Thanksgiving

November 27 - we made it to both the Case's and the Techmeyer's for Thanksgiving dinner. The two were far enough apart that we could go to both, but close enough together that it pinched off the end and the beginning of them. But it worked out and we were able to spend some time with everyone.



After Dinner we had some time to relax and let our food settle, so we mostly sat around and talked and played games.

The Whole Family - Mostly

While everyone was in town we stood together for a few moments and had a few snapshots taken. Here is the better of the bunch of them. A few were out of focus, and a few had half+ of us either sneezing or yawning. I think that we did pretty good for a family of this size. We had Grandma, and all of her children and spouses, and all of the grandchildren and spouses - minus one on a mission and all of the great-grandchildren except about 3(?). That's the closest that we've come to an entire group family picture in about 5 years. Thank you for your patience. You'll appreciate it in years to come.

Grandpa Nebeker

We've had a somber last couple of weeks. Colette's maternal Grandfather passed away last week and his funeral was over the weekend. We'd like to thank everyone for their love and support at this time of loss.

Shayla's Comments
Heidi's Comments
Felicia's Comments

El Dia De Los Muertos

Our two "Day of the Dead" parties fell on the same day and the same time this year - 100 miles apart. One was in Logan and the other was in Sandy. There was no way that we were going to entirely miss either one of them so we compromised and went to both. We left one early and got to one late. We unfortunately missed out on a lot of fun at both - but felt like we were a part of both too. Colette went as 'La Diabla' (which is Spanish for a female devil). I went as the infamous Zorro! The kids had no clue who Zorro was so I told them that he was a super hero - something that they can understand - and I was suddenly wearing a cool costume! Here is Shayla's Pictures. Jenni's Blog.

Pumpkin Time

October 19th: Pumpkin Carving!

Welcome to our annual Pumpkin Carving with the Case Family. As always it was a lot of fun. We got a fun helper this year - an electric carver. Problem was that the overall process wasn't fast enough to pass it around. So everyone else was left to carving with a carving knife.


Brandon's was skeleton face. Ours was the werewolf.


Here we are, and no I am not a pumpkin guts eater. I leave that to Colette and Kyle.

The People Love Zorro

I wanted to be able to use my boots that Mom bought me several months ago (pretty much anything) so I decided to be.... I also got to get a really cool sword! This is at a primary Halloween Party for Lori's Ward. The picture was taken from my phone too so it's not very good - but you get the idea.

Showtime UT

Saturday night (18th) Mom took David & Hollie and Jenni & Jeremy and Colette & I to enjoy an evening with a dinner and a show at Showtime Utah! For those who don't know Sarah and Neil have been helping Neil's mom, Joan Peterson (here or here) with running a dinner theater in Pleasant Grove.

We were entertained with the Sizzling Strings. It was a very fun and high paced show. More talent than you would expect from a group like that! There was also a western themed show that revolved around the performance. Sarah played the part of "Ruby" and did a fabulous job.

We had a table on what would be the front row. At one point in the show they announced that they were missing their next act - that the can-can dancers had gone awry. So they selected 4 lucky unsuspecting poor souls from the audience to fill in. Well as luck would fall - Sarah claims she didn't set us up - David was one, and so was I.... Unfortunately since the evidence is damning - I have protected the innocent by covering their faces. Actually one of the ill-fated dancer's co-workers was in attendance and this individual suggested that it might be funny to place a photo on the company intranet of one of the dancers...I'm not laughing. So if you would like an original - I will selectively pass those on.


Here's one of the string players playing Vivaldi. Sarah also had a singing part. As you already know - it was beautiful.



Here's Jenni's Story here.

Dinner at Mom's

Sunday - October 12th. First of all we woke up to the song "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas". This is a view from my back door looking South-East.

I have a couple of pictures to post, and we had a lot of people there. With as many people that fluctuate through living in and out of state - they all seem to be here in UT. Denni and Burke were there with their kids and Keri and Mike came too. We decided that it was probably the first time that we'd seen Keri since her wedding like 5 years ago.

We had a pasta bar at someone's suggestion. Jenni made these awesome meat balls! We had marinara and Alfredo sauce, and assorted pasta, and breadsticks. It was quite a meal. Matt didn't make it, but with that exception all of the regular in-state-ers were there.

We played a fun game. Simple but it works well with a large group. Basically - everyone sits in a circle and there are chairs for everyone +1. Then everyone writes their name on a slip of paper. You have everyone draw a name. They are now assigned a new name. (You can have your own name). Then you determine a target location. Usually the couch that holds 3 people works best. Teams are Men vs. Women. Object: get 3 men in a row at target location (for the men). Object for the Women - opposite, get 3 women in a row. How it works: sit in approximately a boy-girl-boy pattern. Target location starts with one guy and one girl with the "+1" seat on the target location. The person with the vacant seat to their right gets to take a turn. Simply - they state who they would like to have sit next to them. So they say: "I want Sarah to sit here" and whoever is now assigned the name of 'Sarah' sits there - even though it's really 'David'. Make sense? So the Goal (men) is still to get 'Mike', 'Neil', and 'David' on the couch - even though their names are 'Mom', 'Sarah', and 'James'. One more rule: the same person can't move twice in a row. So it's a game of memory. Try and get people off of the couch who you don't want there and try and get people on the couch that you want there. 3 went too fast for a group of 20 people so we upped it to 4 people on the couch. Sound fun - try it!

If it isn't broke...

Ya know...when something is working out just fine - why change? Well I decided it was time to take one of those lunch breaks again! I shot at 25 yards today and this is 96 rounds. The Range Officer dutifully pointed out to me that I am using too much paper and that I goofed up on a couple parts of it - yeah thanks.

Our Rockin Wii Band

The other day was a Rockin day and we all played into the wii hours of the morning.

1:1,000,000

So I'm just sitting there minding my own business with my face glued to my monitor and suddenly out of nowhere I hear something wizz past my ear. I stared in confused amazement in front of me to realize that someone just threw a string cheese at me. In disgust I tossed it up and over my head. I turned around to see the response from the person that threw it, to find them looking all around for it. Another bystander pointed out that we could all sit and try and do that a million times and would never yield the same result. Wondering what he was talking about, we looked up.

That's What I Call a Lunch Break!

Normally on my lunch break I'll break out my lunch and go into our tiny lunch room and try and work my way into whatever conversation is going on and I eat my food. Or if I'm feeling anti-social then I'll nuke my lunch and head back to my desk. Well today was different!

We went to the Lee Kay Center just South of where I work. It's probably less than 5 miles.


A guy that I work with is a big gun fan - he's actually the one that David bought his shotgun from. He recently purchased a GSG-P5 and a GSG-5 and brought both of them with us. They are basically the same gun except one has a barrel muzzle and a stock. The other is just a pistol grip with a short barrel.

I think that I liked the one with the stock a bit better. They have a banana clip that holds 24 .22 rounds. He has several clips.

This is my target for one of the firing sessions. they both have a red light scope and my scope was a bit low on my first clip, so on the second I compensated for the height. We were shooting at 50 yards with no magnification.

Blue Lake Blast (pun intended)

We just got back from Blue Lake, Utah, which is just on the border of Utah/Nevada about 20 miles south of Wendover. It's a desolate place with one redeeming factor. It has a 60 foot deep geothermal heated lake. Now you ask why that is a redeeming factor to anyone? Well to Scuba Divers who happen to live in such a dry place as Utah - a 'year-round' lake is a dream. Ok, it's not a dream, but it's the best we got. It maintains a temperature of about 70 degrees on the surface and gets warmer the deeper you get.

David, Kurtis, and Me (Mike) went out there with the compliments to James for the use of his SUV. We towed David's tent trailer out there (we took mine last year and fagged out the suspension which resulted in a new axle). Well you would think that with 3 guys out in a desolate spit of earth you would get pretty bored pretty fast - well lucky for us we anticipated this and brought our own entertainment! What a Blast!

I think that we counted 15 guns between the three of us. We each needed a shotgun, each needed a minimum of two pistols, each needed at least one .22 rifle (cheap ammo), and we each needed a high powered rifle. So you do the math. Now sadly, not every gun that we brought was shot, but you have got to be prepared for anything. I also think we had somewhere in excess of 2000 rounds of various ammo - not counting .22's.

We have accumulated more and better 'stuff' over the years, and between the three of us we only had like 4 GPS's, 6 cameras (2 water), 2 video cameras, and 3 iPod's, etc etc etc.

Kurtis bought this M44 .30 a couple of weeks ago and it is a Russian Surplus gun from WWII - complete with Bayonet. I am here to attest that it shoots very straight and very accurate and it is very very powerful. I will demonstrate with a few pictures below.


David built this cool little swinging target to shoot at A while back. If you get it dead on, then it swings around 360 degrees - pretty cool. Well If you shoot it with an M44 it barely moves. The pressure does not go into it, no no no - the pressure goes through it! You're looking at 1/2 inch solid steel with a smaller piece welded on the back. BLAST! Yeah!


This is my attack - nice exit wound.


I brought James' .223 Carbine along and had a good time with it. We found a 6-pack up there and decided to dispose of it. If you look closely, the entry point is just below the "L". The exit point is the rest of the bottle! BLAST! Thought that it was a cool picture.



Then we moved on to shotgunning. We had a fun time (blast) with that too. This actually was the shortest of our gunning activities. The Beer Bottles were the funnest. The liquid (beer) filled bottles exploded on impact sending shrapnel everywhere. Oh the picture above was with a bottle that was emptied before we shot at it - I mean before we found it....



Then it was back to shooting at the target and I drew my 9mm and started shooting away - shooting the target away that is. Yeah I shot right on the weld and blew the target right off! You can see my M44 holes clean through, with a shot indentation on the very top rim - that was the final blow! BLAST!



Then after the lights went out - it was time for a small conservative fire and a couple of mild fireworks. HAH! If you believe we're going to follow typical campground rules in the middle of the desert - then you do NOT know us. To get a feel for the size of the fire, the box looking thing in the center of the fire is a dresser with the drawers strewn through there somewhere. Se found a sheet of plywood and a bunch of 4x4 posts and other crap there in the lot that we contributed to our light show of blaze! Blast!





We had an awesome time and the biggest draw back - other than the fact that all of us weren't there, was the **expletive** Horse Flies! Holy **colorful metaphor** !!! My body is freckled with red marks from **expletive** Horse Flies and mosquitoes. We decided that the moderate weather is not worth the trade off of having **you know what** Horse Flies. So we'll push this back into October - and hopefully it will be less buggy!



Diving Update: Nice water! 15' visibility or so. Calm silt. Dove Friday a.m. and early p.m. We beat the crowd - literally (The Dive Shop from Bountiful was there). Found "The Stop Sign", Horizontal, and Vertical boats, Parking Meter, floating Dummy Head, Golf Clubs, the Sea Turtle, some very active Hot Pots, and lots of Fish.

I bought a brand new Mask from Adventure Scuba in South Ogden. Coolest mask that I have ever seen! It worked perfectly. It is big and allows for peripheral vision and has a nose purge. We also rented our tanks from them. They are a very nice dive shop. They are the Dive Shop that we went to Flaming Gorge with in July.


Finally here we are enjoying the stars while laying on the dock.