Happy Halloween!!

Greetings from Miss Idaho!! Yup. I dubbed myself Miss Idaho for the grand tri-ward Halloween party we had Saturday night. It was a good time. My roommates and I decided to relieve Deseret Industries of some of their nasty 1980s dresses and tiaras. We made our sashes ourselves! Can you believe it? Julia ironed on a black flower on to her dress and actually melted her dress! Lucky for her, I had red thread and mad skills on the sewing machine, so I quickly mended the dress so she wouldn't be flashing anyone. Happy Trick or Treating!!

First Snowfall in the Valley!

Yay!!! We received our first snowfall in the valley yesterday--during the day and again in the evening. And the snow in the grass was still there when I went to work this morning. Hip hip hooray! The ski season is just around the corner....and I am ready to try out my new skis!

The little white thing on my hip is a snowflake--not something weird with my pants.

Meet my flatmates!

Last night was my roommate, Linda's, birthday and we went to Mimi's Cafe to celebrate. And it provided the perfect opportunity to have a picture taken of the three of us! Linda is in the middle and Julia is on the right. Linda is a MBA student at the Y and she just recently moved from Boston. Julia is an elementary school teacher and just moved from Salt Lake City area. We get along great. Sometimes we are up too late talking!

The Evolution of My Skis

This fall I bought an amazing pair of skis. They are K2 Lotta Luvs. I am so excited to try them out this season. I have already developed plans how I am going to lock them up to make sure they aren't stolen by some covetous fiend--lock them in my ski rack on my car, lock them up when I am in the lodge eating lunch, etc. But they are so short! Check out the picture. The new skis are on the far left. When I first bought them, I kept them up in my room. I didn't want to take them down to the cold, lonely basement. But when I had the bindings mounted on them, I finally put them down in the basement. When I put them down in the basement next to my other, older children (skis), I had to laugh! Check out the evolution of skis just in the last 10 years! I went from 180s to 164s to finally 153s.

This weekend, however, I got a bit of a smack in the face with how much I paid for my Lotta Luvs. My roommate, Linda, and I went shopping and we visited Copeland Sports. They are going out of business so they have been having this huge sale. We found her some skis, bindings and boots all for under $200! It was such a good deal we called my two good neighbor-friends, Camille and Lindsey, and they came and bought their gear for the same price! Between all three of them, they still spent less than I did on my new babies--and that was to get fully equipped. But that is okay. I am a more dedicated skier at this point in time. I am a better skier than they are and I need skis that will take me to the next level!! And my new Lotta Luvs will do just that. Every sports-shop-guy drools when I tell him what skis I bought. I love that. :o)

Maybe I really am bitter! Ha!!

Funny story. Today I went over to the bookstore to buy a new journal. The bookstore has an entire section of journals. So awesome! I found a beautiful journal--it has a memento pouch and a little magnetic flap to close it. Check out the picture... very cute. I am excited to write in it. And boy do I have a lot to write in it tonight. You can see more of the journals on their website: www.paperblanks.com

As I was looking around to make sure this really was the journal I wanted to buy I found some little notebooks that caught my attention with the fun/vintage pictures on the front. The one in particular that reflects my mindset right now is pictured here. I got a good laugh from it and instantly bought it. As I was walking from the bookstore back to work, I flipped through the pages of the little notebook and found some outrageous sayings on each page! Check this out:
"alone at last!"
"and then she realized, they were all alike!"
"pain was too good for him"
"...and then I ripped his lungs out"
"he couldn't become a distant memory soon enough to suit her"
"what was I thinking?"
"bitter? moi?"

Oh my gosh!! I couldn't believe it. I didn't realize those sayings were in there. But they are kind of funny. Maybe I really am bitter! Ha! Too funny. My friends buy cats and dogs after a bad boy experience and I buy man-hating-notebooks.

Too Hardy of a Party

So this last Friday night I went to a party with about 10 of my friends. It was up in Salt Lake City and was supposed to be so huge and fun. Well it was huge and fun. My friends and I showed up around 9:30 pm and saw the band playing in the garage, but it was pretty cold so we decided to go inside and see what was there--and because the audience for the band was a little sparse. We went inside and found some yummy food and some more people. We talked to a few people, but the party hadn't really started yet. About an hour later a ton more people showed up and so it became hopping. In fact I met a guy that graduated from my high school two years before I did! That was kind of fun.

But the party was too hopping apparently because the police came and broke it up!! That is the first party that I have been to where the police broke it up. Actually, they didn't really break it up--they just made the band stop playing and everybody had to go inside. We left shortly after the SEVEN cop cars showed up. Yeah, seven cop cars. Can you believe that? I think it was probably best we left earlier, I think it was becoming kind of shady as we could smell some alcohol and pot. One of my friends thinks she even saw some of the partiers doing some harder, more illegal drugs there. Yikes!

Fall Colors and Dutch Oven Dessert

Last night, Lindsey, me, Camille and my new roommate Linda went to the mountains to enjoy some fall colors and some Dutch oven peach cobbler. Guess how many guys came with us...take a stab! Not the good Provo guess of 2 or 3, but ..... (drum roll please).... 8! Yes, that was 8 as in eight. We actually had 2-to-1 odds in our favor. Of course the odds were good, but... some of the goods were *** (if you know the phrase, lucky you! I can't finish it because some of the fantastic goods might read my blog).

I digress. So we piled in our cars and drove up behind Squaw Peak and on a dirt road for a while and basked in the fall colors of yellow, red and orange. I immediately got the cobbler going and then we went for a little walk further down the dirt road.

The colors were amazing! I loved the evergreen trees dotted here and there and the spray of aspen trees there were bright yellow. So beautiful. I think this should be a new tradition for myself--on conference weekend, go up to the mountains, enjoy some fall colors and a little hike and then have some Dutch oven dessert. Delightful!

Canyoneering in Zions

My dream of going canyoneering finally came true! I didn't think it would since the summer is now over and the weather is looking so cool. Lindsey and I planned on a weekend in September to go, but as the time came closer the weather was looking more and more terrible, we are talking mid-60s for the high and even the first snow to fall in higher elevations. So, Lindsey and I kind of bailed on the idea, until her friend's car broke down. Her friend was going to go down regardless of me and Lindsey and her car broke down 20 miles from Zions. So the friend called Lindsey to see if Lindsey would come down and rescue them. Lindsey called me and I said I would go! We picked up the monster truck of the friend's boyfriend's and drove that down so he could tow the friends car back to Provo. See!! It really is a monster Tonka truck! Quite the adventure.

Since we were down there we decided that we would go ahead and do Keyhole canyon. Absolutely amazing! I thought the Narrows was amazing until doing this canyon. Now you must understand what canyoneering means: it means we were repelling down into the slot canyon and most of the time it was into water--water that we had to swim through. With the low temperatures for that weekend we decided it was probably wise to rent wetsuits and I kept thanking my lucky 10 fingers and toes (which I like) that I had that wetsuit. Yes, I am carrying a 200 foot rope on my back. I felt like superwoman. Sometimes the slot canyon was as narrow as my shoulders!

The next day we hiked to Angel's Landing there in Zions National Park. Absolutely fabulously hard hike. Check it out! We had to scramble up this narrow ledge to get the top of it. I recommend it!

The First Wedding of the Next Generation

The first of my nieces and nephews got married this Labor Day weekend. I can't believe it. The wedding was a beautiful and the reception was even more so! My sister, Teri, made nearly all the food and as you can tell by the plate full it, I LOVED it! The younger nephews were all playing in the sandbox in their church pants, shirts and ties. All the family not part of the immediate wedding party sat around and chit-chatted....and ate the yummy food from the dessert buffet.

But that doesn't tell you the story from before the wedding. Holy smokes! Helping my sister put together her backyard for the reception has only convinced me further to rent a reception hall and let the hall employees do the decorating and catering. I told my sister, Jill, "If I ever start to talk about doing something else because the reception hall is too much money, please remind me how much work and stress it is to try to do it myself!" Jill promised to do just that. But the reception really was beautiful.

This picture of Corban, my great-nephew and bride's son, is my absolute favorite picture from the entire evening. You got it...he is underneath the train of his mother's wedding dress. Ha! I love it!

Hiking Timpanogos for the 1st time!

So this year I hiked Timpanogos for the first time ever! I hiked it with Jason and a few of his friends. It was amazing. "Timp" has an elevation of 11,749 feet and you feel it when you get toward the top--I was quite out of breath! We hiked to the top via the Timpooneke (pronounced timp-e-nookie, don't ask...) trailhead which is 7.5 miles one-way to the top. We gained 4,580 feet on the trail. The trail was beautiful! We even saw a moose. It was the most perfect day to hike because the high temperature forecasted for Provo that day was in the mid-60s. Soooo, perfect! And the wildflowers...I couldn't believe they were still out and really, they were in their prime. So beautiful. The view from the top was amazing (as you can see). We went to the "Glass House" shack up top. I don't know why they call it that, but basically it is just a tin shack with 4 white walls and a pointed red roof. There was a sign in book inside, but we didn't sign in. It was actually snowing when we got to the top.

Then we walked around the front of Timp and slid down the "glacier" (really it is just a snowfield) and hiked back down via Emerald Lake on the Aspen Grove trail which is 6 miles long. While hiking down Life Flight flew by several times and we wondered what was up. I called my friend Lindsey (who is on the Search and Rescue Team) to find out what was up. She didn't answer. So we kept hiking. We finally came across a lady on the trail that was in a lot of pain and had thus called for Life Flight to come pick her up. Did you know that Utah County Life Flight only bills you if they take you directly to the hospital? Good grief! She got a free ride off the mountain down to the trailhead where the not-so-free ambulance was waiting for her. (An ambulance would be a cheaper ride to the hospital than Life Flight, I imagine.) The hike down to the Aspen Grove trailhead was so steep--it hurt my knees. But I had a greeting party at the bottom!! Lindsey was there at the trailhead as part of the Life Flight rescue so she was there with the rest of the Search and Rescue team to welcome me to the bottom! (Life Flight was gone by then.)

I highly recommend it for any of you that are interested; however, I might have to wait a while to do it again. It was a hard hike!!