Tag: friends

Thanksgiving Weekend

One shot I took at Temple Square. The snow made it look epic!

Thanksgiving weekend is coming to a close. It is Sunday night and in 12 hours, I have to be back to work! I’m not super excited to go back. Another vacation day could come my way, and I wouldn’t care. 🙂 We had a great time. Here is how it was spent….

Wednesday, 11/27/2019, I took a vacation day to spend the day with my boy at home. We hung out in the morning and then about 1pm, he headed upstairs to play. I ended up watching a movie or two and checked on him. He would yell “Go downstairs”, so I obliged. So much for hanging out with him. Later that day, he ha a friend over and they had a bit of a tiff. We went out for desert to intervene (@ Purple Turtle) — All in all it was a great night.

Thursday, 11/28/2019, Thanksgiving was pretty crazy. We met up with Carla, Mother-in-law, and Jessica (Sister-in-law) at The Big Bear Diner. We had a great meal! They ha a modified menu, so it was pretty small. Due to my Menieres disease, I had to avoid the turkey. A big fat burger was what I had (see image). The others had the Turkey dinner. After dinner, we went to see Frozen II, which was SO good! We loved it. My boy even sat through the movie and he was super quiet! Amazing! When the movie was over, I went Black Friday shopping with a friend. We had a great time battling the crowds! It was awesome spending time with the in-laws and with my friend Bill. I even met Glen Stucki at Walmart while shopping. He is a cool guy, you should check him out! Celebrity!

Black Bear Diner Thanksgiving Dinner – Burger – It had a little problem with the meat.
Black Bear Diner Thanksgiving Dinner – Turkey

Friday, 11/29/2019, was a little unplanned. Our friends talked us into driving up to SLC to have a little stay-cation with them! We packed clothes for 1 day if we decided to stay over night. Unfortunately, when we decided to head up, a storm was moving through, so the drive up was a bit crazy! I hate driving in snow, so I was freaking out a bit! We made it though and went to a place called Dave and Busters for some food and games. We checked into a hotel and then took Trax up to Temple Square to view the lights. If you haven’t been, I’d suggest going to view the lights if you do it during Christmas. It’s a beautiful place all year around, but the lights during Christmas are pretty epic!

Saturday, 11/30/2019, We slept in until 9:30a and then decided to go swimming before we checked out of the hotel. About 11:05am, I got a text that said “KSL NEWSRADIO: NB Lanes of I-15 blocked at Lehi. First responders may need to close SB lanes as well for hazmat response. ….“. My friend had also sent an image and another warning (see image). It was insane. So 9 hours late they would re-open the freeway, but it was super crazy! We decided to just have fun instead of going back home, so we went swimming for about 5 hours. For dinner, we ate at our favorite place, Charlie Chow’s, and then went Ice Skating (our boy did, not us). We had a great time, but it was a bit of a crazy day!

Sunday, 12/1/2019, We cleaned up the basement and setup the tree and decorations. It was a pretty relaxing day! The boys schedule was all jacked up from the stay-cation. It wasn’t your typical relaxing day, because of all the cleaning we did. We had fun though. As we brought out the ornaments we were telling stories about how they came to be. When my wife showed Jacob the ornament we bought when we found out we were going to be his parents, he came over an gave us both hugs! It was pretty precious! There were many hugs after that. I’m a grinch, but that warmed my heart! It was pretty cool!

I hope you all had a great weekend! I only touched the surface of what we did. We have some great friends we spent the last 3 days with. It was awesome! I’m thankful for friends and family!

Where are you from?

Image by GardeningWOW from Pixabay

We are owners of a timeshare. Yes, I was a sucker once, or I still am, but I bought into the dream of owning points into a timeshare where I could vacation all I wanted. I could “even sell the points to family and friends to make back my dues”. It’s a bunch of crap they tried to feed us so we would buy into their property. Now it is 19 years later, and they are still trying to find ways to make you spend more money. Timeshares are a bunch of crap, but there are some cool benefits from using them and going on vacation.

Strangers are one of them. There are many opportunities in life where you can talk to complete strangers, but there is nothing better than sitting in the hot tub with complete strangers and striking up a conversation. It seems like no one is phased by you asking “so where are you from?” It is a pretty simple question. We’ve spent the last 5 days here and have met some pretty awesome people in the hot tub. We all come from completely different backgrounds. We’ve met people from all walks of life: A Plumber, A Oil Field Worker, A Single Mom with 4 kids, and Even a Marine just getting out of boot camp. It’s been pretty awesome. Some of these people you would never imagine meeting.

It’s pretty fun playing the getting to know you games with complete strangers. We usually sit in the hot tub until the security guard comes and kicks us out at 10pm. We usually say our good byes “It was nice meeting you”, “Have a great trip”. Some of them we have talked to a couple of times. We never share Facebook links or Instagram names. We may never see them again. It would be fun to keep in touch. With Facebook, you can at least see their feed and be like “Hey, I know these guys from Tuscan, Arizona.”, or “There is that crazy guy from California that likes to grow stuff in his back yard.” The 30+ minutes you spent connecting with a complete stranger was well worth it and it has meaning, to me at least. I enjoy those times.

It reminds me of a time over the summer, where we were staying in Park City, Utah. I went for a walk to check out the homes up there. Some other random stranger was taking a walk, he was a resident up there, and we crossed paths. He ended up inviting me to go for a walk with him. He had a daily route he took, so I walked it with him. He told me about his failed marriage and his crazy ex-wife. He talked about his kids and his plans to sell his house in Park City and move to some ski town in Idaho. It was pretty interesting. Real cool guy. I’ll never see him again, but it was an awesome experience.

I say take time to talk to random strangers. Get to know those around you. Everyone has a story to tell. It doesn’t take much to sit back and listen and ask questions.