Thanksgiving but no Turkey Yet

It's been a great, relaxing day. We are up at a condo in Park City and it is so relaxing and fun. We've just relaxed all day playing card games and Wii and having random photo shoots. Pretty fun stuff. Because two of the couples had plans with other family today, we are having our Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, so this has been our do nothing day. It feels fantastic. Here's a few pictures from some of the fun things we've been doing.

What happens at 1AM when we're all sleeping in the same room. Notice my sweet new pajama pants from my MIL. Love the orange and yellow stripes!


Playing a cool new card game called hand and foot. I'm addicted.My sister-in-law Miriam had a great idea involving a light, a camera with a slow exposure, and a laser pointer. So fun!

A little bit of modeling fun.

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.

Pocatello Marathon: We did awesome!

4AM: Wake up in our little 2-man tent at the KOA campground in Pocatello, rollover and decide to sleep for 15 more minutes.

4:15AM: Wake up for real, get up, break camp, get everything prepped to run.

5:30AM: Get on the bus to shuttle us to the start line

6:15AM: After freezing for a few minutes before the race, the starting gun fires and we're off! Bill tells me he'll see me if he sees me, and heads off ahead.

Mile 5: my hamstrings, which have been bugging me all training time, start aching, but it's okay, it's not that bad.

Mile 6: My iPod battery dies. I wonder if the race is going to be intermitably long without any tunes to run to.

Mile 7: Bill and I see each other in passing at a spot in the race where the course backtracks on itself. He's in the top 30 or so runners and he tells me I'm 68. We're both running strong and feeling great.

Mile 12: First significant hill. Get up it no problem and continue my quest to catch the runners just ahead of me. I've spent the time since my iPod crashed enjoying the fabulous scenery in the canyon we're running in and running just fast enough to move up through the runners a bit at a time. I'm pep talking my hamstrings, telling them they really don't hurt all that much, or if they do, it's okay because it's not going to slow me down.

Mile 15-18: Ran up a ton of "rises" that sure looked, and sometimes felt, like hills. I didn't remember them from the elevation map on the website, but oh well. Just running along and still feeling pretty good.

Mile 20-21: Catch an amazing tailwind that gets me halfway up the real hill at mile 21. I'm pretty beat at this point so I start taking breaks every mile or so to walk for about 30 seconds. It's a trick my friend told me about awhile back and I've never tried it. It turns out it works fantastically well to get a bit more energy out of my poor thrashed legs. My hamstrings are more than a little sore by now and I am in the mentally tough mode that marathon training is supposed to prepare you for. That mode where my body is screaming it's done, I'm ignoring it and still putting one foot in front of the other even though I'm not sure where the energy is coming from.

Mile 22: Pass Bill. He looks pretty terrible. He hit the not-so proverbial wall at Mile 18 and hasn't found a way over it. I'm not feeling so great myself (that's a huge understatement), but I could at least keep running fairly normal, albeit at a slower pace. He's barely keeping his feet moving, poor guy, but he's still going, and I think that's awesome! Come to find out at the end of the race that he never stopped running no matter how bad it felt. What a guy!

Mile 25: Pass a guy that cheers me on saying, "Congratulations, Marathoner! You're done!" Oh how I wished I was! That last mile was ever so long! People may laugh when marathons specify that a marathon is 26.2 miles, but there is a reason. That last mile and .2 from 25 to 26 seems like the longest you've ever run. The .2 miles makes a HUGE difference! I couldn't wait to see the finish line and it sure was a long way in coming. I had completely forgotten to bring my watch, so I didn't really know my time, except that my first half of the race was fast and the second half quite a bit slower. I was able to make a push at the end to pass one more guy and came in at 3 hours 43 minutes and a few seconds. What a race! I couldn't have been more glad to finish! I loved the course, the staff was amazing, but man was it a hard run!

After my race waiting for Bill: I got a bit of food, stretched some, and waited for Bill, hoping he would make it in. I was rather worried and I didn't know how long it would take him those last few miles. I was SO excited to see him come in at 3 hours 57 minutes! What a race! And he didn't stop the entire time! Way to go Bill!

Awards Ceremony an hour or two later: We got some food into ourselves, stretched as much as we could, and waited to hear the results. There were 281 marathoners, plus enough half-marathoners, 10kers and 5kers to fill out the numbers to about 1000 runners overall. I went back and looked at the results and saw they were very promising for us. Turns out I was right! I finished first in my age division and Bill finished 4th in his! Woot! What a great way to end the morning!

After the ceremony: We had to book it out of there, drive back down to Salt Lake, stop off at my parent's apartment to take the fastest showers in recorded history and drop off our car, then they took us to the airport so we could fly down to Las Vegas to be at Vince and Megan's wedding reception. It was awesome!

What a day! Oh, and one more thing. We watched the BYU vs. OU game during the reception, and it was incredible! I have to admit I didn't think we had a chance, but I cheered them on like crazy and was so excited when they won. Go BYU!

Back Online

I've had so many things to blog about in the last few weeks, but life has been crazy and I just haven't gotten to it. Here's a few highlights:

Bill and I finally got to go on our late honeymoon a few weeks ago. Most of you that read my blog know about the fiasco we had with trying to go to Cancun in April. Delta was not our friend at that point and we missed out on our trip to Cancun. We did however, get a beautiful digital piano with the money from the flights, and because of the extra vouchers Delta gave us, this weekend we will be able to fly down to Las Vegas for Bill's brother and wife, Vince and Megan's wedding reception. They got married in Ohio and we just couldn't get out there for it, so this is it for us being at wedding festivities. We are running our marathon in Pocatello on Saturday morning, then driving back to Salt Lake in time to catch a flight down to Las Vegas, so those vouchers are just what we needed to make it work.

The trip to San Diego was awesome. I went boogie boarding for the first time while we were there. I wish we'd taken pictures, but we didn't really want to leave our nice new camera sitting unattended on the beach while we were in the water. I'll just say it was awesome! Bill blogged about the trip on his blog. I'm not going to post any since his post pretty much sums it up. We got to see several of my aunts and uncles and my grandma while we were there. They treated us like royalty, and it was awesome. We had a couple nights free at a hotel down on hotel circle, and that was fun. It was just an awesome trip. We'll definitely be back in the future.

In other news, today was the second day of school in my grad program! I'm doing my Master of Public Administration at BYU and I absolutely love it! I'm not exactly sure what direction I'm going to take in the program emphasis-wise, but I'm leaning more towards local or state government. I had thought originally I wanted to do international non-profit, but come to find out most of those organizations are in Washington DC, and with Bill going into the Navy Civil Engineering Corps (unless something crazy happens to change that path), I don't think that's the best option for my career pursuits. It might be a little hard to find a job if we're in Germany or New Zealand or something like that. :) I do think it might be fun and fulfilling to work in a city government and maybe even get to work with the Parks and Rec part of it, running that. I might actually get a decent salary out of it, instead of what I would have got if I tried to do that with just my Rec Management undergrad. Who knows. The first two semesters of the program will give me a good idea of some of the different career options, so I'll refine what I want to study as time goes by.

It is SO good to be back in school! I've always loved BYU and it's great to be back. I spend all my time in the Tanner Building, which is a somewhat elitist place. It's quite amusing, but it's a seriously nice building. They just built a new addition and I spend all my time there. Bill came and hung out with me in the MPA lounge yesterday and he agreed it's pretty nice. :)

Speaking of Bill, we have it set up so that we can meet for lunch or other random times on campus and I love it! It's so fun to see each other in the middle of the day! It hasn't happened really since we got married, except in passing as he was coming home to eat and I was leaving for work. It's so fun to be a married student! Complicated, yes, and we're excessively poor, but who cares? :)

Life is good, and it gets better every day. I love it!

We're about to start a new adventure

Bill and I had a meeting on Sunday with one of the stake presidency from a BYU singles stake which concluded with Bill being called as the 2nd counselor in the bishopric of one of the wards in that stake. What a surprise for us! Well, it wasn't a surprise on Sunday, but it was quite the surprise 2 weeks ago when we got the initial phone call scheduling the interview. There was very little question in our minds what that interview would be about. Except that we're out of town this Sunday, we would have started right away, but instead, he'll start on the 30th. What an exciting, scary, slightly crazy opportunity this will be! The calling is for one year only, and I will be attending the ward with him. We'll still do home and visiting teaching in our married ward, but that's about it.

I have pretty mixed feelings about all this. I will really miss the friends I've made in our current ward. Bill and I are still going to try and go to activities and that kind of thing, but I'm guessing that lots of our time will be taken up with this new calling and supporting the activities in that ward. It will be weird to come back in a year to our ward and not know a good chunk of the people there anymore.

I'm sad to be released from my calling as choir pianist. I just got called a few weeks ago, and I've really been enjoying it. Oh well, I bet they'll grab me up again when I come back.

I am excited to for the new opportunity. It's going to be an awesome experience for Bill, and it will be so great to interact with the bishopric and their wives. The bishop and 1st counselor are from a normal family stake, so they'll be quite a bit older than us. That will be really fun to get to know them.

I'm overwhelmed by the role model that I am going to become for the girls in the ward. I've been in several singles wards with young couples in the bishoprics, and I always loved the couples and totally looked up to them. I'm feeling a little unprepared to suddenly be in that position in this new ward.

All in all though, I'm excited for the opportunity to grow and develop. I was really comfortable in the place we had created for ourselves since we got married, so this will be a great opportunity to grow. C'est la vie!

Cute New Living Room Arrangement

Bill and I decided last week that we wanted to replace the rather ugly entertainment center the complex we live in provided us when we moved in. We have a projector, not a TV, so it looked really weird to have that huge spot just filled with games and stuff like that. Plus, it was made out of really ugly brown particle board junk and just looked terrible. We looked around for some bookcases and settled on getting some from IKEA. They were out of our price range at the moment though, so I figured we'd just save up for them. Well, Wednesday a bunch of ads came in the mail and I decided to glance through the Shopko one. I was so excited to find a couple of bookshelves on sale for a third of the price of the IKEA ones! We splurged and went and picked them up that night and assembled them. Turns out our office won't take out the old entertainment center unless someone else needs it, so we disassembled it yesterday and put it under our bed and now our living room looks awesome! We still have one wall that's completely blank, but we have our eye on some art that will fit it perfectly. Anway, here's a couple of pictures of how the room turned out. I love the dark wood color! It's so much better than the ugly brown!

Also, we have a computer desk in the same ugly brown fake wood junk. It used to have a hutch on top of it that made that corner of our room look super cluttered. Last week I took that apart and stored it under the bed too, and I think that part of the room looks so much better too! Bill has some pretty fun artwork down in Henderson that we're going to bring back to fill the space above it now that it's not so crowded, so it should look pretty sweet when we get that up.
I'm pretty excited about all our little upgrades. I've found that I really like decorating! It's so fun to decorate a room and when it's all finished really love the end result. I wish we had a bit more money to spend on it, but oh well. Me going back to grad school kind of tightens up the finances. It's all good, though.

Bill's turning into Paparazzi

For Bill's birthday I got him a Nikon D60 digital SLR camera. It's the sweetest camera! It takes such great pictures. Bill is loving it. We went to my nephew's hockey game the other night and he took 200 pictures in less than an hour. One of these days I'll get my hands on it to try it out for myself, but for the moment, Bill is in heaven and that makes me happy.

My New Baby (not of the human kind)

This treasure has just taken up residence in my living room. Bill got it for me for my birthday!

I am way beyond excited about it! For those of you that know that my birthday isn't until January, my new digital piano is early for good reason. I am getting released from my calling as Relief Society pianist so I can accept my new calling as choir pianist. :) I'm really excited about it. I always seem to get called into music or activities callings. At one time or another I've had most every activities or music calling available, but this is my first time being choir pianist and I'm way excited because I get to play different music than just from the hymn book. Woot! We've been planning to get this practically since we got married, but were going to wait until my birthday in January. With the new calling, it only seemed right to get it now and I'm am loving it!

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.