Family Fun in McCall

What beats a beautiful mountain resort on an Idaho lake? Being there with my whole family of course!

The last week of July we went out to Idaho for a family get-together in McCall. We would always go there every year growing up, but I hadn't been again since my mission. The only problem with the trip was that is wasn't long enough!

Dan, Ryan and I flew out to Boise together and we had a 3 hour layover in Minneapolis. I had no idea that Minnesota was actually so green and beautiful. A pleasant surprise! We decided to take the train downtown from the airport to check it out. Honestly, not much to see right off the train, but it was fun to get out. And there were some cool buildings.

Downtown Minneapolis

After arriving in Boise we grabbed lunch, Dan met Erin to get their marriage license, and we headed up to McCall. It was late when we arrived, and we'd been up early to get going, so we were pretty exhausted but it was so fun to see everyone that night!

We spent our time there doing the usual: tennis, swimming, puzzles, fishing, and this time we even rented jet skis! Jet skis haven't usually been part of my trip there because we've usually gone in October when it's too cold. The jet skis were probably the highlight of the activities. I was a pretty lame driver to begin, and I was a wimp when Ryan was driving, but then I got used to the rhythm of it all, and by the end, was feeling like a pretty rockin' jet skier. It was a blast!

Thursday morning we went to the Pancake House, as always. You can't leave McCall without one of these cinnamon rolls!

Who doesn't want a cinnamon roll the size of a baby?!

It was really fun to play with Matt and Hilary's kids. Seneca is such a cute little girl, and Jason is so fun now that he has so much to say! I can't lie, I love being the favorite uncle...yes, uncle.

It was also great to have Dan's fiancee, Erin with us in McCall. She's great and I am so happy to have her as a sister in law in a few short weeks!

Ryan caught his very first fish! I was so proud of him. He'd never been fishing before (what a shame!) so I taught him how to cast the pole. He did a great job and brought in a nice fish for us, which we ate on Sunday.

He's a keeper!

There was one more surprise at the end of the trip that was pure luck! Saturday I said to Ryan, too bad Byron and his wife are in Moscow, or it would be fun to see them. Well that night, the whole family was sitting out on the back lawn chatting, when the doorbell rang, and who else was there but Byron himself! He came into town at the last minute and thought he'd stop by to say hi to Mom and Dad, but didn't know any of us were there! Sunday I finally got to meet Byron's wife, Amy. The vacation was a much needed break from the stresses of the business, and we had a wonderful time!

Our Business Baby

Summer is flying by so fast! Mostly I think that's due to this crazy adventure we've set out on of owning a painting company. What a job! I have to say it has been harder and so much more work than we ever bargained for. The potential in this is great, but so is the price that must be paid. Many days we wake up to the buzz of text messages or phone calls right around 7 am. Just like a charm. Customers and painters alike are looking to the head honcho for answers to their questions. Days are spent running logistics and solving everyone's problems, not to mention trying to meet new customers and make sales for the next week. As the evening approaches there's finally time to start answering emails and returning other phone calls. Dinner at 9, try to clean up the house a bit, and then back to bed. It's a grind, no doubt.

There are days I feel like we must have been crazy to have bought this thing. The pressure can just crush you. I am continually amazed at Ryan's ability to press forward. I can't say how many times I've thought to myself that this just isn't going to work. But I have more faith than that. We both felt confirmations that buying the business was the right course of action, so I went into the whole thing pretty calmly, and actually excited about what we were doing. The business has definitely taught both of us a lot about our strengths and our weaknesses as we are often pushed to our limits. The best thing in the world is that we are doing this together and can help each other through the hard days. Luckily we don't usually both feel discouraged on the same days. What I love most about working this company is that I get to see or at least talk to Ryan frequently throughout the day. It's great to feel so connected on something like that.

Ryan has some natural gifts with running a business and we've definitely seen the effects of that. We are making sales like crazy! I'm keeping the books and it's incredible to see how much money has flowed in and out of the bank account this year. We've had a lot of struggles, but I'm happy to say that July was our most profitable month thus far, and I think August is on track to be really good as well. When people say we have so much free time because we don't have any kids yet, I just tell them that we do have a baby. Our baby is a painting company. It takes all our money and all our time. :)

No job, New job

The painting company has gone gangbusters and is growing like crazy. We can hardly keep up. Every night Ryan and I are working til 10:30 or 11:00 and falling into bed exhausted, just to do it again the next day. And still, we were missing things, making mistakes, and having problems. We decided we needed to make a scheduling change. For the last year, I've been teaching ESL at a school about 25 minutes from our place. I'd teach 9-1:30, then most days I had 2-4 piano lessons in the afternoon, then I'd work the painting company with Ryan in the evenings. It was just too much.

At the beginning of June, I left my teaching job to have more time to work on the business with Ryan. It was sad to leave my students and some of my co-workers. I've never had such a great set of co-workers as I did at Columbia College. I loved talking with them and hanging out during our break time. And the students all work so hard and I got such validation from them. I'll miss that too. There's something great about being told by your class full of Asians that you are the beautiful teacher and that you are their favorite. (I've always loved being the favorite!)

The painting company is a LOT of work, but what I love most is that I get to spend most everyday just working with Ryan. We love that aspect of owning our own business! I'm getting a hands-on business education as we discuss marketing ideas, operations problems and solutions, finance, profitability, sales, and on and on. Although it was a leap of faith for me to leave my job, we felt like it was the right thing to do. Since my job was only part time, it wasn't that much income and we decided that working together we could probably produce enough of an improvement in leads and profitability to make up for what I would no longer bring in. It's a challenge, but we're learning together!

Green Belt!

Ryan has had a long-held desire to be a black belt and be awesome at martial arts. So about 2 1/2 years ago he decided to enroll in a Tae Kwon Do studio. They've got this great deal at Top Kick where if two people in a family join, the rest of the family gets in free. So Ryan's whole family decided to join shortly after he did. When we got married, I became part of the Nokes clan and therefore became eligible to join for free. This is something I never in my life thought I'd be doing, but I am now an intermediate belt in TKD. 

Demonstration of our blocks at graduation

I recently advanced from the gold stripe belt, which is considered a beginner belt still, to by green belt. I've been going to the intermediate/advanced class all along because that's where Ryan was anyways, but now I'm officially supposed to be in that class, which is great. The classes are actually a lot of fun, and a pretty good workout. I've done more push-ups than I ever thought possible!

Here's a demonstration of our form:

Never mind that I messed up a little bit in it. Also, contrary to how it looks in the video, I am NOT the only female adult in the class. We have several women who come. This particular graduation ceremony we seemed to be missing quite a few of the women. At the end of the demonstrations, we received our new belts. Happy to be moving up the ranks!

What's Your Color?

Color says a lot about a person. How a person uses color in their home can reflect their personality and affect their mood. That's one reason I believe in our company! Last weekend we did our first home show for our painting company! It was a huge crunch getting it pulled together, but it worked. Friday at 3 pm the location for the show opened for vendors to begin setting up, and we still didn't have a booth display. We'd ordered it 3 weeks before, and we'd been told it would arrive probably Wednesday or Thursday. Then we had a crazy snowstorm on Wednesday. The "snowquester" as it was named here in DC. Well, Virginia freaks out at the mention of a weather problem. So they closed schools preemptively on Wednesday and started 2 hours late on Thursday. I think they probably grounded the planes too. Anyways, we were getting nervous about our booth getting in. We got a tracking number at last and found it was on the truck to be delivered, so I was a little nervous all day to leave the apartment because I didn't want to miss it! Finally about 4:30 our booth arrived! We were at last able to get over to the center and get set up. It turned out looking great. Here it is.

All kinds of awesome brochures on popular paint color trends and palettes. It was fun discussing color with our future customers!

The proud owner in his booth

Not only did we have great success off the show, we had a great time talking with people and our good friend Rachel even came out both days to see us. On Sunday afternoon she even brought us the most delightful homemade cookies. And they were even still warm. They were super incredible, just like she is.

Entrepreneurship has been an exciting ride. It's fun to work on the business. It's something we are both really proud of. But it's also a lot of work with a lot of challenges and road blocks.

Iron Chef Cookoff

We've been plotting this activity for months now, but there were too many holidays and business trips in December and January, but we finally got pulled together our first Iron Chef battle. We got together with 3 other couples, the Dows, the Nearys, and the Wildes, and had ourselves a culinary competition. There were some special stipulations on our event. First, you could use whatever you already had in your house, but buying new ingredients was limited to $20. (Two were able to do it, two went over by a little bit.) Second, no use of the internet. Cookbooks you already owned were legal, but no searching for something online last minute.Third, you must produce both an entree and a dessert containing the secret ingredient. So the day before, we sent out a list of about 10 possible ingredients for people to consider. Then at 3:30, we picked an ingredient at random and texted it to everyone in the group. Food had to be to our place by 6 pm. The missionaries were invited to dinner to be the final judges. The secret ingredient: Ginger.

The spread. Everything was good. Some were just more good than others.

The array of food that arrived at our house was incredible. From the Nearys we had sushi and a cranberry pear upside down cake. From the Wildes, mashed butternut squash/potatoes surprise, and a dessert they invented and called "ginger lovin from the oven." The Dows produced sea bass with five chili ginger sauce and apricot ginger scones. Lastly, we presented kabobs with a citrus ginger marinade and a pear raspberry ginger crisp. Hands down, the Dows whooped us all with the sea bass. It was phenomenal. As far as desserts go, the winner was actually given to the Wildes. It was really good, though I thought our crisp was pretty delicious myself. Everyone had a great time and I would love to do it again with some of the other ingredients on our long list of possibilities.

Just Cruisin'

Another cruise? Didn't we just do one last April? Yes, in fact, we did. We went for our honeymoon. And we went on another one in January! It may seem crazy, yes, even a little to me. Ryan lost his job in November, and so we go on a cruise. Well, sort of. We bought Five Star Painting and they have an annual conference every year. This year it started in Tampa, and then we all got on a cruise boat and held the rest of the conference on the sea. So it was for work? Absolutely. Work, with a fair amount of play time. :) That's what I'm talking about.

After we finished visiting my friends in Sarasota, we drove back up to Tampa. We had a couple events for the conference on Saturday night and Sunday morning. Then they shuttled us all to the port to get on the Norwegian Dawn. (With the recent events on Carnival's boat, I'm so glad we were on Norwegian!) It was a nice boat. More elegant than the Carnival boat we were on for our honeymoon. That one had a lot of Vegas style neon lights. This was for a bit more upscale crowd I think. Also, the average age on the boat was probably 65. So, a lot different demographic.

Here's our boat. We are docked at Roatan, Honduras. 

The days we were at sea, Ryan had classes pretty much the whole day. Most of the wives didn't go to any of the work stuff, but I went to most of it. I cut out sometimes though when I felt to tired, or too sun-deprived. :) Most of the cruise it was overcast and even a little rainy, so the last day when we had sun, I wanted a little of that. The classes were great and we learned a lot about our new business. The days that we were in ports, there was nothing structured by the company and we had 4 days of playtime! Although, we usually were doing our adventures with other franchisees as well. It really was a great thing because we got to know people on more personal levels and there was a lot of informal opportunity to learn from the zees (short for franchisees). We could ask individual questions and get experience, ideas, opinions, and advice from many different people. It really was invaluable. Now when we have questions, we have a ton more resources because we are friends with people in the business all over the country.

 Ok, so the business aspect was great, but let's get on to the fun stuff! That makes for a much better post than a recap of paint products or marketing tactics. Our first stop was Roatan, Honduras. I think it was my favorite of the ports. It was super poor, but just so beautiful. It's pretty mind-blowing to see how people live. I'd love to just make tons of money and then come down and help the people learn how to improve their lives. It's a tiny island 40 miles off the coast of mainland Honduras, and it is all jungle. We took a van up to the top of a mountain and did a zipline trip through the rain forest  almost to the beach. it's over 2 miles of zipline.

Places like this made Ryan and I long for the day when we to can build a sweet treehouse. It's kind of a lifelong goal we've both always had!

Our guides taught us to do some sweet tricks, like hanging upside down!

On the second to the last line they clipped us in together and snapped a "couples picture" for us. 

Once we made it to the bottom, they took us in the van the rest of the way to the beach. We had an amazing lunch there (I've never had rice and beans that tasted so good!) and then strolled the beach until it was time to head back to the ship. 

Our guide here was a 16 year old kid, who we both thought was actually 11 or 12, he was so little! But he shared with us a lot of interesting things about the island, (pirate stories!) and gave us a great tour as we drove. He suggested we try the iguana, apparently an island special, but we opted for something different. Maybe next time.

The next day we went with a huge group of Five Star people on an ATV and cave tubing adventure in Belize. To get to Belize City from the cruise ship you have to take a tender (small boat) a couple miles to the shore because the water is too shallow for the cruise ship to dock. The city is pretty run-down. We saw the Church building there and it was by far the nicest building in the town. No wonder I've always heard about how in South and Central America the church buildings are often surrounded by a fence and barbed wire. That was true here. It's really just to protect and preserve it. We took a bus for an hour or so to "the palapa" where we rode ATVs In this case, it was actually a great thing that it had been rainy. It meant the jungle was mud-tastic! We were going through HUGE mud puddles and came out a wonderful mess.

Some of our Five Star friends. This is for reference to show how muddy it was!

Look how muddy we were after riding through the jungle!

The "Butts Up" van that took us on our adventures. 

We hadn't really planned on the ATV trip, be kind of got peer pressured into it. We thought we were just doing the tubing, but then when we were on the bus, found out everyone else was doing both. Rather than get separated from our group. We joined up. I'm glad we did because after ziplining, it was my next favorite activity we did. When we finished up, we boarded the bus again and headed to the river for tubing. This river goes through limestone caves that are pretty cool to look at. Pictures of this aren't great because it's so dark, but here's a few anyways.

Here's half the group as we are getting ready to push off. 

Ryan loved it. We are just coming out of the cave. 

We got to the end and were blinded by the sunlight. The caves were cool, but the beautiful jungle was incredible too! 

When we got to the end, several of the guys jumped off this point. Ryan and I opted not to because it was kind of windy and so we were freezing after having been in the water already. 

They took us back to the palapa for lunch and they fed us tamales. I love tamales so much! Then we headed back to the boat and boarded the ship.

The next day we docked in Costa Maya, Mexico. I'm glad Ryan speaks Spanish, because our van driver there spoke very little English. We took a big group of Five Star people to the Chacchoben Mayan ruins. Our guide found that Ryan spoke Spanish, so he asked him to sit up front with him. That was fun. We asked him all kinds of questions that other people on the van had about stuff. My college Spanish is a bit rusty, but I was able to understand probably 30-40% of the conversation between him and Ryan. Here's the ruins.

Here's one of the biggest temples at the ruin.

This cool tree was in a central area between some of the temples. The way the area was, it looked like it was kind of a common area at some point. 

The last day we docked at Cozumel, Mexico. We actually didn't take any pictures there. It was the first day that way actually just really nice and sunny. We decided to just go to the beach and not be big spenders on any more excursions. I tried to get a tan, and Ryan tried to hide under a towel. And yet, he got burned a bit, and I got nothing. We went to the same beach as we had gone to the previous year, so there wasn't too much new about it, but it was super relaxing.

We also really enjoyed our evenings on the ship. Company sponsored cocktail hour provided us with some nice virgin pina coladas. (Actually funny because there's a large contingency of LDS members who are in the company, so I think the bar was serving way more virgin drinks than they were used to!) The boat put on some great shows. The best one by far was the aerialists. It was kind of cirque du soliel style performing, and it was absolutely phenomenal. There was just one man and one woman, but they did some incredible things. It amazes me that one can train a body to do those things. We also really loved just walking up on deck in the evenings. At that time, it's pretty empty. Most people are at dinner, at shows, or in the casino, so the upper decks are pretty deserted, which makes for a wonderful stroll. I was so relaxed on the trip I almost hated to come back and jump back into the stress of real life. But now it's time to put into practice everything we learned. Wish us luck!