Birthday Festivities

Oh man. I looooved my birthday. Every so often my birthday falls on Martin Luther King Jr. day and when it does, it rocks! I love it! 

I slept in, ate breakfast in bed and basically just lounged. 

Lindsey and I went snowshoeing up at Tibble Fork with Potter. It was beautiful and super fun. And we discovered the best ever sledding hill. 

 

 

 

And then I topped it off with dinner with some friends that evening. Sadly, I forgot my camera otherwise I would have taken a picture. And then the cherry on top was the 4-wheeling with David on the dirt roads above the Canyon Meadows neighborhood.

Bigger, Older, Wiser and Better

Today. Today. Today I am now 30 years old. It's so crazy! To think: I have lived on this earth for three decades, I've known my family for three decades, I have three decades of memories, knowledge, wisdom, and three decades of trying new things.... only to spend at least another five decades doing more things and gaining more wisdom. Even my body has been functioning nearly perfectly for THREE DECADES! 30 years! That's more than what can be said about my car.... I just plunked $550 into it earlier this week.... or anything else.... but I guess some things do last 30 years along with me... family photos, books, journals, the gospel of Jesus Christ, relationships.... and the rest of my family members and friends - they've all lived for the past 30 years along with me. The important things really do last and endure forever.  

30! It's a big number. And a daunting one when you are still in the realm of singularity. But you know.... I'm cool with it. So far, my birthdays have only proven to bring new, exciting, and meaningful things into my life. My health only continues to get better and hold strong. I make more lasting memories with my family and strengthen those relationships. I make new friends and keep old ones, thus broadening my circle. I learn new, fun things to do. I make new goals and strive to achieve them. And I think I get wiser with each new year. Yeah.... 30 isn't going to be so bad... I might venture to even say, I'm thirty, flirty and thriving! :) Totally flirty. And definitely thriving. I've got a good job.... and now I've got my own place! That was a nice little birthday present to myself - a place to call my own. I've got family and friends to be thankful for and all the blessing one could dream of from a loving Heavenly Father. 

Yeah. 30 is gonna be a good year.

My Knight in Shining Armor

This is my official shout-out for the kindness and generosity of my knight in shining armor, David. Allow me to list off all the things he's done for me in the past month: 

• Cleaned off my battery when my car was giving me starting troubles
• Hung my big nasty mirror (it's beautiful - it's just nasty to hang)
• Fixed my ridiculously and incredibly slow wireless internet
• Replaced my windshield washer fluid nozzle on my car's hood that has been broken for years - now I can wash and see out the passenger side of my windshield!
• Hung my ski holder in my storage closet
• Fixed the drawer under my stove so it will actually pull out and work properly
• Drilled the holes in my newly refinished chest of drawers for the new drawer pulls.... and then discovered that we needed to sand down the sides so the drawers would slide more easily
• Hung my magnet board and cute little pail holder over my quilting workstation
• Helped put together my quilting workstation
• Fixed my car's trunk latch so it will actually stay closed when I shut it - okay, that fix was actually several months ago, but I still appreciate it so much!
• Attached my clothes dryer duct
• Helped me move in to my new place and unpack
• Took me to the Urgent Care when I had my big mountain biking spill back in July - again that one took place a while ago, but it was so appreciated and still is! 

Thanks David! (and thank you to everyone else that has helped me as well.) :)

New Years 2010

Did I make New Year's Resolutions this year? No. But did I play in the snow on New Year's Day? YES! And I won.

Then & Now

My old roommate, Julie, was in town visiting her family for Christmas and wanted to see my new place so we decided to do a little roommate reunion with Shanna and her husband. We had so much fun enjoying dinner together, reminiscing old times and laugh-offs with Paul and company and trying to decide if Paul naming his daughter Chloe was for real since that is what we had named our imaginary apartment child and he totally made fun of us for it!

We had to re-enact this old picture from 5 years ago:


And after we did, it was said, "I think I pulled something!" ha ha! What 5 years can do to you. :)


Here are a couple cute pictures with their husbands and kids (Matthew and Bridget, Julie and Whitney, me, Shanna and Spencer).

Christmas!

Merry belated Christmas! Christmas was wonderful... as usual. I went home to Idaho for a few days.

I borrowed my brother-in-law's carpool van to take home to Boise so I could bring back my old daybed for my guest room. And when I picked it up he told me there might be a mouse in it! So me, the mouse-mobile, the mouse and the mouse trap drove to Boise together and then back to Utah with my old daybed and all the bedding I could ever want. This is when I'm grateful and more than cooperative than usual in accepting my mom's off-loading. But thankfully I didn't have any run-ins with the mouse... and unfortunately, neither did the mouse trap.

Christmas Eve was the usual big event of a million appetizers, a ham dinner, a fun white-elephant gift exchange (one where mom got a beloved President Barack Obama commemorative plate - she actually doesn't care for Obama so it was really funny that she got it), a tradition of opening a real gift from mom, and then the family photo that I always insist on taking.

If we didn't get enough eating done on Christmas Eve then we polished it off on Christmas Day at my sister Jill's house: appetizers to munch on all day, soup for dinner, more yummy appetizers, movies, tours of the kids' Christmas loot, and more movies.

I went skiing at my old haunt of a ski hill, Bogus Basin, with my sister Robyn, her husband Doug and my nephew Trevor. It was a classic day of skiing - driving around Boise on a very cloudy day, ascending up the foothills to the resort and climbing out of the muck of clouds into a beautiful sunny day of skiing. It was pretty cold and I was glad Trevor tuned my skis because I needed my edges sharp for the ice I encountered on the slopes! Super fun times as usual!

And now we're on to a new year! And here it comes! 2010!!

My Quilting Work Station!

This weekend I spent my gift card to IKEA from my realtor... on a couple bookcases, a glass table top and some baskets and pails for storage and made myself a quilting work station! I loooove it. Maybe it will motivate me to actually get quilting again. :)

And since pictures are worth a thousand words here are two for you:

The framed metal looking thing is my magnet board that I'll eventually paint and hang above my pails.
And this one is how we got the glass table-top home... inside my car and yes... my good-sport of a friend, Jen, had to sit in the backseat because the table top was extended over the front passenger seat. I can fold down my backseat, but for whatever dorky reason, Honda decided you don't need all that width so the hole from my backseat into the trunk was an inch shy of being wide enough for the table top. Dang! It was a true adventure.