Escaping the Inversion for President's Day

I'm glad that Abraham Lincoln and George Washington were born.  It gives me an excuse to do something fun every year.  (They were great presidents.  I suppose I should be glad about that as well.)

This year, the number 1 thing I wanted to do was get up in the mountains and be above the inversion.  The inversion was pretty bad when we planned it, but there was a storm Sunday night that blew most of it out.  But I still wanted to get up into the crisp mountain air.

We put Jared W in charge of planning it, because he is our official adventure planner.   We got in the car and headed up Big Cottonwood Canyon.

We donned our winter clothing, and the adventure began.

It's customary for Robyn to complain about the cold whenever we are outside.  It's also customary for her to look precious.  Isn't she cute?

 We didn't have snowshoes.  We just had our boots on.  For the most part, the snow was frozen enough that our boots were perfect.  Although, I did fall into the snow a few times.

The beginning of the hike was pretty steep, and was further complicated by the fact that we were on snow, but it was beautiful up there and I was super happy to be out in nature.

It's important to get a couple's picture.  It's also important for Bryce to photobomb in the back.

Jared stopped to rest, so I told them both to look cute.

Do not underestimate the importance of selfies.

Sometimes Robyn just takes a belax in the snowy wilderness.  (Belax is a word coined by my niece when she was about 5 years old)

Here's the whole crew that went on the adventure.

All in all, it was a successful President's Day.  How did you celebrate?

The Day of Love

Valentine's Day is a day of love.  I feel like mine was very successful with lots of love from my love.

The day of love started on Saturday when we ordered pizza at Papa Murphy's.  Obviously, it was important to get a heart shaped pizza.

It totally looks like a heart... kind of.

A selfie with the heart shaped pizza.  Except it doesn't look heart shaped at all.

I tried to take a selfie with Robyn while she cut the pizza.  But I fogot to put myself in the picture.

In addition to the heart shaped pizza, we also ordered a chicken bacon artichoke pizza.  I didn't look at it when I took it from them, but when I got home Robyn took one look at it and exclaimed, "Oh no!"  It turned out they gave us the wrong pizza.  But the good news is that when I went back to get the right pizza, we got to keep the wrong pizza for free.

True love really does conquer all.  Our true love got us a free pizza.

Valentine's Day morning, I woke up early to make Robyn breakfast.  Unbeknownst to me, she had placed nerdy valentines all over the house.  Here are just a few examples.

I'm pretty sure that was true love.

Of course, she got some true love as well.  I gave her a box of chocolates with a little note I had written.

Free pizza and nerdy valentines are clearly signs of true love.  What love did you receive on the day of love?

The Time that Hackers Made Me Arabic

If you take a look at me, there's pretty much a zero percent chance that you'd mistake me for someone of Arabic or Middle Eastern descent.  But about 2 days ago, if you were to take a look at my instagram, you might get a different idea.

I'll start at the beginning.

On Tuesday night, I got several follow requests from people I didn't know.  I didn't think much of it, I accepted their requests and moved on with my life.  Wednesday morning, I noticed that 2 different individuals with the name of "Ahmed" had requested to follow me.  I thought it was a really funny coincidence, so I took a screenshot.

But then I started thinking a little bit more about it.  Why was I getting follow requests at all?  I have a public profile.  Anyone can follow me without my permission.  Then I looked closer at some of the people that had requested to follow me.  They weren't just following me.  They were following me back.  I was already following them.

What?  I never followed these people.  What is going on?

Then I looked closer at my profile.  My profile picture hadn't changed.  I was still as white as they come.  But my name had changed.  It was something in Arabic.  I also looked at who I was following.  I was following all the people I used to follow, as well as a little over 100 other individuals, most of them Arabic.  (I clicked on profiles and their pictures had captions written in Arabic.)

The obvious conclusion was that I had been hacked.

I can only think of two possible theories for why this hacking occurred.

• One of my friends thinks that Arabic culture would really suit me, so they thought I might enjoy seeing pictures of that culture.  (If this is true and it was you, the better strategy is to make me some Arabic food.  I'm just sayin')
• Someone in an Arabic country has one of those things where people pay for followers.  They used my account as a follower and wanted it to seem like a legit Arab account.
• Somebody just thought it would be really funny.  (I probably would agree with them.)

Maybe there is some other reason.  I'm not sure.  

I think the strangest part of all of it was that they set my account to private.  I think it would have taken me much longer to realize it if they hadn't done that.  The follow back requests were what set me off.

The important thing is that I changed my password and unfollowed all of my new Arabic friends.  (Although, I think some of the follow backs still follow me.)  I also set my profile to public again, so all of you are free to follow me without asking my permission.

I think the moral of the story is that hackers are weird.