Random Thoughts

I haven't blogged much lately because, truth be told, I can't think of anything to blog about. Bill and I did go to Henderson last weekend for Memorial Day. It was fun. Of course I didn't take a single picture. Oops... I did help Bill's little sister take engagement pictures for their older brother and fiance. That was fun. They got some good pictures. Cute couple.

While we were in Henderson I had an allergic reaction to who knows what. It started Monday morning with a bunch of bug bite looking red spots on my elbows and knees and it's spread all over my arms and legs. I have no idea what caused it, but I've been taking allergy medication and benadryl all week, so hopefully it will decide to go away soon. I tell you, since January I've had the weirdest things happen to me health-wise.

I have 2 1/2 months left at my job before I start back into grad school. I'm so excited to be done and moving on to the next phase! It's been a good experience working at KLAS. I love my coworkers and I'll miss them, but I'm SO antsy to be doing something new. It's been such a long road to get back into grad school. Now that I've finally gotten into my program, I wish I could just start it right now.

We do have exciting plans for this weekend. We're leaving tomorrow evening to drive to Craig, CO to spend the weekend with my best friend and her family. I'm so excited! I haven't spent nearly as much time with her as I would like to over the last few years since her husband graduated from BYU and they moved away from Utah. It's going to be a great weekend.

Hopefully soon I'll have more interesting things to blog about. Life at the moment consists of lots of hours working to hopefully save enough for our Fall tuition and expenses. Not very exciting, that's for sure.

Take that St. George!

So Bill and I signed up for the St. George marathon, hoping to make it into the lottery, but we didn't. So instead we're going to run this race on the 5th of September. That's right. We're heading of our own volition to Pocatello, ID to run a marathon. We figured, if we couldn't get into St. George, we might as well get something out of the race for our trouble. :) This race was selected "Best $chwag" by Runner's World a few years back. Which if you're like me and don't know what that means, it's known as the race that gives out the most goodies to its participants. We'll walk away with a technical shirt, a duffle bag, a finisher's medal and certificate, various goodies in our duffle bag, and to cap it off, a bag of potatoes. I find that utterly hilarious. It should be a good time. I'd like to run marathons, or at least races, in as many states as I can, so this spreads my repertoire to include Utah, Massachusetts, and now Idaho. I have a few more to go. :)

Y Mountain

I haven't blogged for awhile, since we haven't done anything particularly interesting of late, but we finally got out yesterday and went hiking. We've been wanting to hike Y Mountain for a couple months, but it snowed so many weekends during the last month of school that there was too much snow up there. We didn't want to mountaineer it with ice axes and boots and all that stuff, so we just waited for the snow to melt.

It was an awesome hike! In fact, all of yesterday was pretty much perfect. We slept in until 11am. That's right, 11am. I can't remember the last time that's happened. We're in the midst of marathon training, though this was a rest week, so we did our 5-mile run right after breakfast/lunch or whatever you call a bowl of cereal at 11:30am. After that we managed to kill a few hours not doing much, just relaxing, and didn't get out to hike Y Mountain until 4pm.

The hike was gorgeous. The mountains are so green and pretty right now and it's amazing! It took us about 3 hours to get up to the top and an hour and a half down. We brought headlamps in case it got dark, but we got off the mountain just in time. Here's a few pictures. I forgot my camera, so they're just from Bill's phone, and we forgot to take any on the top, but oh well. It was a good night. Needless to say, both of us are tired and sore today after lots of exercise yesterday.


This was a view back down the path we had just climbed up. We were in the canyon on the south side of Y Mountain

We stopped to sit on a huge boulder and take a couple pictures.

Coming back down the mountain. You can see the Y in the middle of the shot. Pretty cool angle.

We caught a beautiful sunset. It was so pretty!

The money always works out

It's not easy trying to figure out how to pay for grad school, undergraduate tuition for Bill and our living expenses. It can cause a lot of stress, but today I feel really blessed because it just seems like the money always works out. I have a budget and adhere to it, but sometimes unbudgeted things come along and can throw things off. This could have been one of those months, but it looks like, despite that, things are going to work out just fine and we'll be able to pay for important things like car registration. I feel like Bill and I are getting blessed for those things we're trying to do right and I'm grateful for that.

Seriously amazing friends

Last week didn't start out so well, what with not going to Cancun and trying to figure out what to do with ourselves and what to do for a honeymoon instead of the one we had cancelled. 3 of my roommates from right before we got married were the ones that brought Bill and I home from the airport Sunday night. Bill got a text from one of them, Saundra, sometime during the week to set aside our Friday night for something she had planned. I promptly forgot about it, and only remembered Friday when Bill said we needed to be at my old apartment right away.

So we drove over and walked in the door to find the front room completely transformed into a "restaurant" for two, complete with candles, sparkling cider, and our friend Dan serenading us on his guitar. Saundra and Sarah acted as our servers as well as another friend from the ward Trevor. It turns out they had made this wonderful dinner for us and served it to us. It was all so incredible, that I couldn't believe when they brought us the "check" (a red paper folded in half with a note in it), what it said. They had gotten together and bought us a night's stay at this adorable bed and breakfast in Provo and sent us on our way over there as soon as we were done with dinner. These are some pictures of the room we stayed in. It was called the Whispering Willows room, and was beautiful!

What an amazing night! Bill and I don't have a clue how to thank them enough. I really think it's the nicest thing that's ever been done for me and Bill agrees it's the same for him. We did the best we could by making some delectable mango rice to share with them tonight and writing a thank you note, but how do you really thank people that are that caring and go to so much effort to give you a lift and a good memory? They went so beyond the call of duty that I almost started crying on the spot when I saw their note to us out of pure gratitude. I really do wish there were something more I could do to express my appreciation.