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We got a little excited about growing our own peppers this year.  I picked out some really nice looking Anaheim and Serrano peppers that I figured would make some good salsa.  We planned two 20 ft rows of peppers. That should be enough right? But we didn’t plant any bell peppers.  I don’t know why, that’s what we buy the most of at the grocery store.  Usually we get that pack of red, orange, and yellow peppers from Costco and it lasts us a week.  I guess we like peppers.

Cari really likes them. She has taken to just munching on fresh bell peppers as a snack.  She especially likes the sweet red ones. When she found out that we hadn’t planted any in the garden she was really sad.  But she was determined she would solve this problem by herself.  She took the one last red pepper from the fridge, cut it open, took all the seeds, and put them in a paper bag to dry out.  I think she got about 100-200 seeds from that single pepper.

Our garden peppers were already sprouting and some even had good leaves growing. It was late June when Cari told us that she wanted to plant her peppers in the garden with the others.  We didn’t want to break her heart by telling her that it was too late. The other peppers had a good 4 or 5 weeks head start and she probably wouldn’t get any peppers before the first frost, if they even sprouted at all.  So we humored her and tried to prepare her for the fact that her peppers just weren’t going to grow.

Because we figured hardly any would sprout and partly because we were tired of digging holes to plant things we planted about 20 seeds in each hole. Nothing happened.  For weeks she would run to the pepper rows and check for her sprouts.  Each time she would come away with the same heart-broken look of disappointment. Then something crazy happened.  They came up. All of them.  In a matter of days we had many many dozens of pepper sprouts crowding each other.  So we thinned them out. Another week later we thinned them again. I think we thinned them out a total of 4 times.

Now we have as many bell pepper plants as we have other peppers.  We have been harvesting our other peppers for about 3 weeks but hadn’t seen any flowers or tiny peppers yet on the bell peppers. Until last week.

Cari and I were at the farm harvesting a couple baskets of tomatoes and Cari was asking me “How come Mommy was so excited over her first tomato? We have TONS!” I tried to explain the excitement ones feels when they first start to see the fruits of their labors.  She didn’t get it.  Then we walked past the peppers and there it was.  The first pepper.  Cari was so excited she started screaming and jumping up and down.  And she finally got it.  She understood why Mommy was so excited over the first tomato.

And I am amazed.  Seeds from one pepper we bought at Costco.  Now it looks like we’ll have bell peppers to last us the whole fall and first few weeks of winter. Not to mention all the salsa and spaghetti sauce we’re canning.  I think we’ll even have plenty to dry in those cool bunches and just hang up for fun.

Moral of the story:  You can count the seeds in a pepper (if you’re patient) but you can’t count the peppers in a seed. Never underestimate the hopes and desires of your children.

So I started Cycling.  I’ve wanted to do it for quite sometime.  This summer I made the goal to get started and not more than 2 weeks later MonaVie announces that we’ll be putting together a team for the ULCER this year.  I figured, “Hey, this is a heck of a way to kick it off” and I signed up.  The ULCER is next week and I’ve been trying to get prepared.  This weekend I rode a 58 miler.  It just about killed me.  So I figure I need to step it up a notch if I’m going to finish all 105 miles of this weekends race.

So I’m biking to work a couple times this week.  This is what this morning looked like.  How can you not love that?

Just getting to slow down just a little and enjoy the sunrise is worth it alone.  Not to mention the getting into shape and being healthy.

See you out on the road.

So my stake has a big farm.  Actually the church owns a really big chunk of Saratoga Springs and it’s all farmland.  But they have this small strip of it that’s probably about 10 acres or so that they set aside for the wards.  Each ward is in charge of what they do with their lots.  Our ward this year just announced that anyone that needs extra garden space can sign up and get some garden space down at the stake farm.

We like fresh produce as much as the next family so naturally we signed up.  Turns out that only 4 families from our ward signed up and we ended up with a whole section to share with one other family.  Each section is 40ft by 160ft.  That’s bigger than the grass that I mow at home.

So far we have spent about 20 hours planning and digging and planting and watering and we’re almost a quarter of the way done getting it all planted.  And I’m sore.

But there’s something about farming (gardening) that just feels right.  I don’t know if it’s because I live almost 70% of my waking hours in front of a computer screen but standing in the middle of a field watching the sun go down as I dig neat little rows in the dirt is really an amazing experience.

I have a friend that is taking a class on guitar making and he is making his own custom acoustic guitar.  I have the honor of designing the head for him.  A relatively small task but an important one.  And I was thinking about it, “How would I love to build my own guitar?”  Man, that would be my pride and joy.  But really, I don’t have the time for it.  I have chosen not to.  Am I missing something that is more valuable to me that what I have chosen? I don’t know. I think I’m right but only time will tell.

I also recently launched a photoblog.  How would I love to carry my camera with me everywhere and find one fantastic shot every day. I am also getting all the equipment for my own darkroom donated to my cause.  I just hope that I’ll have the time to develop a handful of photos each month.  There’s nothing like watching your print come to life in the developer.  I always over-expose and carefully watch my developer times.  Then yank and into the stop bath.  Most of the time it turns out with a little bit more contrast.  I love the contrast. Continue reading

Jonathan is 9 years old.  And he reads books.  Lots of books.  And he reads them fast.  I was worried that he skipped over things he didn’t understand because he reads faster than I do.  I wanted to know what kind of books he was reading so I tried to read the books that he brought home.  But he would have them finished in one day and I would only be a few chapters into them.  So I gave up on that.

Then last month he decided he wanted to keep a blog.  So we got him set up with a blog.  His first post was about how to level up your character quickly in an MMORPG called Runescape.  It was every bit as good as many of the tutorials that I have read on many online games.  I was honestly a little bit surprised.

So then about 2 weeks ago, he told me that he had been working on a book at school and he needed a thumb-drive so he could bring it home and work on it here too.  When I first read it, he had written about 3000 Continue reading

So I have been here at MonaVie for 6 weeks now. It’s a lot bigger adjustment than I was planning for. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, it’s just more different that I was expecting.

I have had big corporate jobs before. The kind where everyone has a responsibility and they just stay within their little silo and do their job. Then they go out after work and forget what they did all day. It’s like there’s a mental force field around the building that makes you forget your job as soon as you leave.

When I worked for myself I didn’t have a silo, I wore every hat that needed to be worn. I did what I liked and made my own decisions. Then when I left the building, I couldn’t stop thinking about what we were going to do the next day. Not because I was stressed (most of the time anyway) but because it mattered more to me than it could to a 9to5er. It was fun.

See, I knew all that already when I came to work here, and I was expecting to have to make a conscious effort to adjust. But there’s a few thing I didn’t expect. Like I had forgotten that I have hobbies. I can’t wait for spring to go fishing and golfing. And I have been finding ways to get time for photography. I forgot how much I love those things.

But then there’s this entrepreneurial side to me that I just can’t seem to silence. I have about 9 irons in the fire and I just can’t seem to let any of these ones go. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to let them go. Most of them are small but there’s a couple that could be huge. And as much as I love golf and fishing, I love business more. But who’s to say you can’t have hobbies and business? If I remember correctly, I never golfed more than the first 2 years running Main10. That’s also when I got to take that fishing trip to Vancouver Island.

So I guess I am adjusting, and I’m enjoying having time to think about business away from work. And I am enjoying being able to work with big marketing budgets in my day job.