Looking forward to Thanksgiving

I'm just about done with all the school and work things I have to do today. After that and when Bill gets home from work, we're heading up to meet his family in Park City to stay for the next few days in a condo. I am SO excited! If I can just get my work done now so I can relax, it's going to be a fantastic holiday! Hopefully I'll have pictures and stories to tell afterward.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Shabby Apple Dare to Design Lawn Frock GIVEAWAY!!!!

Love this dress! I want one!

Shabby Apple Dare to Design Lawn Frock GIVEAWAY!!!!

Mad Craziness

I haven't blogged in weeks because I don't feel like I have much to blog about. School is absolutely crazy. I regularly get up at 5:45AM, am out the door by 7:30AM or so, and I don't get home until 5PM on a good day, and more normally after 6PM. It is insane.

I just love my classes and I love being back in school and learning so many new things, but I am going a little bit crazy with the schedule. Bill and I just don't see each other very often and when we are together, we're usually doing homework. All of the fun things we love to do together aren't happening at the moment because we both have so much homework and go to bed so late at night that we're just dead all the time. It's a good thing we ran our marathon a week into the semester before it got crazy because I haven't been running in probably a month. I hate it! Don't worry though. Bill is getting me to do pullups and pushups and situps at night now and that feels great. I have this crazy desire to start doing triathlons, but I think about the time that will take and it makes my head spin.

So yeah, life is crazy at the moment. I'm trying to hang on and when I start to have crazy reactions to things, I try to remember that I'm ridiculously tired and if people are bugging me like crazy, I try and step back and blame it on that. :)

In other news, Bill got 100% on his surveying midterm. Woot! He's amazing! My group and I just had a 9-minute conversation with the Utah House of Representatives. It was awesome! It's so hard to get time with him, and it was freely offered to us through a contact at the state capital that my teammate Ryan knows from his work there before he started the program. So there's definitely good things going on in my life at the moment, it's just a little more crazy in ways that I can't control at the moment then I would like. I like being busy, but I also like it including things I love to do, like hiking and rock climbing and running and stuff like that. The balance is rather off at the moment.

Mom's Rocking Chair

The finished chair. The detail on the top is so beautiful.

I don't exactly remember when it happened, but somewhere in the last couple years I had this idea to refinish a rocking chair my mom has had in the basement for as many years as I can remember. It was my great-Grandma's, and looked like it could be really pretty if it was cleaned up. Probably 6 months ago, I posed the idea to my dad and more recently to my siblings as a gift to my mom for her birthday in September. Everyone thought it was a great idea, so I started the process.

I got it cleaned up and refinished and had a new seat put on it. It sounds like a pretty simple process, but I tell you, it took a long time and figuring out if we could afford it and that kind of thing. It was finished just in time. I picked it up on the 24th, which is my mom's actual birthday, and had it in my living room until Sunday when we celebrated her birthday.

Mom LOVED it! She had the best reaction I could have imagined when we let her open her eyes and turn to see it. She was completely surprised and touched and happy and it was just awesome. Here's a few pictures from the party.

Mom blowing out her one candle.

Mom's reaction. The picture doesn't do justice, but she gave her trademark squeal of approval that I imagine all my siblings remember well.
Mom enjoying her chair. She was so happy and it was awesome.

Blogging to De-Stress

I'm feeling stressed. It hit me like a ton of bricks this afternoon. I've been going along just fine in my grad program the last few weeks, but it seems that all the projects and assignments are finally getting started, and I already feel like I'm drowning. I have no idea when anything is due and I feel unorganized, and it's stressing me out. I haven't really exercised very much since the marathon a week-and-a-half ago, and that's bugging me too. I have a paper due tomorrow morning and in the spirit of trying to set the stress aside, I'm blogging before I get to it. :) This afternoon when I got home from class, instead of tackling any assignments, I laid out the blanket that we used at the 4th of July fireworks this summer and spent 45 minutes picking out all the prickly weeds and pieces of grass that got stuck to it. It's been sitting next to the front door for two weeks and I finally decided I couldn't stand it being there anymore. It made me feel good. :)

In other news, Bill and I went to our bishop's house last night and went horseback riding with them and they made us an awesome dinner afterward. The Browns are so awesome! I haven't been on a horse in years, and it was tons of fun! Hopefully I'll get some pictures of it from them soon.

This weekend is the BYU vs. Florida State game. We have All-Sport passes, so we'll be there and at every other home game this year. It's going to be awesome!

I'm learning lots of new chords and other things in my guitar class. I can play "She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain" like a pro. :)

Minus being excessively stressed out this evening, things are good. I really love my program, which helps out when things get crazy.

I think I've hit my quota for blogging tonight. Bye now!

Devil's Castle

Bill and I had awesome plans to go backpacking over the weekend with our friend David, up Twin Peaks in Big Cottonwood Canyon. But then Bill and I couldn't get up there until 7:45 PM. And then when we were following David up to the parking lot, which I was sure I knew exactly where it was, we missed it and spent the next hour trying to find each other since there's no cell reception in the majority of that canyon. Then, while getting my backpack together, I dropped my chapstick and shut my car door in order to retrieve it. I stood up and tried to open the door and realized it was locked with my keys inside, nicely stowed away in my pack. So there we were, locked out of my car with my pack inside. If I had it, we would have just gone and figured it how to open the car when we got back, but no luck.

So instead we went camping in David's front room on a pile of blankets. :) That was actually really nice. And we got up fairly early yesterday morning with hangers, intent on going to unlock my car and get on the trail early. Yeah, hangers don't work on Hyundai Elantras, in case your wondering. So we went to try and flag down a cop, which we did. Turns out slim jims don't work on Hyundai Elantras either. But never fear, we have USAA insurance and we finally remembered we had roadside assistance through them! So we called and they said they'd be there in 45 minutes. Awesome! 2 1/2 hours later, they did arrive and open my car and we were ready to go!

Our awesome backpacking trip started about 15 hours late, at noon yesterday. Sorry Twin Peaks, you'll have to wait for another day. You're too long for a 5-hour hike. Enter Devil's Castle! It's in Little Cottonwood Canyon, is quite a bit shorter hike, but very technical. There's lots of scrambling and clinging to rock ledges with large drop offs on the side. In Bill and my terms, that equals awesome. Some that read this may not agree with that, but we sure like it. :)

Here's a couple of pictures of Devil's Castle, looking up at it and then back down on it after we'd crossed the whole thing.

It was an AWESOME hike! Really steep on the way up, then scrambling along the knife-point ridge line you can see in the second picture above. It was incredible! This is Bill and David on our way up. Here's a picture of Bill and I at the top of one of the many high points on it.
Here's a couple shots of the view from the top. And yes, the second picture has a huge drop off about five feet away from me. David, Bill, and I are all much more comfortable with large drop offs like this when we're a few feet away. It was seriously beautiful though. If you live in Utah and have never been up to any of the canyons, you're really missing out.
For the most part the hike wasn't too exposed. We were definitely on a knife edge, but there was usually a decent path or it was wide enough that we could walk without fear of tumbling off any big cliffs. There were just a couple places that made my heart beat pretty fast though. Here was one such place.

All in all, it was an awesome day and an incredible hike. Thanks to David for sticking around to work out the locked out issue. It took FOREVER, but he was so nice to help out. The hike was just great. Now that our marathon is over, it's so nice to not have long runs every weekend taking up all our time. I'm so excited to start doing all the other activities that got shorted because of running 30+ miles a week for the last 5 months. This is going to be a fantastic Fall!

Learning Guitar

I decided to take a beginning guitar class this semester. It's awesome. I'm not very good at it. I love it. I'm going to be better in 4 months.