As we near opening for our next show at the theatre I usually find myself with more free time, though I think that this time around my time will be taken up by getting ready for my honeymoon.  This mainly will involve cleaning the apartment and packing.  I am really looking forward to this trip.  It is the first real vacation that Ruth and I will be taking alone together.  It Should be really fun and I am sure it will feel like it was too short.

We also basically just got back from our trip to Disneyland with Ruth’s family.  That was a lot of fun, and it has been quite a while since I have been to Disney.  Ruth and I flew out and met the family there to spend outs first day at Knott’s Berry Farm.  Smaller than Disney with big rides, but also way bigger lines.  We stood in some pretty long lines to ride the rides.  We actually took to calculating how many people the rides could move in the amount of time we waited in line.  We actually waited around 3 hours for one roller coaster that was about a 20-second ride.

After Knott’s, we headed to Co Co Ichibanya (aka Co Co’s), a curry house that is starting to make a US presence, coming from Japan.  Co Co’s was the Jones’ favorite curry house in Okinawa, so they will go out of their way to go there when they can.  I don’t have anything to compare to, but it is darn good food!

Then it was on to Disneyland where we had two days in the parks including staying till about 1:45AM on New Years.  Disney is a lot of fun even when it is wall to wall people. It is the place where everyone has fun, and if you take a moment to plan your day, you don’t have to spend forever waiting in lines.  We managed to break the Pinocchio ride, as soon as we got in the car, bells started ringing and lights started flashing and they had to evacuate the ride.  Then the fog rolled in so thick you could barely see 100 feet in front of you.  We couldn’t see the New Years fireworks, but we did managed to get stuck in the crowd.  We got to fight against the press and then this great little old lady helped us jump the ropes when the cast members weren’t looking so we could get out of the crowd.  Good times were had by all.

Sunset lights up Balanced Rock at Arches National Park

Of course the other big thing is my photo gallery opening that was last week.  For the month of January I have a display of Utah Landscape photography up at the JCC here in Salt Lake.  It was very exciting to lay out all the prints and see them big and up on the wall.  I don’t have the space to really look at more than one at a time at home.  The opening reception seemed to go very well, there was a good turn out and I have since received a few emails asking about the images.  If you are in the SLC area you should stop by and see the prints, otherwise you can see the images on my website.

Ok folks, it has been quite the long stint since I last posted here.  Every blogger says it on a regular basis, but life has just been totally crazy.  My last post was in May, before I went to camp, before I got married, and before the current season at the theatre.  It was almost before the summer really started and now winter is starting.  I have been kind of bad about lots of things in the digital world of communication though.  I have been very slow at responding to emails, I have been behind on processing and sorting photos, and apparantly I am behind on getting videos together from the summer to go online.  Then there are the actual things that I havent been doing, like going to the gym.  Great.

So, will this just be a feeble attempt to try to get things moving on the blog again? I have no idea, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

So, if you got through that first paragraph and didn’t have a “wait, what?!” moment, you probably either already knew that I got married this summer, or you just missed that part.  Yes, since August 25 I have been happily married to Ruth and life is pretty good.  The wedding was beautiful, and everything seemd to go smoothly despite being out of the state at camp for the two months leading up to it.  We held the ceremony and reception at the Alta Lodge and we were happy to celebrate with friends and family.  Good times were definately had by all.  The weather was beautiful, the montains were beautiful, and the over atmosphere was great.  With a ceremony that we wrote ourselves, we were married by a mutual friend in one of the most beautiful places I can think of.  Don’t believe me? Here, see for yourself:

Here we are standing under the canopy that was built by Ruth's father, with our friend Warren officiating our wedding.

Working backwards in time from the wedding, the summer at camp was not one of the best.  Maybe that is why I refrained from writing during it.  I don’t know that I will say too much, though there is plenty to say about it.  The camps were under new ownership as of this past summer, and for some that transition was not so easy.  Suffice it to say, I saw some good friends mistreated in a very public manner and it got dragged out for the better part of the summer.  While I managed to spend the summer flying under the radar, there were grumblings about me as well.  Camp can be strange like that, it is just unfortunate and really hard when friends get hurt.

So let’s not dwell on the ugly past.  The theatre season is in full swing so life has been very busy.  Getting Annie up and open was a killer, but now there is a little room to breathe.  So in the mean time I have been prepping a bunch of my photos for my first ever gallery display!  I will be showing photos at the JCC in SLC for the month of January.  This is pretty darn exciting.  I have the prints on order and should get them soon and I am really excited to see them.  I am having all the prints done on metal with float mounts.  The test prints I had made earlier look amazing, it is a really cool finished product.  It would be hard to show what the prints look like in a photo, so any of you who find yourself in the Salt Lake area during January should stop by and see the gallery!

With that, I think that I need to stop staring at this computer screen. I have spent a lot of time in front of it in the past couple days. Besides being warm in bed sound much nicer!

It is that wonderful time again when a small but fierce group of bloggers attempts to take over the blogsphere for a day with Bloggerstock!  Well, I like to think so anyway.  This moth happens to be the one-year anniversary of Bloggerstock, which is pretty exciting.  This month I have the pleasure of hosting the founder of the Karaoke Blog Ring of Death, and the blogger behind Sara Swears A Lot.  She is always entertaining and often her writing does the title of her blog justice.

I won’t dwell on the theme for this month, basically the idea was to dig through your old journals and pull out something fun and share it.  I will let Sara share her take on the topic.  So, without further ado, here is what you have been waiting for:

The theme for Bloggerstock this month was “before there were blogs” AKA in the old, dark age that sucked. I was lucky enough to find an old notebook from when I was in 4th grade. Most of it was boring as shit, because apparently I was the lamest 4th grader in the history of ever. But one entry made me realize that I’m the exact same girl today that I was ten years ago.

“My friend Josie and I got into this big argument and aren’t speaking. I’m mad at her. But then I thought two things. Who am I going to play with? WWJD? I talked to her today. We both said we were sorry at the bus stop. Besides, who’s pool would I use (J.J.) Just joking. I like her because she’s just fun to play with. She’s a very good friend.”

Riiiiiight, 4th grade Sara. That’s super believable. If that J.J. hadn’t been there, I might have thought you were being a selfish brat, but nevermind!

I also like how your first thought is that you’ll have no one to play with, and your second thought is pondering what Jesus would do in your situation? I’m not sure how often Jesus got in fights with friends who had pools in their backyard, but let’s be real for a second, 4th grade Sara. Everyone loves a pool. And I’m pretty sure Jesus would have done the same exact thing in your situation.

If you’d like to read what K. Syrah (www.shoesneverworn.com) has to say for Bloggerstock this month, check her out on my page! And a big thanks to Alex for putting so much work into this blog ring. I know it’s way more stressful than it looks!

With any luck, if you are looking for my post on this month’s topic, you can find it over on Bobby’s blog.  If you enjoy bloggerstock and would like to learn more about it or get involved, you can just pop over to our site Bloggerstock.net.  Any information you could want is there.

With that, happy blogging!

Happy mother’s day Mom!

I have to saw, I have an awesome mother.  Sure, there have been and probably will continue to be times that we don’t see eye-to-eye, but never the less, I love my mother.

Of particular note, this year she qualified for and ran the Boston Marathon.  Not only did she run the marathon, but she ran it is a great time.  I was a little bummed that I couldn’t be there to stand out on Comm Ave near my grandparent’s house like we used to do on marathon day when we were kids.

My mother does lots of cool things.  She has done some pretty cool trips in the past few years.  She has ridden the Trans-Siberian Railroad, gone to somewhere in Africa (I forget which country), and most recently Patagonia.  I hope that at some point I will be able to do things like that.

Of course really the important thing is that I have to thank my mother for the fact that I am ever here to write this.  I do my best to make my mother proud every day.  I know that there are things that I do a certain way because that is how I learned it from my mother.  The biggest thing I think that I have not done that my mother wants me to do is get a haircut.  I probably could use one, but not short like she think she wants.  It’s my hair, I’ll wear it how I want.

So, with that, here is to my mother!

About a year ago I started surfing the web looking for a web host to host my blog, my fiance’s blog, and eventually the Bloggerstock website.  Spent some time on Google and I landed on JustHost.com.  They gett pretty high ratings when you search for hosting reviews.  Almost always in the top 10 if not in the top three.  They offer a pretty darn good price for unlimited everything (which isn’t truly unlimited), and they make some pretty bold claims about their customer service right on their homepage.  They even provide a “secret link” at the bottom of their page which if you click, will get you a discount on a few months of hosting (oops, it no secret anymore).  In my humble opinion, all this comes with a giant BUT….

Over the past year I have not really had any cause for concern with my web hosting. Everything was working, the sites were up, and life was pretty good.  The backend was a little tedious, but many hosting companies use the same c-panel software, so there was no reason to really care about that.  Once I had the sites set up and working I rarely went into the back end other than to make backups.

Then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I started getting emails from JustHost.com telling me that my account had been suspended and that I was violating there TOS.  How?  Well, apparently something in my account was using too much processor time.  Somewhere in the TOS is a little line that tells you how LIMITED you actually are when you pay for UNLIMITED.  Of course, instead of just putting a CPU limit on your account, they actually just suspend your account if you spike over 10% CPU usage.  They don’t provide a means to monitor your CPU usage, nor do they give you any warning.  It’s just BAM! “Sorry, we suspended your account.”  Of course this means that you can’t even log in to make adjustments to try to correct the problem.

The first time this happened, I replied to the email and the tech asked for my IP address so that he could open up access for just me.  Response time was fairly quick, within an hour or so.  Fine.  He also sent some suggestions, but nothing really useful.  I followed all the suggestions he gave, and they re-opened my account.  However, they forgot to reset their monitoring software so within two days I was locked out again for the same exact case.

This time, I called their 24/7 support phone number.  Guess what, I got straight through to a real person!  But, hold the phone, this person could not do anything but tell me that I should send an email to their support team!  WHAT!?  So, I tried their online chat support.  Again, got right through to a support person but the answer I got was exactly the same, I had to email support.  Can someone please explain to me what the point of having on call support people readily available if they can’t help?  I would rather sit on the phone for an hour to talk to someone who can help then instantly talk to people who can’t.

So, I fire off more emails to support.  It took an entire day this time to get a response.  In fact it seems like it took a little threatening to leave their company.  At this point they said that it had been a mistake, that they had not reset the monitoring software and that my account would be re-opened immediately.  While this made me feel a little better, I was still very frustrated by their support system.

Which brings us to the end of last week and this weekend.  Once again I get an email about server overload and my account being suspended.  I am sorry, but while I would love to have tons of people visiting my sites, it just doesn’t happen.  I haven’t changed the code here beyond updating to the latest version of WordPress, so I just don’t understand what changed.  In any event, since friday, my account had been suspended and despite my multiple emails to JustHost.com support, I received to a single response until the wee hours of this morning.  I talked to two online chat techs who both claimed to elevate my case to highest priority, but  nothing came of that.

One tech actually told me that the only way you can ever talk to a high enough level support person is through email.  I am sorry, that is just no kosher.  If I can’t actually talk directly to someone who can help me then your support system is flawed.  I don’t care if I have to wait, I would rather wait if it meant getting the service that I need.

So, with a few quick clicks I had a brand new hosting account with GoDaddy.com. With a little bit of fighting with JustHost.com I was able to get them to give me a download link for a site-wide backup of my account.  The domains that I purchased through them are being transferred to GD, and my blog is up.  My fiance’s blog is back up, and bloggerstock is coming back soon.  My account with JustHost will be cloased, and in theory I should get some money back.  I better get money back or I will make their lives miserable.

Moral of the story, don’t always believe internet rating sites, and don’t use JustHost.com unless all you need is hosting for a super simple website and you don’t want any kind of customer support.  They are temptingly inexpensive, but not worth the frustration in my book.

While I don’t normally advertise on my blog, I kind of want to rub this in JustHost’s face.  So, to show how happy I am with Godaddy.com: