Google Voice...

...is the coolest thing you didn't know you needed. It will change the way we use phones once it catches on and free us from the tyranny of the cell phone carriers. For those of you who don't know what it is (and if you aren't dying to get it then you OBVIOUSLY don't know what it is), it is best described as "one number to rule them all." When you sign up for the service you get a phone number that will act as a gateway to all of your other phones. You can then set it up to forward your calls to different numbers, different voicemail messages, or to a "this number has been disconnected" message for the spam you hate getting.

Got that? In so many words, you get complete control over incoming calls. For example, on my system I have one voicemail message for my family, one for my friends, another for church people, and one for my classmates. So my family gets a "hi family!" message, my friends get a "I miss you!" message, and church people get a quote from the Bible (Just kidding! But I totally should. The missionaries would think I'm the coolest ever).

Even better, When someone leaves me a message, I have a whole bunch of other options as well. Google automatically transcribes the message and I can have them text or email it to me. So I never have to leave a class to get an urgent voicemail message. I can read it right on the spot! The transcription service makes mistakes, but never so badly that I don't understand the message. I can also call into my voicemailbox and listen to the messages just like with any other mailbox. If I log into Google Voice I have still more options, such as embedding the voicemail in a blog like so...


...or I can download the message and make a trance song out of it (sorry, I haven't actually done that yet), or I can block the caller so that I never have to hear from that person again unless I want to.

Do you really really want this yet? If not, here is a quicklist of some other features of Google Voice:

• FREE incoming and outgoing texts (however, if you have texts forwarded to a cell phone, you will still be charged by your service provider)
• Call screening: Callers not on your contact list are asked for their name. Then you are asked if you want to accept so-and-so's call or send them to voicemail.
• Voicemail screening: If you send someone to voicemail, you can listen in on the message and decide to cut in at any time.
• Call transferring: If you have multiple phones set up with your account, you can easily transfer an ongoing call to one of your other phones with the touch of a button (*).
• Call recording: You can record any call simply by pushing (5) on your keypad. Beware next time we are on the phone...
• "Do Not Disturb" function: When activated, all calls will automatically be forwarded to voicemail. Great for times when you can't answer calls but you don't want to turn your phone off.
• Call initiation from the web: You can make a phone call from your Google Voice number using any phone. Just enter the number you want to call, select the phone you want to call from, and hit "call." The phone you want to call from will then ring your phone and the number you want to call.
  
• Smart phone integration: Palm Pre and Android phone users can get an app that essentially takes over the phone functions of the device. That means outgoing calls and texts will display the Google Voice number. It also means you can send and receive texts to your phone absolutely free of charge! No more ridiculous carrier per-text charges. Similar apps are coming for other phones in the future.

The list could go on, but that should have interested you at least a little. It's really something you don't realize the benefits of until you have started using it. Once you start, you will wonder how you ever managed without it. It's a new standard of living, I'm not kidding. But perhaps the best feature is that no matter what you will never have to give out a new number or beg your Facebook buddies to re-send you their numbers due to a lost phone. No matter what phone you have or what phone is near you, you can always send and receive calls for your Google Voice number. All of your contacts will be kept safe in your account (which is linked with your Gmail account as an added bonus). And this is Google, so you know they will keep coming up with killer new features. Holy cow this is awesome!

Sorry for the full-on advertisement. I promise I'm not being paid to do all this brown-nosing to Google; I just really really love Google Voice. Sadly, it is currently invite-only. But they are giving away invites like candy right now, so sign up here and wait a week or two. I promise that you'll love it if you take the plunge and really use it.

Speaking of, if you want to know my new Google Voice number, just call my current number. I'll give you a hint, though: It has the word TRUST in it! Yeah, I picked it out myself. Bye!

The Shark's Cousin....

...is the Stringray. Who knew? I learned that from the DOE (Dept of Environment) who was regulating Stingray city last week.

Last week was our annual trip to the Cayman Islands. Yes, it was amazing! I could never tire of that place. From the extreme humidity to the bipolar weather to the sunburn/peeling, I love it all! Bring on the burn, the frizzy hair, and the inability to be useful or productive for an entire week! I welcome all these things!

We drove to Utah the Friday night before we left for Cayman (our departure was Sunday). That Saturday (we arrived in Provo at 2:30am) we spent with my family before leaving. I also got to work on and catch up with a few clients while I was there.

Sunday we left Provo airport and arrived in Cayman about 9 hours later with a lay over in Texas. I've decided that Texas isn't very exciting. there are no mountains, well, non that I saw.



As soon as we arrived we ate dinner and stocked up on food for the next day. I was able to get a picture on my phone of a random rooster that was roaming around the gas station that we stopped to get our goodies at. I guess roosters roam the streets just like squirrels here do. it was kind of odd to see but entertaining.

The rest of the week we were entertained by sleeping, reading, eating (the food was divine...and the desserts...OH,don't get me started on the desserts), stingray city, snorkeling, kayaking, more snorkeling, more stingray city and borderline comatose-relaxation. Can you say *BLISS*

Stingray city was my favorite thing from the entire vacation. I finally became good at holding them. what's weird is that you get to hold these things that are meant to be wild....but they are not. They're gentle and soft (for the most part). I got a few "battle wounds" like getting smacked in the face with a tail from a stingray I was holding. They kind of swing their tails when you hold them and this one I was holding had a very VERY long tail that collided with my face. I also got a few over-eager stingray trying to suck my entire fist because I was holding squid in them. that was a little startling and left me with what looked like a small self-induced hickey on my thumb.


Funny story: Wednesday was an overcast day. Tristin and I went out on the catamaran and sailed up and down the bay. After 20 minutes it started to rain hard, as if stones were being thrown from the clouds. We couldn't run for shelter because we were stranded on the catamaran in the middle of the bay. The only shelter would have been to jump in the water. After a minute of freezing cold rain on my sunburned body, the sky's cleared up completely and it was as sunny as ever. This is what I meant by bipolar weather :)

The only complaint I have about the week was that Shark Week was playing on the Discovery Channel all week long. The thing about Shark week is that it's extremely mesmerizing. As soon as you start watching it you get sucked in and you wanna watch it even more. Seeing dismantled legs and arms and bodies on shows called "I survived a shark attack" was not a comforting thing to watch every night, especially when you're in the ocean every day BUT you still watch it. Obviously it wasn't scary enough to stop me from watching it but I probably shouldn't have because every time I got in the ocean I'd think "Hm...I hope there aren't any sharks near me today!"

Saturday we flew back to the States and surprisingly I was NOT harassed by immigrations or customs. I tend to be a target for suspicion in airports. the rest of the day and Sunday was spent with my family catching up and just hanging out with them. It was a very unreal moment when we had to say goodbye because it felt like we had never really left Utah. Our life in Colorado almost seemed like a very distant memory. It was very bizarre. But now we're back and in the swing of things again and I realized that although I left my home in Utah, I was welcomed by my home here in Colorado.

"Time goes, you say?"

"Ah no, Alas, Time stays, we go."

How far we have come in the past month and a half. What feels like days has been weeks and what will soon feel like weeks will in actuality be months.

I hadn't realized it but it had been an entire month of bloglessness for me. Some sort of record, I'm sure. So I blurted out to Tristin that he should do an update on our lives as I was running out the door to work the other day. What I didn't realize was that there wasn't really anything interesting enough (for him) to blog about....until he set out on his quest to hook up half the apartments appliances to be on-demand by the touch of our phones. You can read about it in the blog prior to this one.

Here's one new thing I've learned about Tristin. When given a lot of spare time, he will start crazy projects. He's probably broken and fixed our computer (which is new) 4 times over since we've moved due to tweeking programs on it and what not! I don't speak the language of technology so I don't really know the specifics, all I know is that one day I'll want to use the computer and it's broken...again, or he's hooked up the tv and surround sound to the computer and none of those are working. Then I come home and lights are switching on in the house magically and there he'll be sitting on the couch grinning at me, trying to see if I'm freaked out or if I've figured out that it's one of his projects he worked on. He kind of reminds me of Merlin the magician from the cartoon, The Sword in the Stone. (that scene from the movie say's it all). Some days his tricks run smoothly, and then some days he gets a little carried away and things get a little messy with which I say "I don't care, as long as you can fix it"....and he always does. I Love my nerdy husband!

Wow, talk about a tangent...
So here it goes, our lives here in Colorado the past 4 weeks or so...

ZIM FEST (the end of June):

It was pretty cool. The farmers market had a lot to show for the day and we had live music and singing. What really stumped me was that I was half expecting black people to be performing because it's Zim Fest....as in ZIMBABWE the country in AFRICA! How ignorant am I? You'd think ME, a WHITE person from South AFRICA would understand that there are white people in Zimbabwe! I'll tell you what, I'll never make fun of anyone who asks me stupid questions about Africa again, "are your parents black, can you read, are their buildings in Africa, do people wear shoes in Africa, why are you white" questions like that.


4TH OF JULY:

Conryd and Aly drove to Colorado to spend the 4th weekend with us! It was awesome. Friday we took them to see Boulder, Saturday we played games, relaxed, ate food til we felt sick and wrote our names in the air with sparklers in commemoration of the 4th (how cool are we?) Then Sunday they had to leave us which really stunk.

MY PARENTS:

My parents came to visit us the following week. My dad had a show in Denver from the 8th-11th so we'd hang out with them during the evenings when I didn't have work. We ate at the International Tea House 3 nights in a row because the food was TO DIE FOR! It was so amazing, I couldn't believe my taste buds. Then Saturday we took my mom to check out the Farmers market which she loved. We saw and heard some interesting things from a guy wearing a "I love Weed" shirt to a man in the line behind us verbally marking his disapprobation to the lady next to us by saying that she was torturing her dog for letting it walk on the hot pavement and that she should put her hands on the ground and see if she likes it.

Aren't people great?



Then we had to redo the whole goodbye scenario which I've come to strongly dislike, BUT I have to get used to it because it will have to be done a lot in the next 3-4 years.

On a positive note, Colorado has stolen our hearts. It's beautiful, comfortable, the people are lovely and we are very happy here.

Homemade Hax0red iPhone Videos

So it has been over a month since we posted anything. Big deal, you know you don't care that much. All the same, you might have had a moment in the middle of the night when you wondered what we are doing. Right before you realized you still had half a sandwich in the fridge from lunch. Yum!

We don't really want to bore you with details of what we've been doing (Juanique is working, Tristin is pretending to work and slowly rotting until school starts), so here is an abridged version: We saw lightning and our phones can open our garage door. Yeah, we are awesome in two different ways. And we have videos to prove it. Here's the lightning:



All apologies for the lousy quality and the sidewaysness. All we had was an iPhone (not 3Gs--we do it old-school hax0r style), which doesn't do well with fast things or the dark. I recommend you download the video, open it with VLC, turn on image sharpening to full throttle, and rotate the image 270 degrees. That would make it watchable. But skip to 1:20ish and only watch for 20 seconds. Yeah, I could do all that for you. But then I'd lose interest before this video actually got put up and it would be another month before you heard from us.

OKAY, here is the exciting part that you've all been hoping for ever since you got your first garage. That's right, friends. We've figured out how to open our garage door with a garage door opener OR the computer OR a remote OR our iPhones! You can believe what you are reading, because we have proof in the form of another blurry iPhone video. This is the part where we confess that we don't own a real video camera. We hate memories and stuff. But I'm pretty excited about this, because nothing makes me feel more like a man than opening my garage door with my phone. I know, I have issues. Just wait until I get a Roomba and arm it with a laser. Just the thought makes me a little bit teary eyed. Okay, here it is:



You are so jealous. If you aren't, pretend you are so that I'll feel cool. Thanks. We've also got a digital picture frame and the living room lamp set up on this system. Once we get some more $$$ we can add to it, so that eventually the whole house will be controllable with the phone. And then I will get a Roomba and attach a laser to it. At that point, pray you are on my good list. Mwahahahaha!...

Where Do the Deer and the Antelope Play?

In BOULDER~ that's where! Well, just the deer, No antelope. (I'll explain later in this post)

Today was our adventure to the Boulder's Farmers Market. It was the perfect day to go as well because IT WAS ACTUALLY SUNNY! This whole week has been showered in rain and lightening which reminds me a lot of South Africa. I don't remember seeing lightening much in Utah, come to think of it. Nevertheless, it was great to feel the warmth again and tie my sweater around my waist. Our adventure started with a search for parking. we parked about half a mile away but the walk was pleasant. the actual market itself was just amazing! If I had the money to spare I would have gone CRAZY. All the food was locally grown and organic, there were tons of bead and jewelery booths, beautiful hand made clothing, paintings, pottery and flowers and plants for Africa. I wish I had taken more pictures but I completely forgot to. I came across a booth that sold handmade sandals from cow hide (I think) that were just GORGEOUS! The owner was really cool and told us that her shoes she was wearing were 7 years old (and they still looked great). They are so durable that you can go anywhere with them like hiking through rivers or just hiking.....so I ordered a pair (I shouldn't have but if they're going to last that long and look that great, then I need them). We also was a poster saying that in 2 weeks time the Zimbabwean Music Festival will be here in Boulder so we can't wait for that. (Don't you wish you were here to see that mom? It's your mother-land where you were born!!)

Later we drove around looking for a store. We ended up in a residential area in Boulder that was at a higher level than the city itself. As we passed a house we saw a deer literally 2 feet away from our car. So I went trigger happy and took a lot of pictures. She was just beautiful and not shy at all. She even started walking towards the car.

Our next stop was Pearl Street Mall which is an outdoors mall with tons of people playing music and putting on shows, not to mention the diversity of the stores there is amazing. We came across a guy on a ball who was juggling fire. Definitely a show worth sticking around for. Then about 10 minutes later our wonderful weather turned to a tropical rain storm and it was time to head on home where we were met with hail. Yes, hail!

All in all it was a fantastic day. We are starting to feel very happy and comfortable here in Colorado. It's a fantastic place to live! In fact, the area here was voted the 2nd best place to live in the USA, next to Provo which was voted the #1 place to live. Haha. So I guess you can say we moved down in the rankings, going from Provo to Boulder :) Just kidding.

Love to all!

Bread Attempt # 4!

Yay! we did it! we finally made bread that looked like bread and it was soft and edible! Is it the healthiest of recipes? No, but we weren't sure if it was our mistake or the bread-maker's mistake so we bought a "pre-made" box of the dry ingredients for sweet bread (just add water) and TA DA! So now Tristin and I have to find a healthy bread recipe that works in our bread machine.

Do you know of any good recipes for bread that are yummy and healthy? Please share. We'd love to know! As for us, it's back to the drawing board. *sigh*

Bread attempt # 3 (as shown in a past post)

Bread attempt # 4! Success! And Tristin STILL refuses to smile properly for pictures. Haha-I love him

Perspective.

I was reminded today of a video I once saw earlier this year. Every time I watch it I am humbled but the extreme amount of abundance I have in my life! If you have 3 minutes to spare you should watch it (if you haven't seen it before). How I don't count my blessing enough some times. Hope you enjoy.