No time for Blogging

I promise pictures for Jodi and details for Nicole but I had to share some quick thoughts. I can't tell you how many times I pulled the camera out this week and said, "we have to take a picture so we can blog about this." But then, the reality is that I'm too busy doing the things I say I will blog about, to find the time to actually blog about them. So here is the quick list of obsessions and business for the week: picking 12 pounds of fresh raspberries, making 2 1/2 batches of fresh raspberry jam, making one sample batch of Raspberry White Chocolate Almond Blondies for Isabelle to enter into a baking competition, making three different kinds of Peach-Raspberry tart/pies to decide what I'm going to enter into the bake-off, buying: 2 cantaloupes, one pineapple, one BIG box of peaches, four pounds of black grapes, 5 pounds of strawberries, 2 pounds of champagne grapes, 3 mangoes, 7 bananas, 12 pounds of raspberries, and 1 pound of cashews just so we'll have choices to play with in our new blender!! Which brings me to our next obsession, Chris' new BlendTec blender (more about that in a different post!) and Smoothies! Not to mention, just this week I added 3-6 new piano students, I have a new calling, and I just agreed to be the Room Mom in Abby's class. I've been making craft samples for Super Saturday, along with some extra projects for myself. I've been working on designing another Halloween wallhanging to work on with some women in my ward. I'm batting around the idea of finishing Abby and Claire's quilts for their birthdays (in less than a month) and possibly decorating their whole room... I'm starting to think about Christmas projects and gifts, and have started conspiring and working on our annual Halloween party too. Just today, I've done three loads of dishes and ignored that many loads of laundry. I threw a party for Zach's second birthday, washed my van inside and out, caught up on the second season of 30Rock, and last season of Eli Stone, helped my kids with their homework, watched neighbor's kids, tried a few new recipes and made up a few of my own, enjoyed the Onion Days carnival last night, played an all night game with Chris and some friends, ran too many errands, and arranged some food storage stock up, I've been making good use of the fresh veggies from ours and others gardens, and even shared loaves of Zucchini Bread with our new neighbors from the 3 batches I made (now I've got big plans to learn how to can peaches and spaghetti sauce), and I still managed to keep my house clean, and take care of Chris, our cats, and our four brilliant kids! Hopefully this next week will be more productive! And yes, I will try to find time for some pictures...

Heidi's Mosaic

Heidi's Mosaic, originally uploaded by heidimaloy.

This is for Scott, Nicole, and Jodi who say I don't play along!

Concept:
1. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
2. Using only the first page, pick an image.
3. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker. (choose four columns and three rows, also choose individual URL's)

Questions:
1. What is your first name? Heidi
2. What is your favorite food? Southwest/Mexican Food
3. What school did you go to? Brigham Young University
4. What is your favorite color? Green
5. Who is your celebrity crush? Matthew McConaughey
6. Favorite drink? Milk
7. Dream vacation? Venice, Italy
8. Favorite dessert? Grand Marnier Souffle
9. What you want to be when you grow up? True to Myself
10. What do you love most in life? My Family
11. One word to describe you. Tornado
12. Your nickname. Animal

Home Away from Home

Hard to see but that is Abby and I racing down the Alpine Slide- yes, she won! (but I had Zach ;)I just thought this was a cool pic with the light, at our favorite new Mexican restaurant in Park City- El Chubasco! Yummy---

Here's me getting ready to bounce, bounce, bounce--- we should have jumped before hiking the mountain though- I was tired! But it's always fun to flip in a harness (Chris wimped out!)Me, midflip... hahahaha
Abby's getting ready to go- no surprise- she's like a Mexican jumping bean! Flip, flip, flip!
Once Claire got the hang of it, she was a flippin' flipper! Lot's of fun!

Nice view huh?? Hiking in the backcountry above Snowbird-pretty, and the kids were troopersClimbing the tunnel to the other side of the mountain, the flash lit it up, it was dark!
Cute girlies in the wildflowers!
This was on the trail up to the top of the mountain... view of Mineral Basin! Gorgeous!


The kids were mad that only Dad got to put his feet in the creek... ice cold snow runoff!On the Chickadee lift to the Alpine Slides- their favorite thing!!
On the Peruvian Chair lift, to the top of Snowbird... beautiful!!
Chris and I LOVED this sign, as we take our young family up the mountain, Abby's head is covering it a little- but it says "Be prepared for Self rescue" Hilarious!

This was us riding on a gondola up (and down) the hill, that's our condo in the background.Here's Chris on our Condo balcony, the view from our living room...
Park City commissioned a bunch of artists to design Moose's that are placed all over the city- here's one, but our favorite is "Stanley" at the Tanger Outlets....
Just a picture of our Hooligan's on Main Street during Park Silly Sunday Market...
Here we are setting off on our weeklong adventure, getting lunch at the Texas Roadhouse! Yum!Anyone that wants to bag on Utah can eat their heart out, it was a beautiful day!
Zach was just being cute and trading off holding the girls' hands instead of the usual Mom's, so...
This was in front of the Westgate Resort... fun, fun, fun...

We got suckered into a timeshare in Park City last year, and even though I threw a fit about it to Chris (ask him, it's true) I have to admit, it's nice to have a close place to get away to, and more, it forces us to take vacations!! We spent all last week up there, the last week of the kids summer vacation, just swimming, eating, playing, sleeping, watching Olympics, alpine slides, hiking, chair lifts, a day at Snowbird, riding a mechanical bull, jumping on a bungee tramp, and watching a marathon of America's Next Top Model, and shopping. I know-- it was a great week! So I thought I would share a few random pics of our vacation... enjoy!

And I have to elaborate on a few funny things... we don't have Cable, or Dish or any TV right now at our house... so one of the treats of the week was Disney channel for the kids, and Food Network for us. The great thing was that the Olympics started so that's what we did about every night, got obsessed with Olympics. The other funny thing though was that, on Friday we stumbled on the beginning of America's Next Top Model and got sucked into a marathon- and yes, I said we!! I teased that I was going to blog about it- Chris was just as, if not more into it than I was- he says it was the cutthroat competition... hahaha! But we had fun vegging too...

Breaking Dawn

In light of my brother-in-law's recent post about Mormon cultural sins, I had to share a little about a guilty pleasure and a confession about my true thoughts of this cultural phenomenon!

While the books in the Twilight series are National Bestsellers, so not limited by any means to an LDS audience, there is no question that they have been making the rounds through the LDS circuit and have a HUGE following. Granted- I enjoy the "Twilight" books, and considering I would not consider myself a "reader"- the fact that I read them at all is a huge compliment to the books! Having said that, here is my confession against the grain so to speak... I don't think that Stephenie Meyer is the greatest author ever, after "New Moon" I was convinced that Bella was a spoiled brat and hardly a great heroine, and a shallow character at best- she drove me absolutely crazy, a whiny spoiled brat! Edward was jealous and controlling, and not a great role model for teenage love (ie, it's probably not a great idea to let your boyfriend sneak in and spend every night with you). And frankly, I was rooting for Jacob a little by the end of Book 3!

Having said all that... Breaking Dawn, helped relieve a lot of that for me. I won't give any spoilers for you slowpokes who haven't finished it yet- you know who you are! BUT, I have to say that Bella redeems herself quite a bit, and my take now is just that she really was meant for Vampire life after all, and her wimpy, whiny former self is better off lost! And I was surprised at how much I like Bella being a vampire. Yes, I actually do like Edward, and he obviously had more self retraint than Bella, hello!? It would have been nice to have more details about the vampire/human honeymoon sex, I mean come on, how does that work?? And yet, I'm glad she refrained, knowing it's meant for a younger audience... maybe an adult version!? hahaha... And I'm happy for the fitting happy ending for Jacob that solved so many problems in one fail swoop! And I wish I had an Alice in my life! But there is one HUGE, flaw with the book and I'm not sure how it managed to survive editing... Renesmee? Seriously??! But, despite my polar feelings on the books- I enjoy them like everyone else and had finished my "copy" (Thank you Derek) by Monday afternoon... and on one final note.... you Twilighters really do need to get a life! Just a few random thoughts- but what do you think??