From going to the Craig Ferguson show I’m on an audience waiting list. Last week I got an email offering tickets to the American Idol finale part one THAT DAY. I said “Yes, please” and got 4 tickets! You have to be 12, so I took Dylan, Gavin and their cousin Bobby. It was a LOT of waiting around, but fun. The email confirmation was a ticket to wait in line for a ticket outside the Staple’s Center. After an hour in line we got our actual tickets, but had ~1 hr to kill before we could get into the Nokia theater. There’s an ESPN Zone right there, so we headed over there. Saw Brooke White up close doing the TV Guide show. After the Zone we headed to the theater. There was an interview area for TV stations to interview previous Idol contestants. Saw Scott, the blind guy and a few others. Matt Girard was practically begging people to get his autograph. We passed. Once we were in the Nokia we waited some more. It was cool to see the stage with all the neon AI signs. We sat near the back of the main floor. A few rows in front of Jason Castro. From the live audience you can barely hear what the judges are saying, probably by design. The girl, Krystal (?) was way better than Lee on all three songs. She got standing ovations every time from a crowd that was favoring Lee by a big margin. Lee seemed to have low energy and like he was just kind of going thru the motions. It was fun and the boys had a blast. The best part was the HUGE smile on Gavin’s face when I told him why he was getting out of school early!

I spent most of last week in Orlando meeting my new employer. Stayed at the Rosen Shingle Creek, near Tiger’s place. Very impressed with the new owner and the corporate staff. I got to meet the greatest American mountain climber: Ed Viesturs. He was a guest speaker and I got to chat him up for ~30 minutes at a banquet before he spoke to the group. Very interesting, amazing and adventurous person. He has climbed all of 14 of the 8,000 meter peaks in the world WITHOUT OXYGEN! He’s climbed Everest 7 times and was there in ’96 with the IMAX crew when all those people died. Got to see my high school buddy Tom while I was there.

Saturday the whole family participated at our stake’s Mormon Helping Hands project. About 300 of us went to a huge children’s shelter to work on various project. The youth were tasked with organizing their 13,000 rubber ducks that they use for a fund raiser. We had to sort them in order, record them and package them up. It was a very tedious task! There were 75,000 of us working on service projects across the state.

Saturday night we had a birthday bash for Gavin. Took the group of 12 kids bowling then went back to the house for swimming and games.

Happy Mother’s Day to my babies Momma and all the other Mommies in my life!

We had a tough decision last weekend: boating at Lake Mead or boarding at Mammoth. The original plan was to go boating at Mead until I saw that the water was only 60 degrees. I checked Mammoth and saw that they had ~2 ft of new snow in the past week, the temps had stayed cold and it was about to get sunny and warm. We had a blast: the snow was in great shape, off season ticket prices and we were able to ride/ski together all day. Downside: mom and dad got fried. Despite multiple applications of sun screen, the 10,000 elevation, bright sun and reflective snow conspired against us.