I {heart} MN

Scott and I are in Minnesota for a family reunion, which meant another long day and a half in the car... But it was so worth it! Minnesota will always feel like home.

(we saw this dog on the drive up!)

Welcome home

We arrived in our new house on Tuesday night.  After a night of camping indoors because we didn't have anything but pillows and sleeping bags (and no running water) Britta and I awoke at 6:30 am and promptly fell back asleep for another two hours.  After arranging to have our water turned on early Wednesday afternoon, we discovered that the truck shipping our belongings would arrive around 2:00 pm and the local Elder's Quorum Moving Company would be here shortly thereafter.

Now, after a day of unpacking and sorting, here is a grand tour of our new place.  The front room is the biggest room in the house and, as such, gets two pictures.  Firstly, facing the front of the house in the north cardinal direction:

then, in the south-facing direction:
This next picture is of the most important room in the house: the kitchen (again, facing south).
Next is the master bedroom (picture taken facing east):

And finally, the 2nd bedroom, to be Britta's office (facing south-east, for variety's sake):
So, there you have it.  We still have a bit of unpacking and sorting out to do, but we do feel a bit more at home now that we have some furniture and wall-hangings, and food, and running water, and more clothes, and lots and lots of cardboard boxes and crumpled paper filler . . . Maybe I should now take my weekly shower.  For Britta's sake.

I think I will.

So, 'til next time, over and out.

In the car, 18 hours later...

We made it!  So one of our conversations in the car included elementary school jokes.  Do you remember this one: 

A family of tomatoes were walking down the street one afternoon.  The baby tomato kept falling behind, so the daddy tomato turned to him and yelled, "Ketchup!"

So I'm following that advice and catching up on my blog.

More to come...

Hiking Mount Timp: The Drama

I've lived in Utah for 9 nears.  A month after I moved to Utah friends of mine hiked to the top of Mount Timpanogos and I have wanted to ever since.  So finally, the last possible month I could, Scott and I made the attempt.  It was July 5th.  Scott climbed the mountain two years ago around the first week in July so we planned our hike based on his experience then.  We didn't plan on crossing large fields of snow before we were even half way up the mountain:

But it was a fun adventure.  The air was warm even though the snow was so prevalent.  We continued up the mountain and saw some amazing views.
At one point we crossed a snow field following footprints of previous hikers, but when we got to the other side of the snow, there were no more footprints and no more trail.  We were lost and this is what we saw:
Vast patches of snow dotted with islands of dry land.  While we were lost we stopped on a hill to eat a snack.  It was breathtakingly beautiful.  I felt like I was in the opening scene of the Sound of Music and I flung my arms out and belted "The hills are alive...."  Scott just laughed at me.  We also saw lots of new varieties of wildflowers when we were lost that weren't on the trail, but more about that later.  It was obvious which direction we needed to go because we could see the saddle and the summit, so we headed off towards it confident that we would find the trail again.  And we did find it!  So we followed the new footprints in the snow that lead to the top of the mountain.  This is what the snow looked like near the saddle (can you spot the two hikers?)
So we followed these new footprints until we came to a point where the footprints stop.  It turned out that we were following footprints of people who had come down off the mountain and we were at a point where they had slid down on the snow like a slide on a particularly steep part.  We knew this couldn't be the right way to get to the top.  It was way too steep.  But for the life of us, we couldn't find a trail of footprints that led to the top.  So I foolishly decided to backtrack a little, then zig zag my own way up to what looked like the trail above us.  I felt pretty comfortable in the snow, even though it was steep.  With some caution and a little adrenaline, I made it back to a solid part of the trail that was peeking through the snow.  When I looked down to find Scott, he was still about 100 feet below me and not as comfortable in the snow.  With every step he felt more and more uneasy and I felt more and more foolish for leading us up this way.  Well, with more adrenaline and a few scrapes and bruises, Scott made it to the trail with me, but we were both a little shook up.  We sat on the trail for a little while as we watched a few tiny dots of people who were on the trail behind us find the correct way up to where we were.  Eventually we continued up to the saddle where the view was awesome.  Here we are:
We could see the whole valley, even our little apartment!  Even with the drama in our hike, I'm so glad I was able to hike Timpanogos before I left Utah.

The Brighter Side of Timp

Scott and I were blown away with the amazing wildflowers lining almost the entire trail (minus the parts completely under snow).  I took dozens and dozens of pictures of flowers.  I narrowed it down to these twenty for the blog, but there were many more varieties that I didn't fit on this collage and many more varieties I didn't even take pictures of.  We have some stories and made up names that go along with some of these flowers you could ask about if you are ever interested in our imaginative eccentricities.  If you happen to know the real name of any of these flowers, we'd love to become educated.

The following is a picture showing an example of how the wildflowers were growing rampant along the path.  It also is a good shot of a funny stand off we had with a deer.  We were on the trail traveling in the opposite direction of the deer when we ran into each other.  He cocked his head and looked at us as if humans were the strangest thing he had ever seen.  Both parties, us and the deer, stood looking at each other for about 25 seconds before he decided to finally give way and casually strolled off the path.

Freedom Festival

For the 4th of July we went to see the balloon launch and parade again this year, this time with Brett, Sarah and Olivia.  In the evening we had a BBQ and did our own small fireworks.

My Girls

Girls Camp was at the end of June and I was able to go for a couple days.  My Young Women are crazy!  They have a ward tradition of "ragging" their hair. You could always find them in the crowd because of the colorful tiny rags spiking out of their tightly wound hair.  About half of the girls tied their hair in rags the night before camp, then took them out on the last day (see end pictures).

The Stake really outdid themselves.  I remember when I was a young woman our stake did some elaborate events and firesides, but nothing compared to this:
They made the biggest structure at camp, a two walled pavilion, look like the Kirtland temple with white sheets and cut fabric to look like windows, complete with a steeple!
This was pretty amazing, too.  It was a precise historical replica of the tabernacle from the old testament.  They had the outer court with it's altar and washing table, the inner court complete with finely woven material, altar, and shewbread, and two sisters dressed in white dresses guarding the holy of holies (which we couldn't see, exactly, but they had a light behind the ark of the covenant so you could see it's silhouette through the veil).  It was amazing.  It was all part of a temple fireside where the girls walked around each station and learned about the history of temples and the restoration of the church.

On the last day of camp the girls took out their rags and afro-ed their hair.  I guess it's a ward tradition!  It was pretty fun.  Some of the hairdos got pretty big!