Went hiking, wish I hadn't come back

(a view of the actual top of Buckley from the "summit" we got to)

Earlier this week a friend of ours invited us to go hike Mt. Timpanogas from the front side. It's called Everest Ridge and it's pretty insane. It's way out of our hiking league at the moment, but we said yes anyway. :) Thankfully, the plans fell through due to weather constraints with the sun melting the snow too much for it to be safe to climb. (keeping his ojos from getting snow blindness)

Anyway, instead Bill and I decided to hike Buckley Peak, which is just south of Y Mountain and has been on our list for months. We didn't start until about 9am and it took 6 hours. What an awesome hike! (pretty mountain view we saw on the way up)

Buckley doesn't have a trail to the top, so we planned to go up a chute on the north side. We thought we had gotten there and headed up this awesome but incredibly intense chute. It was quite the experience. The chute was full of snow, progressively more so as we got towards the top, and it got a whole lot steeper than we expected the last probably quarter of it. Bill was breaking trail at one point and the snow got super powdery. He ended up to his waist in snow nearly every step. It was super scary since we were on probably a 60 degree angle, but he was a total champ and made it through the incredibly hard part. I took up the lead after that and we made it to what we thought was the top not too long after that section. Much to our surprise we weren't really at the top! We had gone up one chute too early and were probably a thousand feet below the actual summit. It's all good though. It was such a crazy and fun ascent that we didn't even care.
(a view of the chute we went up. It's steep)

Like I said, Buckley doesn't have a trail to the top. There was no way we were heading back down that chute, so we ended up picking our way down the forested side of the mountain through deep snow all the way back down to the trail and then back out the canyon. It was tons of fun. If you've never hiked down a super steep hill in powdery snow, you've really got to try it. You sink in every step enough to feel like you can't fall down, and it is just fun. We were able to go super fast. We did kind of get stuck in a scrub oak part and had to pick our way through low branches trying not to scratch ourselves too much. Bill came away with some war wounds on his hands from hitting them in the snow a bunch on the way up, but otherwise we we got down safely.
It just felt great to be out hiking. Both Bill and I have really struggled to find time to work out this school year with all the time constraints we have with school work, and our weekends are usually pretty full so we haven't been outdoors nearly as much as we would like. I know I feel a million times better when I work out on a regular basis. There's just something about pushing my body hard makes me feel really good all around. It's great.

Taking a moment to ponder

I got a phone call this morning from my mom letting me know that my Grandma Kitty had passed away early this morning. She has been sick and in a care home since December. My siblings and I were able to go down and visit her at the end of February and spend one last time with her. I knew it was coming and that she was very near the end of her life, but it is still sad to know she is actually gone now.

At the same time, I know she's in a better place. She's with her family and loved ones. I'm so grateful for my testimony and faith that helps me to know that. It's sad to have her leave, but I know that I will see her again and be able to give her a big hug. She won't be in a bed unable to even sit up without help.

I have so many great memories of her. I spent many summers in my youth at my grandparent's house in Washington. Grandma Kitty and my grandpa were divorced, but through many miracles in my family, they became friends, so while I was at my grandpa's house, my Grandma Kitty would usually be at my aunt and uncle's house and we did many things together. We painted our nails and went shopping and just talked and had a good time.

While I was at BYU I decided to start writing to her. She loved writing letters and we used to write back and forth a couple times a month. She sent me Christmas packages of goodies and cards and letters. I have a box full of them that I treasure.

This last August Bill and I were down in San Diego and we were able to take her to a Padres game. What a fun night that was!

My mom looks so much like my grandma in this picture. Since everyone says I look a lot like my mom, I hope that I look like her here too. What a beautiful woman!

This was taken 11 years ago at a family reunion in Washington. Look how young we all look! Tori is the youngest girl on the left side and she has two kids now. Time surely does fly.

My grandma was truly a wonderful woman and I'm so grateful for all the wonderful memories I have of her! You will be missed Grandma!

Odds and Ends

Bill and I ran the Rex Lee Run on Saturday. We were slow, but we ran it together and it was nice. I just looked up our times, and I think I'll just keep them to myself. They're not competitive, that's for sure. :) We stayed afterwards in the crazy rainstorm to try and get prizes, but we didn't win anything. According to the announcer, we're super unlucky. lol. It was a good time. I really do love to race, even if I'm slow racing. I was running fast for my current abilities.

Bill and I went on a quick shopping trip to get ice cream for our FHE. A group from our ward was coming over. I made a red velvet cake the night before on a whim for the event. Well, sort of on a whim. I had pulled the recipe out and gotten the ingredients, but didn't know when I was going to make it. It was good! A tad more dry than I would like, but still good. So we ended up bringing home a hot 'n' ready pizza because I really didn't want to make dinner. Then Bill had his best idea of the day. It was one of the first really warm days around here, so we grabbed a couple blankets and our pizza and headed to the park across the street to have an impromptu 20-minute picnic. Awesome! We never just sit like that. There's always something to do, so it felt so good.

Today Bill came down and found me in the Tanner Building and we got wraps for lunch for the Cougareat. Oh how I love those caesar wraps! They're really not healthy, but they taste so good, so we splurged. We sat on the grass again to eat them and it was wonderful. I was ten minutes late to accounting, but it was totally worth it.

We're going to an opera in Salt Lake tonight. Hillary invited us. It's going to be great! I just hope I can stay awake. I'm seriously sleep-deprived at the moment.

Things are looking up

Things are looking up in the internship search my friends! We may not get to go to Las Vegas for the summer, which is a total bummer, but we have possibilities in Boise! I never thought I'd be excited about that, but when summer is looming in a month-and-a-half, and neither Bill nor I have a job or internship, suddenly the location seems less important if we can both find opportunities that will help us get good job experience.

My career services people are absolutely amazing. I was in there at 5PM yesterday and this morning I already have a letter of introduction sent from one of my professors to an agency both Bill and I might have opportunities at. Talk about being on top of things. Props to the MPA program at BYU!

New Art for the Living Room

We have lived in our apartment for over a year and have slowly decorated it so that it's really quite cute...except for one huge blank wall in our living room/kitchen/office. (that's all one room really, which makes it a HUGE wall) Bill came home over a month ago with an idea of something to do with that space that wouldn't cost us hundreds of dollars for a large piece of art. It involved painting 6 stretched canvases different colors and then splatter painting over the top all the colors to tie them together and to our rug we were trying to match. We bought the supplies soon after and they have been sitting in our bedroom for at least a month, waiting for some free time to actually paint. The last two nights we finally got to painting, and I think it turned out so well! We had a great time painting the canvases, and last night we went over to a park by our house to splatter paint them. I didn't get any pictures of that, but the final product looks great. Here's what our room looked like before.

This is the huge blank wall. What do you do with that much off-whiteness?!?!

Here's the rest of the living room with the awesome red couch and the rug that I picked out all the colors of for the art. I love this room. I will like it much better in a larger apartment or house without goofy colored cabinets, but the colors and the piano and the bookshelves just make me happy.


This is the process for painting it. I was worried about paint fumes, but we used acrylic paint and it was no big deal.


And the finished product close up.

Internship Woes

I haven't had too many opportunities to feel the effects of financial recession until now. I had some job troubles at the beginning of 2009, but that was a separate issue. Bill and I have been going to school or working summer jobs for the almost year, so we've been pretty sheltered. We've been looking for internships lately though, and really feeling the financial crunch everyone else is experiencing. Internship and paid just doesn't seem to exist in the same sentence, at least not for me. Bill has more opportunities being in civil engineering, but he doesn't have anything nailed down either. In the public sector, every government and agency is looking at extremely limited budgets and they're worried about keeping their current staff, not to mention any interns. Bill and I have been planning to go to Las Vegas for the summer, but we are seriously struggling to find internships there or anywhere.

I'm really not sure what we're going to do. At least one of us has to have a paid job! It's so frustrating to have a bachelors degree, half of a masters, and see jobs paying maybe $10/hour, if they pay anything at all. Currently I have some fantastic opportunities to "work" over the summer...for free. I'd take a $10/hour job if someone offered. It's really hard to imagine working full time, or even part time, and not getting any sort of paycheck. Bill has an interview tomorrow at least. We'll see how that goes. It's with a great company, so an internship there would be sweet.

Forgive me for airing my frustrations on my blog, I'm just super stressed out about it. Life is too expensive not to get paid.

Trip to California

I headed down to San Diego this weekend with my siblings Natasha and Greg and Greg's girlfriend Jessica. Mark and Rob came down from northern California and we met up at my aunt and uncle's house. We were there to visit my grandma who has had major health problems in the last few months that have put her in the hospital. She appears to be very close to the end of her life, so we wanted to get down there to visit while we could.

It was a great weekend! We talked and told stories and laughed and ate tons of food all weekend. We went to see Grandma multiple times a day, always leaving having tired her out enough that she would always go to sleep afterward. We took a trip down to the beach at La Jolla and saw all the sea lions and walked along the ocean. That was fun.

I forgot my camera, so I will have to get pictures from my siblings, but we had a fantastic time. We did have quite the hiccup when we headed back Monday morning. 20 miles out of town we got a flat tire. It took 5.5 hours and $800 for 2 new tires before we were able to head on again. We had to call so many places to try and find the tires Jessica has on her car. She has a Lexus, and apparently that means all replacement parts are ridiculously expensive and nobody stocks them. On a whim, after calling all the dealerships around and a bunch of tire stores, we stopped by Costco. They weren't answering their phone. Lo and behold they had the tires! They had accidentally ordered them at one point and just had 4 tires on hand. Yay for us! That was definitely an answer to many prayers. We rolled back into town at 12:30AM Monday night. It made for quite the time taking my two tests Tuesday, but I survived. It was worth it to see my grandma, my siblings, and my aunt and uncles.