Serious Lack of Snow

Snow so far this winter has been disappointing. Supposedly, the 5 year average snowfall at Sundance for the month of December is 85 inches. This past December, they only received 5.5 inches of snow. How tragic! So instead of snowshoeing like I usually do for New Year's, Janie and I tried some cross-country skiing at Sundance. The snow wasn't bad, and we had a lovely time being outside. I'm praying for more snow because I just don't know what to do with myself when it's too cold to bike and not enough snow to ski or snowshoe.

Christmas Letter 2011

Christmas 2011

Oh my. Another year has come and gone. The saying is so true that says time flies by even faster when you’re older, and so is the saying about forgetting things when you’re older. Lately, I’ve been telling my student employees that I’m not responsible to remember anything unless they email me, write it down for me, or put it on my calendar. Good grief! I’m only 31!

For part of the year, I actually had a roommate again. Can you believe it? The best kind of roommate: my 19-year-old niece, Jen. She moved in with me during her sophomore year at BYU to escape some crazies she was living with. We had a lot of fun together, and I didn’t have to give up my precious kitchen organization because she hardly has any stuff! Bonus. Her stay with me was short and sweet before she took off for a study abroad in London. Sigh.

I had an abundance of adventures this past year. I think I’m feeling some need to get them out of my system and be utterly irresponsible in the process! Or maybe I’m just going crazy in my old age. I skied some seriously epic ski days - I’m talking three feet of new powder each time! And I coined some new powder-day sayings: “no budgets on a powder day” and “no illnesses on a powder day” - if that gives you a hint of how irresponsible I was. I went to Hawaii for a week in February and finally used my SCUBA certification, and, get this, went on my first ever, and probably last, helicopter ride/tour! 

I also fit in a backpacking trip to Canyonlands National Park, two organized road bike rides (one 60 miles, and the other 100 miles), a hike through some slot canyons, a couple fishing extravaganzas with my new fishing pole (where I learned to clean my own fish!), bought a new 29er mountain bike (that I looooove!), a business trip to Chicago, my first 12-hour mountain bike race (don’t worry, it was a relay - I didn’t ride my bike for 12 hours), and dove into the truly adventurous world of online dating. And the cherry on top: I went to Europe in October! I visited Prague in the Czech Republic, Vienna, Austria, and Budapest, Hungary. Prague is a beautiful city with street performers everywhere. I loved all the pastries, cakes, and tortes in Vienna, and Budapest stunned me with its baths and central market full of ethnic foods and crafts.

Grad school continues to be a big part of my life despite still working full-time, still taking piano lessons, still racing for my mountain bike team, and overcoming the sickest year of my life (three colds, shingles, and the flu - all in the first eight months of school!). But I finished and rocked my first year of school with my best-ever grades. I love it. Seriously. Going back to school has been my best decision to date.

I would be remiss to leave family out of a Christmas letter, or an entire year! So it’s a good thing I didn’t leave them out. I hosted some family in my fabulous guest room several times throughout the year - like for Robyn’s annual ski trip with me and Teri, and my mom’s visit for the Sundance Outdoor Theater production of The Sound of Music. I also went home to Idaho to see my dad, in the lovely Blackfoot, and for a quick trip to Robyn and Doug’s cabin in Cascade; and I went to California to visit Joni and Adam. And of course, I’ll go home for Christmas.

Lastly, I’m so grateful for this time of year to celebrate the good news of the birth of the Savior, Jesus Christ. I know He lives and loves each one of us, and that through Him we can return to live with our Heavenly Father again. I hope all is well with you and your loved ones and that this letter finds you well and happy! Take care and keep the emails, blog posts, and Christmas letters coming! 

My Favorite Christmas Ornaments & Decor

I was sorely tempted to not put out my Christmas decorations or tree this year. With my trip to St. George last weekend and finals all last week, I wasn't going to get to it until this weekend - only two weeks before Christmas, which did not make it seem worth it! And I have to admit the other deterrent was the fact that I'm the only one that will enjoy my decorations - I'm not having a party nor do I have any roommates or family to enjoy it with me. BUT there were six little reasons why I decided to put my Christmas out - six heirloom Christmas tree ornaments that Mom gave me that Uncle Rob gave to her a long time ago. As I put those ornaments on my tree tonight, I thought it might be a great blog post slash family history entry to blog about my favorite Christmas ornaments and decorations and why they are my favorites.

Here are the six ornaments that convinced me to put up my Christmas this year. These are my all-time favorites because of the memories I have from my childhood with them. Every year, Mom and I would put these on the tree and every year Mom would tell me how these came from Uncle Rob from his time serving in the military. He was stationed in Germany when he bought these in Stuttgart and brought them back to the states for my parents in about 1969. There were several boxes of ornaments - enough that Mom gave all of us girls some of them. I have two of each of these ornaments.

This is the ornament that celebrated my first Christmas in 1980. Of course this must be a favorite.

These ornaments are among my favorites because it reminds me of the true reason for the season: to BELIEVE in Jesus Christ who is the giver of PEACE and JOY and that we are to celebrate NOEL by remembering Him.

I bought this candy dish when I was on my study abroad in London in 2000. It reminds me of the Christmas concert that the local singles ward in London put on for the community and for which we BYU students sang the traditional English Christmas carol, The Holly and the Ivy. When I saw the lyrics to the song in the dish, I just had to buy it.

I love this snowman figurine because he's on skis! I think my mom gave me this.

I love these little snowmen carolers too. I think my mom gave me these too. She gave me a lot of my holiday decorations.

This little snowman putting on her ice skates reminds me of the ice skating class I loved so much that I took it three times while I was an undergrad at BYU. Mom gave me this too.

And then of course the nativity scene that I dreamed of for years and finally got for Christmas from Jill last year. I love it. The little box with yellow rocks in it, by the wise men and camel, is real frankincense that a coworker gave me for Christmas several years ago. I think she got it in Jerusalem because she and her husband have directed the Jerusalem Center several times.

MTB in STG

I chose to study for my final exams on my mountain bike down in St. George, Utah. I think it was a pretty successful study method. Ha ha! Getting to St. George was the adventure. We hit a big-time snow storm about an hour south of Springville, and didn't get out of it until 30 minutes outside of St. George. It took us six hours to make the drive when it normally takes about four. The roads were that bad - about a dozen cars in the burrow pits, one upside-down, cars sliding all over the road on the black ice, several driving with their hazard lights on going 30 mph, and blinding snow flying at the windshield like we were on the USS Enterprise in Star Trek going warp speed. But we made it without any problems.

We enjoyed several hours of mountain biking on Saturday in 45-degree weather, which for mountain biking isn't too bad since I can get really hot while mountain biking. Then we met up with our team friends for dinner and birthday cake - the whole reason we were down there was to celebrate a couple team members' birthdays. We rode our bikes once more on Sunday. Then we headed home! Just in time to watch the First Presidency's Christmas Devotional. It was a fabulous weekend. :) (The pic is of Dave, Wendy and me on the very difficult Zen Trail that I hope I rode at least half of it on my bike as opposed to walking it. Ha ha!)

Resolved

In the last day or two I've had a couple epiphanies.... moments of enlightenment.... or maybe more aptly: moments when suddenly things settle when the pot has been stirred for a while.

#1 - I'm swimming the moat again. Have you read the book Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert? Or seen the movie? There is a part where she goes to India to study meditation/yoga/whatever. She meets this man that torments her for a while and then kind of becomes her mentor to help her learn to meditate. He says to her, "If you want to get to the castle, you've got to swim the moat." I love that phrase. You've gotta pay the price, pay your dues, however you wanna say it. I've been putting off the inevitable all in the name of healing, but I needed the time to heal. And now that I'm healed, I'm diving back into the moat .... with a new vigor .... and with another phrase in my back-pocket: "The definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results." So, I'm doing something different and that is what makes me say I've got new vigor ... enough vigor to join match.com that is. Can you believe it? For years I've stubbornly refused any form of online dating, and then on Easter this year a woman in my ward gave a talk about Easter, naturally, and closed her talk, started to walk away from the pulpit, but then returned and said this, "And by the way, match.com really does work." For some reason that struck a different chord in me. So I've been thinking about it ever since and made the mistake of mentioning it to my coworker, Greg. He's been bugging me about it ever since until I decided to join two weeks ago. Whoa. It's been .... okay. I'm corresponding with a couple guys .... that seem ..... nice. So yeah. And the moat part of all of this? I'm finally facing the inevitable ups and downs of dating again (the moat) so that I can eventually get to the castle that's gotta be closer than ever than in the past.

#2 - My statistics professor is more reasonable and generous than I gave him credit for. Four and a half weeks ago I took my statistics midterm immediately after arriving home from my trip to Europe. As soon as I looked at it, I knew I was going to bomb it. There were new terms on the exam that I had no idea what they were. He told us to study the key terms in the book and that is what I did, but these terms were not in the book. I found out the next day that the vast majority of the class was outraged by his exam and for telling us to study one thing and then introducing another entirely. That night, we tried to reason with him, but he would not listen at all, would not even consider it. We were livid, but we could tell we were fighting a losing battle, so we gave up. I think we subconsciously and independently, but therefore collectively, didn't take any action since we decided to see how he graded the exams. Four weeks later, earlier this week, he finally returned our graded exams to us. A LOT of us were flabbergasted at how generous he was. He gave us points we didn't deserve, and he has improved his teaching to clarify his expectations better than he did before the midterm. Maybe he really did listen to us. So yes. I'm entirely shocked, but very pleased that he has heard our pleas.

One last, unrelated note: Martha Stewart's Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies are so good! I just made them tonight.

First Snow (at my house)!

Looky looky what I woke up to! The weather forecast said this snowfall was supposed to hit yesterday morning - maybe it did other places but not at my house so I was actually kind of disappointed. Now that I'm enjoying some summer activities and hobbies, I'm beginning to dread when summer and fall give way to winter, BUT I'm still very excited for winter and the first snowfall. Is that an paradox? To miss summer but still love the winter? I don't know. I am relieved, though, that I still love winter and snow - I was beginning to wonder. What I think I don't like is the in-between weeks: when it's too cold to ride my bike, but there's no snow on which to ski or snowshoe.

Happy Guy Fawkes Day

"Remember, remember the fifth of November!" Jen and I celebrated Guy Fawkes Day together. It's kind of exciting to have someone to celebrate the holiday with again - now that she's been on a study abroad to London she can appreciate the holiday with me! We ate fish and chips for dinner, bread pudding for dessert, had some tea in my Wedgwood mugs that I bought in England, and we watched the fabulous BBC version of Sense & Sensibility (which I prefer over the Emma Thompson version). Our celebration wasn't the normal British celebration of bonfires and effigies of Guy Fawkes, but it was a treat nonetheless!

Dinner in a Pumpkin = Halloween

Jen came for dinner last night to hear about my trip to Europe, but I also made it my celebration of Halloween by making dinner in a pumpkin. We shared one of the Sacher Tortes that I brought home from Vienna for dessert. I'm really, really glad she helped me eat it since it was so rich. We also watched the movie, The Others. We had a great time. So that was my Halloween since I'll be sewing tomorrow night. Ha!

Budapest: Cash, Baths, & Guns

Of the three cities, Budapest provoked diverse reactions from me. There were some parts that I loved and some parts that I thought were super sad. The three things/stories that stood out to me the most are:

• I had to pay for everything with cash even though the company/store claimed to accept credit cards - even our hotel wanted us to pay with cash. To make matters worse, the ATMs would only distribute large denomination bills so a lot of these cafes and stores were pretty bugged with us that they had to break our large bills. I wanted to tell them, "So accept credit cards or tell your stupid banks to distribute smaller bills!"
• The baths for which Budapest is famous are pretty dang cool. They were beautiful and extensive! And we only went to one bath complex. The dynamics of the people at the bath was interesting: there were a lot of older men and women and a lot of younger men, hardly any younger women except those there with their boyfriends/husbands. So we four girls were the strange sight at the baths, I'm sure.
• My run-in with a police officer and a huge machine gun at the Budapest airport. We arrived at the airport three hours before our flight left since Melanie's flight left an hour before ours did. The three of us got our boarding passes but we couldn't check our luggage and go into the terminal until 2 hours before our flight (according to the Delta lady I asked), so we sat down on some chairs near the check-in line (or where it would eventually form). About 50 minutes into our wait and when I was completely enraptured by my book, some guy bent down by my face to get my attention and started speaking to me in what I think was Hungarian. I looked up and that's when I saw that he was dressed in all black, with a big vest on, several guns on his hips, and a huge machine gun in his hands with his finger practically on the trigger! I was shocked! I told him I didn't understand what he had said so his response in what was probably his limited English was, "Please go." My thoughts started racing! Did we break some Hungarian law by sitting here for so long? Where does he want me to go?! Since he didn't specify where I/we had to go, we got in line to check our luggage. Thankfully he didn't follow us more or make any requests after that. While in line we watched him and several other armed officers and men in suits with ear-pieces close off that part of the airport and secure it. So we think maybe a dignitary or somebody big was coming to the airport. Funny thing is that this was our first incident in Budapest when I was expecting one earlier with all the reports I heard/read about: the U.S. Embassy saying crime in Budapest was a concern, scams on tourists, Jenny's friend being arrested for jay-walking. Yeah, Budapest was kind of interesting that way. 

Here are some of the other interesting things about Budapest: 

• We had a slightly harder time dealing with the language barrier in Budapest. My Hungarian phrasebook said that Hungarian is unlike any other language in the world and it has several ways to convey the meaning of one English word/phrase. The signage in Prague and Vienna was usually in English too or easy enough to read since German has a lot of common words with English. But the signs in Budapest, those were harder to follow since their words looked nothing like English. 
• Graffiti was prolific throughout the city. It was quite sad really. There were also several buildings in terrible states of disrepair that would otherwise be beautiful buildings. It seems like Budapest has had a harder time recovering from communism.
• I bought a really neat, hand-made table cloth thingy from a very spunky older woman on Fisherman's Bastian. She was quite the bargainer - it was kind of fun to buy it from her and I hope she made it and even more so I hope the money she made off me helps her out. 
• We hiked up yet another European hill - this time Gellert Hill in Budapest. My legs were burning by the time we reached the top. About halfway up we came across a bit of an exhibitionist - I didn't look long enough to see what was really going on or what he was exhibiting for us but thankfully he turned away from us and walked down the hill in the direction we had just come from and were not going to go back that way. Once we got to the top, some old man was making some money off tourists by having them guess in which of three cups was the ball - you know, the trick where he moves the ball around between cups and has you guess. If you get it right you get the money, if you get it wrong he keeps the money. We think he had some friends in on it too in order to look like other tourists were trying to make some money off of him and he wasn't very good. He was kind of sloppy with moving the cups around so I could tell where the ball was, but he was entertaining enough to watch for a bit. Gellert Hill is also where we bought our secret boxes. They are pretty amazing since you have to know all the secrets of the box in order to even open it. It takes about 10 steps to open it. Very fun.
• Central Market in Budapest was amazing! It's a permanent market in a magnificent building. The ground floor is entirely food while the second floor is all crafts and clothes. We spent several hours in the central market buying our souvenirs since it seemed like there were some excellent souvenirs there as opposed to Vienna and Prague. 
• Budapest used to be two different cities: Buda and Pest. The Buda side is very hilly while the Pest side is entirely flat. It was quite the phenomenon.
• One of the girls, Randa, was very excited to see some of the Holocaust and Jewish sights in all three cities, but we had terrible luck! Apparently, October is a big Jewish holiday month as practically everything we tried to see was closed due to Jewish holiday.

Gresham Palace, now the Four Seasons Hotel. It took 5 years to renovate the palace for the hotel.

Chain Bridge

Castle Hill Palace and fountain

Fisherman's Bastian

View of Parliament from Fisherman's Bastian

Randa and me on Fisherman's Bastian

Fisherman's Bastian

Another cool pulpit in a church on Castle Hill

St. Matyas church on Castle Hill

I liked how they painted the walls in this church. It made it feel earthy.

Stained glass window in the church

Lord's street on Castle Hill

In the funicular that took us up to and down from Castle Hill

One of the abandoned buildings in disrepair

Another view of the same building

Waterfall on Gellert Hill

The beautiful Gellert Hotel

We toured rock church which is built in a cave in the side of Gellert Hill

Rock church from a distance

Paprika in Central Market

Central Market

Central Market

Eating lunch in Central Market

Exterior of Central Market

The courtyard of our apartment building

The closed synagogue

The Holocaust Memorial behind the synagogue

Parliament on the day we toured it

Outside the baths we went to