Beef lips revealed

What is up with the beef lips? Several people have inquired about the title to my blog so I thought I would finally explain the origin.
The line comes from a comedian named Jake Johansen who Glenn and I kind of liked when we were first married. (1990) I don't know if he's still around or if he's still clean (he was back then) so I'm not necessarily plugging him. But he did this bit on hot dogs where he was saying that everybody says hot dogs are bad and you don't know what goes into them so he was reading the ingredient list, hoping to find something about the little white ball maybe in parentheses, but he had to stop when he came to the beef lips. Then he said "Why are the beef lips in our food?" He then goes on that maybe we should give the beef lips to the dog, and you could probably get a dog to beg for a lip etc.
Not that that is hilarious in and of itself but it has become an inside joke of sorts between Glenn and I whenever one of us asks a "why" question, the other will often respond with "Why are the beef lips in our food?"
I actually thought it was a really good title for my blog because when I was first started the blog I didn't know if it was going to be about nutrition (healthy recipes and such) or more of a journal so this title really worked because it has a food element, it's personal to Glenn and I, and it's also kind of funny. So thus the beef lips blog was born.
My only concern has been the web address because I learned that if you don't put the hyphen in you will go to a blog that is not good. I thought about changing that part but first of all I don't know how to do it and second I think I'm somewhat established now at beef-lips so please remember the hyphen!
Here's Jake Johansen

and here's a hot dog

Enjoy!

Random Pictures

Here are some ramdom pictures that I've been meaning post.
Here are the girls before their first day of school.

This is William before and after his first day of pre-school.




This is Dylan in his golf "uniform". I grabbed him yesterday just as he was running out the door for school. He played in a JV match and although they lost, Dylan had the best score on his team. He looks good doesn't he?

Shelves

I am dedicating this blog entry to shelves. Yesterday I spent 12 hours in the basement working on organizing some different areas. The first was my cold storage room. We had some shelves built into the room but they were so far apart that there was a lot of wasted space. Each wall had 3 shelves so last week I added two more shelves giving us 5 per wall. That was a real pain. (I really don't know if it was a smart thing for me to learn how to run the cordless drill. I look back now 15 years ago and think that it was probably a mistake to install our first garage door opener rather than waiting for Glenn to find the time to do it. My impatience set a bit of a precedence.) Anyway I finished that storage room yesterday and quickly filled it. We had some food storage in the garage because of the lack of space so even though I completely filled the room I did get everything in there that was supposed to be there. I wish I had before and after pics but you will just have to settle for after. Here's the cold storage room.

Next we emptied some storage shelves in the basement laundry room and used them to organize the books for the amazon account that the kids will be running. This was Dylan's account but we decided to make it a kids account so they can all pay for their extra-curricular activities. Dylan was ok with the change because he now gets help and it's paying for the same things that he was using it for anyway. We used to make him pay for baseball, golf etc. but now it will be paid out of this account directly. A lot of my time yesterday was spent overhauling his amazon account. He really wasn't listing things correctly so a little more training was probably in order anyway. Here's how the book shelves look now. The girls did all the stacking and I think they did a great job.

All the books on these shelves were still in boxes that were stacked in corners and crannies. This isn't the whole inventory, there are two other book shelves by the computer just outside this room. I'm excited to have this organized and to have the kids all helping. I think it will be a good system.
And lest you think I have it all together here is the stuff that we cleared out of the laundry room which is now awaiting more shelving!

I never really have it all together but I do love the feeling of progress!

Swimming and snoozing

The kids went swimming a couple of weeks ago and I thought they looked cute so I snapped a picture. I love that they are old enough now to go swimming by themselves. This was on a Saturday afternoon and they were getting bored so we just shipped them off to the pool for a couple of hours. The only tricky part is William since he's not able to go without an adult yet. Luckily on this day William was not around while the kids made their plans and got ready. Of course I had to go make sure he was safe so I sneaked upstairs and found him...


The picture doesn't do it justice but he was sleeping all crammed into the wall. It looked like maybe he was looking down the side of the bed for something and then just fell asleep. I also need to mention that he ran around all morning in bare feet down at our office which is a big dirty warehouse. Ewwww, I'm glad he wasn't under the sheets!

"Building Up a Righteous Posterity"

I mentioned that I'm reading the transcpript from the Worldwide Leadership Training Meeting on the side of my blog but since that changes often I thought I would get a more permanant plug in.
I did not hear/watch this meeting first hand, in fact I knew nothing about it, but I remember the next day at church was a fast Sunday and a lot of people were referring to it. I was kind of disappointed (and bugged because I didn't know about it) that I had missed something so good and relevant to my situation.
Soon after I printed the whole thing from the internet but I didn't ever read farther than the first talk. Then when it came out in booklet form with the last Ensign I set it by my bedside to read with Glenn. Finally last night I decided that I just needed to read it! Hopefully I can read it later with Glenn but if not oh well.
Anyway it's a great resource. I love the way it was presented in a round table discussion because it feels so comfortable, like I'm just talking with a group of good friends. And what friends! I really admire all of the people that were involved: Elder Holland, Elder Oaks, Sister Beck, Sister Tanner and Sister Lant.
Elder Packer and Pres. Monson also spoke in the meeting. I think I'll be referring to this resource often in the next 20 years or so, or more likely forever.