Climbing Mt. Olympus

Bill and I headed out with our friend David to do some hiking/rock climbing yesterday. The day involved a lot of firsts for us. First time Bill's done a multi-pitch climb, first time either of us have done big wall climbing, first time we've simul-climbed. Yeah, it was a great day. This is what Mt. Olympus looks like from Salt Lake. It's the mountain just south of Big Cottonwood Canyon:


We climbed that big rock face on the left side of the picture. It's about 2000 feet high. Neither Bill nor I had any idea how much we would be climbing when we started, but it was an incredible climb. I estimate we did 10 pitches of climbs. A pitch is the length of a climbing rope, by the way, if anyone is wondering. They're usually 60M long, or 200 feet.

The climb was awesome! David led it, so he had all the cams and stuff to connect into the rock. He had two ropes connected to his harness, one going to me and one going to Bill. We let him climb to just about the end of the rope and then we would together start climbing up after him simultaneously. It's called simul-climbing. Well, that's not really a technical term, but that's what we called it.

Once we got all the way to the top of the wall, we scrambled up a couple hundred more yards to get to the ridgeline, and then came back down the side of the big face and rapelled a good portion of it back down, then scrambled over tons of boulders and loose rocks the rest of the way down. We started the hike at about 7:30AM and I expected to be done by maybe 1PM, but we actually didn't get back to our car until 5:30PM.

What a crazy day! It was one of the coolest things I've done in a long time. We even managed not to get too terribly burned. My skin's particularly sensitive at the moment so I did get a bit burned even though I had sunscreen on, but it's all good. It was ridiculously hot! 102 in Salt Lake and we definitely felt it out on the rock. There was a cool breeze since we were up a few thousand feet from the valley, but man, I have not sweated that much in years. We were dripping wet pretty much the whole day, but it was totally worth it for the adventure.

Here's a few pictures. Ignore the bum shot, but this is a view up from where we started climbing. The rock part in the sun in this shot is where we ended up climbing. We're just scrambling up the ravine here.


This is one of the views looking down on part of what we climbed.


Here's a couple of us almost to the top.


Here's the views from the top.


This is one of the belay stations we rapelled off of.


And this is another shot of the wall we climbed up and later rapelled down the side of.

6 Months!

Today is Bill and my 6 month anniversary! And guess what? Both of us completely forgot about it until my sister called me just now to announce she's engaged! Yay for her!!! I am SO excited about that! She's 9 years older than me, not like you can even tell, but it's definitely about time for her to be able to get married and I'm just so happy for her. She and her fiance talked for the first time on my wedding day, and went on their first date 4 days later on my birthday, so I feel very invested in their relationship. :)


Oh, and I'm very happy about the fact that Bill and I have been married for 6 months. I can't believe it's been that long! It seems more like 6 weeks or 6 days or something like that. Yay for marital bliss!

The Long and Short of It

This is not a low-maintenance haircut, but I think it came out pretty cute this morning. My hair has so much body in it that I have to flatten the top down as much as I can, lest it look rather ridiculous. It'll be fun for summer though.

Quite a Cut

I've kind of disappeared from blogging in the last month or so. Life was happening, ya know? I'll have to post about that later, but in today's news I got a free promotional offer at a day spa in town recently with a bunch of sweet offers in it. I went this morning to use the first one, a haircut, since I figured my hair needed a trim. I wasn't planning to cut half my hair off, but I like the result. :) I'm excited to see what it looks like tomorrow when I do it myself. I might be blow-drying my hair a lot more this summer if it doesn't do curly as well. lol

Lily's Baptism and Rock Climbing

Yesterday my niece Lily was baptized. What a cutie! She looked absolutely beautiful in her white dress and cute hair. All of my family in Utah and Lily's family on her mom's side were there for the special occasion. After the baptism happened and lots of pictures were taken, we headed over to their houses for a lunch and good family time. After eating all the guys headed out back to play some football. Bill and Natasha's boyfriend Kelly both played in their church clothes. It was awesome! If I hadn't been wearing a white dress, I would have been out there with them! It was fun to watch though.

In the evening Bill and I decided to head to Rock Canyon for our first outdoor rock climbing of the summer. It was the maiden voyage for my new rope I got last summer. Sad, I know, that it took me a year to get it out! We always go with friends that used their ropes. We kind of got weathered out, but we got in a couple climbs each and had a good time. We'll definitely be climbing more now that we've gotten a taste for it again.

Trip to Craig

Last weekend Bill and I left Friday night after work for the booming metropolis of Craig, CO. It also happens to be the home of my best friend Kirsten and her family. What a fun weekend it turned out to be! Saturday was her birthday, so we made sure to play all day. They have an awesome backyard, perfect for crochet and bocce ball, so we played both. That night we dropped her 2 boys off at a friend's house and headed out on a double date to eat some ribs and play more bocce ball at the park. The weather was perfect, so we couldn't bear to stay inside too much. We came back for cake and presents with the kids after our date, and watched a cute movie, New in Town after the boys were in bed. Sunday morning we took them on a little walk by a river near their place and got to go to church with them and just relax. It was such a fun weekend! Kirsten and Ryan move around a lot with his job, so I'm so glad we got to go there while they're only 4.5 hours away. Bill and I took some family pictures for them while we were there too. So fun! Kirsten is having another baby boy in August, and we'll head back out there for the baby blessing after that. I'm so excited to have another reason to head out there before they leave!

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.

Haircut!

I've been wanting to get my hair cut for ages and finally got around to doing it today. It's been long for the last few years and I decided to go shorter for the summer. Not short like when I was younger, but just not halfway down my back. Here's what it looks like straightened from the appointment today. I'll post a curly picture another day.

A Plague on Delta and Travel Agencies

Bill and I had plans to fly out to Cancun last night for our honeymoon that we didn't really have when we got married in January. We've been planning it for months and were so excited to go. When we got to the airport, we found out my ticket was made in my maiden name and when I changed my name with Delta's records, they failed to change the ticket. They wanted to charge us $200 to make the change, which is absolutely absurd. They gave us no service and wouldn't help us at all. We ended up getting our tickets refunded and headed home rather dejected late last night. The hotel we were staying at in Cancun was a free deal that we got by going to a presentation while we were engaged, so we thought we'd lost it by not being able to get there on the flight. Needless to say, last night we didn't feel so happy or great.

However, when we woke up this morning, we found out that all non-essential flights to Mexico have been cancelled because of the swine flu that is going around down there. It's really bad and over 100 people have died from it in Mexico. If we had gone last night it probably would have been a very bad idea. There's a good chance we wouldn't have made it out of Atlanta where we had a stopover scheduled or something else bad might have happened.

That being the case, we called the travel agency that had booked the hotel this morning, hoping to get the trip transferred or at least our $100 deposit back. Their response? We could change it to a specific date if we wanted, but only make those changes today, and it doesn't matter that we don't know if the swine flu will be over by whatever date we pick. Oh, and if we want to change it, we have to pay $350 to do it. And no way can we get our deposit back. That's final regardless of if the state department has basically told everyone not to fly to Mexico. Does that travel agency care? Nope!

This hasn't been the best start to this week. Definitely not.

Camping and Canyoneering

Bill and I headed down to the Goblin Valley area with some friends to go camping and canyoneering this weekend to celebrate the end of the semester. We left Thursday and came back Saturday afternoon. It was such a fun weekend! It's always great to get out of Provo for a few days, and we had tons of fun doing this canyon, Baptist Draw. We would have done another one, but we got rained out. Oh well. Good times all around!

This was how most of the canyon was. It was so narrow and so many pretty spots.

I love Bill's face in this one. It screams, "Who are these people and how the heck did I get into this canyon?!"

This was the first place we had to span to get across. It was a little too wide for me and to be honest, I was scared of falling, so my friend Adam came and gave me a hand. That's Adam Read from Colorado Springs, Tori, if you're reading this. Small world.

After getting out of the canyon we headed down to Goblin Valley to play on the goblins. This shot looks cool, but really it's me being too scared to stand up on the goblin because it was so windy. :) See the clouds? That's why we didn't do another canyon the next day.

Isn't Goblin Valley cool? I highly recommend making a trip down there for anyone in Utah. What a fun place to explore!

This picture is all for Hillary. Manpris and chacos, all of her favorite things.

It looked like a saddle. What can I say? It was a great weekend.

Oh, and one more thing. For all of your viewing pleasure, this is Bill showing he's 5 popped collar cool.

Swanki Hats GUEST GIVEAWAY!!!!

Swanki Hats GUEST GIVEAWAY!!!!

These are the cutest hats! You should totally go look at them.

Finished Decorating House Pics

Save for a few pillows and a set of curtains in our bedroom, the apartment is as decorated as it's going to get. I think it turned out quite cute. Here's a few shots of the living room:

From the "dining room". Good shot of our new rug.
View from the front door. And yes, that's Bill's legs, standing on our kitchen counter. You can do that in your own apartment you know.Our more artsy wedding photographyA few fun photos at the temple after our wedding right next to our front doorWe got a bunch of pillows from IKEA that we really like. Oh, and Bill really likes to jump on the bed, since there's 3 inches of foam under that amazing down comforter. Here's him levitating.

What an awesome weekend it's been!

This weekend has been fantastic. Yesterday was super busy and tons of fun. Bill started the day early with a 7AM dance final. That part wasn't so great, but I was asleep, so no worries, right? :) I got up shortly after he got back and we made pancakes for breakfast and then headed out to Kohl's and then to a piano store to play some different digital pianos. How awesome would it be if we could afford a $2300 Clavinova? I'll settle for something for about half that price that will fit into our living room. That is, in about 6 months when we've earned enough to buy it!

Next we went to see Monsters and Aliens with a gift card from our wedding. It was at that new theater in Orem, which is so nice! It took us about 5 seconds to get our tickets at a kiosk before we went in and then we walked right into the theater. How cool is that? No lines! By the way, it's a really cute movie. It had some great one liners and lots of laughs.

After that we headed to Paradise Bakery in American Fork for lunch and then on to meet a couple friends to go shooting on the other side of Utah Lake. We had tons of fun, though Bill and I completely forgot ear protection. Stupid, I know. He stuck some 38 specials in his ears and they worked just great, but my ears are a little small for those. :) I stuffed some tissue in my ears and hoped for the best. That didn't work out so well as my right ear started ringing after the first shot and it's still ringing today. Oops! It's a lot better now, but it's still going to take some time for my hearing to come back all the way. Not my most intelligent moment.

After shooting it was off to Guitar Center in Salt Lake to play a few more reasonably-priced digital pianos and then a quick stop off at IKEA to pick up square pillows to go inside the cute pillow covers we bought last week for our bed. I'll have to take a picture and post it.

We stopped by Chili's on the way home for dinner. It was one of our last wedding gift cards. Sad day! We've done lots of fun things these last 3 months on other peoples dime. Thanks everyone!

We've been training for over a month now for the St. George Marathon. It was a little hard to get out on long runs these last few weeks when I was so sick, so yesterday we promised ourselves that we'd go on our planned 8-mile long run. That turned into leaving at 10:40pm to run and running somewhere between 6 and 7 miles. Close enough, right?

And that was the day! Crazy busy and never a moment to stop and breathe, but so much fun!

Wish I could get to Texas

So my brother and his girlfriend eloped recently and are having a wedding reception the first weekend in May. My mom and 2 sisters all got tickets to head down for a quick 1-day trip to be there for it. I want to go too! The $325 plane ticket just isn't fitting into the new student budget Bill and I are on these days. Sad! Anyone want to buy a plane ticket for me? :)

I got a scholarship!

A couple weeks ago I found out the bad news that the government thinks Bill and I are made of money, so we don't qualify for pell grants. This week I got much better news. I found out Monday that I got a scholarship from my program! $2000 for both Fall and Winter semesters. It doesn't pay for the whole $5000 price tag of one semester of grad school, but it does take off the edge. I'm quite pleased.

Feelin' Domestic

So I love headbands but they always give me such a headache, so when some of my coworkers found this place that sells headbands that tie underneath, I was so excited! One problem. They're $15 or so bucks, each. Yeah, seriously. Who can afford that? Well, I probably could before I got married and got into grad school, but not these days! Well then at Christmas time my coworker gave me an adorable green one of these headbands and I found out that she made them herself. Second round of excitement for me! I have a sewing machine thanks to my wonderful mother-in-law, and they really don't look hard to make. So I've been planning on trying my hand at this project since January and finally got to it this weekend. My sister and her roommate helped me pick out a couple cute squares of fabric at WalMart last night and I started working on them today during the afternoon session of conference, which was amazing, by the way. :)

Below are a few pictures of the result. I'm so pleased with how they turned out! They have a couple really great features. One, like I said earlier, they tie instead of having an elastic band. You can make them as loose or tight as you want. It's awesome. Two, if you look close at third picture you'll see that there's little velcro tabs on them. It helps them stay in place in your hair, so if you want to wear them with your hair in a ponytail, you don't have to pin it in. What a great little feature!

Anyway, here's the breakdown on cost. Piece of material, $1.50. It made 4 headbands. Ribbon for tie, $2.00. I still have some of both left and could make several more with it. Velcro tabs, $2.50 for a pack of 20. I used all those up. So the final price, including tax? $1.27 each. I made 8 of them in a few hours. It would take me less time now that I know how to do it. I made up the pattern from the finished one, so it took a little while at first to get going, but was super fast once I got into a rhythm. Anyone want the pattern?

Festival of Colors

Bill and I took one of my old roommates Saundra with us to the Hare Krishna Festival of Colors yesterday. It was so much fun! Here's some pictures of the festivities. There's the three of us in the midst of throwing the colors, what it looked like when I finally dared pull my camera back out after it had died down some, and then what we looked like afterward. What a fun afternoon! We'll definitely be doing this next year. :)

Sick and not getting better

I've had a sore throat for over a month. Yup, over a month. I finally went to the doctor the other day and she told me to get a humidifier. Now that very well may work and I plan to as soon as April comes and I actually have money again, but I'm just wondering what the deal is?! I've lived in a dry climate my entire life. We don't run our heater high, or at all if we can help it since we live on the third floor and we're plenty warm. I drink plenty of water, but yet I feel perma-dehydrated. I'm so tired of this!

Oh, and to make matters worse, the allergic tendencies I've had since high school seem to be ratcheting up these days. I've taken more allergy medication in the last 6 months than I care to think about.

I really just hate taking medicine and in the last few months I've taken more than I've needed to in years and I still don't feel very good! Sorry for the complaining post if you're reading this, but it's been an exceptionally frustrating morning and I have nothing else interesting to talk about at the moment. I could really use a very long vacation, that's all I can say.

Vice President of Events

I just applied for the Vice President of Events for the BYU Graduate Student Society. I'm so excited about the position! I hope I get a chance to interview for it. It would be right up my alley. Fun times!

Running Woes

Bill and I usually run together in the evenings, but tonight I have a commitment in Salt Lake, so I decided to go running this morning. The weather has been gorgeous these last few days, so I was only wearing shorts and a running tank top. I was maybe half a mile into my 3-mile run when I looked down and saw a wire ring on the ground kind of like a hanger. I stepped on it with one foot and apparently hooked my other foot in the ring because before I knew it I was scraping along the cement on my hands, knees, and thighs. No fun at all! The small amount of clothing I had on did nothing to shield me from the concrete! I kind of just laid there for a minute, shocked that I had fallen so fast, and then slowly got up to discover that I had torn a chunk out of my right hand and my left knee was pretty scraped up. I wasn't bleeding too much, so I decided to keep going on my run, but needless to say, my pace slowed down quite a bit.

When I got home, I started cleaning myself up and discovered that I also scraped up my right thigh and knee pretty good and my left hand is roughed up too, though nothing like my right. When I fell, I slid along on my chest and stomach a little bit, and when I looked in the mirror I realized the whole front of my tank top was covered with dust. I can't imagine what I looked like out running! Bloody knee, dirty shirt, roughed up legs and hands...I'm all patched up now, but moving kind of slow. I wouldn't call it the best start to my Friday, that's for sure. It made me want to curl up on the couch and not do anything. Wouldn't it be nice to have that luxury!

Working on Grad School Stuff

I've been working on some of my admissions stuff for grad school these last couple days. I got my official acceptance letter yesterday with a packet of information and I've been going through it and doing things like updating my personal information, changing to my married name, doing scholarship applications, looking at schedules and what my program is actually going to be like, and details like that. It makes me so excited! I just can't wait to get going in this new program and a new direction in my professional life. I feel like I've been floating along in limbo for quite awhile at the place I currently work, without a good career path, and this new direction just makes me want to do a happy dance. Actually, I've done one several times already. :) I can't wait to get back into school!

I Got In!

It's official. Nearly 3 years after I graduated with my bachelor's degree from BYU, I've received another acceptance letter from them for their Masters of Public Administration program. I'm going to grad school! I can't even tell you how excited I am. I've wanted to go back practically from the day I graduated the first time, but it's taken a few years for everything to fall into place and me to get to this point. I'm just so excited I can't even contain it!