Days of 47 Float

Kaitlin illustrated my float idea for me.

Several months ago I was asked to serve on our Stakes (our area of churches) Days of '47 float committee. Here in Utah, Pioneer Day is a state holiday. We call it the Days of '47 because 1847 was the year the pioneers first settled Salt Lake Valley.   Every year there is a huge parade in Salt Lake commemorating the event.  The Days of '47 parade is second in size only to the Rose parade, west of the Mississippi. This year our Stake was asked to build a float to enter into the parade.  For the last month our committee has been brainstorming ideas, and I ended up submitting two ideas, complete with artistic renderings.  This week one of my ideas was accepted!   They asked me to run a blog and a facebook page so people in our area can be kept up to date on our progress.  You can read all about my float idea there. Since right now the idea is really only a concept, the next step for our committee is to draw up an actual 3D plan.



Straight A's? How Did that Happen?

We have hit the half way mark in the school year for the kids.  This week we looked at Kaitlin's grades for this past quarter.  She had gotten straight A's! Kaitlin was amazed. "How did I get an A- in Chemistry?" she exclaimed.   We looked it up and discovered that she had been given 30 points of extra credit and that had bumped her up from a B+.   The extra credit was marked "water passes".  Kaitlin thought for a moment and then it dawned on her; she had not used any of her 3 bathroom passes the entire quarter.  Each was worth 10 points extra credit.   So how did Kaitlin get straight A's this quarter?  Because she didn't go to the bathroom in Chemistry, that's how (of course, there is a lot more to it than that, lots of responsibility and hard work and all that, but the story is funny regardless).