Uinta Mountains Trip July 19-22 2012

Joe and I left Brigham City and headed towards the mountains around 3 p.m. Thursday. We set up camp at Butterfly Lake and decided to just fish there for the evening. Generally I catch TONS of fish at Butterfly but wasn't really having much luck. Joe was out-catching me 4 to 1 (which sucks because he is the newby ha ha).

Friday we played around some more at Butterfly and decided to hike the short trail-less hike to Castle Lake. Again, Joe caught all the fish at Castle. We decided to head back to Butterfly and my wife, son, and my in-laws were fishing and waiting for us at Butterfly. We drove down to Pass Lake and played around a little before returning to camp to cook some dinner. After dinner they went home and Joe and I drove down to Kamas to meet my brother and bring him up to camp.

Saturday is where the story gets good. We decided to go for another small hike to Ibantik Lake. Trying to find a place to park was pretty ridiculous but after a while we finally were able to. What a crazy packed weekend. We got a pretty late start but the hike started out really well.... until we realized we took the wrong trail. We ended up at Watson Lake and realized we took the wrong trail so we hiked straight over over the "mountain" next to us and dropped down to Wall Lake. We fished there for a few minutes but decided to get on our way to Ibantik. The clouds were coming in at this point but we didn't really think it would be too horrible so we trucked on. We ran into several people that were hiking out, none of which had been all the way to Ibantik. Most of the people we talked to said they were catching lots of little bitty brookies but nothing big. We finally made it over The Notch and it had been lightly sprinkling on and off.

We hiked down passed Lovenia and the several other small lakes right there and the rain started to pick up pretty good. We started seeing lightning and hearing lots of thunder and were going to head back but decided that hiking back over The Notch wouldn't be a good idea with the lightning, not to mention we were so close to Ibantik that we decided to try our luck with some fishing.... but just before we got to the lake THIS HAPPENED:

After the hail stopped we went down to the lake (there were several tents at the lake) and we threw in some flies and some lures, none of which proved to be productive (with the rain and all we didn't think the fishing was going to be good anyways). With a break in the storm we decided to hurry and head back over The Notch. We got hit with rain pretty hard on the way out and decided to just hit it hard, needless to say we were completely soaked by the time we even got to back to Wall. From wall I made another small error and we headed down towards Trial Lake (which was the best error of the trip). We had to hike back up to the Crystal Lake Trail Head from Trial. We finally got back to the truck and drove to a camp host site and purchased a few bundles of DRY firewood. We headed back to camp and ate some dinner and cooked a sweet cobler (Cherry Apricot Cake over peaches) it was fantastic. It took us a while to get warm since we were all soaked straight to our bones, but it was completely worth it. Ibantik was quite beautiful, even if we got completely hammered by hail and rain.

Needless to say I was trying to ruin the Uintas for the two brothers with me that were first timers in the Uintas. However, they were already planning next years trip so I don't think it was completely ruined for them.

Aside from Joe catching all the fish (JERK), my constant lack of correct trail picking, and the horrible weather.... It was a great trip.

The "PLUG" Post

Hey Everyone,

Today is the day that I give a couple shout outs to a couple awesome things.

First thing on the list for the day: My older brother has created something amazing and he has put in VERY hard work to get it to where it is and I would love to see it go even further. What we are talking about here is this: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/340631149/dragonmage-warfaretm-0 <<< This link will take you to a kickstarter.com project that my brother has launched. It is a board game that he has been working on for a few years now and it is awesome. Seriously, and I am not just saying that because he is my brother. My brother has spent so much time refining, play testing, updating, and tweaking that its almost unfathomable.

If nothing else you can stop in and drop a $1 donation just to support the cause. If you don't want to drop a dollar there is also an option to just support the game with no donation amount (raising the number of supporters helps get the project on the home page). On Kickstarter you are pledging money to the cause and you will only be charged the amount if the project reaches its goal. Personally, I donated $50.00 bucks and wish I could have done more.

A $32.00 pledge gets you a copy of the game. I have purchased games before that cost $60.00 dollars and although they were great games, they weren't as good as I think this is. Thanks in advance for all your support.

Second thing on the list for the day: I have an amazing Wife. She helps keep our business running both financially and physically. She is currently over 7 months pregnant and won't stop working to push things forward. She has been working in her spare time to come up with designs to add to shirts for our Etsy.com store. www.etsy.com/shop/cheaperthanshirt Check them out, share them, "like" them (or just our etsy shop in general). She has put some great effort into our business and there are no words that I can express to show how grateful I am to have such a perfect spouse. Without her I would be broke and have a crumbling business.

Third thing on the list for the day: Lets see, actually that is it... just those two things. Seriously though, please stop in and check out what I listed above, it would make some people pretty dang happy :)

Why I LOVE Being a Parent - Episode 2

My son is about two and a half years old and LOVES to push his limits. If we tell him not to hit something with his plastic baseball bat he will get it as close to said item as he can and then look at us and laugh. Putting him in "time out" always seems pointless most of the time until we heard this:

Korver was swinging his plastic baseball bat around and hitting everything he could when he accidentally smacked himself in the head with it. He brought the larger part of his bat to eye level and said this: Bat... YOU DON'T HIT!!!! You go time out, 2 minutes.

And he set his bat on the couch and left it there.

We were laughing pretty hard, I couldn't believe it.... but then a few minutes had passed and he went and picked his bat back up and said to it: Bat!!!!! You went time out..... You don't hit.

Just when you think that everything you say goes completely unheard, you realize that there is nothing as great as being a parent.

Why I LOVE being a parent - Episode 1

I decided to start a new blog series the other day and I just didn't get around to posting anything. I had several good stories in mind for this and as soon as I sat down I couldn't think of anything to type.

Just now I decided to post what my boy just did because I thought it was pretty funny.

Earlier today Korver was attempting to work me into a "HULK" sized rage. He was starting with all the known tactics to avoid taking a nap. I was pretty patient for about two hours and then started to get a little bit upset. All of the sudden Korver threw the largest tantrum I have ever seen.... EVER. He was flailing, screaming, and throwing his head into me in a pretty violent rage. I just held him and helped him calm down. Needless to say he never took a nap (after 3 hours of trying).

About an hour and a half later he asked me for a pop-tart which I decided to give him half of. It was a chocolate pop tart and he had chocolate all over his face. About 10 minutes ago he came up and asked if he could sit on my lap and I grabbed him and helped him up. I licked my thumb and started trying to get the chocolate off his face when Korver said: Daddy, I wash your face. He then stuck his fingers in his mouth and put nice fresh slobber all over my face.

All the anger in the world can't stop you from smiling at that. I laughed pretty hard.

Little things like that is why I love being a parent.

More Socialness

So, I finally figured out how to change the "url" name of my business on facebook. (its about time).

http://www.facebook.com/CheaperThanShirt

It has been pretty fun making shirts (and other things) so far and realistically we are just starting. Everyone is coming up with some pretty cool ideas for shirts.

we have been doing graphic design work for a few years now and adding the ability to do T-Shirt printing seemed like a no brainer. It is pretty fun to see what kinds of things people come up with. We have had a few hiccups with shirt sizing but other than that everything is working out better than we had imagined. Some shirts are XL and are the same as a different brands L. Others are 3XL and are the same as others L. It makes for interesting times.

I know that I thank everyone constantly but I have to again, We have had lots of help with some little things that to most people would seem insignificant. But when building a business, every single stone adds to the structure. (and I mean that in more ways than 1).

Thanks Everybody

Socialness, Etsy, and Business

My lovely wife finally got our Etsy Store up and running and I am pretty excited about it. We don't have much in there yet but hopefully we will be able to get several more things in there soon.

Currently we only have a few T-shirts that we designed in there but hopefully by the end of the week we will have our designed tile work and glass print work in there too. If anyone is interested in visiting our store please check it out @: http://www.etsy.com/shop/CheaperThanShirt also while you are at you can always like our Facebook page @: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Alternate-Universe-LLC/346698512063630

Thanks to everyone who has helped us up to this point, we have some pretty awesome family and friends.

Eat Your Words Episode 3

This story takes place over about a two week period....

We had gotten several 12 packs of soda for quite cheap (since my wife coupons). We probably had about 3 different flavors open. Korver (who is 2.5 years old now) loves rolling things across the kitchen floor. He was getting out all the cans and rolling them all across the kitchen.

I kept telling Korver to put them all back and he would just reply with: "No daddy, I roll it".

I repeated a couple times telling him that he needed to put them away or he would go to time out. He still wouldn't listen and finally I put him in time out. When time out was finished I asked him why he was in time out and the reply was: "I roll the pop".

This went on for a good duration of the day including soda cans getting thrown and it ended up to be quite the battle. I had to rearrange things in the kitchen so I could put them in a different place that wasn't so accessible.

Fast forwarding two weeks to this very morning I was thinking to myself: "I wish we still had some soda, I don't want to go anywhere right now".

Literally five minutes later Korver had a Mt. Dew Voltage and he was rolling it across the floor.... I have no idea where he got it..... WE HAVE BEEN OUT OF SODA FOR A WEEK (so I thought... apparently we had one more somewhere).

So, I guess you can say that sometimes you just need to EAT YOUR WORDS and enjoy a SODA :)