Finally…Sunshine!

I must say, my 2010 has not been off to a good start. We started off the year with a funeral, which should tell you something right there. In addition, I had a couple of very disappointing personal experiences in the first couple of weeks of the year: one relationship, one financial. It hasn’t helped my mood that we have been in the midst of our annual icky inversion the past couple of weeks. It has been regularly mentioned on the news that the Salt Lake City area and counties along the Wasatch Front have the worst air quality in the nation!

Last Saturday seemed to be the last straw. Ryan’s weekly job is separating the clothes for laundry. We went downstairs into the laundry room (where we usually only go once a week), and our ceiling had collapsed, and was continuing to drip. EVERYTHING was wet! Everything on the counters and floor, as well as streaks of water stains down the front of one cabinet. It was a mess! Papa and Ryan had planned to go to the International Auto Expo, so I still sent them off to do that. Rara came over and helped me get everything cleaned up. I had planned to spend the entire time that Ryan was gone working on my school work. Instead, we cleaned the basement.

Rara traced everything back and found the problem: a small crack in the tank of the upstairs toilet. Apparently water had been slowly dripping and seeping for quite a while, building up in the ceiling. We made a quick fix to that and called the plumber. Since it’s a holiday weekend, the charge for an initial visit would have been quite large. We felt that we had made enough of a fix to make it a couple of days until the holiday weekend was over.

So…now to the sunshine. Kristin and I have been thinking about something fun that we could do again with Ryan and Abby. We decided that since Park City is always above the inversion, it would be fun to go up there. I mentioned the Utah Olympic Park. The more we talked about it, the more we thought that would be a great idea. Plus, we had 2 for 1 coupons from the Entertainment book!

The Utah Olympic Park is located just off of I-80 and Kimball Junction. Most people know that it was the site of the bobsled, luge, skeleton, Nordic jump, and freestyle skiing events during the 2002 Olympic games. But what most people don’t know is that it is the official training site for not only the US athletes in those areas, but for several other countries, as well.

We went on a guided tour by bus, and were able to go to the actual sites and starting points for each of those events. Our tour guide was a former Olympic athlete, so he was able to provide a lot of fun details about the events and training. At one point, he commented that kids start training for Nordic ski jumping at about 10 years old. He looked at Ryan and said, “How old are you?” When Ryan answered that he was 9, our tour guide told him that he was just about ready to start. This happened just after Ryan had told me that he was too cold and wanted to stay on the bus. He has decided that he’ll stick with the Summer Olympic sports!When our tour was finished, we went back into the Alf Engen Ski Museum & George Eccles Salt Lake 2002 Olympic Winter Games Museum. We enjoyed learning about the history of skiing, remembering some of the highlights of the 2002 Olympic games, and participating in several activities which simulated the various sports. Since the Vancouver Olympic games start in about three weeks, we are excited about all of the new things that we learned about winter Olympic sports.When we finished seeing all of the fun things at the Utah Olympic Park, we drove to Park City’s Main Street. The Sundance Film Festival starts later this week, so the banners were up, and they are getting ready for the crowds and celebrities.We had an extremely yummy lunch at Red Banjo Pizza (also using the Entertainment Book coupon). Ryan and Abby stuck with their regular plain cheese pizza and garlic bread. Kristin and I tried the chicken & artichoke pizza with lemon juice squeezed on it, as well as the zucchini sticks. Yum! When we finished lunch, we walked down Main Street to the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory and bought some absolutely scrumptious things for dessert.

Thanks, Kristin & Abby, for a fun day! We enjoyed experiencing the sunshine – both literally and figuratively. We really needed that!