Two weeks worth: A funeral, Halloween and Florida (plus a snow storm!)

Funeral

We attended the funeral of my cousin, Carma. I mentioned her on my previous blog and added the link to her obituary. It was a nice funeral and she obviously shared a lot of love with her children and grandchildren. The highlight of any family funeral is the family reunion. It was great to see several of my Clyde cousins that I don't connect with very often. The best part was having lunch with Nan, Christine, Dave and Roy. I love that I get along so well with my siblings and have such a connection with them, even though we don't see each other often enough.

Roy, Dave, Nan, Christine, Catharine

Halloween

Halloween dinner was a week early because Roy and I were going to be gone on the 31st.
However, everyone shared costume pictures.

Yuna, Yuli; Matt, Crista, Ruby, Bridget, Greta and Todd

Bridget as Scooby Doo; and Todd in his car. He loves cars!

Ila on left; Ollie at door on the right, Finn is next to him. The rest are friends

Ila as Black Panther; Gunnar (2nd from left) with his friends. They are "Ghillie's" whatever that is.

Harvey the dinosaur; Beverly (on right) with her friend, Afton

From right to left: Beverly, Mav, Max

See last week's pictures for some of the other grandchildren. Jennie and Jordan put some thought into their costumes, too, but I decided it was rated PG 13 so I chose not to include it here.

The Halloween Skate Show

We made it back from Flaming Gorge in time to see Orianthi in her skating debut performance. On the right she is with her coach, Caitlyn Rasband. Caitlyn also performed and they both did amazing! See below for both of their amazing performances.

Ori, Catharine, Caitlyn and Dallin

Halloween 5K in Logan

Crista and Matt each took 3rd place in their divisions.

Flaming Gorge

Roy and I drove up to Flaming Gorge Thursday to check on things and relax for a minute before we left to Florida for his unrelaxing business trip. The cement looks great and should help with the dust. While we were there it was covered with concrete warming blankets so we didn't get a good look. These pictures were taken with the house camera. See the Geneva Rock truck.

It's hard to get a picture to do justice to a sunset. This sunset made the drive to the Gorge completely worth it, it was gorgeous--No pun intended. It was a little cool, but beautiful.

Universal Studios

We went to Universal Studios on a Monday. It was fun to see all the Harry Potter stuff. Many people bought wands and were dressed in full wizard robes. There were places in the park where you could use a wand to make magic happen.

We were told it was probably worth it to buy the rapid pass to save on waiting in line, but after two rugged roller coaster rides (one of which was excluded from the rapid pass), we didn't feel so well and decided to stick to the calmer rides and movies. We did use our express pass a few times, but it probably wasn't worth the investment. Also, it was a Monday and it wasn't that crowded (until later in the day when the Halloween revelers began to show up). At 5pm, part of the park closed for Halloween rides and events. We missed a few things in that area because we didn't realize we only had until 5:00. We hurried because we hoped we could take the train back to Islands of Adventure but because it's connected to both parks, it was closed so we had to walk all the way to the exit and back in again at the other entrance. Dinner was the best thing of the whole day. We hadn't made any reservations, but when we saw someone motioning that there was still room in Mythes, we went over and put our names in. The restaurant was advertised as "Voted the best theme park restaurant." We were very pleased with the delicious dinner and were only sad that it's inside the park, which means we're very unlikely to ever return.

Gringotts bank; Catharine, Roy and the conductor of the Hogwarts express.

The next picture is just for our grandchildren who like unicorns. This was on Hagrid's MagicalCreatures Motorbike Adventure.

After this ride Roy was unable to stomach lunch, so I had a turkey leg and he had a coke.

Roy and Catharine at Hogwarts

At the Convention

Roy and Carlos (Roy's employee from Costa Rica)

Carlos works remotely for Roy, so though Roy sees him all the time on-line, this was the first time they've met in person. Carlos joined the church at 17, and then served a mission. He seemed to enjoy hanging with us. I spent each morning with Roy and Carlos at the Convention Center (The Dolphin Hotel). We had breakfast, then I gathered "swag" for my grandchildren. After about 10:00 I'd head back to our less expensive hotel where I went to the pool and did some reading along with a little water exercise.

Animal Kingdom

Three hours of Animal Kingdom was included with the conference. We were allowed into the park right at 8:00 pm. Dinner was served throughout the park complete with drinks and ice cream bars. We got to see the Lion King Spectacular, which was a lot of fun. With only a few thousand people in the park we could almost go on every ride that was open (5 or 6). The Avatar simulation was the best ride! I liked it better than almost any ride we went on throughout the week. Carlos kind of wanted to go on the Everest ride (roller coaster), but Roy absolutely couldn't, and I was too chicken. This was a fun night. When we left the park, we were greeted by a few Disney characters.

The first picture is Roy, me and Carlos with a lion king character (I'm getting old, I don't know the name). On the right are the three of us with Goofy right after leaving the park. The lighting isn't great in either picture, but they're kind of fun so I included them.

A First Cousin from Clermont, Florida

I mentioned above that it's wonderful to have a connection with my siblings. I have also found that I can easily connect to cousins, simply because we are related. I spent an afternoon with my first cousin Debbie and her daughter Elena and her four children. We had lunch at Disney Springs (a shopping area), then spent time just walking around the area and visiting. I got close to Debbie when we lived in Georgia after she made an effort to come and visit Roy and me. She is right between Phil and Nan in age. I enjoyed our time together so much that it didn't even occur to me to get a picture of us together. However, I had Elena share a picture of her cute family.

Elena, Julia, Jackson, Mike (her husband), James and Katelyn.
All their children are adopted. The two little ones are only a few
months apart in age.

On Friday evening, after Roy was done taking down his booth and the conference had adjourned, we drove the 40 minutes to Debbie's home and had a nice lasagna dinner that she had prepared. We also saw all around their yard and home (they have 17 acres, so plenty of room) which included a very interesting business that Albert and Debbie are in the process of selling. I did remember to take a few pictures while we were outside.

Albert and Roy in front of some of the machinery Albert uses in his business.

This truck goes around to the restaurants and "vacuums" used vegetable oil out of receptacles that look a little like garbage dumpsters. Apparently, the oil is valuable enough that the receptacles have locks that are pretty much bullet proof. I have to admit that I was surprised to learn that used vegetable oil is valuable.

A couple of Albert's storage containers.

This business got started sort of by accident. After Albert sold his John Deere business and was ready to retire, he needed a hobby. He built himself a machine (I can't remember what it was called), and began making his own diesel fuel with the vegetable oil. After a while, he started selling the extra fuel, but when the price of diesel went down, it wasn't worth buying the chemicals needed to make it (Albert said he gave himself a crash course in chemistry to learn to make the fuel). About this time, he realized that the used vegetable oil was worth nearly as much as the bio-fuel he was making. He wasn't interested in doing anything with it, though, because he really was ready to retire. However, he had a neighbor that was struggling financially, and he convinced Albert to partner with him. Now they have contracts with a thousand restaurants all around central Florida.

After looking around the yard, we went in the house. While we were waiting for dinner, Albert Jr. more commonly known as Dude came over and we had a great visit with him and 3 of his 4 children. Dude works for Wayfair on their app. He has a career similar to both Nick's and Dan's careers. Debbie had invited us to the baptism celebration dinner of Dude's youngest daughter on the Sunday we arrived in Florida, but we weren't due to arrive until 4:30 and by the time we got bags and everything, we knew it would be too late. It was a good thing we didn't even try to make it, because one hour into our flight, someone on board had a seizure and we had to go back to Salt Lake City. We didn't arrive in Florida until 6:30. Dude shared a picture of the baptism day:

Jessi, Scott, Isaac, Abert James (Dude), Layla and Claire

So, what happened to Albert's bio-fuel machine? He took it apart piece by piece. He didn't want to sell to anyone local who would compete for the oil, and he didn't want to sell it out of state because of the cost of shipping.

Epcot

Saturday we spent the day at Epcot. It was fairly enjoyable, extremely exhausting, and I will probably never go there again. We only rode one ride that caught us off-guard. It was Guardians of the Galaxy. It is a new ride and the only way to ride it was to get into a virtual line. We had no idea what we were getting into. Of course, it was a roller coaster--in the dark--with cars that could swivel sideways and backwards. Luckily it was very short. Also, Roy had taken some medication early in the day that prevented him from getting too sick. I have to admit it was fun--and probably the best ride in the park.

Snow

No, we didn't get snow in Florida, but our family in Utah experienced a pretty good storm. Dojin made this snowman. The eyes are brussel sprouts, the nose is a pepper and the buttons are mushrooms.