Brandon Hansen

Cami and I just gt back from our Cruise and had a great time.

We sailed on the Royal Caribbean “Freedom of the Seas” ship. It was absolutely huge and amazing. Such a fun trip.

We went to Utah first to drop the kids off at Papa and Juju’s house so that they could have fun there with everyone while Cami and I went alone. We were gone for 7 days (April 20 - 27), then we returned back to Utah and stayed another few days there.

I am going to post for about the cruise this weekend, and a little more about the trip to Utah and our experiences in the Doctor’s office (which if you have seen Cami’s Blog, she talks about Spencer and Clay and our 2 trips to the Urgent Care on the same day). That’s life with the boys.

On the cruise we had three stops. First in San Juan, Puerto Rico, second in St Thomas and third in St Maarten (the best by far). The cruise ship is the biggest in the world (according to everyone on board) and had everything you could want. Tons of free food, a Rock Climbing wall, a FlowRider, a mini golf course, a movie theatre, a shopping strip, an ice skating rink, a couple productions stages, a golf simulator, a huge exercise and work out gym, a boxing ring, an art gallery, a casino and a bunch of bars and lounges. A few of those things we could have done without, but for the most part it was really great.

At the end of the cruise, they showed a “Cruise in Review” DVD that they sold and I was famous and made it onto the DVD from my sweet skills on the Flowrider (to bad it was of me wiping out and they played it on loop 4 or 5 times in a row). Oh well, like I said, I will post more detail later this weekend.

As for a few pictures of the cruise, here are some.

Here we are with the Freedom of the Seas. There are 13 decks on the ship and our room was on the 7th floor. We were talking to the personal trainers on board and they told us that the average person gains 2 lbs per day while cruising, so we decided to take the stairs everywhere we went.

It is an odd feeling to be on board for two days straight and not see any land. You feel kind of vulnerable, especially looking over the side of the boat when it is completely dark outside. It was great and the water that far out is some amazing colors of blue.

One night we went to a disco party, and these are the cloths we wore. Pretty groovy.

Cami and I took on the rock wall, and this is Cami in action. It is a lot harder then it looks.

Here is the famous FlowRider. Don’t be fooled by how it looks like I know what I am doing. This is about 1 second after I stood up and about a half a second before I ate it.  Some of the guys on board got pretty good at it, but I didn’t spend too much time there.

For some more pictures, visit my Flickr site here.

Here is an update on the vegetables in the basement. It is getting a little warmer outside and I look forward to the day I can re-plant them out doors. We are going on vacation at the end of April and I hope I can plant them before we go.

They were getting a little out of control so I had to build a “boxing ring” for them to climb. So far, so good.

I am in Lafayette, Indiana today and tomorrow for a meeting with Lafayette Life Insurance Company and it is cold. I thought that I would bring my running shoes and take off a little early in the morning for a couple miles, but it is windy and only in the low 50’s, and I only brought shorts. I would run in the hotel fitness center, but they do not have one. I was bummed because I couldn’t work out  Monday and left early this morning  so I couldn’t run today either. Tomorrow I will be in meetings all day and traveling in the afternoon and will not be back to Colorado until late evening, so I guess it will have to wait until Thursday.

Lafayette is about half way between Indianapolis and Chicago. We flew into Indianapolis this afternoon and drove about an hour north to get here. It is the same city that Purdue University is in and this week they are hosting some of the NCAA  Women’s Tournament games. The company said that they usually put visitors to their home office up in a nicer hotel then the one that we are in, but it is not a big deal. We are comfortable and it is not a big deal. Tonight we went to the Outback Stakehouse for dinner.

We have meetings tomorrow at the home office and then fly out after. The trip home tomorrow is kind of a bummer because we drive to Indianapolis to turn around and fly to Chicago for a layover, then on to Denver, so it will be a long day.

Each day that I go to water my plants they seem to have grown a little more. I planted them with the idea to get them to a point where I could transplant them by mothers day, but at the rate they are growing, they will out grow the box by the middle of April.

I have to rotate them a couple times a week because they tend to grow towards the light as you can see in the pictures. Overall, I think the tomatoes and peppers are doing great so far, but I haven’t seem anything even sprout from the zucchini. I planted some more seeds on Sunday, so we will see how they do it the next couple weeks.

Here are a couple updated pictures.

Tonight for family night we decided to clean the basement a little bit then we went to the dollar store. The boys like to go there and pick out a toy or treat and think it is pretty cool that:

1. Everything costs a dollar, and
2. we tell them they can have whatever they want, and
3. they can just roam the store (for the most part) without us following them around.

It is a treat for them to go there.

Tonight Koby got an orange sword and Spencer got a pack of recorder flutes. There were two in the pack and as soon as we got to the car Koby called the blue one to be his, even though they were both Spencer’s to begin with. Spence, being the agreeable kid that he is said “okay, you can have the blue one” and Koby made out with two toys out of the trip. (It totally would have been something Cami would have done as a youngster.) I guess that is why we love them.

I happened upon a book that I am kind of excited about. It is called “Often Wrong, Never in Doubt”, by Donny Deutsch. I had to ask Cami a couple times if she was sure that it was only a dollar and she assured me that it was. It is hard to believe that you could find something like that in the book section at the dollar store. Now, I am not sure how good it will be. I usually don’t buy a book without it coming recommended in one fashion or another, but it was a buck at the dollar store. If and when I get to it, I will update with my review. According to the reviews on Amazon.com, it looks mostly good, but we’ll see.

I have gotten past the first week of my mini-greenhouse, and have had to make a couple minor changes which I think have made a positive improvement.

The first change that I made was to switch the light bulb out from a 75 watt plant bulb to a 125 watt heat lamp. The plant bulb was a little too weak and didn’t quite give the heat that I needed. With it getting a little cold during the night, there just wasn’t the heat I needed.

When I built the greenhouse, I did it intentionally with an arched roof and plastic wrap so that the water that I put on the plants would evaporate, collect on the sides and top and keep it pretty humid in there and help the plants. With the 1st bulb, it wasn’t quite strong enough. But the new heat bulb works great and the sides and top do a great job of collecting the dew and keeping it pretty humid and warm. It is awesome.

The next change that I made was I put a timer on the light. It is timed to go on at about 6:00 am until about 7:30 or 8:00 pm. This is to give the plants a little break and simulate the sunlight a little bit. It seems to be a positive benefit for the plants.

Right now, the tomatoes and bell peppers are growing. I have yet to see anything from the zucchini. Maybe this week, but more likely I messed something up and they will not grow, but two out of three is not that bad.

Here is a picture from this week. (I will update this project about once a week.)

One of the things that my dad made us do when we were younger was work out in his garden. He always had a pretty large plot of ground dedicated to his vegetables. It was something that I really didn’t enjoy too much growing up, but as I have gotten older I have begun to enjoy it a little but more.

I think it would be awesome to have a green house and grow plants year round. Remember “Big Top Pee Wee” when he grows those huge tomato’s? That was sweet! (By the way, this year is the 20th anniversary of that movie)

Anyways, I don’t have the room on my property for a greenhouse, but I thought about it for a while and came up with a makeshift greenouse for my basement. I built it with some PVC pipe, plastic wrap and a heat lamp. There are two variations and think I like the 2nd one a little better because of the pots that I used and because it is indoors. 

Design 1

Design 2

The box I built in the 1st design was meant to be filled up with dirt so that I could have a bigger planting area, but I decided I didn’t want that much dirt on the table, especially because it doesn’t have a bottom on it yet or a good place for it to drain when I water it. Plus in the 2nd one the lamp is a little closer to the plant, providing more heat.

Not too sure if this will work or not, but I will keep track of it and if something good happens, I will update about it.

I recently picked up the last two John Grisham books and read them both in the last couple weeks. I really enjoy reading his books and the last two, Playing for Pizza, and The Appeal were good. They are both totally different styles.

The Appeal took about two weeks to read. I thought that it was a little slow starting, but as I read more and more of it, it made sense why it started as it did. The stage and story line were being set up and  the characters were all being introduced. On the jacket cover, it is mentioned that while fiction, it will make you have a different look at the legal system and the way the supreme court justices are nominated, among other things. I am still not totally sure how I feel about the book. I liked it and found it interesting, but somewhat depressing in how it turned out. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because like life, things do not always work out as we wish they would. That’s how life is.

Playing for Pizza was a great book, in my opinion. While most of Grisham’s books are legal thrillers, I was kind of tired of that style of writing and enjoy his books that take on a different style.
The story is about a third string NFL quarterback that happens to get in the game in the NFC Championship with his team up by something like 20 or more points. He goes on to throw a couple interceptions and some other crappy plays and his team loses the game. He is hit hard on the last play of the game is ends up in the hospital, unsure of what exactly happened. He is booed out of town and his agent ends up finding him work in Italy with a team in the Italian NFL. The characters are easily likable and the story is easy to follow. Overall, I thought it was a great book (even though it only got an average of 3 out of 5 stars on Amazon). I read the book in about 3 days.

Well, I would recommend them both. If you are a reader, you will probably like them. I read an interview with John Grisham and he said that his plan is to write a legal thriller type book every year for the next several years. I look forward to adding them to my collection.

One of the blogs that I read is by the creator of the Dilbert cartoon, Scott Adams. Most of the time it is really funny as he has an interesting sense of humor.

He wrote a comic last year that asks the question: “Why does it seem as if most of the decisions in my workplace are made by drunken lemurs?”  Pretty funny when you read the strip.

There was a man in Iowa that got fired for posting the comic at his work. I guess that the comic is more accurate than most people thought.

Here’s the story - http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/WaterCooler/story?id=4323900.

This time of the year in the NBA is always fun. First you have the All-Star game, which in my opinion is not as cool as it was when I was younger. It is probably because I have gotten older and have lost a little interest in that aspect of the game. Who knows?

The other cool thing that I always look forward to is the trade deadline. There have obviously been some major trades this year with Shaq, Jason Kidd, Shawn Marion & Pau Gasol. Today was the deadline and there was another pretty big trade involving 11 players, most notably with Ben Wallace going to Cleveland and Drew Gooden going to Chicago.

Pretty cool and probably good for Cleveland.