Adam and Heather Hayes

Well, we made it through another very busy Christmas season.

It seems like we spent most of December running here, there and back again. (However, we didn't do any running the week of Christmas because of the weather. Then we just spent our time digging out our driveway time after time. Luckily, Santa was able to beat the weather and make it a very nice Christmas for us all.

The girls had a blast with their new gifts. Erith got a doll that she could "do hair" on. Tricity got a microphone, it just happened to be connected to a karaoke machine. Vi got her very own laptop learning thing and Clara got her own care bear. Mom got the Twilight series and hasn't surfaced since. I got a sander and a jig saw as my main gifts, plus some other fun Wii stuff.

Overall it was a great Christmas. My sisters spent Christmas Eve at our place, which means we stayed up really late talking and playing. Everyone had come over the night before to have our "Hayes Christmas" on Christmas Eve. I'm still the leg wrestling champion and we didn't have any bruised heels or broken egos this year.

Well here I am now in my 30s. :) 

It has been a while since I wrote, so I figured this would be a good time to sit down and write a bit. I had a great birthday earlier this month. Life has been treating us pretty well.

Here I am with all my cute daughters. Clara is growing up fast. She is now sitting up by her self and trying really hard to figure out how to crawl. She pushes up on her hands or kicks with her feet, but not at the same time yet.

We went up to Jackson and had some fun with my family. It was packed, but we all had fun anyway.

Business is good and we are just trying to wrap up things for this year. The girls are all doing well. Vi had the croupe but is better now. We were worried for a few days when all she did was rasp and sound horrible. 

Overall life is good. The house is all decorated for Christmas, and I think I finally got all my shopping done for this year. The girls (especially Tric) are excited for Christmas, and Tric takes every chance to tell me just how many days until Christmas.

Well my latest project has come to a close, (for now at least). We finished off the main components for the swingset recently. It was quite the project. It went through a couple of revisions as we worked on it and we added a number of features as we saw just how large a 12 foot swingset can be. 

We will be adding a rockclimbing wall on one side and possibly another slide and a zip line. (I mistakenly joked with Heather that all it was missing was a zip line... and next thing I know she wants one added.)

Anyway, we figured we should get it done before it snowed. Unfortunately it snowed on it the day we were planning on staining the whole thing. So it got snowed on once before the stain was on.

As to other projects, I hung two lights and replaced a ceiling fan that Heather got for our 8th anniversary. Unfortunately it included some crawling through the attic and digging through insulation so I could put in some extra supports for the heavier ceiling fan. All in all it went quite smoothly and it is giving the house a more modern feel compared to the older "brassy" lights we had up.

My next project will probably come around Jan/Feb as we tackle the master bathroom. Heather wants to completely redo it.

• New tile flooring/walls
• New deeper tub
• New cabinets
• New sink/toilet

Well, now that we've got Clara paid for (or at least her doctor bills, hospital bills, etc.) we're starting to get some money so we can do things I should have done earlier. The first project on the list was to insulate above the new office.

I ran into Home Depot and got 10 bags of "natural" cellulose insulation and rented a insulation blower. I also saw a slide while I was there that I got for the upcoming swingset project. Unfortunately, my eyes were bigger than my car. It took a bit of pushing, shoving, and manhandling to get the insulation, blower, 8' slide, and all the other stuff that was still in the car (3 car seats, a playpen, and a stroller) to fit. I'll just say it was a very very very tight fit and I'm really glad I didn't buy two extra bags of insulation or I would have been up a creek.

Well, I got home with all of the said stuff just in time to run off to softball. I got back home around 9:30, got the kids in bed by about 10:10 and then we decided to blow the insulation. It took both Heather and I to do it. I took the hose up in the attic and Heather manned the blower. After fiddling around with the machine, we finally found how to open the trap door at the bottom to actually let the insulation go through the machine. After we figured that out, it was just a matter of trying to navigate around in a attic that is not lit and fairly short.

We finished up right before midnight. I came out of the attic very hot, sweaty, and covered from head to toe in dust, dirt, and insulation (good thing it wasn't the fiberglass kind). I think it worked because the office is MUCH cooler today than yesterday so I hope that it was money well spent.

Well after fixing the pump for our well a few weeks ago, we decided that we didn't want it to have any reason to go out early. We had a leaky faucet out by the pump that had been very leaky for about a year now. I thought that I could just dig it out and replace it.

I soon found that it was a very, very deep pipe that I was trying to dig out of the ground. I dug for half of one day and was rather dismayed, downtrodden, and down right depressed at not having found the junction. (The hole had tons of water in it as I dug it because of the leaky faucet, so I was forced to "bail out" the water every few minutes so I could see what I was doing while I was digging. But the second day I got smarter and turned off the pump. So by the time I hit the junction I had gotten most of the water out of the hole). I called around to people in the ward that I thought might have a backhoe that they would rent. Unfortunately, nobody was home.

So I dug some more yesterday and finally found the junction. That was the good news. The bad news was that the hole was not even close to being big enough for me to bend over to work in, which explains the above pictures. So.... I ended up working in the hole upside down. (I had to come out every once in a while to get the blood back out of my head that kept turning very purple.) This was made even more interesting in that the hole filled up with some water after we took the old faucet out. So as I was hanging upside down in the hole with my head hovering above the water, I tried to tighten the pipe that was underwater, and thus invisible, with the pipe wrench.

Fortunately, I didn't drown and we have the new faucet in place. Thanks goes out to Josh who didn't let me drown and Stuart who helped me know how to replace the thing once I got the hole dug and for taking pictures so you can all laugh at me. 

Well, well, well, what a week we've had. 

I woke up on Tuesday and found that we had no water. I was worried that our pressure tank had finally given up and that I'd find a few feet of water in the basement. Fortunately that was not the case.

After checking breakers and fuses and getting some advice from Stuart as to which well pump service company to use, we had Forman Pump come out and check out our system. They checked the "quick fix stuff" first, but it wasn't the cheap stuff that was broken. After pulling over a hundred feet of pipe out of the ground we found that our 11 year old pump had gone out (normal life span of a pump is 12-15 years from what the experts told me) So we replaced the pipe and pump and dropped the pump down another few feet because the water table was lower for this time of year.

Well, unfortunately that wasn't the end of our problems. We powered up the pump and things were good, but we had awful water pressure. Dropping the pump meant putting it closer to the bottom and closer to the dirt/silt/stuff that resides at the bottom of the well. That plugged up our filter in quite a hurry, but it was probably a good thing that it did, because it made me look into the pressure tank a little more than I had.

I decide that it would probably be good to pressurize the tank again. So, I called my dad and he came over with a couple of tanks of air. We pressurized the pressure tank (I now know how to do it properly) and everything works great. We've never had this good of water pressure. I really think that our pressure tank hadn't been doing its job for a while now (it is a bladderless tank and I think the air was all but gone in it). I think that contributed to our early pump failure.

At least now I know what to look for as signs to re-pressurize the system, and understand a little better how a well pump works.

On the down side I have one heck of a sunburn that looks pretty funny. Hopefully it will have faded a bit by the time we bless Clara in a couple of weeks.

Well I know it has been a while since these tournaments, but with us having a baby in the middle of everything, I just haven't been able to write about them. However, I do want to talk about them because we took 1st 3 out of the 4 tournaments with one of them being a perfect day where we won every match including against our toughest competitor Hillcrest.

As for our final stats over the season:

49 games won, 9 games lost (85% game win rate). 23 matches won, 8 matches lost, 1 tied match (74% match win rate).

April 19th

• IF-Tracy (win)
  
•     25-9 (win)
•     25-15 (win)
• Shelley 16 A (win)
  
•     25-21 (win)
•     25-18 (win)
• Toca (win)
  
•     25-14 (win)
•     25-19 (win)
• Hillcrest Jena (win)
•     25-19 (win)
•     25-16 (win)

April 26th

• Shelley (win)
•     25-14 (win)
•     25-14 (win)
• Blackfoot (win)
  
•     25-11 (win)
•     25-17 (win)
• Dig-it Gold (tie)
•     25-21 (win)
•     21-25
• Dig-it Black (win)
•     26-24 (win)
•     9-25
  
•     15-9 (win)

May 3rd (We weren't supposed to play at this tournament, but they had an opening so we played (even though we didn't have our SETTER).

• Hillcrest Jena (Ranked #2)
  
•     17-25
•     21-25
• Bobcat 16 (Ranked #1)
  
•     18-25
•     23-25
• Jackson Hole 16 (win)
  
•     25-8 (win)
  
•     25-18 (win)
• Shelley A (win)
•     28-26 (win)
•     25-16 (win)

May 10th

• Jackson Hole 16 (win)
•     25-14 (win)
•     25-14 (win)
• Blackfoot (win)
•     25-17 (win)
•     25-19 (win)
• Shelley Jo (win)
•     25-9 (win)
•     23-25 (I probably shouldn't have let them goof off as much... but it was their last tournament)
• Hillcrest 15 (win)
•     25-15 (win)
•     25-20 (win)

This is an amazing talk that discusses in no uncertain terms the financial problems facing the United States. It goes over some amazing statistical data for "average" families and the financial crunch that many people are facing compared to 38 years ago.

Skip forward to 4:45. That is where the lecture actually begins.