Why the name?

We've come a long way. This December Mary Ann and I will be celebrating our 12th anniversary. We were married while in college and pretty poor. Mary Ann found this ad for a place to live and talked me into it. It was a separated house behind a house in Ogden. It wasn't an apartment and it cost about half as much. $250 a month. We quickly nicknamed it the shack and it has been called that ever since.

The trade off was it was basically in the middle of the block in an alley. It was located about a block and half away from the turn around point for the cruising on Washington Blvd. For neighbors we had a big black rottweiler, Ralph, to the north; an unmarried couple that had the cops called on them for stealing their parents' car to the east; and a dysfunctional family that a social worker could have done a thesis on to the south.

Oh yeah, and there was the one time when half of the big tree in the yard had blown down onto the house and almost trapped me inside. Oh, and then there was the spider egg hatches. At least two that I haven't completely repressed. I could go on and on. I can't believe we stayed there for two years.

Well, almost 12 years, two kids, a new house, a couple of jobs, and a lot more gray hair later, we've still have our challenges. Its much bigger than the shack but our house still has issues that we have to deal with. But at least it has we now have a garage and A/C and we don't have to drive through an alley and rely on Macey's frozen food department to cool down in the summers.

- Scott