Living in a Horror Movie

At the beginning of the month Noelle cut her foot on some broken glass. She made it down the stairs before I got to her with a towel. 

Unfortunately, I had to leave right after it happened so I bandaged her up, sprayed some carpet cleaner on the spots and took off, leaving the babysitter at home. (He did not notice the bloody footsteps before I left.) 

Well, Morgan got home from his meetings before I did. He was talking to Zach, our babysitter, and asked him what happened on the stairs. 

Zach was flabbergasted! He mentioned that Josh had come down from bed saying that his foot hurt...but he had no idea. 

Morgan went up to make sure Josh was okay. Josh let him know that it was Noelle that hurt her foot. 

Anyway, I got home and explained the situation. Morgan was able to clean up some of the stain, but we decided just to pull up the carpet and eventually replace it. 

Cafe Duo vs. Whisky Road Restaurant

Morgan and I had the opportunity to try two different restaurants recently. I thought I would share my thoughts for anyone interested.


Cafe Duo 
The design of this restaurant was beautiful. You could tell by the bathrooms that it was a high end restaurant. You could also tell by the menu!

Morgan ordered a burger with a salad and I got steak and potatoes. We also ordered an asparagus quiche because we saw one in the kitchen and it looked amazing.


We were with a large group of friends, probably 11 in total. It took the kitchen 90 minutes to bring out our food.

The food tasted very good, but there just wasn't enough. If Morgan and I hadn't ordered the extra quiche (which they accidently brought out with an extra side) I would have left the restaurant still hungry.

The presentation of the food was great, especially the salad which was wrapped in a cucumber slice, but still there wasn't enough food. *Disclaimer: my experience with high end food is limited to what I see on tv.
That said, it seemed like they were trying to be like the chefs on TV that give small portions of food. That is fine and dandy, if you have a three or four course meal. But the restaurant did not have appetizers or desserts on its menu. If you don't have an appetizer on your menu then you should believe that you will serve enough food with the meal to satisfy your customer.

The service was okay. Our waiter was kind and I always had plenty of water to drink, but when you have to wait so long for you food you are not really going to like your server.

Bottom line: Excellent tasting food, but not enough food and service was lacking. The server himself wasn't terrible, but the experience all together left me sour.


Whisky Road 
Morgan and I went to Whiskey Road to celebrate our 13th anniversary. The restaurant was smaller than Morgan thought it would be, but we were still able to get a table without having to wait.

The servers were all young, attractive college students (most likely). They were not dressed immodestly, and were very kind and attentive.

The FOOD was GREAT! I ordered salmon with asparagus and baked potato and Morgan got a steak with asparagus and Blue Cheese Au Gratin.

We both had just the right amount of food to be satisfied. We didn't get an appetizer because we wanted to save room for the dessert which was raspberry filled homemade donuts.

The donuts were the only disappointing thing about the evening. They were warm, covered in sugar and delicious. However, I had one donut that did not have ANY raspberry filling and some of the others only had a little bit of filling.
I absolutely LOVE raspberry filled powder donuts, at least the ones that I had when I was a kid going to the Hostess outlet with my dad. Lately I haven't been able to find any that have had enough filling. So, it was mildly disappointing, but still VERY Delicious.

Whiskey Road was also a little cheaper than Cafe Duo, but not by much.

Bottom Line:I would definitely go back to Whiskey Road again and again (I definitely want to try their hamburgers.

Farrell's Results

The results are in. I did not win the grand prize for the 10 week session, but I feel great.

Here are the stats from the beginning.

Mile Run: 8:56
Push Ups (on knees): 28
Sit-Ups: 31
Sit & Reach: 21 1/4 inches
Body Fat: 34.35

At the end my results:

Mile Run: 7:52
Push-Ups (on knees): 60
Sit-Ups: 43
Sit & Reach: 22


So I cut my mile by more than a minute, added 32 push-ups, 12 sit-ups and 3/4" on the sit and reach. I lost 4% of my body fast and 15 pounds total.

This is a picture of the woman who did win the challenge.  She lost a total of 22 pounds and looks great!

My Review of the Program:

The Coaches:  One of the big advertisements for the program are the personal coaches that each participant gets. There were 3 people in my group and we had two coaches.

I think it is better to describe the coach as an assigned friend. I don't know how they are picked, but they seem just to be other participants who have been at the gym for a while.

One coach would send us weekly emails of encouragement and some recipes. The emails were obviously stock emails that went out every week (our coach forgot to replace old coach names).

The coaches were both very friendly, however I didn't feel like they were pushing me to work harder.

So if you go in to this, then realize that the coach is not actually a coach, but rather they are your assigned friend.


The Instructors: I have a few favorite instructors like Angela, Angie, Joe and Kevin. Each instructor came up with their own plan for what they would teach that day, although you would basically be doing the same sort of exercises.

It is harder to stay motivated and engaged during the Strength Training days. You are mostly stationary working one group of muscles at a time. Some instructors were very good at keeping Bands fun, which meant that those who were not as good were noticeably lacking.


Class Times: I mostly went to the 5:30am class during my 10 weeks. I liked that it was in a smaller room so I could completely focus on what I was doing and not notice people walking behind.

A couple of evening classes offered babysitting which was nice when Morgan was out of town and I had to take the kids. It is just hard because in the evening I am worn out from my day.


The End: I actually did not win any prizes at the Celebration party, which bummed me out. Especially because they had a "Friends Prize" for people who came with a friend for the program and Charity and I totally did.  One of the instructors told me that was his fault, he forgot to put our names in for it.  Bleh.

I also wish that I had done my beginning testing for push-ups on my toes. You can't really increase speed, but you can increase endurance and strength. I recognize that this is me just being a little bit of a sore loser. I also know that you could purposefully do poorly at the beginning testing to have the results skewed, however I did not want to do that. I wanted to see what my level of physical activity was. I would have been cheating myself if I did not push myself.


So I am doing another 3 months of the program. I have switched to the 6am class so that I can sleep a little more and have more time with Morgan. I miss the teachers and other students from the 5:30am class, but I have to do what is best for my family.

Mount Rushmore!

We arrived in Hill City, SD Saturday night. We checked in to our hotel and found a place to eat. We wanted real food, which meant that it took longer and we didn't leave the restaurant until 8:30pm. We stopped by a grocery store and then went to bed.


Sunday morning we got up, showered, ate breakfast and then went to the Mount Rushmore ward for Sacrament meeting.

We changed into pants at the church building and headed out to try and see Mount Rushmore. It was rainy and cloudy and we were tempted to not even give it a try. But we came all this way, so we had to go and see what we could see.


The 2 umbrellas in the van were very handy.

Here it is!  Mount Rushmore!

You can kind of see George Washington's round forehead.

The rain didn't stop us from playing in the run and having a good time.

We went inside and downstairs to the tourist spots to see if there was something we could take a picture by to show that we actually had come to Mount Rushmore.

When we got back upstairs and outside the clouds and cleared a little bit!  We could see all 4 Presidents.  Horray! It was not a waste of time to drive home this way.

Still raining on the walk back to the car.

But Jet didn't let that bother him.

And then we drove home!

Driving and an Unexpected Stop

We did not stay the night in Pocatello. Instead we drove to Kemmerer, WY.  The drives to Pocatello and then to Kemmerer were absolutely beautiful. It was shame that we had some rainy weather, and then night driving so we couldn't see as much as we wanted to.

After playing in the hotel pool we started our drive to the Mount Rushmore Memorial. On the way we discovered that Martin's Cove and the Mormon Handcart Park were just off the rode, so we took an unexpected break.

I have a great-great-great grandmother that was a 10 year old child with the Martin Handcart. It was cool to see her families name up on the wall.

We decided to borrow a handcart and go on a very short journey.

Morgan and I pulled the kids, but it started sprinkling again so we kept things short.

This is a picture of Devil's Gate.

Jet was pretty tired.

Hanging Out in Pocatello

After we had fun in Utah we decided to drive up to Pocatello to see family there before we headed back to Iowa.


Noelle is showing me that she lost the owl pendant that was on a necklace that Aunt Shannon gave her. She was very upset because this necklace was very, very special to her.  Kyle is looking in the air conditioning unit for the said owl pendant.

We kept Jet locked in the swing.

Playing football.

Jet is still locked up, because we didn't want him to look like his cousin...

Who was busy playing in a sand box that had turned into a lovely mud pit.

Later, Noelle lost the necklace chain underneath the deck of the house. So we had to look for that, too.

We put the camera on a timer and took this great picture. Except Jet, who was sitting on the car, wanted to check out the camera and missed the shot.

So then we held him and stopped his shenanigans.

Driving to Pocatello

Noelle loved her wings and wand!

Noelle also got to open some late birthday presents while we were in Utah.

She was VERY excited about it.

On our drive up to Pocatello we stopped by a couple more temples. Here we are at the Bountiful Utah Temple.

Jet decided he wanted to see the camera .

He made it!

Then we drove up to the Ogden Utah Temple. Eli and Josh loved walking along the fence.

We needed to hang out at the fountain for a minute.

Walking backward is much more fun.

Finally, our last temple of our trip was the Brigham City Temple.