I Like Jimmy Stewart!

While I was in Utah I watched Bend of the River a 1950s western with Jimmy Stewart, Arthur Kennedy, Rock Hudson, and Julie Adams. It reminded me how much I like Jimmy Stewart. As I look at the list of movies Jimmy has been in, I realize that I have not seen very many of his movies.  But the movies I have seen him in I really like. 

The Man Who Knew Too Much with Doris Day
It's a Wonderful Life with Donna Reed
Bend of the River with Arthur Kennedy
Mr. Krueger's Christmas

After I watched the movie I decided to read some of his background and it made me like him even more.

He got married for the first time when he was 41-years old and stayed married to her until she passed away after 45 years of marriage.  Jimmy stayed faithful to her the whole time they were married. (The IMDb website (where I got this info) mentions that not many men in Hollywood at the time were faithful to their wives, (and I guess that trend continues now too)). His wife Gloria had two sons from a previous marriage when they got married and then they had twin daughters together.

He was a pilot and served in World War II and received distinguished awards for his service in the war. He was friends with Henry Fonda, Ronald Reagan, and John Wayne.  He was a family man and seemed like a genuinely good, kind person. 

If you would like to learn more than you ever wanted to know about Jimmy Stewart, go to the IMDb website.

Jimmy Stewart is cool.

I Donated Blood!

I donated blood for the first time last week.  It wasn't so bad.  The people there were funny and put me at ease.  It didn't hurt too much.  And I met all of the requirements to donate.  I couldn't donate blood in the past because of all of the foreign places I've lived but the requirements have changed and now I can donate. Yay! 

The end. 

Birds!

 One of the other places we went to while I was in Utah was the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. It was awesome and I think Adam and Emma and Ellie and Lara and Glen would have loved it.  We saw lots of cool birds and the path we were driving on was a long the Bear River and it was beautiful! 

 Since Brigham City is not very far from the Bird Refuge we decided to take a short detour to see the beautiful new temple being built there.  Look at that!  Isn't is magnificent?! 

Near the visitor's center of the Bird Refuge. 

 A new kind of self-portrait.  A picture of the back of me and what I am looking at. 

 A ring necked pheasant. 

You have to look closely but there are two birds in this picture in the water.  I don't remember what kind, but they were cool looking :)

 I just barely caught the Great Blue Heron in the picture.  But I like it.

Another cool bird of which I do not know the name.

A snowy egret.

These ducks were fighting.  The duck on top was holding the other one under the water.  And the bottom one was kicking the top one with it's feet. We watched them fight for 5 minutes and there were no signs of stopping. 

Look at all of those pelicans!

Self-portrait of Timbo, Mamachka and I  :)

I liked this shot.

This one too.

Mamachka and I

The refuge was beautiful!  The birds were awesome!  And the company was great!

I Ran a 5k!

I ran in a 5k race on Saturday. It was my first race as an adult.  I liked it. Cami, Glen, and Emma also ran the race, but I just ran by myself.

I had two goals when I started the race.  Run the whole time and get under 33 minutes.  I definitely ran the whole time and my time was 31 minutes 16 seconds.  YAY!  I feel good about participating in the race and I am glad I achieved both of my goals.

I actually got a little teary-eyed when I could see the finish line and I knew I was going to make it. I was glad I was wearing sun glasses :)  This may sound funny but I felt like all of the other people in the race kind of gave me energy to keep on going.  Knowing there were people ahead of me and behind me helped me.

 

Under the Sea!

I visited Mom and Dad and Timbo in Utah for a week and it was lovely!   I relaxed and watched movies and read books.  I started cleaning out my room (which I did not finish, but I got a good start).  I hung out with Dad, Mom and Tim.  I visited with a couple of old friends and went to a few new places. 

 

The Living Planet Aquarium was one of the new places I visited with Timbo.  I liked it.  It was pretty small and some of the tanks did not have signs there to tell us what we were looking at, but I liked it any way.  It had some cool fishies.  

 

Like this one. It did not have a sign near it but we thought these were awesome looking fish. 

See the black, round spiky thing?!  Well that's a sea urchin.  Isn't it cool looking?!

Can you guess what this fish is without looking at the next picture?  And yes the fish really glowed like that. 

 

The fish above is a red piranha. I imagined piranhas differently.  I think I expected them to have bigger teeth, but this piranha did not have big teeth.

They had penguins at the aquarium.  They were fun to watch as they waddled around with their wings out and played with one another.  They were cute.

 

Although it's hard to see the otters in this picture, they are there.  I had no idea that otters lived in the Provo River.  These otters did not come from the river, but they are the same kind that live there. They were a lot of fun to watch.  They're brothers and they wrestled a lot and went down the slide a couple of times. 

Tim touched a stingray.  I was not brave enough nor did I have any desire to touch it.  Go Tim! 

Look at this amphibious fish on the land with no legs.  And his eyes bulge out of his head.  It was so weird to me.   Look at the picture below to learn a little more about the mudskipper.

An axlotl.  This was also weird to me.  Essentially it's a water salamander. Read below to read more about it. 

There were also seahorses and an octopus and cockroaches and an anaconda and rainforest frogs and jelly fish and small sharks.  It took us a little over an hour to see everything and we even went back to see the otters and the penguins twice.   I thought our little adventure to the aquarium was worth it. Thanks Tim for coming with me.

Shuttle Landing!

We saw the Discovery space shuttle make it's final descent into Dulles International Airport on Tuesday April 17. 

Heather (one of my bosses), Coralee, me, and Wendy (and Kathy was the one who drove us to see the shuttle but she did not walk up with us)

I got into work on Tuesday and some of my co-workers mentioned that the space shuttle was flying around the D.C. area to make it's final descent at the Dulles Airport.  (The shuttle is to be housed at the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum which is very close to the airport.) 

We talked about it and decided it was worth it to go somewhere to try to spot the space shuttle being flown in.  We decided to go the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum parking lot to watch. On the way we saw a lot of cars parked a long the freeway and on bridges and a long exit ramps to get a good view of the shuttle.

We got off at the exit for the museum but we could not get all of the way to the parking lot because the exit to go up was blocked off.  So we parked a long the bottom of the exit ramp (a long with a lot of other cars) and walked up the ramp to get a good view of the shuttle.  

And it was an awesome view!  We waited for a while and then this is what we saw. 

 Look at all those people that were there with us.  I got goosebumps the first time it came around.

 It was a spectacular sight!

See the fighter jet above it. 

 It was right there.  We were so close.  We saw it twice from this vantage point.  It flew this low one time but did not land, then it flew around one more time and we saw it again and then it landed.  We could not see it land because there were trees in the way but it was awesome! 

 

If you look at this picture you will notice the little space man on the right hand side, which we thought was so cute :)

I am glad that we decided to take this little field trip from work and see a little part of history.

Harlem Globetrotters!

On January 6, I bought two tickets to see the Harlem Globetrotters with Spence on March 24 at the Verizon Center.  On January 10, Spence was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. (You can read updates about Spence here.) I was really excited about going with him, but after he went into the hospital and started chemotherapy, I soon realized that he would probably not be able to go with me. I kept on hoping that maybe that would be the week he was out of the hospital and he could still come, but alas it was not.

Although I was sad about not be able to go with Spence, I was able to go with Adam. And it was a lot of fun! If you've never been to a Harlem Globetrotters game, I would recommend it.  It was highly entertaining!

 During one of the plays, one of the Globetrotters got on the shoulders one of the other ones and they ran to the hoop and made a basket like that.  This is the player that was on the shoulders and he held on to the hoop and couldn't get down because he was "afraid" of heights.

 The mascot came out during one of the plays and started dancing.  This guy was hilarious!  I can't describe it, you just had to see it.

 The globetrotters dancing with the mascot. The dancing happened quite a bit and it was hilarious every time!

 This player got himself up on the hoop while they were playing and when the opposing team would shoot a basket he would kick the ball away from it so they couldn't score.  Then they started playing music and he was dancing away up there on the hoop. It was awesome!  

 Adam. It was hard to get a good picture of this boy.

 Me at half-time.  Adam wouldn't be in the picture with me. 

 

They had a guest player on the team.  I can't remember his name, but he was some professional football player that I also can't remember from what team.  (He's the one on the far right.  Number 21.  With his back towards us.)  

 

 Another picture Adam Adam bo badam during half-time.

 Some of the players up-close.

 So throughout the game, one of players (Special K), had a microphone attached to him and he was talking almost the whole time.  He would crack jokes and make fun of the players on the other team and the referees etc. It was quite funny!

A couple of times they brought kids out to the court to distract the other team.  They did cool tricks with the ball as they were playing.

Oh and they had two rules in the game that they normally don't have.  When someone got a penalty for bad behavior, they put the player in the penalty box for a certain amount of time and wouldn't replace him with another player.  So at one point there were three globetrotters in the penalty box and so it was two against five.  The two smallest players were the ones playing against the five from the opposing team.  They did some pretty awesome tricks at that time.

The second rule was when there was three minutes left in the quarter, they would sound a buzzer and there were four spots marked on the floor where if you made a basket from there it was worth four points.

 The one semi-decent picture of Adam and I.

The final score.  The game was awesome!  Thanks Adam for coming with me!  I loved it!