If you don't have work, make work!

Well we have rented 1 apartment and 3 houses since we have been married and there is one thing that is common in all of them. They are not yours. You live in a house and want so badly to make it your own but you don't want to spend money to do it cause... its not yours!
I don't care. I did it anyway. I spent 25 bucks and bought a ceiling fan (on clearance) at Lowe's to replace the 1936 light fixture that is in our baby room.

the new fan

the antique fixture (so pretty)

When i got it home i was so excited to put it up but Anna had a better idea. "The baby doesn't need the fan and we do so why don't you put the light from our room in the baby room and the new ceiling fan in our room" she says. "Of course," i say, "why not," because i learned a few months ago not to argue with a pregnant wife.
This is when the fun part begins. I thought it would be a piece of cake. Match the new wires from the new lights and fan to the old nasty corroded non colored wires from the 1915 house. That was the easy part. a bit of guess work and a quick flick of the switch and Abracadabra it worked. The real problem came before i even hooked it up. It went a little bit like this. (start time: 8:30 pm)
1. Take down old light from baby's room
2. Take down light from Mommy and Daddy's room
3. Pull down on the outlet box in Mommy and Daddy's room to make sure it can
hold the new ceiling fan.
4. Find out that the ghetto contractors that put in the new light cut a hole in
the ceiling in a random place and stuck the outlet box in and anchored it to
the cardboard ceiling (or something with the same amount of structural
integrity) and nothing else.
5. Make the decision to continue the project tomorrow (it was now 10 pm on a
school and work night)
6. Recon the attic to find its structural supports.

This is the size of the opening to the attic that i had to climb through

7. Find no supports so i cut a piece of 2x4 and screw it to the 2 crossbeams.
8. Check the newly constructed brace and find that now it shakes the whole
ceiling so now i get another 2x4 and attach it from the ceiling crossbeam
to the roof crossbeam. (sorry I forgot to take pictures and decided not to
go back up in the asbestos filled attic)
9. Bask in my brilliance and take a Dr Pepper break.
10. Begin to hang the ceiling fan with the help of my friend Jon.
11. Realize that the night before i put the ceiling fan together and was
supposed to wait until after the motor part was hung so now i get to take
all the blades of and start over.
12. Hang the fan, take down the fan, hang the fan, take down the fan, and hang
the fan one more time hoping that i finally get it right.
13. End the adventure at 10:15 pm with the wife climbing into bed saying
"turn off the light when you are done cleaning up."

Oh the things we learn while in our youth!

I miss Todd Tyler!

Life changing times

Dear Diary, I know it has been a long time sense I have written and I will do better…. I looked back at some of my childhood entries and noticed that they were all about 2-4 months apart and then noticed that my blog was turning out the same way. I would not be a good Nephi.

Well a lot has happened sense September that is worthy of a shout out.

1. We are having a baby. Not just a baby but we found out last Friday the 14th of November that we are having a baby girl! She is due to enter this frozen arctic ice flat on the 10th of April







2. I completed my first solo in the H-300 helicopter about a month ago.





3. I Built a Bassinet for the soon to be here baby from scratch









4. I just got called last Sunday to be the Assistant Teachers Quorum Advisor. (yes I can finally test out my new sleeping bags true sub zero potential)

5. Hello, my name is Dusty and I am addicted to Facebook.

6. We moved to a newer, nicer, cleaner, bigger, better house just down the street (the baby room is going to rock your socks)

Here they are

This is our new tent (that we took back cause it had 2 big holes in it straight out of the box).



This is our great day on the lake. The lake was great but the boat started having some problems. We still had a blast








This is Anna and I at the Headwaters of the Mississippi.




Paul bunyon and his big ox Babe

Labor Day.......

So I think it may be time to update the old blog again. No excuses just kind of forgot. Well school started up again last week and it has been going really well. I am still waiting to finish my private pilot course but all I have is one more flight. I am in German 2, Military science 1 and 2 ( to catch up from the first semester I missed), aviation orientation, aviation human factors, ROTC lab and PT and helicopter private pilot course. All in all it is 19 credits so a fairly busy semester.
We did take a break this past weekend to go camping with our new tent and sleeping bags and take a rented boat out to Lake Itasca and Lake Bemidji (both in Minnesota) to go tubing and knee boarding. The boat lasted a few hours before it broke (longer story than I want to tell) so we went back to shore and swam in the freezing Minnesota water. We took a walk the next day to the “Mouth of the Mississippi.” It was cool but just another place on the map that I can tell my grand kids that I went. Very pretty place but after 20 minutes not much left to see. Here are some pictures of the fun vacation with more on the way later.

My Little Darlin is a Firecracker

Happy July everyone. The 4th is so much better out here in the country where you can blow up fireworks and shoot guns and nobody cares. We had a blast out at the Bronson’s Farm (an hour southwest of town). He owns enough land that you can’t even see half of it from the house (and North Dakota is flatter than Texas). We ate steak (my expertise) and ribs and played ultimate Frisbee until it got dark. Finally at around 9:45 it got dark enough to start the fireworks but we didn’t start the big ones until 10:30 because it doesn’t get dark until then. We had a lot of fun and decided to start saving money now for next year cause it was a blast. I have my second solo flight on Friday morning. I am very excited. It is so much easier by myself than with an instructor hovering over you all the time. I should be finished by August 10th or so. I am ready for it to be over however so I can start flying helicopters. I finally picked the helicopter that I want to fly. It won’t be for a while because it is a special ops (delta force for army aviation) helicopter that the “Nightstalkers” (aviation special ops) flight. It is the AH-6 little bird. It is old but amazing. You can find out about it at Wikipedia.com. Well I will fill you in later about my progress!!!

There is fun in North Dakota

Well I started my private pilot courses last week and they are going great. I had my first exam 3 days after class started and I did very well. The weather hasn’t been that nice though. It has been raining so I only flew once on Saturday but it was great. I had so much fun and my new headset worked great. My ground school… Not so fun. I do have a pretty cool ground school instructor though who informed us about fun things in the area. This past weekend was the annual Fargo Rib Fest. Anna and I and the Pierson’s decided to go on Friday night because my favorite country band was playing and the concert was free. DIMOND RIO ROCKS.



Minus all the drunk, smoking, country bumpkin’s with no teeth it was a very fun evening. We didn’t have enough money to try all the ribs but we did try Aussom Aussie’s and they were amazing.





By far the best ribs ever. Those Aussies can cook. They must be authentic as well because the guy that took my money told me “Thanks Mate” in a very legit accent.



Dallin and I found Heaven on Earth and had to enter






Anna Loves her funnel cakes



My wife is so hot