Warm Feelings

The day that I became a father was one of the happiest days of my life. I was amazed at how something that I helped create just came to life and had such a huge impact immediately on the world. I love the time that I get to spend with my children. Our days are filled with bike rides and fort building. Naps and Happy Meal runs. (For me) I love seeing my kids learn new things and understand new concepts that they never would have understood even a few days before. My kids are extremely happy kids. They are always laughing and having fun. They bring me cozy warm feelings.

The Culprits

Now to talk about another warm feeling. Every year our family goes the Utah State Fair. What I have learned about the State Fair is that A) it is the exact same thing every year and B) the people that you see at the fair will make you think to yourself, "Where do these people live? Because wherever they live, I do not want to live there." The reason that we go to the fair is that you get a lot of Utah culture in a very short amount of time. We have never been let down by the fair. Ok so the scene has been set, we are sitting at the fair getting ready for the night show to start. This night at the fair they had a lion show going on. I decided to put my son Graham on my shoulders so he could get a clear shot of the show that was about to begin. I was having a great time that night, we had some friends with us, we had just finished eating our Fair food and we were ready for a show. And that is when I got a warm feeling. This warm feeling started on the top of my shoulder and then carried on down the front of my chest. At first I didn't realize what had just happened. I had never been urinated on in my life and up to this point it wasn't something I was really prepared for. Once the realization hit me I immediately got my wife's attention and said, "Uh, i just got peed on." Then I walked over to the funnel cake truck and bought a funnel cake. It had chocolate swirled on it. It was delicious.

This leads me to today. We were are the Herriman rec center swimming as a family. Well, when you have a three year old and a one year old you don't do much swimming you do a lot of walking around the kiddie pool. My daughter Campbell was not into the swimming at all. Every time I would go in the water with her some massive boy child would come and splash water on her. She was very nervous to be in the water. So like any good father would do I got out of the water and sat on the bench with her. We had been sitting there for about 10 minutes when the next warm feeling of my life occurred. I was a little shocked that the urine reached my leg because she had a swimming diaper and plastic diaper cover on. But somehow, someway, the urine found my leg. I was instantly brought back to that day when her brother had done the same thing to my shoulder. And you know, in a way it was kind of a parent-child rite of passage. It was like my children were marking their territory. And I was somewhat ok with it. Being the hilarious comedian that I am I picked Campbell up and walked her over to her Mother in the pool. When I got there I said those words she had heard before, "Uh, I just got peed on." Then I looked my wife in the eyes with a bit of defiance and I sat right down in that swimming pool. Chlorine kills everything right?

Let Them Pin!

My wife has a newly acquired addiction. It's not cocaine, or meth, or even alcohol. It's Pinterest. +Pinterest really came out of nowhere. For those of you who don't know, Pinterest is a site that allows you to take a snapshot of articles, blogs, crafts, etc. that are found online. That snapshot is called a board. You link to other peoples boards and see what they have liked as well. This sounds all good and fun however, I want to talk about a few downsides of Pinterest. First of all my wife guards her board like I guard my Pez collection. You can look but you can't touch. I have tried on numerous occasions to get her to pin some things for me. She looks at me like I am that big Kardashian sister that isn't as popular as the rest and I know the gig is up. She aint having it. Case in point I tried to get her to pin this hilarious someecard that I created:

The other downside is that her board has become one big "honey do list" there are hundreds maybe even thousands of things that she wants to do to our house, car, backyard, my belly, our kids, etc. For a 29 year old balding lazy man like myself this is a bad thing. I know that there is a playhouse made out of pallets but do we have to have one in our backyard? 

You thought I was kidding. 

All jokes aside, I am fooling you right now. I actually love that my wife loves Pinterest. Pinterest is not only the home to projects it is home to some amazing desserts, dinners, snack, treats, and stuff that will grow my belly. There have been many meals and snacks made that came directly from the pages of Pinterest. 

Had It. Loved It. Pinterest Is To Thank.

I recently read an article from a girl that was very negative on Pinterest. The article talked about how she felt the purpose of Pinterest was to be a place to "keep up with the Jones" (or wahetever your neighbors names are) she felt like moms were paying more attention to Pinterest then they were to their children and so on. I was a bit perplexed (huge word) by this at first because I have only observed my wife using Pinterest for good. It's kind of like the tesseract in The +Avengers. When you use it for good it's great, when you use it for evil it unleashes nasty alien monster centipedes on the world. Yeah same thing. She has used it to cook me meals, make activitites for our son's school time, swoon over Ryan Gossling, laugh at hilarious someecards (see above picture), make awesome desserts, make over our home (better than +Ty Pennington), and so much more. 

All that being said I think Pinterest is a place for awesome people to get awesome ideas to be awesome!  Pinterest is really about the American Dream, Food, Fun, and Ryan Gossling. My tag line for this post will now and forever be, "Let Them Pin!"

Candy Man Can

I have something I need to admit to the world. I am addicted to candy. When I was a little boy I had a reputation to be able to "smell out" any candy in any room or house that I was in. No matter where the candy was located I could find it. It was kind of like a Willy Wonka Sixth Sense. But without all of the dead people. I carried that reputation for many years and to this day I still have those secret powers. One thing you need to know about the Hintze family is that we are obsessed with candy. My Grandpa Hintze was famous for having boxes of Sees Candies in his desk and handing them out to people that visited his office at BYU. My uncle kept his stash in large drawers that were built in to his water bed. And my Dad constantly had a mountain of Peanut Clusters and Chocolate Raisins by his side. I know what you are thinking, "THAT IS AWESOME!" Yeah I was thinking the same thing. So coming from candy royalty I have quite the task ahead of me to keep the traditions alive.

I use seasonal candy as my calendar. I know that when I see those Chocolate Oranges in Harmon's Christmas is right around the corner. Or when the Cadbury Mini Eggs hit the shelves its time for Easter.  I have prepared a pictorum below. (By the way I just made that word up. It is currently underlined in red because it aint real.)

Valentines Day

Easter

Fathers Day

This is a bit of a stretch because I eat these year round.

Halloween

Christmas

Yes I took this picture. I call it "The Unravelling" It's deep trust me. 

These are just a few examples. I know by now you are searching your house for any piece of chocolate you can find. You probably cant find any and so you have gone to your last resort AKA Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips. I have been there before. It's not pretty but they will get the job done until you can get to the store to restock. 

Anyway back to the matter at hand. Do you want to know my two favorite movies growing up? Willy Wonka and Heavyweights. Below is a scene from Heavyweights where all of the campers, well just watch.  This may be the best piece of cinema ever made. 

The point of all of this is that I have made a promise to myself (much to my wife's dismay) and humanity that I will keep my cupboards stocked with the good stuff. No matter the cost to my wallet or my waist line. So if you are ever in the mood for something sweet you know where to find me. And if all that wasn't enough for you there is also that whole Pez thing. 

Get Your Rib On

You would think that the world had ended for me. I was sitting in my room one night after attending the annual Rib Fest in Reno, NV. The Rib Fest is a wonderful 3 day event of worshipping all things pork. Especially ribs. There are 50 different vendors trying their best to win over the hearts and taste buds of those ready to gorge themselves. And let me tell you, I gorged. I lost count of how many ribs I had eaten after my 2nd or maybe 3rd rack. For those of you out there that don't know how the rib accounting system works, a rack is 12 ribs. So I ate my fair share and then some. I went to bed that night feeling like Kobayashi after an eating competition. The next morning, I was up and at em' like a spry chicken so I decided to look up the local buffets in the area. The Grand Sierra Resort just so happens to have an all you can eat brunch buffet. So I thought to myself "Self, why not pour about 5 more pounds of fatty food down my gullet." My self should have told me otherwise. It was not a good idea.

About 8 hours passed before the stone in my gall bladder decided to block the substance that keeps the whole system moving. Quick anatomy lesson, your gall bladder produces bile, the bile is what breaks up the food in your stomach so you can digest. I had a gall stone blocking the passage out of my gall bladder which caused a back up of bile. Basically it was like my initial reaction to seeing the ball hit the goal post in the recent BYU loss to Utah. But over and over again for about an hour. And that is about the time when the diva inside of me decided to come out. This is the point in the story where I want to introduce my wife Stephanie. Little bit of background on her, she is a nurse, mother of two, and all around Bad-A. Yep, I said it, she is the mother of two. My wife has been through 2 terrible pregnancies to bring our beautiful children into this world. We are talking Epic amounts of sickness pregnancies. She is going to be mad that I am telling you this but she would keep a bowl under her bed and every single morning for almost her entire 9 month pregnancy she would wake up, pick up the bowl, and immediately vomit. This was the norm for her for both pregnancies. One time we were in the parking lot of an I-Hop about to go in and eat a delicious stuffed french toast and she had to vomit. So what does she do? She takes a sandwich bag out of her purse, vomits perfectly into it without spilling a drop, throws the bag o' puke in the garbage can, and heads inside to eat her delicious french toast. Superwoman? Yep.

Yummy!

Back to my "Woe is me" story. As I was having my gall bladder attack I was telling my wife that I loved her and I was going to die. I was telling her not to marry another man. I was telling her that I had buried a bunch of money in the backyard. Ok well some of those things I just said are not true. I was being a bit of a Beyonce, mixed with Christina Aguilera, and throw in a little Whitney Houston minus the drug abuse. My wife being the nurse that she is stayed very calm the entire time. I have a feeling it had to do with my life insurance policy but I have not been able to confirm that. Once we got to the hospital I really started flipping out. One thing I don't get about emergency rooms is how little they treat you like you are having an emergency. I was thinking my life is surely over at this point if I dont get immediate help and the receptionist is sitting there watching Jersey Shore.  There were numerous ideas that I had concocted in my head of how to make a big scene and run back into where all the doctors are and demand to be seen. I did not do that and eventually they took me back to be treated. After many hours and a whole lot of morphine (nasty drug) they decided to do an ultrasound on me and found out it was gall stones. I think that night I told my wife I was sick or didn't feel well about 500 times. The entire 9 months she was pregnant I think she may have told me that 5 times.

This leads to today. I have been on bed rest since yesterday after I had my surgery and have been waited on by my wonderful wife hand and foot. After my wife gave birth she was in bed for a total of about 12 hours. I have been in bed for well over 24 hours and don't plan on getting up for at least a few more days. Every chance I get I do this thing called "milking it". I am very good at "milking it" but my wife is onto me and calls my bluff quite often. Moral of the story, Dont eat too many ribs, but if you do eat too many and get a gall stone you better learn how to milk it.

All Is Fair, You Know The Rest

I met my wife at Snow College my freshman year right out of High School. She loved me at first sight, she just didn't want to admit it to herself. She was friends with one of my roommates and I knew right when I saw her that I wanted to marry her. Ok, enough of the lovey-dovey let's get down to business. One night my roommates and I were sitting around our living room playing X-Box eating our Top Ramen and we got to talking about our kitchen chairs. Over the past few days our chairs seemed to be disappearing. (I'll be honest they could have been disappearing over a longer period of time but we were college kids and we were lucky to have chairs at all) We finally realized that some of our chairs were in fact missing. There were quite a few groups of girls that would frequent our apartment from time to time. (Ladies Men) So the possibilities of which group of girls was pretty much endless. Yes you are reading correctly, we immediately decided that it had to be girls trying to prank us. It is just in their nature.

Upon finding out the news we started to interrogate different girls. Basically our leads were running dry. We were like a bald man in a wig shop. Plenty of options but none of them looked quite right. (You can use that - I give you permission.) I had been dating my wife at this point for a few months and of course I didn't suspect her because she was an angel. (I was blinded by her beauty)

One day we were sitting around our apartment up to no good as usual when we got a knock at the door. Upon opening the door we found a ransom letter. The letter stated that we could have our chairs back if we dropped off a carton of ice-cream at a specified location. The location happened to be right behind my wife's apartment. Remember that fact for later. My roommates upon reading this letter of course were enraged. We were not going to be bested by anyone. Let alone a bunch of girls. (channeling my inner Heman Woman Haters) So what did we do? The obvious thing, setup surveillance on the drop location. Hire other students to go undercover for us at the drop location and wait.

Like I said before it just so happened that my wife's apartment had a perfect vantage point right over the drop point. We had a perfect view of the location and because my wife was so in love with me she was more than happy to let us use her apartment for surveillance purposes. The plan was to have 2 of my roommates drop off the ice cream and have the other roommates watch from afar. As soon as the pickup was made we were going to move in and bust the perp. The drop location was in an alley so we had a car on each side of the alley ready to block if the perp showed up in a car. The scene was set for the perfect bust. Now it was just a waiting game. The drop location was right behind the college's recreation center so there were people coming in and out quite often. We would watch intensely as each person came and went.

After a while there appeared a young boy and girl in swim wear. They looked like they had just been swimming in the pool and we didn't think much of them. Basically, we were stereotyping which was not a good idea. These two young kids came out of the building and started looking around. After a short time a car pulled up that appeared to be their parents. The little girl walked over to get in the car and then quickly turned back to the ice cream, grabbed it, and jumped in the car. At this point in time i literally felt like I was in a Bourne Movie. This little girl was a spy. She had fooled us all and we were not prepared. As soon as we got our wits about us the chase ensued. We didn't really want to chase the car because we had no idea who these people were at all. But being the young, dumb college kids we were we chased them anyway. We followed them through almost the entire small town of Ephraim. In the end they ditched us down some back road. I don't think I have ever been so confused in my entire life.

A few days went by after this incident with no word. We felt like our chairs and the ice cream was gone for good, taken by some wanderer. Then the grapevine started talking. We heard whisperings around campus that a group of girls that we knew very well had pulled off the prank. I knew the group extremely well. It was my wife and her pleasant roommates. Yes the apartment we were doing surveillance from was indeed the place where the whole stunt had been concocted. And to top it all off our chairs were sitting at the table of that very apartment the entire time.

It has been 9 years since this incident took place and I am still not allowed to discuss how my roommates and I got our revenge. It was mean, it was messy, it was immature, but most of all it was stupid. It did not at all match the level of intelligence that their prank held.( Added by Stephanie- Zach's beautiful, smart, talented, and queen of all pranks, wife.) But lets just say bags of flour are hard to clean up.

Never Grow Up

When I was 12 years old I would rollerblade down to our local drug store with my brothers and buy penny candies. We knew that with the dollar we each had we could buy 94 penny candies a piece with tax. 94 pieces of candy is a lot of candy. That much candy makes dentists everywhere smile as wide as the grinch. Muahaha. I was pretty much hooked on penny candies for much of my childhood. An intervention was probably in order but being as I come from a long line of candy lovers the denial ran deep. My brothers and I were really good at talking my Mom into giving us $1 a piece for our drug store excursions. There were more expensive candies at the drug store ranging from $.05 all the way up to a few dollars. One of the more expensive "luxury" candies was the Pez dispenser. You know those awesome little things (I'm biased) with the different character heads that when you pull the head back a piece of candy pops out. I had been eyeing the Pez display for a few weeks thinking to myself, "If I only could talk my mom into giving me a few more dollars I could make it rain with that Pez dispenser!" (Well maybe it wasn't that  thought exactly but something close to it.) This all went down in the summer and I had just been approached by my neighbors to mow their lawn for $20 a pop. My first thought was of course, "I can buy 1,880 penny candies with that kind of dough!" (Once again, the thought might be altered a little bit. Give me a break this was a long time ago!) Anyways, back to the riveting story. I knew that with my newly found cash money, I could afford some Pez dispensers. So I strapped on my Roces rollerblades and headed toward history.

The first Pez I ever bought was a Tweety Bird. 

I started off by just buying a few dispensers here and there and then this thing came along called Ebay. For those of you living in the stone age Ebay was started as a place to buy and sell Pez dispensers. (You now owe me $1.50 for that piece of knowledge.) With the advent of Ebay my collecting took off. 

I currently have about 1,000 dispensers and counting. In your mind you are probably imagining some awesome Pez room with Pez stacked floor-to-ceiling. Well think again good sir/madame. My Pez are packed away in many many boxes. I have been working on my wife for about 5 years now to get her excited about Pez collecting. For some crazy reason that hasn't happened yet and for some other crazy reason she won't allow them to be displayed in the family room. So they sit patiently in their containers waiting for the day that they can be released on the world to bring happiness and joy to every man, woman, and child. Yeah I am really just writing this blog to continue my efforts to talk my wife into allowing me to display them.

Live Long And Pez On! (Patent Pending.)

Crappy Ride

A few months ago I had the chance to prove my love for my wife Stephanie. I was on my way home from work and she called in a favor. Of course being a huge Avengers fan I decided to take the call like a true superhero. I said, "Yes my lady, your wish is my command." This was said before I had realized what was being asked of me. (ya know, the old foot in mouth sitch) The next words out of her mouth forever changed my car. "I need 6 bags of manure." Some of you may be thinking, "Manure isn't that bad just throw it in your trunk and take it like a man!" Well well well au contraire mon fraire this is the ride that I roll:

(Not my actual car. I am way too lazy to walk out into my garage and actually take a picture of my car. Google Images FTW)

Do you know how many bags of maure that you can fit into the trunk of a 2002 Mitsubushi Lancer? I do, 3. So for those of you keeping track that leaves 3 bags of manure that have to be put somewhere. That somewhere ended up being my back seat. 

Oh yeah, one more fun fact that I forgot to mention. The air conditioner in my car has been broken for about 2 years now. So picture this with your minds eye- I am rolling down I-15 going about 65 mph with 3 bags of manure in my back seat. The temperature outside is a balmy 90. Lets just say after a very short period of time the manure started to "Breath". The stench hit me about 10 minutes into the 40 minute drive. To this day when I am sitting in my car and the sun hits my seats just right I am reminded of that hot day when love overruled reason.