Busy Week Past...

We have had a fun and busy week. It seems like there is always something going on at the Jesienouski House. Scott posted about the big Halloween surprise party for Taylor. That was a hoot! I have Taylor on video as she is coming in the door, I could watch that everyday!

On Tuesday, we had our Young Women Halloween Party and I dressed up like a witch. We had fun with the 12 & 13 year old girls in my class.

On Friday night, Taylor went with her Girl Scout troop to Kanab for a Halloween sleepover party. They had a great time decorating pumpkins, going on a goblin walk and basically just having fun! Shaylie slept over at Aunt Anissa's house, since Scott and I had a "grown-up" party to go to that night.

My friend, Stephanie Sabaitis and her husband Shayne, invited us and two other couples over to play a Murder Mystery game. Scott and I played brother and sister and I was certain that HE DONE IT. But in the end it was the Banker. Oh well. It was a blast.

Saturday night we had our annual Trunk or Treat at the church. I am always gung-ho for this activity and as we won last year for best trunk, the girls were hounding me to do something good again this year. I decided to do a "Un-Fortune Teller" Booth. I dressed up as Madame Yasmina and gave the kids bad fortunes as they came into my booth. "Your armpits will soon be infested with the fleas of a thousand camels." "Your nose will grow great long hairs that refuse to be cut." I spoke with a thick accent and many of the kids (and parents) didn't recognize me. It was so much fun! But, alas, I didn't win. I think they didn't want to give it to me two years in a row. (That's my story anyway.) But, I was having so much fun in my booth, that I didn't even go around and see what anyone else had! Dang! So I didn't see what the winning car had on me.

Yesterday, it was the Jesienouski show at church. Scott taught the fifth sunday combined EQ/RS lesson on Internet Safety and the new Ward Web Site. I had my lesson in Young Women. Taylor had a talk in primary. And both the girls performed in the annual Primary Sacrament Meeting. Then Scott had interviews with his home teaching guys. So it was a crazy day...especially for a Sunday.

Today we got the girls all costumed up for the Halloween Parade at school. Shaylie is the cutest ladybug ever and Taylor was a spider witch complete with pet spider. In Taylor's class, they played Fear Factor and the kids had to face such gross challenges as digging through worms to find a spider ring, eating baby food (green peas), eating mustard flavored kipper snacks and putting their feet in Ice Cold Water for 30 seconds. It was a riot watching the kids try to down the fish and the baby food, in fact...I was surprised to see that the baby food was the hardest for them to eat.

Tonight, we are having Anje and Anissa, and possibly Bella & Chad, come over to trick or treat. We still have to rig up the Spider outside to attack the innocent children as they come to the door. I'm sure that I will have more to post after the goings-on tonight. I hope everyone has a safe and fun Halloween.

(PS- Happy Birthday to Rose Jesienouski and Ashton Strong. We love you!)

Boy, am I glad that is over!

The St. George DWS video conference equipment is now working correctly! All the equipment changes, testing, phone calls, getting yelled at, and the problem was...............a loose wire at the Dixie College Library. Now that I am done spending my life working on the video conference, I am having a hard time remembering what it was I did before this :-D
Now back to working on computers.

2 Weeks down, 7 to go

Taylor and I are now beginning our third week of training for the Einstein 5k race in February. The first week, we ran 60 seconds and then walked for 90 seconds for a total of twenty minutes. Last week we ran for 90 seconds and then walked for 2 minutes for a total of 20 minutes. This week we will run 200 meters, walk 200 meters, run 400 meters, walk 400 meters, and do that all again twice. By the end of nine weeks, we should be able to run 3.5 miles. We are following the couch-potato to 5K running plan. Hope we survive :-)

We had a surprise Halloween party for Taylor on Friday. Tonya invited all the girls in the immediate area that were her age so that hopefully she can make some new friends. I took Taylor and Shaylie to the park while the last minute setup occurred and kids arrived. Taylor thought she was going over to Shaylie's house that night, so when she got home, it was a big surprise! They painted pumpkins, then watched a scary movie outdoors (We hung a bed sheet off the trampoline for the screen. After that they played games till midnight. It was a very fun evening.

New Blog

Grandma Dawn has a blog! This was an extreme surprise. It reminds me of the time when my parents bought a computer. Good to see other people coming into the technology realm. Her address is: http://mommessages.blogspot.com/

GRRRRRRRRR....

After three months of working on the video conference system at work. I have now replaced the CSU, the PRI (three times), and now the codec. I have learned how program the system and how to wipe it. I now know the acryonms. I feel I have spent my life in the video conference room. Well, after that, it is still doing the same exact thing. But we now are absolutely sure of one thing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with anything in my building on the video conference. Which is what I could have told you three months ago. The only difference is now I have physical proof of that. What a total waste of time.

So Busy...

...and sometimes, I really hate my job. I have spent the last three weeks on the phone with tech support and State ITS and out of my office trying to get the video conference fixed. It has been so frustrating because I have been doing so much without getting anything accomplished (Everyone seemed to think it was someone else's problem). Then the worst thing happened yesterday. My boss, who barely even knows who I am (he has said "hello" to me last christmas and that is the only time he has talked to me in the last two years) writes an email to my supervisor telling him to tell me to get off my *** and work on the video conference equipment. Even my supervisor blew up about that. Oh well, I guess this is going to happen, as he never stays in touch, but I wish he would have talked to someone in the know, before he flew off the handle. I am going to start collecting letters of recommendation from a lot of the people I work with and send them up to my boss as an introduction to me.

In other news, on Monday there was a massive denial of service attack directed at the state. The shocking thing was, it was directed at the Novell Servers (these attacks usually go after microsoft) It was causing most of the servers in the state to reboot every few minutes. Once I got that problem solved, it was back to the video conference problems.

We had a printer that would stop printing after about an hour. After pulling it ompletely apart, including the motherboard and hard drive and NIC card, it still didn't work, but at least it gave a error message as to what was wrong. I eventually fixed that, but it needs a new nic card (I took one out of an older printer). The cool thing is, I got HP to replace the broken NIC card free even though it is out of warrently. I can be so cool :-p

I am at work today, even though it is Saturday, becuase I need to put server pack 4a on all the file servers.

I was right

I had my meeting with the Stake Presidency last night. I had guessed what was happening is that I was being released as 2nd Counselor in the Elder's Quorum to be called as the 1st Counselor in the Elder's Quorum. The meeting took all of five minutes. No wonder President Russell wouldn't tell me who was the new first counselor. I continue my slow upward rise. First, secretary, then 2nd counselor, now first. It is scary to think about what could be next.

New School Pics

We received the new pictures for the school year. Here is Taylor's:

Cute as ever!!! Now for Shaylie:

Once again, not centered. Vote in the poll if she should get retakes. And lastly, as she is now at the school as an employee, she has a picture:

Use or Lose

I just got an email saying to check your vacation time because anything over 320 hours at the end of the year is lost. I checked, and I need to take two weeks off! :-D We are taking bids to see where we should go. ;-)

Busy Week

We have a busy week ahead of us and many things to fix. Either we need a new battery for the Toyota, or we need to drive it around a lot to get it charged back up (We didn't use the car for 3 weeks, why do we need two cars? ;-) ) My bike is in the shop AGAIN for broken spokes (this is 61 miles since the last broken ones) and we really need to check our shower fixed. Also, there are some broken boards in the fence. Good thing Tonya got her first paycheck. :-D
Wednesday, Tonya has enrichment night and they are making 72 hour kits. We are getting 4 for us and I think Anissa and Dawn are getting some, so she will be busy that night. Also, I have a meeting with the Stake President, which normally could be scary, but I think I know what it is about, will let you know Thursday if I was right.
Thursday night is Ward Volleyball, we'll see....
Friday is the Ward Luau, but we are probably traveling to Salt Lake for Tonya's cousin's Wedding.