A tropical storm rolled in earlier this week that has been dumping buckets of rain over the past few days. It’s been so needed! Last night the temparature dropped a little bit, and that rain turned into a little hint of snow on the mountain tops.
When I was younger my family had this little teepee made from fabric and sprinkler pipe. We played in it all the time, it held up well and was a lot of fun. I’ve been wanting one for my kids to play in for awhile, but for Alicia it was just one more project on her already too-long list of artsy projects to do.
Several years ago my sister Katie was feeling entrepreneurial and went door to door selling these teepees, so I asked her if she’d be up to me paying her to sew one. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to. She then said maybe Calli would be up to the task so I reached out to her next. Calli was unsure if she wanted to but tried convincing me that sewing wasn’t hard and that I could do it. Ha! As if! Anyway, she said “maybe” so I left it at that.
Fast forward a few days. My brother Scott still lives in the neighborhood we grew up in, the one Katie sold teepees in. One of those neighbors had bought a teepee years ago from Katie that was going unused and wanted to know if Scott’s kids wanted it and dropped it off at his house. Scott told Katie about it, she then called me and here we are today, proud owners of a little teepee!
The cherry on top of the story though is while Katie was doing the door to door sales all those years ago, my Mom was the one that was actually sewing them. So, while I was being passed around amongst siblings it was my sweet mom that used her angel magic to send her grand babies a teepee that she had made 20 years earlier. ❤️ #lovenote
September is coming to an end, and it went out quite beautifully. This is a 5 image panorama of photos taken in portrait mode and stitched in Affinity Photo, a pretty solid photoshop alternative that only costs $50 once. The stitched photos are straight-from-camera JPG’s shot with Velvia on my X-T20, no processing at all besides putting them together.
We bought a new(er) van. I grew tired of the 2002 Odyssey and the problems associated with age and miles. We now have a 2008 Town & Country Limited, fully loaded, with 94,000 miles on it. We bought it at auction with my friend Shad at Integrity Motors, and unfortunately it came with some issues associated with middle age, but those are pretty much taken care of now and hopefully it gives us some good years of service ahead.
Today Alicia had a Relief Society Super-activity and was going to be gone from 9am – 4pm, so I decided it was time to take the kids on an adventure in the new car. I grabbed a bunch of DVDs, some water, my camera, and some snacks and we headed off for the Provo River Falls, which is along the Mirror Lake Highway.
It’s been about a year since I went through and edited my photos from our trip to Japan in April 2017. Tonight I was feeling nostalgic and wanted to see all the photos I took that I had forgotten about beyond the ones that I’ve shared online or have as my desktop wallpaper. Definitely a trip down recent memory lane! I love Japan, I can’t wait to go back again.
On Saturday my friend Joshten was going to be drifting his race car at Rocky Mountain Raceway. I wanted to take Emmett so he could see the drifting as well as the drag racing that would be going on. Sadly, it was also one of the last weekends that RMR was going to be open. I’m not sure why it’s shutting down, but this is the last season. Several years ago I was a track photographer there, working every weekend right on the track to take pictures of the dragsters. It was so much fun. It makes me sad to know that the tracks are going to be silenced.
The drift races were the street legal Midnight Drags, which are a lot of fun. It’s always a surprise which two cars will come out head to head. I post a video down below of 2 Nissan GTR going at it. The white one pulls a 9.83s 1/4 mile at 141mph! Crazy fast.
Before getting to RMR, we took a side stop to The Train Shoppe in Salt Lake and took a look around. It’s a fantastic store! They have a ton of trains and tracks to sell, as well as several model trains set up to run around. It costs 25c to run a train for 2 minutes, but you get to be the conductor and choose the speed, etc. It’s a pretty cool place. Emmett wanted to take home a lot of the trains. Unfortunately, they’re a pinch out of our price range.
