Last week I got a $50 gift card to Target from one of my clients (along with a $100 Home Depot card and a $50 Famous Dave’s – oh, so good!) and was pondering what to use it for. Then I remembered that Jenni and David had told us about this cool DVD player, made by a company here in Utah and sold at Target and WalMart stores, that filters objectionable content out of movies. So I checked into it and, lo and behold, it was $50! So, we went and got one a few days ago. It’s called ClearPlay (www.clearplay.com). It is very COOL! Basically, you download the filter for the movie you want to watch (or download all 2000+ of them, plus they’re constantly adding new filters as movies come out on DVD) onto a thumb drive or a CD. Then you load the filter into the DVD player (or load a bunch of them – it will store a lot of filters so you don’t have to reload a filter each time you re-watch a movie) and watch the show. The filters remove adult content, profanity, vulgarity, violence, and gore. Actually, I haven’t had enough time to play with it yet to learn all it does, but you can at least turn each category of filter on or off. We’ve just left the default settings.

Last night we hooked it up to the projector and watched School Ties, which has a lot of swearing in it, and it just silences out the swear words. Well, at least all but the semi-swear word that ends the famous last line of the movie. But I really don’t think you could filter that one. Having the movie end in abbreviated audio would just be really weird. And there’s a long, pretty rough fight scene at the beginning that was shortened to about 10 seconds with no blood. But if you hadn’t seen the movie before, you would never know it was missing. So anyway, we thought it was very cool and give it two thumbs up. And at $50, you really can’t lose. I’m looking forward now to watching 300, Apocalypto (might have to turn the violence filter off for those two, or they’ll be a half hour long), Alexander, Munich, United 93, Anchorman, and a bunch of other movies we haven’t been able to.

I just realized i never updated this with the news we found out last week that we’re having one of each! Julie and I were both hoping for one of each so we are excited.

Well, we had an interesting vacation at Bear Lake last weekend. The Lehman family always goes camping around the end of July, first part of August up to Bear Lake. Most go for at least 2 nights, and come back Saturday. But we just went up on Friday afternoon.

The adventure began with multiple stops at grocery stores and gas stations as we made our way from Layton to Logan to Garden City with some slow going between Layton and Logan where they’re doing all the construction on the freeway. So we finally got up there at about 6:00 pm.

The 2-man tent in the wind

Julie and the kids in the wind storm with Eden getting her diaper changed

Peyton holding the stick caterpillar

We were able to head down to the lake for a bit just to wade. But as we were getting ready we realized that we had left Eden’s bag with her swimsuit, clothes, and diapers at home. So she had nothing to wear but what she had on. You’d think as a former European missionary I would have known to just let her go Euro style and run around naked on the sand (then this blog could have been titled “Going Bare at Bear” and that would have been pretty cool). But the thought didn’t occur to me until after I’d just rolled her pants up and let her play in the water for a while and get everything soaked. Eden decided though that she did NOT like walking on the sand and made me put her shoes back on her. Pretty funny. After the wading and a good mud fight between the boys, we headed back for some good foil dinners and scones.

As we were finishing the scones, a stiff wind started rolling in from the lake and just got stronger and stronger. Soon, our tent was only about 2 feet tall because it was getting blown to the side so hard.

Katie and Megan had brought our little 2 man tent and it was almost flat on the ground. Julie and the kids got in our tent and sat against the back wall to keep it up while I stood outside and held the rope tie-downs. For some reason our tent seemed to be getting the worst of it. This was strong wind, apparently around 50 – 60 miles an hour. It lasted about an hour and by the time it was done, we had 2 cracked fiberglass poles that will need replacing before our next camping trip.

The next day was pretty rainy and cool. Not much fun for swimming. But we did find this cool caterpillar crawling on the back of my shirt. It looks just like a twig. Sorry I didn’t get a closer shot. So after a while we just packed up and headed home, with a stop at the famous Fredrico’s in Logan for pizza and salad.

I just got off the phone with USAA, where we have our homeowners and auto insurance and numerous investment accounts. Even though they’re located in San Antonio, I REALLY like the convenience that their website offers to manage all those things, even together with our local credit union accounts and because they cater to military and their dependents, their rates are almost always lower than anything we’ve found for us at this stage of our lives.

However, I’m very disappointed with them now, because since the last time I called them for some support, they’ve gone to an IVR system. You may not know it by that term, but that’s the technology where you call a company and you have to talk to a recorded voice to get where you want to go. Maybe I’m too old school or something but these systems drive me completely crazy! One reason is that I hear myself sounding like a robot as I say “Banking . . . Investments . . . Brokerage Services . . .”. Another is that NO ONE IS LISTENING TO ME!!! I’m not talking to a person. The “person” on the other end is just taking a recording of my voice and breaking it down into digital bits and processing it to decide where to send me. You all know I’m not a talkative person anyway. It’s hard enough for me to talk to other people , now I have to talk to a machine??? And it seems as though more and more companies are going this route. I’m not even asking to talk to a real person! Just let me push buttons. Tell me which number to push for Banking, then for investments, then for brokerage services. I’ll push all 3 of them. It’s not like talking to a recorded voice saves me any time!

I would feel completely different about it if the systems were smart enough for me to just tell what I wanted, like “Uh, yeah, let me talk to someone about my brokerage account.” Nice and easy and it could send me right to a brokerage services account agent. That would be great! But as it is, I have to listen to the whole menu of options and the word I need to say for each particular option anyway. JUST LIKE I DO IF I’M GOING TO RESPOND WITH A BUTTON PUSH. So why is it better? Have we become so lazy that it’s too hard for us to lift our hand and push the proper button on the keypad? I can’t imagine this is true. So the only reason I can see for adopting this technology is if it saved the consumer time. BUT IT DOESN’T!!!

I’m not even asking to talk to a real live person (although, this does make me long for the days of a few years ago where contacting virtually any technology company by phone, meant speaking to someone with an Indian accent who had never set foot in America before — but that’s a whole ‘nother topic). No, just take me back to the good old push button days where I can let my fingers do the walking – and talking! Well, fortunately for us IVR haters there’s a great website I just found. GetHuman.com. This contains the “secret codes” for tons of the big companies out there to get you directly to a customer service agent, whether they’re in India or not. Check it out.  Some are kind of funny and make you wonder “how did they figure THAT out?”

And tell me if I’m just too old school. I’m 32 years old, and technically a Gen-X’er, but sometimes (like with text messaging – I’ll blog on that another time) I know I can sound like a grumpy old man.

Julie’s up at girls’ camp for the Young Women this week, so we’ve been juggling our kids back and forth between her parents, my sisters, and me. Well, yesterday, I returned home from picking up the kids after work and had a few messages from a lady in our ward wondering if we wanted any sod because a friend of theirs had a couple extra pallettes and was just going to throw it away. Do we want sod??? Are you kidding? It had been awhile since the last message she had left, so I frantically called her back hoping that the friend had not thrown the sod away. Turns out they just assumed we wanted it (like I said, a very safe assumption), and her husband had borrowed a company truck with a pallette jack and gone to West Jordan to pick it up and bring it back to us and he would be back up here by 7:30 or so. WOW! So cool.

So I ran out to get going and my home teacher was outside, hard at work filling in sprinkler holes. What a man! I told him the story and we hurried to prep the parkways for the coming sod. Julie’s parents had got the parkways all cleaned out of weeds and junk so it was just a matter of pulling out some dirt and leveling things for the most part. The sod showed up and as the truck came pulling up to the curb, about 10 of the youth in the ward from age 12 to 17 came walking up the street, ready to help. I passed out shovels, rakes, and gloves and some continued the parkway prep and others started laying sod. Well, that is after we had quite an adventure getting the sod down off the truck. It had a hydraulic lift and we thought it would be pretty easy, but I ended up laying into the pallette like a blocking sled to keep it level and on the hydraulic lift.

After about 20 minutes of sodding, another friend in the ward showed up to help pass out drinks and do whatever she could. That was a huge help because about this time, Logan needed help inside, Peyton and Soren were hungry, and Eden was about ready for bed. So she took over in the house and made sure the kids were taken care of and eventually put to bed, so I could stay outside and work.

It was now starting to get dark, so I pulled out the construction floodlights and turned them on the parkways. We finally got all the sod laid and the mess all cleaned up around 10:00 pm. We got all the front parkway and about half of the side parkway done with the 2 pallettes. It was awesome! Even though it was just parkways, IT WAS GRASS!!!! I haven’t taken pics yet, because Julie’s got our camera, but as soon as she’s back we’ll post some up here. I can’t wait for Julie to get home. She is completely out of cell range at Aspen Ridge so I haven’t talked to her. But I wouldn’t tell her, even if I had. She’ll be so excited for that surprise awaiting her. I’ll just tell her I had it planned all along!

We know that much. We went for an ultrasound yesterday and the doctor said one is a girl.  He THINKS the other one’s a boy but couldn’t be too sure.  It was real hard to get a good angle plus they’re only 16 weeks along and most doctors don’t do the ultrasound to tell gender until 20 weeks anyway.  But everything looked great.  They were head to head in there, and definitely taking up a lot more space in there than just a month ago when we found out.  The next appointments in 3 weeks and it’s with a perinatologist, which they send you to for any high risk pregnancy, which twins are.  But the doctor said again yesterday how natural or “spontaneous” (not conceived through any of the various fertility treatments) twins are SO much safer and lower risk, so that’s always good to hear.

Last week, Julie was sitting home, enjoying a bit of peace and rest while the kids were quietly playing on their own.  It doesn’t happen very often, so it’s a big deal!  Then the doorbell rang and Julie opened the door to find a Layton city cop.  Now, some of you will remember that Julie has never done well around cops.  Once she got pulled over for driving too slow.  The cop just wanted to encourage her to speed up a bit but he ended up having to console a bawling teenager who apparently thought going slow must be a prisonable offense.  So the presence of the policeman, combined with raging pregnancy hormones was not a good mix and Julie almost immediately was in tears.  The policeman informed her that someone had complained about our yard, that we were in violation of city ordinances with the weeds in our yard, and that we had 2 weeks to get things cleared up or we would receive a citation.  He was actually very nice about it.  But I was ticked off.  That lot where our house sits has been uninhabited for 25 years before we built our house, totally overgrown with weeds every single one of those years.  And now when it is TOTALLY OBVIOUS that we are putting in our sprinklers and getting ready for grass and actually trying to make it a nice yard, we get complaints.  So I called the officer and he was pretty understanding.  I told him that we had to fight with Layton city for 2 YEARS to get the irrigation water that we had paid for and that the previous owner of the land had paid for every year and that was supposed to be part of our property actually put in and that there was NO WAY I was going to pay $400 or more a month to water an acre with culinary water when I’m paying for irrigation rights every year.  Yes, there is an ordinance that says that your front yard has to be in 18 months after you move into the house.  But that also implies that the basic utilities to be able to get that done and which we’ve been paying for, have actually been put in.  Well, he agreed and said that as long as we’re working on actually improving it, that’s what matters.  I just wish I could tell that to whoever complained.  I asked who did and he said it was an anonymous complaint.  So Mr. Anonymous Busybody Neighbor, I just have this to say:

“Believe me, NO ONE wants this yard completed more than WE do.  Do you think we like having the ugliest yard in the neighborhood?  Do you think I like telling my kids they can’t go out and play or that they have to go to the park to play because of all the dirt, mud, weeds, and sticker bushes that are all over our yard?  Maybe if you were as observant of the people in my yard as you were about the yard itself, you would notice that we have been working on that yard, on getting the sprinklers in, on getting the weeds taken care of so we can put in grass.  We’ve had friends and family come help us.  It’s a big job.  It sat untended for 25 years while you and the rest of our neighbors used it as a dumping ground, or a golf driving range (we have found a ton of golf balls as we’ve been doing this sprinkler system) or a hot-air balloon launching pad (seriously, a neighbor ran their hot air balloon ride business from our property at one point), or a scenic view spot (even now with our house built, we still have people just wander right into our backyard to look at the view, like there’s not a house there – really weird), or a “political/garage sale/open house sign” place.  I’d like to get it done too.  And soon it will be and we’ll have a nice big yard that we can invite the whole neighborhood over to for a barbecue.  I only wish I knew who you were so I could UN-invite you.  Next time, be a man, come talk to me if you have a problem with my yard or my kids or whatever and I’ll be more than happy to explain what’s happening so we can resolve it like good neighbors.”

OK, done venting.   And here’s some pics of the latest work we’ve been doing on our yard: