San Diego 50th Birthday Trip

Matt turned 50 this month.  To celebrate, I arranged for us to meet up with our long time best friends in one of our favorite cities, San Diego.  The Hammers live in Seattle now, and the Bells still live in the Boise area.  The six of us haven't been all together for almost six years! We've been saying for years that we need to go on a trip together, so I'm really happy that it finally worked out even if it was a short weekend trip.  We all stayed at the Hilton Resort and Spa at Mission Bay.  We packed a lot of laughs, good conversation, awesome food, and fun activities into those couple of days.  Mormon Battalion visitors center and Mexican lunch in Old Town, Coronado Island beach and hotel, delicious Thai dinner, breakfast where the hip young people eat, touring the air craft carrier Midway, hilarious six person surrey bike ride along Mission Bay, sunset walk at La Jolla Beach, and late night ice cream after seeing a movie.

A Jar Full of Fun

I have a friend who told me about how her family put all of their tickets and passes of family activities in a jar and save them for a year.  At the end of the year, they dump it out and look at all the fun times they had together.  We started doing that a couple of years ago.  We sometimes forgot to put ticket stubs in it, or we didn't have paper passes because so often they are bought on line and are electronic. We actually stopped even trying quite a few months ago.  But that jar remained in our cupboard despite being ignored.  I recently pulled that jar out and dumped it on the kitchen table.  It was fun to look through what was in there.  What did I find?  Lots of movie tickets, Disneyland passes, local and major league baseball games, tickets to stuff we did in Dallas, Rising Star president's brunch, Lagoon and Universal Studios passes, ski passes, Jazz and Real SL games, The Lion King broadway show (here in Utah), and tickets to Emma's middle school musical production.   Then it all went to the trash.  Maybe we will do that again one of these days.

Snow

February has brought us a lot of snow.  That's good and bad.  On the 6th, we got 15 inches.  Our kind neighbor snow blowed our driveway half way through the storm which was so helpful!

The next morning, Matt and I went to Oquirrh Lake and snowshoed around part of it.  We were the first to make tracks in the snow!  It was difficult at times to stay on the path because we couldn't see it at all.  It was super cold and snow was blowing in our faces, but it was so much fun and great exercise going through such deep powder.

February First Was "Fantastique"

February started off on a high note.  We enjoyed a night at the Salt Lake Symphony at Abravenel Hall which had been gifted to us by Chelsea and Spencer for Christmas.  The performance was called Symphonie fantastique which included music by Bach's Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 5 & 6 and Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique. The pieces by Bach featured a handful of instruments including violin, viola, flute, and best of all, the harpsichord which was fun to hear and watch the lady play.  Berlioz's piece was cool to listen to and imagine the story behind it which we read about in our program.  The best part of that symphony was watching the conductor do his thing.  Where we were sitting near the front, we could see him from the side and could see his facial expressions and hear his grunts and noises.  He was quite dramatic as he should be with such a dynamic piece.  It's amazing how he knows that hour (or more) long symphony inside and out.  He didn't have any written music in front of him.  I wish that I could have taken a picture or video of him, but of course that isn't allowed.  These pictures were taken during the warm up.