Random Events in July and August

{The last post of our summer events.}

The last month and a half of our summer was very full and exciting. Here's what we were up to:

BEAR LAKE
Went to Bear Lake twice with my mom, aunt and cousins in the valley.

How many women does it take to put up a shade tent?-- 5

BABY SHOWER
2 of my 5 best friends from high school were pregnant this summer (one actually had her baby) so I threw a shower for both of them and all 6 of us were able to get together!  It was so much fun.  It had been 3 years since we'd all been together at the same time (since 2 girls went on a mission) and it was so great to see everyone.  It was just like old times.  I love these girls!

I had fun making 2 diaper cakes and 2 signs, since one had a boy and and the other is having a girl.

CAMPING
Brody and I only went camping once this summer (besides our backpacking trip) which I was pretty sad about.  I love camping and its not like we didn't have time, so I'm not sure what the deal was.  My mom and brother's came up for smore's and cards, then me, Brod and Sal stayed the night in our little tent up Green Canyon.  It was a lot of fun!

BEAUTIFUL SUNSET
We witnessed another (among many) amazing Utah sunsets (no editing done on this).

HIKING
We did a lot of hiking and climbing this summer.  My favorite hike was with my parents from Green Canyon over to Logan Canyon. It was cool to see the mountain we live by from the other side.  Plus, it was gorgeous!

BOUNTIFUL TEMPLE
One of the goals on our little list is to attend 50 temples in our lifetime. So since Utah has so many that are so close, we try and go to as many of those as possible.  This summer, we went with my parents to the Bountiful Temple, which was gorgeous.

Well, that's it! The end of our summer adventures.

Lava Hot Springs

The day before we left for Arizona, we were able to take one last quick trip with my family, to: 

Brody nor I had ever been there before, and we had a blast! We spent most of the day at the water park, but we did sit in the Mineral Hot Baths as well.  But since it was so hot outside, we jumped in the river first to cool off.

The first thing Brody wanted to do when we got there was jump of the highest platform (33 ft)

I knew this would happen, but I tried to put it off as much as I could anyway.  I'm not a very brave person, but I do scary things like this anyway (sort of to impress Brody, even though we're married. It's still kind of fun that way). So we jumped off all the lower ones first, working up to the tallest. When it came to be our turn, here's how it went:

Brody and I went first, my brother's were behind us. Brody started counting to 3, the whole time I was shaking my head, not wanting to do it. My brothers just laughed at me.

When he said go, I knew it was time. Everyone was watching and waiting for us, so I just screamed, and went for it.  I was still scared for my life, if you can't tell from my face. Brother's still laughing.

Down, down, down we went...

Ahh, finally, it's over! It was fun, but I definitely don't want to do it again!

Here's the boys:

And even my mom and dad jumped!! I was very impressed with them.

Along with the dreaded platforms, we also had fun doing tricks off the lower diving boards, going down slides and just soaking up the sun.  It was a really fun day and a great way to end our best summer ever!

{Still more to come of our summer adventures in July and August}

Whirlwind

{Definition: "created when local winds start to spin on the ground. This causes a funnel to form. The funnel moves over the ground, pushed by the winds that first formed it. The funnel picks up materials as it moves over the ground, thus becoming visible."}


Our life has been a whirlwind the last week or so.  A specific event happened last Wednesday that caused certain aspects of our life to be 'picked up' and shifted around very quickly.


We went from peacefully enjoying the last 3 weeks (or so we thought) of our wonderful summer in Utah, to now (8 days later): sitting in our apartment, back in the heat of Arizona. 


The event that caused all this commotion was that I secured myself an interview for a job I very much wanted: working as an office assistant at Thunderbird (where Brody is going to school).


They called on Wednesday and wanted to interview me the following Monday.  We decided to take the chance that I might not actually get the job and go down early anyway.  


SO... we spent the next 4 days packing up and finishing all the last minute activities we were wanting to do and headed out at about 5pm on Sunday.  We arrived at our apartment in Glendale at 8am the following morning, I had my interview at 11, we spent the next few days moving all our stuff into our second floor apartment (in the 110 degree heat, mind you.  More details on that further down in the post.) and getting everything set up and put away.  We are now finally done and I found out yesterday that I DID get the job!! YES!! It was all worth it.


We seriously had probably the best summer of our lives-- neither of us had jobs (lived with parents to make this possible) so we could pretty much do whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted.  It was the best!!  Besides all the big/obvious stuff, here are some things that made the summer so wonderful:


-- Hikes in the beautiful Utah mountains
-- Playing 'Rook' with my parents (best game EVER)
-- An unlimited amount of delicious fruit in the house at all times
-- Night walks with Salomon
-- Morning runs with mom or good friend Maryn
-- Weekend trips with Brody's family
-- Hanging out with awesome friends
-- Seeing a lot of the Bundy's
-- Rock climbing and Mt biking with just me and Brod
-- Watching our Nephew Dylan learn and experience new things
-- Badminton, Croquet or Beach Volleyball in the backyard
-- A few trips to Bear Lake
-- Cool summer nights where the temp is perfect (I'm REALLY missing that right now)


And so many more...  A big thanks to everyone who made our summer so awesome!!


Here's a list of even more fun things we did that my mom came up with:
Movies seen:  Letters to Juliet, Robin Hood, The Last Song, Knight & Day, Eclipse, Toy Story 3 (but not w/ each other), Charlie St. Cloud
DVD's watched: (not counting LOST) Nat'l treasure 1 &2, Over the Hedge, Toy Story 2, Goonies, Invincible
Eating out:  Subway, Hamiltons, Firehouse, Smokin Blues, Zupas, Fredricos, Center Street Grill, Arbys, Indian Oven
Card games played:  scum, 7 up 7 down, loser, wyoming rummy, hearts 5 times, and ROOK 8 times!

Eating out, movies, DVD's, cards, cooking new recipes, card games, badminton, croquet, beach VB, ultimate frisbee, working out, hikes, bike rides, walks w/ Sal, extended family parties and dinners, cooking out, TV shows (Bach, SYTYCD) old LOST', LOST season 6 5 1/2 hour finale, shopping, temple, Jakes eagle project, making recipe books, you making my cute scrapbooks, you and Brody cleaning/chores/projects, dutch oven dinner in canyon, celebrating Memorial day and July 4th and 24th, celebrating Dad's, Jess's, my and your BD's, aquatic center and SA pool, Bear Lake, helping Bundy's, s'mores in green canyon, lava, and our family vacation. . . . . whew!  And, what you did w/o us: boating, park city, bear lake, tetons, climbing, camping, and SLC w/ Landon. 
----------------------------------------------


For those of you that are still reading, here are some humorous details about the day we got back to AZ...


So, we get here, expecting our power to be turned on since we told them to do it by Monday. Well 'by Monday' I guess means anytime before 5pm on Monday, so no AC for us. That also meant I couldn't plug my straightner in to get ready for my interview.  So we had to drive 30 minutes to my cousins house (thanks Jord!), get ready, and then go back for the interview.  What a hassle.


After that, we thought that by the time we loaded everything from the storage unit into the moving truck, they'd have the power turned on. But no such luck. We're already dripping with sweat anyway (seriously, there was a constant flow of it dripping down into my eyes and making it so I couldn't see) so we decided to keep going.  Up the 18 steps to our apartment with every little item we own, (and the big ones too, don't forget about those) which was fun.  Finally, after about an hour of this, they came to turn the power on.  But much to our dismay, the full blasting AC didn't cool down the apartment below 85 degrees till about 7pm that night.


Meanwhile, our dog Salomon is sitting in the car with the AC blasting since we thought our heat box apartment and his thick fur coat might be too much for him. Lucky dog.


When we finished bringing everything in, we were so hot, we went and jumped in the pool.  It felt so nice, but we should have given it a little bit of thought first because when we got out we realized we didn't have any towels.  They were buried deep in some unknown box stacked high in our apartment.  So when we got home, we frantically searched, dripping wet, for a towel of some sort.  


Finally we found them and figured that since we had towels and a plastic shower curtain liner (that we had purchased earlier that day), that we'd be safe to shower and finally get dry.  But alas, we couldn't find the hooks that connect the curtain to the rod, so we had to take turns holding the shower curtain up for the other person so as not to flood the bathroom. 


It was quite the day and we just laughed through the whole thing, but I'm glad we're all settled now and that everything is put away!

A weekend in Park City

We spent this past weekend in Park City with Brody's family.  We stayed in a cute little condo and had a lot of fun eating out (at some fun new restaurants)...

(It was fun watching Dylan eat a lemon and ride the Merry-Go-Round)

Played games, sat in the hot tub, rode the Alpine slide and coaster...

 

(The Alpine coaster was so fun! It's like a personal roller coaster where you can control your own speed.  We quite liked it!)

 

Checked out where they had some of the Olympic Events from the Winter Games in 2002...

Went shopping at the outlets and checked out the Arts Festival.  

Park City is such a cool place with tons of fun things to do and it was great to be there with all of Brody's family!

Backpacking in the Tetons

We just got back from an awesome backpacking trip up in the Grand Tetons.

I've never been backpacking before in my life and I was a little worried about how I would do and whether or not I would like it.

Turns out, it wasn't quite as hard as I thought it would be, and...... I LOVED it!!!

We went with a group of 6 of us and spent 2 nights up in the mountains. The scenery was gorgeous and it was just so peaceful!!

It was a 3 hour hike to the camp spot.  I was so surprised to find that my big pack didn't hold me back like I thought it was going to.  So that was good.  We hiked a total of about 6 miles in with an elevation gain of close to 5,500 ft!

There was a baby deer right on the path and it let us get really close. It was so cute!

We camped in a spot called the "Meadows." It was cool being so far away from the world and surrounded by beautiful, tall mountains.

Me and Kim - we got cold

The 4 boys climbed a really tricky route up the Grand Teton called the Petzoldt Ridge the second day that took about 12 hours.  Sadly, they got snowed out at the very end.  Snow!  Even still, Brody was so happy that day.  He said it had some of the scariest climbing he's ever done, and he definitely lives for stuff like that.

By the end, we were pooped, not to mention sore.  But we really had so much fun and I definitely hope to go backpacking again someday soon!