Celebrating Mom

My mom's birthday is at the beginning on November, so we all gathered to her house to celebrate her. Here are the pictures I love from that day. I sure do love my family; they make me happy.

Raking Leaves

Evan and Chance came over in November to help us clean up our yard of leaves. We had a bit of play time and enjoyed the nice weather. Got a few pictures of Chance playing.

Friday Night Videos

I hope that everybody had a great Thanksgiving. We had fun with two different dinners/desserts, so we ate more than we needed. We didn't mind.

Yesterday, before the dinners, I stumbled across the story of Stephanie Nielson and her husband, who were in a plane crash and survived; but not without the physical scars. I was touched by her story and various videos I found...I began to read her blog. My family was in a plane crash when I was four and I realize how lucky...lucky isn't the right word...we were protected. I have always known this, but never understood it. Stephanie's strength is astounding. Here is one of the videos on her story:
Click Here to go to her blog.

Rafael's Art Studio

Way back, at the end of October, one of my friends and I went to visit a little art studio. We'd heard about it and thought it would be interesting.

The studio is located at 1320 S State Street, and the tours are offered on Fridays from 12:00 (noon) to 2:00 p.m.

We didn't know what to expect, but I can say that we were surprised by what we saw.

Rafael is not associated with any religion, but he has studied the Bible, Book of Mormon and the Torah, among other religious writings. His art is based on the theologies he's read and interpreted. It was an interesting experience, if not creepy at times.

He has hallways, and staircases going off into narrow passageways. Many of those, were ones he didn't show us. At one point, deep into the "depths of hell," my friend and I looked at each other, and I could read that her expression was what I was feeling. We were very deep into the ground and I thought, I hope I've been paying attention because if Rafael was to turn off the lights, we'd have no way to know how to get out...it was a labyrinth in many places.

Although I didn't get a negative vibe from Rafael, I was relieved to get out of the building at the end of the tour. I felt pretty unsettled.

Here are some of the pictures I took that day.

The first of the many statues he showed us was this version of Eve, climbing onto the back of the serpent to reach the fruit.

This hellish version of the serpent is found deep in the ground, in the depths of Hell.

This is Eve as Lady Wisdom:

Rafael didn't explain this one to us, we walked past it and I wanted a picture:

Hanging on the wall are these old instruments. Rafael used to work at Summerhays Music before it burned down. This is what he recovered:

This is the only picture of Rafael that I have. He turned right as I snapped the picture.

To see more of the pictures, click here.

Farewell, My Friend

This past week, a friend of mine passed away from complications of pneumonia. It was shocking for all of us who counted him a friend.

He was one of those people, that other people want to be like. He was kind, generous, supportive and loyal to his friends. And he made friends easily.

There wasn't a time when I'd stop by his office that he didn't offer me chocolate. He always had a smile. He made the best homemade ice creams and various other desserts...which, he shared the recipes with me. I'm happy to have them.

It used to make me so mad that he would try to start a water fight at the most random times...because it made him happy.

When I was offered the position of trainer, we was more happy than I was expressing...he was so happy for me because he thought this would be a perfect position for me - that I would flourish. He was right.

I will miss running into him and seeing his smile and hearing his laugh. He was a very good man and he deserved a lot more than he ever had here, and I hope that he knows the impact he had in my life, and the lives of all those he touched. It sounds cliche, but he really did impact people with his kindness. I will have a couple of taco-stand-dollar-tacos with week in his honor.

There's so much more I want to say about our friendship and the influence had on me growing up, but I will leave it at: I will miss him.

Friday Night Videos

Here are this week's videos:

Anime to a whole new level...a holographic concert:

Hilarious video about how other people's music can be so distracting:

How Phish sounds to people who aren't fans....made me laugh:

One semester of spanish love song....hilarious!:
I wasn't planning on all my videos being related to music, but there it is.

Josh and Lucas

A good friend, Mark, and I decided to experiment with our photography skills by taking pictures of his kids. These were taken before Halloween. I'm kinda behind in posting my pictures. Here are my favorites:

Lucas:


Josh:

Friday Night Videos

Week Two of our go-live is complete. Yay! My time was limited, again, but I found some really fun videos.

I fell in love with this song:

I find this song to be inspiring and it reminds me of my friends who fight hard to be good moms every day:

I'm posting this one because people are awesome:

My new favorite commercial (a game I'll probably never play):

Friday Night Videos

Posting on Saturday, because I could barely function when I came home from work yesterday. We went to dinner with Eric's family and then came home, and it was straight to bed for me. It's been a truly exhausting week, but it's a once in a lifetime oportunity to be involved in this project.

Here are the video finds I've been saving up.

These two are adorable:

Sarah McLachlan's new song. Start at 30 seconds to get to her song (and skip the introduction):

I saw the original vidoe on the news this week, and then found this explanation (sort of):

Last on my list of clips this week, is an advertisement for my employer - and I'm pretty loyal to them, so I was proud when this rating was released:

Magnificent Seven

Two days into the Go-Live I have a few Must Go's. I have to start with the fact that we've had old, DOS based systems to schedule patients and register and bill them. More than one system....so we desperately needed some new technology.

We've trained more than 4,500 users in eight weeks and we went live with the new system on Halloween.

I'm one of seven trainers on the phones as a resource to other trainers, IT outposts, super users and end users. We are called the Magnificent Seven. I have enjoyed being in this role and I think the roll out has been smoother than a lot of people expected....but, we get the issues that people have and I have issues with some of those people.

here is a brief must go in regard to this experience:

1. Don't enter in multiple trouble tickets for the same issue. Really!?

2. There are so many people in the command center working through the many trouble tickets and so many people think that their issue is an emergency, high priority and should be the top priority!

3. Calling one of the Mag7, not liking the answer, so calling back to speak to another Mag 7. The answer didn't change.

4. Other credentialed trainers who "help" answer trouble tickets and then reassign them back because they don't know how to answer the question....We don't always know the answer, either, but we find it and then close the trouble ticket.

What I have loved - What Must Stay:

1. Really great Super Users in the clinics who practiced after training and made sure that their areas were truly ready for the go-live!

2. A doctor who called me today and realized in the middle of our conversation that this new system means they'll have to change their entire work flow, and while I fretted for a minute about how he would kill the messenger (me), instead, he says: "Actually, we've been needing to re-evaluate our work flow and this will make us do just that." Yay!

3. Managers who have had so much patience when we tell them, "we'll put in a trouble ticket for IT to handle this issue." And, they hang in there knowing that they have no choice, but they choose to have a good attitude about the wait.

There's my quick list. Two days down, 8 more to go for the go-live support.