TheTechFamily.comJesienouski Family News – Proud Bloggers since 2001

Taylor and I went to the Roadrunners game last night. It has been a couple of years since we went to a baseball game, so we felt we needed to catch back up.
I had a Bratwurst and Taylor had a chicken Sandwich. Then we had Nachos and then Ice Cream, it was great!
The game was going pretty well, the team was up 4-1, then the wind kicked in and by the bottom of the fourth, it started to sprinkle, I was hoping that the team could hold onto the lead and then the game could end in a rain delay. At the middle of the 5th, the Roadrunners lead 6-5 and the rain was coming down pretty hard. But then it stopped and everything went downhill from there.
The starting pitcher for the Roadrunners got tired and started walking batters more than usual, they replaced him and the relief pitchers started walking almost everyone. Taylor has early morning soccer conditioning and I go to work early, so as it was nearly 10:00pm and only in the top of the 7th, we decided it was time to go home. As we listened to the game on the ride home, they walked several straight and suddenly the score was 10-6 for the bad guys, what a waste. The Roadrunners eventually lost 10-8. As we drove home, we drove into the rain so it was a nice cool night.
The Crowd, as usual was very small, even though they were offering kids free with paying adults (which BTW, doesn’t apply to teenagers we found out) The ones that were there were having fun, until the rain of course, then it was basically only kids and the die-hards.
But we had a fun night!

Tonya was going to the store and she asked if I needed anything, I told her 34″ waist shorts and she brought them home. I was very nervous to try them on as the last time I could wear shorts that size was my senior year of high school, but shockingly, they were loose around the waist and they were not tight anywhere! I am almost to my goal of 32″ waist (which I think I could wear when I was at St. Vincent’s elementary school) Very happy day! Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels, so this should be fun!

I attended the Ogden Train Show.  It was a great time.  We had a LOT of people come and look at our layout. The highlight of the show, however, was the DDa40X that is parked outside. It is the largest diesel train engine ever built, and I got to sit in the cab! That was a big thrill for me! To see all of the pictures from the show, click here. My mom and my cousin with her new baby were able to attend. Hopefully, for the show in November, I can get the whole family together!

I finished up the first round of my diet over the weekend. I ended up losing 34.6 pounds, putting my weight at 206.4, which is the lightest I have been in my married life! I eventually will do another round, as my goal weight is to be 183 (my weight when I was a sophomore and junior in high school). It is so much fun to weigh less. We actually started eating semi-normally on Sunday, and I actually lost a pound! One thing I have found, it takes a LOT less food to make me full now. We had lettuce wrapped burgers for lunch yesterday, and I could barely eat one. Now I know I cannot push it as if I do I will be able to eat more and more, but if I do everything in moderation, I will be ok. I have also noticed that my blood sugar is back in the normal range, hopefully that will last.
The one problem I am having is that none of my pants fit. I have to wear a belt with my 36″ pants and don’t even get me started on my suit, which has size 42″ pants. I am going to the store this week to see if I truly can wear 34″‘s, which would be the first time since high school, I am excited about that. The goal is 32′s, but that is a little ways off still.
Changing gears (hah!) Tonya won us 2 tickets to the NASCAR Nationwide race is Las Vegas last weekend, so Taylor and I went to watch the race with 70,000 of our closest friends . When we got there, all the Sprint Cup guys where practicing, so we got to see Jimmy Johnson, Jeff Gordan, Tony Stewart(My Favorite), Dale Jr., Joey Logano (Taylor’s favorite), etc. That was real exciting! The race had Kyle Busch and Danica Patrick, so we were happy. It is really neat to watch a race in person, you can feel the wind from the cars and definately hear the cars, it is SO MUCH BETTER than watching the race on TV. We had a fun time.
Coming home, there was a huge wreck on I-15 about 15 minutes from Mesquite, both lanes were a parking lot, so Taylor and I watched almost the entire movie Transformers on my cell phone, there was only about 20 minutes left when we finally got moving again, a Suburban must have lost their trailer when we finally got up to the accident.

My wonderful husband Scott is turning 39 today!  So in honor of this occasion, I am listing 39 random facts about Scott that show why he is so amazing!

1. 1- Scott is 6’2″ tall but he wishes he were taller.
2. 2-Scott is a great dad! He loves his daughters and is super supportive (Tay may say overly-supportive at times). He takes off work to go to plays, games, and other special events. He wants to know everything they are doing and he does his very best to make sure they know he loves them.
3. Scott is a family man. If there is a choice, Scott will always choose to be home with me and the girls. He loves spending time together, even if it is just sitting home watching each other play on the computer.
4. Scott is very photogenic…not to mention amazingly handsome.
5. Scott was born in St.Paul/Minneapolis, moved with his family to Fargo, ND, and then to SLC.
6. Scott is brilliant. He is super smart and can learn/do just about anything he sets his mind to. I think Taylor inherited this trait from him. I remember in college, he would be facing a challenging programming issue and wake up in the middle of the night with the answer his mega-brain had been processing in his sleep.
7. Scott makes us laugh. If you don’t know this side of him, you don’t know him well enough yet. He has a dry, sharp, sometimes cynical sense of humor, but I just get it! He cracks me up on a regular basis.
8. Scott has never had a cavity!
9. In High School, Scott was in the band, a sports manager, and school mascot. He also worked at AlphaBeta to earn money for college.
10. Scott loves trains! He has a train room full of beautiful works of art and engineering. He picked up this hobby as a boy, but has really started taking it seriously in the past 5 years. He was just recently written up in the paper for his latest Train Show exhibition. He loves to show off his latest and greatest creations. Just ask!!!
11. Scott’s favorite color is BLUE!
12. Scott is loving! One of my favorite things about Scott is that he says “I love you” to me everyday, many times a day. He never leaves the house without saying it in the morning and he never goes to bed without saying it at night. And usually he says it about a hundred times in between.
13. Scott does his own laundry and does dishes almost every day! He (almost) never complains about anything else I ask him to help with around the house either. He is very generous about helping me whenever I ask, and even if I don’t.
14. Scott loves sports and is quite an expert with rules and other nuances of the games. It drives me crazy whenever we’re watching a sporting event and Scott will make a comment about what just happened that is echoed seconds later by the commentators on TV. It justs one of his gifts.
15. Scott’s (not-so) secret dream job is to be a train engineer.
16. Scott hasn’t had a soda-pop in about 10 years. He gave it up when he found out he was diabetic, just before his 30th birthday. I don’t think he’s had one sip since. Amazing will power!
17. Scott loves biking! He biked to work and back for the majority of the past 6 years. One year he even logged over 3000 miles on his bike. He’s been hit by cars twice, I think; and he’s been just about anywhere a bike can go in St. George.
18. Scott’s favorite 80′s band is Def Leppard.
19. Scott is very supportive of me and my crazy stuff! He encourages me to write, to play, to sing–to pretty much do whatever I feel I need to be doing at the moment. He is so great to help drive kids, or stay home while I’m out at Girls Nights or classes or meetings or whatever! He always says when I’m happy, he’s happy. How great is that?
20. Scott has about 5 email addresses.
21. Scott loves his dogs. He never had a pet as a child and he is head over heels in love with our dog Blackberry, and to a lesser extent, with Cricket. He could play fetch with Bubba for hours. They adore him too!
22. Scott is an early bird. He wakes up every day about 5:30 and is always the first one to work in the morning around 6:30 or 7:00 am.
23. Scott is kind of a geek.
24. Scott’s favorite movie is Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back.
25. Scott was once in a TV commercial dressed as Darth Vader.
26. Scott is a closet Twilight fan. He’s just finished reading the book while walking on the treadmill in the morning.
27. Scott is pretty handy. He’s been channeling his inner Tim Taylor in the past few years. He built a wall in the garage, installed a ceiling fan, and repaired our washing machine, and has been mastering the few tools he’s acquired, while constantly wishing he had more.
28. Scott has a great singing voice.
29. Scott is a wonderful friend. He has become friends with several “older gentlemen” in his train club and I love that he thinks nothing of the so-called “generation gap.”
30. Scott loves kids. He really is a natural teacher. Whether with the kids in Primary or at the train shows, or coaching a team, he loves seeing them smile and enjoy something he has created or taught them–most especially if the kids are named Jesienouski.
31. Scott is passionate. When Scott decides to do something, he does it ALL the way. He throws himself into projects and does it the way he wants. This is something I admire very much about him
32. Scott is an Aquarius which means he is shy, with strong convictions, sometimes hiding the depths of his personality under a layer of frivolity. Fits, I think.
33. Scott’s favorite food, among several favorites, is Italian Sausage…or anything with Italian Sausage in it. He especially loves going to Olive Garden for Zuppa Tuscana and salad.
34. Scott is good with money, and by this, I mean he doesn’t really spend any. He has made a great effort to keep us out of debt and is very thrifty, much to his wife’s dismay.
35. Scott cooks the meals at our house about once a week.
36. Besides working for the state, Scott also runs a computer business on the side, is an officer in his train club, and serves in our church.
37. Scott is very creative. Trains, websites, logos, graphics…he has a very creative mind and finds lots of ways to put it to use. I remember in college he made a basketball court out of masking tape in his dorm room. I  never saw it personally, but I heard about it…it was legendary.
38. Scott is a wonderful provider for our family. He works hard and makes sure that his family wants for nothing. He leads out in making sure we are having Family nights, family prayer, and scripture study. He encourages us to be better in every way. He is always the first to suggest improvement projects and fun activities.
39. Scott is the best father, husband, son, brother, friend a person could have. We are so blessed to have this man in our lives. I have known Scott for 18 of his 39 years–that’s about half his life– and he only gets better with each passing year. I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with this wonderful man.

We love you, Scott! I hope your day is amazing. Thanks for sharing your life with us!!!

Well, I have finally gotten back to work on modules for the T-Trak Modular Layout. These two modules allow us to change directions on the layout so now we can do things with the layout instead of just making an oval. The first one is a mountain with tunnels. The mountain lifts off to deal with possible derailments.  I made the trees a new way this time, I used Caspia for the trees, with green foam glued on.  I believe it looks really good and it wasn’t that hard to make a whole bunch of trees, and it was quite cheap, made over a hundred trees for $17.00.  Lots cheaper than the normal trees I buy and a lot more realistic looking.

The next module is my lake module.  I like the sea serpent on my old layout so much that I had Tonya make me a new for the T-Trak layout.  Tonya made it so that it was looking back, so I put a little girl standing on the shoreline and it looks like the dragon is looking at her.  I have named the Dragon Susan after the character in Monsters vs. Aliens.   Again I used the new trees and used a quite a bit of Woodland Scenics Realistic Water in the lake.  Tonya painted the base of the lake to have a shoreline and look like it gets really deep.

Here is a closeup of the little girl and the serpent. You can’t see it in the picture, but I have three adults running away from where the girl is standing. Also, I put some dead trees around the lake to show that when there are not kids to eat, Susan goes around and eats the leaves off of trees. Also to the side you can see part of the dam. On the other side, it has two culverts where water is coming out, looks pretty neat, but the picture of it was blurry, so you will have to trust me.
Lastly, here is a picture of them together. With these two modules and their sister modules that James is building, we can have four trains running on their own tracks and the layout is shaped like a +. It was very popular at the last show we were at, and it is still very easy to move the layout and setup. Can’t wait to put the big layout together again! Hopefully in January! BTW, if you didn’t notice, you can click on the pictures to see a bigger version.

This morning, for some unknown reason I turned left going off my street (normally go right). As I turned to get out of our neighborhood, I saw a house that had 10 reindeer in their front yard. I thought that was a very nice decoration and wondered where they stored such big decorations throughout the year. As I got closer, however, I found out they were not a decoration, there were 10 deer in the people’s front yard! 2 of them had antlers! I went to grab my cell phone to take a picture, but I guess stopping a car really fast in front of them spooked them and they ran off. I love where we live!

This morning as I was driving off of my street, I turned the corner and had to come to a halt as a deer was standing there! She looked at me for a minute, I looked at her, she got on the sidewalk and I drove by and I watched her go back on the road. I have never had a house before where I could walk outside and see a herd of deer, I love this place

Scott has been down with the flu for the past couple days. So far, the only one who has escaped is me. Unfortunately, I have already had 4 days off taking care of the girls, but better I miss work than Scott. He is on the mend, but he has had a temp as high as 101 and spent a whole night in the bathroom trying to get rid off all the food he’d eaten in the past week. He’s now getting a kind of cough…which I hope is not turning into pneumonia as has happened with some of my friends. It’s been a nasty year for bugs. Maybe it’s good that we are getting it over with so we can enjoy the holidays (knock on wood). I think it will be remarkable if I don’t get sick next, but then I already think it’s remarkable that I haven’t been yet. Hopefully my luck will hold! If only I could resist the Halloween candy as well as I’ve been resisting the flu!

Click on collage to see bigger version!

Scott and I have been married 17 years today! I guess we are getting to be an old married couple:) To celebrate, we took a day trip to Cedar City and revisited Cascade Falls. This was the location of my would-be proposal but timing and weather thwarted all of Scott’s plans…so we went back up a year later (after we were married) and he recreated his proposal for me. Today, we did the same thing. It was actually very fun and quite romantic.

It’s such a beautiful place! It’s an outlet for Navajo Lake just off Highway 14 in Cedar. Red rock, pine trees, and quakies everywhere. The trail was actually closed because parts had collapsed earlier, but all kinds of people were coming and going and they said it was safe enough, so we decided to chance it. And it was! We’re glad we went.

We came down off the mountain and ate at Applebee’s. I was pretty beat. (I do not recommend hiking on a 500 calorie a day diet!!!) I had my steak and broccoli and felt immensely better.

It was just fun to spend time one on one with my wonderful husband. Too often we get caught up in the craziness of life and forget to remember why we love each other in the first place. I always remember quickly after spending any amount of time with Scott. He has always been a natural fit for me–he is so fun and makes me laugh constantly. He has been a terrific husband and father over the past 17 years and I’m so glad to share my life with him.

Happy Anniversary, my love! I’m looking forward to the next 17 and more!