Escalante Camping Trip

All I can say about this past weekend is: wow! It seems like we did sooo much on Friday and Saturday. So we drove down to Richfield, UT on Friday morning to meet up with Scott and Cathryn, and decided that before we would leave to get to our campsite, we would go see the new Batman movie. And HO-LY CRAP!!! That movie was probably the best superhero movie that I've ever seen! That being said, it was also one of the most creepy movies I've ever seen. The Joker was exactly as I think he should have been, and the movie was just....... amazing! I don't even know how to describe it, but I would definitely recommend it, though, Mom, Dad, if you read this, I can pretty much guarentee that you guys wouldn't like it.














Anyways, we eventually left for Escalante (Southern Utah) by about 4:30pm and got there right about 7. We were totally stoked to do this trip cause it was one of those things where you backpack in a few miles and have to cross a river a bunch of times. Plus it was my first time doing a camping trip without sleeping in a tent, so that was pretty awesome. It took us about 2 hours to get to our camping site, but surprisingly it was still slightly light outside once we did get there, so we didn't have a problem getting dinner ready or setting up our sleeping area. We ate chili, courtesy of Tucker, that was amazing, and then when we went to bed we watched The Transformers on the Matheson's portable DVD player.. haha, yeah, totally camping, I know.

So when we woke up in the morning, we got everything packed up and headed out by 8 to get back to our car. On the way out we stopped by some indian ruins and a natural bridge, and then once we got to the car (nice and tired from our 7 miles of hiking roundtrip to our campsite), we headed to Bryce Canyon to meet up with some more friends to do a 1.2 mile hike. Now I know that that hike doesn't sound so bad, but it was a hike down into the canyon, and then right back out, or rather out and up. Needless to say, by the time we started the uphill climb, we were ready to just fall asleep. But we did make it out, and after making it back to Richfield and cleaning up a bit, we went to a great restaurant in Monroe, UT for some amazing steaks. After that Tucker and I headed home, and both fell asleep as soon as we got everything into our apartment. So yeah, we're both sore and tired, but we had an amazing time this weekend and wouldn't have had it any other way.

Been Awhile...

To those of you that actually read our blog, I apologize for the two week break that we've had in our posting... my excuse is that work is very tiring and Tucker's excuse is that he never knows what to say on here. But all excuses aside, here goes.

I'm pretty sure that the most major thing that's happened since my last post was the Fourth of July. And not gonna lie, our BBQ was a total blast! The only drawback that we had with the whole thing is the fact that we don't have air conditioning, so when Tucker started to heat up the big pot of oil to fry the wings, our apartment quickly became unbearable. So we moved everything over to our neighbor's (Austin and Michelle) backyard, which surprisingly was much cooler than being inside. The food was great, and hanging out with all our friends that we don't get to see very often was even better. After all that we did fireworks (more than one little plastic green army man melted that night), and then when all but Scott, Cathryn, Jared, and Heidi had gone home, we watched episodes of The Office. Such a great night.

The day after we eventually got everything cleaned up and then we decided to drive up to Ikea for a "date". It's always fun to go walk around that store, and we even came away with a dresser for our bedroom so that we have a place for all of our clothes, and then on the way home we got a new guinea pig!!!! It was a great surprise. His name is Chimichanga, but we call him Chimi for short, and he's got the coolest/craziest hair I've ever seen on a guinea pig. Hopefully he'll live longer than the rest of our attempts at having a pet, and we've already decided that if he dies as well, that we're just going to give up on the whole having a pet thing.



That's basically it, except for the news that I'm just as fast at swimming as I was my senior year of high school... not necessarily as in shape, but in a race today that I did with some other girls at work, I got the same time that I usually got back in my prime. Pretty sweet! Now I just have to get back in shape, which I've been working on for the past couple weeks, so it's only a matter of time before I'm able to swim more than a 200 without getting short of breath.

Park City

So our trip to Park City this past Friday was a total blast! We only ended up going with Scott and Cathryn cause Ryan and Leah had to work (I think), but even so, it was one of the fun-est dates that we've ever been on. We left for Park City at about 5:30pm and got up there around an hour later. I've never been up there before, so it was really cool to see how gorgeous and slightly different that city is in comparison to Provo. It had kind of an old, New England/European feel to the way the houses looked, and it was easy to tell that the people that lived there were better off than everyone living in Provo.

But anyways, the actual walk through the mini-art galleries was really fun. Lots of the stuff was amazing to look at, though I wasn't a big fan of a lot of the 'modern/contemporary' stuff. And it was kind of funny too that more than one of the galleries had a faint smell of alcohol permeating them. Over all though, I think there were just two artists that I liked a lot. The first is Sergei Trukhan, and Tucker had seen his work the last time that he did this walk and liked him then. The picture that's included here to the right was the most amazing painting that I have ever seen. It's kind of hard to tell here, but when the lighting is shining just right on this, it sort of glows and looks like the light that's shining through the trees is actually real. Tucker and I have already decided that someday when we have a couple extra thousand dollars, we're definitely going to buy a copy of this painting.

While we aren't a huge fan of photographers, there was one husband/wife team, John and Debora Scanlan, that had simply beautiful pictures. I loved them so much, I convinced Tucker to let me buy one of their notecard sets for $15 bucks so that I can frame them and hang them in our bathrooms someday. I've never seen photos with such vibrant colors and such simple compositions look so amazing.









All in all, I'd definitely do that gallery walk again, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone here in Utah. It's a blast! Oh, and in case you were wondering, it takes place the last Friday of every month, and is in the historic downtown part of Park City.

On Saturday night we hung out with Ryan, Leah, and Scott and watched the movie Flawless. It was a pretty good movie, seeing as none of us had ever heard of it before. Demi Moore and Michael Cane star in it, and I probably wouldn't mind seeing it again. And last but not least of all the things we did this weekend, we went to Ellie Belnap's homecoming. She gave an amazing talk, and it was nice for me to finally meet her because I've heard so much about her. Her ward was ok, but the music director was..... well, it seemed like she was having a competition with the entire congregation on who could be louder. It was kind of hard to get into the right frame of mind for the sacrament when she was belting the song out like she was in a Broadway play. But oh well, can't blame her for liking to sing.

That's all for now I guess. On the 4th of July, we're going to have a BBQ with a bunch of our friends, so that should be fun, and I'll do my best to take pictures of it to post here.

***Note: For some reason, all of the links that I had for other people's blogs got deleted. I've got a few up again, but I don't remember all the ones that are supposed to be there, so let me know if you want your's on our list.

Nothing Much to Report

So this post has the potential to be extremely short since not much has happened this past week.

I guess I'll start with a follow up from my last post (aka whether or not Tucker took me to the movies). Yes, we did go see Indian Jones this past weekend, but as I predicted, it wasn't on Friday, haha! Of course it's ok that we didn't go Friday night, I just think it's funny that I knew exactly what would happen. Tucker came home from work, and when I showed him movie times for that night to remind him, he pitifully asked if we could see the movie the next day. So cute, haha! So we saw the movie on Saturday, and Tucker even bought me a cute dress (such a nice husband). The movie was..... just alright, I suppose. Definitely wasn't as good as the originals, but it wasn't completely horrible. A disappointment, is what Tucker called it.

As far as being sick goes, I'm still on the tail end of whatever we had. My nose is still stuffed up, and I've developed a cough that is extremely annoying when I try to sleep, but other than that, I feel just peachy.

The only other thing that I can think of to let everyone know about is we're going to Park City this Friday night with some of our married friends to go walk through a bunch of mini-art galleries. I think it'll be a blast, and I'm pretty sure that TuckTuck's excited too.

Bored at Work

Yup.. the title for this post pretty much sums it up. I got here at 5:15 this morning and have finally Facebook'ed myself out (one can only look at pictures for so long). But anywho, I figure it's been a week since I last posted, so I'll go ahead and fill some time by writing a new post for those of you who visit here.

I'm not sure if I mentioned in my last blog that I had a sore throat last week, but I did, and by the weekend, it evolved into a full on cold thing. It would have been fine to be sick under normal circumstances, but because of the fact that I had to get in the pool at work everyday for four hours, it made it pretty miserable. How did I get sick, you might ask. Well I blame it either on one of the little kids that I teach swimming lessons too, or one of the other girls here at work cause she was sick right before me. Whatever though. I finally went to the doctor yesterday morning, and he didn't really tell me anything that I didn't already know to do. But I'm happy to report that I'm feeling much better today, and will attempt to get in the water to teach lessons. Oh, and yes, I did get Tucker sick as well, though his doesn't seem to have been as bad as mine.

In other news, my good friend Deborah Peterson has finally made it public that she's pregnant, so I feel ok writing it here. I'm so excited for her, and just slightly jealous too, though not enough to change anything just yet. She and her husband, Sam, will be having a baby girl on November 2nd! They're going to be great parents, and their baby is going to be dang cute. Seems like a lot of people that I've known up here at BYU that are married already are either pregnant or have a baby, and that makes me want one too. But I'm almost completely positive that with the way our lives are right now, Tucker and I couldn't handle it financially or timewise. Ah well, maybe in a couple years. It's funny though, we've already got a bunch of names picked out for future children, so we don't have to worry too much about that once we do start having kids.

Lastly, I'd like to let everyone know that Tucker has promised to take me to see Indiana Jones on Friday. You can be sure that if we don't see it, you'll be hearing about it here in my next post, haha!

One final note: I love the new feature that lets me see when everyone's updated their blogs. Totally sweet!!

Summer Plans

Ok, so it's been a couple days longer than a week since I last updated; my bad. I've either been too busy or too tired these past few days to have written something. But hopefully now that I'm starting to settle into my new routine/schedule, I'll do better in the future.

So, last week I finally started working again (hallelujah!) and I'm really liking it. I work mostly in the mornings and a majority of the time for each of my shifts is spent in the water teaching swim lessons (which I am loving). Some days I don't enjoy spending four hours in the water so much, but teaching and swimming are two things that I love, so most days I don't mind too much at all. The staff at my new job are all great. Everyone's just laid back and good humored, so it makes for a nice work environment.

In other news, we got to hang out with some of our friends this past weekend. Scott and Cathryn were in town (they're living down in Richfield for the summer) and so we had made plans with them to go to dinner or something, and then a few hours before we were supposed to meet up with them, Leah Dymock called us and asked if we wanted to hang out. So... we combined our plans and all went over to Ryan and Leah's for dinner and games. We had a blast playing games and just chatting (and watching Samantha crawl all over the place), and dinner was excellent. But we also made some more plans for this summer with all of them.

Tucker's really excited about all these plans, so I'll go in chronological order and do my best to remember/guess the dates for these things. This Saturday, Ryan and Leah are moving back up to Provo, so Tucker and I will help them with that. Then on the last Friday night of June (the 27th, I think), we're all going to drive up to Park City to go walk through some mini art galleries. The next time that we're all going to meet up again is the Fourth of July, and more than likely we'll be having a bbq. We'll probably have more than just the afore mentioned people at this since Jared will be in town and we all want to see Heidi again. Plus, Tucker wants to make steaks and wings, and boy-howdy, people will not want to miss out on that! Next, either the weekend of July 11th or 18th, we'll all be meeting down at the Matheson's in Richfield to go camping. I'm pretty sure that we're all stoked for this one cause Scott says he's got some amazing places picked out to go to. So, that's all that we've got planned... for now. More than likely we'll be doing more stuff, but by the time we had all this sorted out on Saturday night, it was way past my bedtime and the Matheson's had a two hour drive ahead of them. So needless to say, this will be an awesome summer.

Oh yeah!! And we are probably going to fly out to North Carolina for about a week at the end of the summer to spend time with family and also to go to one of our friend's wedding/reception. We're way excited for that. But I'm also bummed a little cause that means I won't get to make another trip down to Phoenix, but we'll get to go down for Thanksgiving, so it's all good.

It's Already June?!

Posting on a Sunday.. this is weird; I'll throw off my whole schedule with the blog! Ah well. With my new schedule at work, Tuesday's aren't going to work for posting any more, so I'll just have to experiment with different days till I find one that works. That's right, I said it; I finally have a set schedule for work, it's only been about a month now. Starting tomorrow morning, I work from 5:15am - 12pm (I work that shift Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays) and then also on Tuesdays and Thursdays I work 7:45am - 5pm.

And I'll be perfectly honest, I'm actually excited about working at this place. It's a pool owned by the city of Springville, but it services Springville, Mapleton, Salem, Payson, Spanish Fork and Santaquin; quite a big area for one small pool. I did my training and first inservice this weekend, and just from being around the staff and in the general atmosphere of the pool, I can tell I'll like it. Now all I have to do is figure out how to use the cash register and I'll be good.

Yesterday (Saturday), Tucker and I finally took the trip up to Kohl's to get Tucker some desperately needed new clothes. We had a gift card from our wedding and one from my mom for Tucker's birthday gift, so he pretty much went hog wild. Four new pairs of shorts (as all his old ones had holes in them), four new dress shirts, new slacks, and a couple new tshirts (both of which are not black/navy blue). Not gonna lie, he looks pretty dang good in his new outfits. He even wore one of his new dress shirts to church today, and normally that wouldn't be a big deal, but it was the first time that Tucker's ever worn a colored shirt to church so he felt a little weird.

Well, that's about it for now. Depending on how tired/worn out I feel this coming week I might post again; not much, mind you, just a small little update on how things are going. Have a great week!!