Valentine's Birthday

Valentine's weekend was a pretty eventful weekend in the Platt house. We had some friends over on Friday night to watch the opening ceremonies of the olympics. I made my traditional Olympic chocolate cake, and even wore my USA olympics vest!

Scott made chili, and Sarah & Jimmy brought some snack as well. Here is Sarah warming her cold hands on the chili pot.On Saturday, I went to a Bridal shower in the morning, and then we went to a Valentine's banquet for our church in the evening.

Valentine's day is also Scott's birthday, and this year was his 40th birthday! He asked me not to throw a surprise party (or even a not-surprise party) for him, but I wanted to surprise him with something special. So a couple weeks before his birthday I emailed almost everyone in my address book, and asked them to send Scott a card...I also welcomed them to have fun with it, and send silly cards, funny cards, or even cards signed by people he doesn't know. They pulled through, and Scott got quite the haul of birthday cards!Sunday morning Valentine's photo.After church on Sunday we went to my parents house to celebrate Scott's (and my niece Hannah's) birthday. Hannah and Rhea were both sick, so Doug had stayed home with them while the rest of the family came for lunch.

The nieces had all made birthday cards for Scott. I really liked Hannah's card. It says, "40. You are really OLD." From the mouth of an 11-year old.

When I walked in the door, Olivia gave me her usual greeting: "Where's Uncle Scott??" She was happy to see him!My parents gave Scott an Army blanket!

Silly picture!Lynn and the girls made a giant cookie for Scott's birthday. Yum!

On another note, this is the pile of dishes we attacked tonight. The last time we did dishes was Sunday...yes, only 2.5 days ago! And there are only two people in our house!! That is ridiculous! I'm voting that the next house we live in has a dishwasher.

Hoover Dam

On Sunday while in Vegas, Lynne, Carol, and I took a road trip to Hoover Dam. It was 65 degrees, sunny, and beautiful! It was also a nice change of pace from the crowds on the strip. On the way, we stopped at the Lake Mead NRA Visitor's Center, and I got a couple stamps in my National Park passport, a patch for my backpack, and some prickly pear cactus jelly. Yum!

Lake Mead:
This is a dangerous cactus garden!

About 4 miles before you get to Hoover Dam, you see all kinds of funny signs about how slow traffic is...and they were right! There is a security checkpoint about a mile before you get to the dam, so traffic was moving at less than 25 mph. it took about 30 minutes to go the last 4 miles!

The highway over the dam (going from Nevada to Arizona) is very curvy with many switchbacks, and of course, you have all the traffic from tourists visiting the dam, so if you are just trying to drive cross-country, it can be frustrating! They are currently building a new highway for the non-tourist traffic. We could see the completed parts of the highway as we were driving, and it is a nice, straight, 4 lane road. The bridge over the canyon is not quite done yet, but it looks pretty cool!

You can see all the platforms on the posts of the bridge. They also had huge cranes rigged up on both sides. After they built the arcs, they are putting on the highway, starting from the middle.

Michelle asked my why we wanted to leave the strip for a day to see the dam, and I said, "Because it is the most impressive feat of human engineering in the USA. And because it supplies most of the power for the western half of the United States." Pretty impressive! I read that the Hoover Dam is taller than the St. Louis Arch, the Eiffel tower, and the Pyramids!

Here is a great view of the new bridge from on top of the dam.

There are two copper statues like this, and they were the heaviest statues in the nation when they were put there. They brought them in on huge block of ice, and centered them in the correct location as the ice melted.

Las Vegas!

A couple weekends ago I went to Las Vegas with my co-workers, and we met a couple vb friends from Texas for a girl's weekend! we got there late Friday night, and took the red eye home on Sunday, going straight to work on Monday, so it was a fast weekend.

Here is the view down the strip toward New York New York. I was amazed at how big everything is--each casino has pretty much an entire shopping mall, plus the casino and the hotel and restaurants, in it! We probably walked 10 miles over the 2 days.We decided to take the monorail all the way to the south end of the strip (we stayed in the Stratosphere, which is on the very north end of the strip). The monorail did save time, but it was a long walk through the casinos to get from the strip to the monorail station.

Michelle and I

Our hotel, the Stratosphere, at night.

This is the ceiling in the lobby of the Bellagio. It was covered with big, glass flowers. Very pretty.

After supper on Saturday, we watched the fountains at the Bellagio.

We also went downtown to the Fremont Street Experience. It is about 2 block that is covered with a huge video screen, and they do shows on it every hour. It was pretty cool.

And I got my picture taked with local celebrities...