Nolan is now talking and very clearly putting sentences together. He has actually turned into quite the jabber-box. Recently I have been teaching him to say his prayers before getting into bed. Tonight the prayers went something like this:

Daddy: I’m thankful for Gracie

Nolan: Gracie.

Daddy: I’m thankful for Gehrig

Nolan: Gehrig

Daddy: I’m thankful for President Monson

Nolan: Monster… Monster? … MONSTER!?!

He later crawled into bed and held on to his stuffed monster he got for his birthday and kept repeating “Monster” until he drifted off to sleep.

A couple of days ago it was time for haircuts. Rachel and I mutually agreed to use the clippers on my head and give me a buzz of sorts. I look pretty funny because of my cone head and receding hairline. I’ve come to terms with it though. Afterwards it was Gehrig’s turn for another summertime buzz. As he was sitting there with his chin pressed into his chest watching his hair fall to the ground he said, "Why are you cutting my brown hairs?"

Apparently Gehrig wants to fit in. He’s the only blonde in the family. He was born with blonde hair and blue eyes, but after about a year and a half his eyes turned green. Now his hair is starting to darken. He likes that because he wants to look like me, so he was pretty concerned to see that we were cutting his "brown hairs".

So the 25 things tag on Facebook is cool and all. I enjoy reading them. I figured I’d put this on my blog instead. It will automatically be imported to facebook anyway. If you read this, consider yourself tagged, if you write or have written 25 things, leave a comment and let me know so I can read yours as well.

1. I love my wife – just as she is. I think she is the perfect companion for me.
2. I have 3 awesome kids. We love to wrestle together. Many a night has been spent wrestling on the floor. It usually ends when Rachel joins in and starts putting the hurt on me. She’s such a sadist!
3. I love sports – especially baseball. I don’t really like watching sports, it just makes me want to play. As I’ve gotten older I enjoy watching a bit more… just a bit. I hate exercising unless its in the form of a sport.
4. I’ve always known the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was the only true church. Always. Never a doubt. I know Jesus Christ stands at the head of it. I know Joseph Smith was called as a prophet to restore Christ’s church. I know Thomas S. Monson is the prophet today.
5. My top heros are (each for different reasons): Joseph Smith, My Dad, My brother Toby, My Father-in-law, Dale Murphy, Travis Knudsen, & President Tindall. (Sorry to everyone who didn’t make the list ;))
6. I broke my arm pitching in a state baseball tournament my senior year in Dave Draveky style. I’ve never broken a bone before or since then. I’m still mad that we lost the game because of it.
7. My favorite number is 7.
8. When we were first married and struggling to have kids, I bought my wife a dog. Her name was Maggie. She was a Shih-Tzu I convinced myself that I wanted to get rid of her because I hated dog pee on the carpet. Once Gracie was born, Maggie sat on a pillow crying the whole time because she lost all the attention. So we sold her. I cried like a baby. Despite how much my daughter loves animals. I don’t think we’ll every own another pet – especially an indoor pet.
9. I grew up in Roosevelt, UT. I loved it. I think the only time I spent indoors in the summertime was sleeping (even then I wasn’t always inside). I have fond memories of playing kick-the-can and other games with our neighborhood friends. I don’t think my parents every really knew where I was or what I was doing all day. I had a Huffy that took me all over town.
10. I don’t like hunting. My brother always told me it was becuase I was gay. Truth is, it is exciting, but it all ends as soon as you shoot the thing, then its just work from then on out. After cleaning, skinning, and cutting up my first deer, I haven’t had much desire to do it since. I’ll just buy my jerky thanks.
11. On a similar thread, I don’t like fishing either. I went about 3 years of going regularly and never getting a bite. So I gave up claiming I was cursed. My step-father who was an avid fisherman and hunter set out to prove me wrong… he never caught a fish or shot a deer in two of those year either. He finally agreed that I was cursed.
12. I prefer small cars over big trucks. I sold my small car and got a big truck because I found it to be much more useful in getting my never-ending-honey-do-list accomplished… if that’s possible.
13. I thought I would be rich by now 🙂
14. I’m inherently lazy. Like a river, I tend to follow the lines of least resistance. I wish that wasn’t the case. Otherwise, I’d be rich by now.
15. I’ve always loved computers and video games. I decided when I was young that I would love to sit in front of a computer ALL DAY LONG. I’m living the dream baby!
16. I’m a huge Dave Ramsey fan. I dropped $41,000 in consumer debt in 3 years. Last year, when Dave Ramsey came to Salt Lake City, I helped promote the event. I helped them sell more tickets than any other person and earned platinum tickets which allowed me and my wife to eat lunch with Dave before his show and have back-stage access. I do have priorties though as I left the show early to attend a stake priesthood leadership meeting.
17. I love stupid comedies. I don’t watch them much because my wife hates them. I don’t think she has a sense of humor.
18. I served a mission in South Africa. I would love to go back there. I wouldn’t dare take my family to a few of the areas I served though. I wouldn’t dare go back there myself unless I was wearing the missionary duds.
19. In high school I got really into CAD (Computer Aided Drafting). We competed in VICA  computer aided manufacturing competitions and won state and national competitions. We beat guys that worked for companies that made Indy 500 car parts. We even scored higher than all the college teams. After winning nationals in Kansas City, I turned down a scholarship and never did CAD again.
20. One of my favorite movies is Rocketman. I waited forever for it to be released on DVD. When they finally did make a DVD version, it was only available through the Disney DVD club. I joined and ordered 8 copies (the max they would allow me to order). I kept one and sold the rest on Amazon for an average of $50 each. All 7 sold in a few days. I got my DVD and made over $200.
21. I have the memory of an elephant. I can pretty much remember my whole childhood. Often, when my wife can’t sleep, she’ll ask me to tell her a story from my childhood. I’ve never told the same story twice, but she always falls asleep before I can finish the story. There are only 3 things I can’t remember… I can’t remember names, I can’t remember appointments, and I can’t remember… uh…
22. I ran into the same chain link fence 3 times in high school. Twice my junior year and once my senior year. The first time was playing football in PE. I jumped to intercept a pass and came down on the top pole and knocked out my front tooth. The second time was in baseball practice trying to catch a fly ball. It turned out to be over the fence and I got a black eye. The third time was in a game against Uintah. I robbed a home run and cut my chin open. That was the only one that was “worth it”
23. Last count, I currently own 88 domain names.
24. I think ice cream should be served after every meal!
25. In 9th grade I asked a girl to the end of the year dance. The girl I really wanted to ask had moved to Idaho. She happened to come back to visit and she said that if she had a date she could come back for the dance. So I asked her as well and decided to tell the other girl I had asked someone else. It was too close to the dance for her to be asked by someone else. I think this is one of the worst thing I have ever done to a person and I still feel bad for doing it. 😐

Sorry, just a quick rant here. I’ve always been a WordPress fan for blogging. It was probably the first blogging platform I tried and its probably the most popular out there as far as self-installations. There are actually many sites running WordPress that would not really be considered “blogs”, but that’s not the point of this post anyway…

It seems Blogger.com has taken the world by storm. I expected that to happen once Google bought them. Google certainly has the midas touch. They have improved the platform greatly too. They’ve made blogging so easy that my mother-in-law could blog! 😉

So here comes my rant. Blogger (aka blogspot) is great and all, but there is one feature that everyone seems to use that I absolutely abhore. It is the little music player that people keep putting on their sites. You know the one… the little flash player embedded from playlist.com. OK, I know its technically not Blogger.com, but seriously, that is the only place I see people using this horrid gadget!

I know a lot of my family and friends have this on their site, I don’t mean to offend… wait, yes I do. Take it off! I don’t want to hear the beginning of your favorite songs, really, I don’t.

It’s not that I don’t like your favorite songs, it’s just so much more:

1. The player doesn’t actually start intil it appears in the viewable area of your screen. This is OK. Some people put this at the bottom. So once I get done looking at your recent posts, I probably want to hear the intro to your favorite latest hit before I move on. If not, I’ll just hit the button to stop it.
2. Speaking of the button to stop it, I believe the only way to do so is to hit pause. That button is so small! That is just annoying. It should be the largest button on the player.
3. What’s the average length of a song? I’d say probably 3-5 minutes. What is the average amount of time a person stays on a web page? Probably about 5 seconds. OK, so with blogs, it may be a bit longer, but no more than a minute, unless you’ve really written a novel. But seriously, no one is going to still around just to listen to your songs. I would guess that someone is on a blog post page no more than an average of 30 seconds. There may be execeptions, but your blog is not one of them!
4. I use [[tabbed browsing]]. Sometimes I’ll go to my list of blogs and middle-click each one to open them all in tabs to see what everyone is up to. Yeah, I know I’m not normal, but this saves me a lot of time because I don’t have to wait for each of them to load individually. A few of this have this playlist in the visible screen area they start playing. Now if listening to one person’s music was not annoying enough, now I have 3 or 4 trying to play together. It makes for the worst kind of [[Mashup_(music)|mashup]]. I’ve got to go through each of my tabs, find the offenders, then try to click that stupid tiny pause button!
5. Maybe I’m closed minded because I don’t care to know what your favorite songs are. Maybe I have my own favorite music. Maybe I happen to be listening to it when I come browsing to your blog. Maybe your favorite songs seriously clash with my favorite songs. Ever think of that?Of course not, or you wouldn’t torture me so!
6. For those of you that put this playlist in your menu or footer or header, or generally somewhere that gets loaded on every page. Stop it! Have you noticed that if you click a post title you can then read the entire post and the comments associated with it? So when you do this, your little music player will have to reload and will generally pick a new song. Well, I guess that is a feature. I would hate to hear the first 10 seconds of the same song on every page. At least there is a new song to annoy me on every page, and I know exactly where to find that tiny little pause button immediately.
7. You’re killing my bandwidth. Yeah, I have high speed internet so it’s not that bad, but back to the tabbed browseing issue. When these things start playing, they are streaming music. That is going to slow down the load time of all my other players until I can get you to stop. So again, do me a favor and get rid of that thing!
8. Sometime my wife likes to catch up of friends and family through their blogs. This can be done on the laptop in bed. If the speakers happens to be left on and she comes across your blog, we would just like to personally thank you for waking our sleeping children to your awesome music. It’s probably their favorite music too.
9. I use a tool called Enounce MySpeed. It’s a niftly little gadget that allows me to speed up flash videos and watch them 2 or 3 times as fast. This is mostly helpful when I watch online video tuturials and such. There’s a slight problem though. It also seems to work on this little playlist player. So, as I’m scrolling down your page and get to the part of your menu where you’ve plugged in this wicked-sweet-gadget you found. Up pops my MySpeed controller and I just happen to be scrolling my mouse wheel still. Now your music plays 3 times as fast! That would be great since now I may actually get to hear more than the first 5 seconds, but its not great, really. I have to reset my MySpeed control back to normal and close it and find your stupid tiny pause button again. OK, so this one is not really your fault, it’s mine for wanting to get more information in less time. I’ll give you that one. Still, it is annoying enough to make the list.
10. It’s so [[MySpace]]-ish!

So if the above reasons are not enough for you to remove your playlist and you find pleasure in annoying me, I’ll burst your bubble now and just say, nevermind, don’t worry about it. I’ll just be visiting your blog using Firefox and Adblock Plus. I found that this playlist was on multiple domains such as profileplaylist.net, musicplaylist.us, etc. But I found this filter worked rather well: “*/mc/*.swf?config=*”

Lest I leave you sad and disappointed because you can see my point and agree with me, let me give you a suggestion. Why don’t you create a page (a page would be better than a post for this one in my opinion) that has your little playlist player on it. That way I could come to your site and IF I’m interested in seeing/hearing your favorite songs, I’ll check out your favorite songs page. I might even say, “Wow, cool, I like that song too!”, but probably not. There, win-win!

Where is the duster so I can dust… I mean undust things.

Gracie wanted to help clean the house yesterday.

Daddy: Gracie, get your scriptures and get out of the car.
Gracie: Uh oh. I think I left my scriptures at church.
Daddy: Oh, good!
Gracie: Why? … Why is that good?
Daddy: (Walking away) I was being sarcastic.
Gracie: (short pause) … Why is that fantastic? 

Tonight after reading scriptures we wrote in our gratitude journals. I wrote that I was grateful for prophets and apostles. I asked the kids if they knew who the prophet was. Gehrig said, “I can’t remember.” Gracie said. “President Monson. I then asked if they know who one of the apostles was. Gracie said, “I don’t know.” To our shock, Gehrig said, “President Oof-dorf!” [Uchtdorf].

disclaimer: Now, lest anyone think that our 3 year old is that bright, I venture to say it was a lucky guess because even though we have never told our kids the names of the 12 apostles or first presidency (which, yes, we should) I did read to Gehrig this morning from the Friend short articles about the first presidency. I’m still surprised that he remembered his name because I didn’t think he was paying attention to anything while I was reading.

I found this note on the fridge:

Gracie got some play-dough from school. She made a little pie and left it on the counter. I guess she was afraid I would eat it.

Yesterday I came out of my office to find Gracie had covered the walls with Post-It Note drawings. No worries. I still have tons of Post-It’s from 3M Employee Pallet sales 😉

Here are a few of my favorites (yes, they were bright pink, I don’t know how my scanner made the background light blue…)