but until tonight I thought he was Karl Malone. :/

My Blog

Hello there!! Well... I always wanted to have a blog... I guess the reason why I never really got one is two-fold... First, I'm planning to get me a web site and and have it in a way that I would write my own blog inside my web site, and second, I don't know how good I will be in entering new posts, photos and videos (which means that I will have to make use of my camera more often). I will give this a try because this may be a way for me to develop new skills and form new habits. I'm excited about it. I don't know if blogs must serve a purpose... if they do I'm one step behind because I don't know the purpose of mine. I guess it will be One Heck of a Ride discovering my blog's purpose. If at least you can learn something from it, then it would already make me happy. I'm not yet familiar with all the features of Blogger but I think it allow you to leave comments, so feel free to comment on whatever... lol. I hope you enjoy the ride (whomever you may be!). :D