Monday, August 26, 2013

Final Video Project

I finished up my New Media class and must say I really, really liked it. It was fun learning about video editing and shooting good shots. I've never had a class like this, where I felt vulnerable, but challenged, showing my work to my peers every week. It was fun to see everyone's ideas turn into a video that told a story. I loved the discussion and bonding time we had as a cohort. It's sad to think this was the last class we'll all have together. Only 8 more months until graduation. 

Here's my final video project. We had to do something geared toward our profession so I did an instructional car seat video. I appreciate my cousin and her son taking the time to act in my little video. When we were younger Stephanie and I made some pretty quirky videos, so it was fun to work with her again. 



Here are some photos from the last night of class. A few are people are missing, so at graduation we'll have to get a complete class picture.  



Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Work Bike Challenge

My employer has a great wellness program and upper management's support to back it up, which makes a huge difference. At my last place of employment a group of us started a wellness committee. It was my first professional group experience horror story. One person liked to dominate, upper management didn't care, and HR wasn't interested in prevention, they wanted intervention in the form of an on-site clinic. Now don't get me wrong the clinic turned out really nice and hopefully it's serving the employees well, but that is not going to help lower health care costs like preventative efforts would. 

The things I like about this wellness program is
  • every floor has fruit basket stocked with fresh fruit that you can purchase for $0.25.
  • they have up to $200 wellness reimbursements if you attend a class and your screening shows that you improved your health from the previous year. 
  • monthly activities

I decided to participate in July's bike challenge. It was planned out perfectly that the last day of the challenge was the Antelope By Moonlight Bike Ride. I was there, but didn't get to ride because I was working, selling helmets. 


I had a total of 10 rides, which I thought was pretty good, but turns out the winner had 94 rides. Either way for participating I received a $7 gas card. Most rides were by myself, but one day I biked alongside my brother on his way to work. I had a lot of fun and with the added challenge of it being a competition I was more likely to go out for a ride. I need to get back to that for my own sanity. I love using Strava to track my rides and follow other riders I know.


Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Camping At Our House

The Bear Lake With Friends post tells the story of how we ended up camping at our house. On the drive home we lost four friends who decided to go home. We got home around 10:00 PM so I played host and got all of the beds set up while the guys went to the store to buy meat to grill. We ate, had a bon fire, played a game, then went to sleep. 

My friends are great they washed my dishes and helped me cook. We had french toast and chorizo con juevos. After breakfast we all go ready to go to Fort Buenaventura which is literally 2 blocks from my house. We canoed, cooled off in the River, then did some more grilling. 









Here are a few videos I recorded for Instagram. The quality isn't great and the river sound is way loud. 



Our camping trip didn't turn out how we planned, but we had a lot of fun and definitely made some great memories. Hopefully we have a round two next summer. 

Bear Lake With Friends

Back in May we reserved cabins for our 1st annual friends camping trip, then we slowly waited for the months to pass until we could all be together in the wilderness. Jenny and Sam weren’t able to make it due to a death in the family, and we really missed them.

We arrived to cloudy skies and the threat of rain. That didn’t stop us, we still went to the beach, wet our feet and grilled some food. The water was a beautiful aquamarine color, due to the limestone deposits suspended in the lake. It looked as gorgeous as the water in The Bahamas, and is actually known as the Carribbean of the Rockies.



We had such fun group bonding activities. We all played volleyball. The men played cards and did most of the cooking. The ladies built a fire and had girl talk.



Later in the afternoon the girls set off for the pool while the guys continued their card game. While we were there the creepy grounds keeper kept pacing back and forth watching us. When the guys finally arrived he was less than friendly. He was mad that we didn’t have our wrists bands on. I fully understand that yeah, we should’ve went and put our wrists bands on, but we were having too much fun at the moment. The guy came back upset and said he was sick of us not listening to him and that guests had complained about our profanity. He decided to kick us out. I’m super non-confrontational, so I was okay with it, but the more I thought about how ridiculous it was to kick us out because of our language I got upset. First, I know us, and we weren’t even drunk or as wild as we’ve been in the past. I think we were actually all very well behaved. We were camping for hell’s sake, some words are going to come out. I’m going to call it like I saw it, this guy and his guests felt threatened by such a large  group of colored people. The hypocritical thing was I was getting mad at my husband for arguing with the guy, but not even two seconds later I went off on him. Like I said I don’t like fighting, but don’t ever challenge my race or my gender or I will attack your ass. We talked about how getting kicked out was bound to happen since quiet time was after 10 PM. I guarantee that we wouldn’t have met their  “quiet” standards.

So the Bear Lake KOA turned out not to be the right setting for us. We packed up, got a refund and headed to Ogden. Everyone was invited to camp at our house.