YES! We back! Texas was so so fun. It’s hard to know where to start because family-wise my trip was so awesome and business-wise we kicked some tail. How about family stuff first? Then I’ll post all about the business end on uselifewisely.com. Yeaaaaaahup sounds like a plan.
The Duprees live in Houston, TX. It’s my sister Anna, her husband, and 3 children. We had such a fun time! Anna picked me up from the airport in their new Kia minivan and the AC felt so great. Texas is humid like pigs stink and that’s a lot. You can feel it all around you, it’s like getting hugged by the air non-stop. And if you’ve ever smelled pigs you know it’s an all-consuming choking awfulness. Lots of Humid.
Here’s a funny water fountain phenominon. I took most of the pictures in this post with my iPhone using a program with nifty filters that posts them to Twitter. That’s why they look attemptedly nifty.
The Houston airport is no respector to heights.
My first night there I went with Anna to her dance studio where she employs a couple teachers. One was sick so she took over the hip hop class. I helped out by teaching the kids a few breakdance moves. Ha ha.
Here I is, breaking it down with the ladies.
One thing I was so grateful for at Anna’s house was their piano. I now realize how desperately I want one. Or a keyboard, or a synth, or anything with keys. I really love piano. I only took 6 months of lessons when I was 8. I now have a few songs memorized and want to learn much more, it’s so fulfilling. They had the sheet music for Apologize by One Republic which I attempted but found a you tube to be a little faster to learn from. Amazing, this technology stuff.
I love this thing, want one of my own
It was so fun hanging out with my nieces and nephew, too. I took Sienna and Bella out to see the Justin Bieber movie on Friday night. We got some mexican food beforehand. These kids are hilarious.
Chuy's in Houston. Pretty good!
The Bieber movie was unbelievable. We accidentally (oh and how we did pay) went to the director’s cut which had an extra 40 mins of footage. That thing was LLOONNGG. Even Sienna the 10 yr old was wondering when it would end.
It’s true with Living Legends at BYU and true with the BieberFever movie, sometimes the crowd makes the performance. These people are up out of their seats and dancing. In the theatre.
Crazy stuff, huh!?
So pretty much visiting Houston was way awesome. My sister Anna is amazing. At her dance studio one of the moms was impressed she had any kids at all and about passed out when she found out Anna had 3 kids and is in such good shape. Good genes, right?
Hey blog peeps! I’m back from what has been a delightful escape from P-town. Oh wow lots has transpired, where to start?
Well Saturday Dec 18 marks the day my older brother got married to the girl we thought was impossible to find. Terrin is the newest member of our family and a great sister-in-law already. She’s way cool and we are all so excited about the weddin’. My family went to the temple together the day before which was so great. The temple is a very special place for those of the LDS faith. We believe families can be together forever through how we worship in the temple.
Ammon and Terrin looked fabulous and we had a great time at the brunch. We were all very impressed at my brother Eric’s toast, he’s so articulate and did a great job speaking. He’ll make an excellent attorney. He talked about how Ammon is the guy you hear a story about that was told through a friend of a friend of a friend. He’s right!! Ammon has been in the special forces in the Army, ridden a live and very large and angry bull, ran a marathon, killed a quail in flight with a .22 rifle hip-shot ( I was there, no freaking joke people), won a real MMA cage fight, rebuilt numerous cars and motorcycles, and ridden the “dragon’s tail” (world famous twisty road for fast sport bikes). Mucho thanks to Eric for the sweet toast.
My brother in law Cooper got Ammon a really nice BBQ for his wedding and we put it on the top of our Pontiac Vibe. Lucky it didn’t fall off!!
The reception was fun, we messed with Ammon’s car pretty good (but not too much because it’s a 2005 BMW 545i :/) and I tied some empty soda cans to his muffler so they would make noise when they drove away. They went to Beliz after
We looked went to walmart for some crud to put on his car. We may have been the only people in tuxes in any walmart across the globe.
So the day after the wedding was Eric’s birthday so we celebrated and then drove to Phoenix! Yes! We stayed with my older sister and her family another sister of mine from Houston and her family came too!
Hey y’all! I found out through my iPhone correcting me that “yall” is spelled y’all instead of “ya’ll” like I always thought. It makes perfect sense now. I was so blind.
This week has been amazing! Wow, so much fun and adventure. The trip to the trade show was more intense than I thought. The first 5 hours to Boise weren’t too bad, just a little rain and I was running on beef jerky and a pomegranate ‘naked’ juice graciously given by the lenders of the car. I would have been fine driving the VW Jetta all the way to Washington but my parents offered to let me drive one of their cars so I took them up on it.
I ended up driving the 2006 325i which was very very nice all things considered. First of all, you can cruise at 100mph and it feels like you’re doing 55. We didn’t go that fast the whole time but ya know, it’s nice to have it if you need it. Second, it has some pretty nifty traction control that came in handy when Benjie and I got caught in a snow storm in Washington. We couldn’t see more than 10 feet in front of the car. Intense it was. Sort of just crept up on us and I’m glad we made it out of there!
I picked up Benjie from work in downtown Boise, he works at Clearwater Analytics. It’s way cool, their office space is a floor of a taller building and they wear jeans and t-shirts to work. I’m so glad for that, I thought Benjie was getting all corporate-ed out and living under the tyranny of a no-fun boring-party poo-boss environment. Quite the contrary and that’s good for my homie.
For those new to Parker Planners, Benjie and I partnered in the summer of 2008 after Parker Planners was around for about a year. It was way fun to catch up and we had about 8 hours to do so on the way to Tacoma. Another super lucky (side story: see image below, yes, that is SUPER LUCKY ELEPHANT rice. I first saw it on my mission. Oh man that was good for many laughs) break was that our former employee Jackie Lau lives right in Tacoma now! She has a fancy marketing job with Kraft foods with company car and all that. She let us stay at her place which was super cool. We got there around midnight and left the next morning just after 6am. Quick visit indeed.
So we got the Hotel Murano (if you reverse the name like that it’s at least 14x more fancy than ‘Murano Hotel’) around 7am and it was mega artsy-fartsy. Loved it. Tacoma is a pretty cool city, lots of hills like San Fran and right by water like various other cool cities. Benjie and I set up our booth quickly and ate the free (ehh, kinda, we did pay hundreds of $ to be there) pastries and juice. People were busy body bees as they set up their stuff. It was fun to see. At 10am when the show was supposed to start we were primed and ready to talk about planners. The minutes felt like hours as an extremely slow trickle of potential buyers walked briskly, directly to the booths they needed to hit. Right past us. We then watched as a few more came and lovingly embraced employees at other booths. ? What? These people obviously have been doing this for years and already know each other. Can we be 20 years older and magically know all the college bookstore buyers, too? Huh? Who does this stuff anyway?
So after about 30 mins (2.2 eternities of stress and anguish) I thought we were doomed to be welcomed to a wonderful trade show and kick in the rear by a harsh reality that selling is harder still than I ever thought. Sigh.
THEN. Then a lady came up to us, she was younger, maybe late 20’s with some interesting piercings and tatoos. She was hip, funny, and seemed to like us a little. We talked to her for less than five minutes then she gave us a promising “I’ll take your info packet back to my boss and see what he thinks”. Oh good. Progress. Then after a few more comments from us she said “ok, I’ll do it, what do I need to fill out”.
Ammon and I hiked Mt. Timpanogos, the second highest point in Utah at 11,700 feet. It was really fun! Beware the video has a lot of references to the “double rainbow” internet meme made famous by Jimmy Kimmel’s twitter feed.
My grandpa Parker passed away in 1997. He fought in WWII in a submarine as a 17 yr old. He rebuilt lots of cars with my dad and owned one of 1500 Rambler Rebels (a very light and powerful car from the late 1950’s). I always liked coming down to Hurricane to visit he and grandma. They were always so kind and loving. Grandma would stuff you full of food and grandpa would direct you to the candy dish or read to you any time.
I’ve visited this place many many times but never met the neigbors until two days ago. Al next door has been cutting my grandma’s grass since 1997 when grandpa passed away. I had no idea someone was taking such care to help one of my family members. I was blessed with the opportunity to mow Al’s lawn Monday he is recovering from heart surgery. He said that my grandma is a very neat person. He’s right. The biggest surprise however was meeting Al’s wife. When I met her she said “you’re Ray’s grandson, it’s the eyebrows, I can tell”. Then she said we had beautiful eyes. I thought that was funny, but hey when you got, you got it . Sonya’s career was in nursing and she was the first on the scene when grandpa fell off the ladder. She tried to revive him but said he was gone before he got into the ambulence.
What a neat experience to get to know my own family better through close friends of theirs. I could/would/should really be back in Provo right now being responsible but I’d give up lots of money to hear more 1st hand accounts about my grandfather. When we meet people like that it’s not by chance. We need to hold onto and record those events.
This weekend has been amazing! So Thursday we loaded up the trucks, B-mer and Vibe and headed for the hills just outside Hurricane, UT. It’s pronounced “Her-ih-cun” said really fast if you’re from around here. We went to a place I’ve been many times with my dad and brothers to shoot guns and what not when I was a kid. My grandma has lived down here since the early 80’s and many a vacation day has been spent exploring southern Utah’s red rocks.
This trip we had my dad’s go-kart with us which was perfectly suited to the terrain. Way fun, and the best part is you can take a passenger along for the ride, too; this time it was a niece or nephew saying “go crazy!” or ” no jumps this time”. We also shot some guns and oddly enough there were hundreds of little tiny frogs all over the ground to entertain everyone.
Enjoy the documentation:
We went to a demolition derby Saturday night and it was they best one I’ve been to! Oh man you wouldn’t believe it! Normally they do cars, old weird cars with no traction and there’s a few bumps, but nothing spectacular. Ever seen demo-derby trucks!?! Yup, they got ‘em at the Washington County Fair! Oh yeah. We saw one get nailed from the side and flip over. So sweet.
There’s Eric and I on the way down. We got to drive my dad’s BMW, sweet ride though very high maintenance.
This is probably the best part of a cruise, unlimited super good food! Wow! You wouldn’t believe it. In attendance: Chelsea+Josh, Eric, Jared, and Me.
We spent a lot of time in bathrobes, this makes for easy hot-tubbing.
We rode quads on the beach in Ensanada Mexico. It was stinkin’ awesome. You had to drive on the steet in traffic for like 15 min just to get to the beach which was scary, but man the beach was worth it!
Here’s a little of our 4-wheeler excursion. This is Eric and I showing our intergalactic connection in being able to do donuts on quads right next to one another while not crashing into one another. I, however, exited the intergalactic circle and suffered the consequences. Viva 4-wheelers on the beach!
Hola amigos. La vida ha sido loco pero rocking bueno. That’s Spanish for: Life has been crazy, but rocking bueno! I just got back from a crazy 2 weeks. Trip to AZ, cruise to Mexico. Oh yeah. It’s like 2am and my dear Christina just got back from Aruba so we had a little chat on the phone. I’ll be posting pics and video fun from the cruise.
Cruises are crazy, you ever been on one? It’s like a floating city, man. There is non-stop food and people doing smiley happy-dances the whole time. Pretty cool stuff. Also cool is going to sleep in a surprisingly big bed and room for a ship and waking up on the coast of a new country! Yes! Booya for sleeping and waking up in new sunny places with cheap crud-ola you can buy. Street tacos for $1.10. Mmmmhmmmm. I didn’t even get sick! (that I am aware of) and I don’t even think I have any parasites! (that I can see).
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