Something to Love

I sit by the south east window at work. The sun heats up the window sill to the perfect temperature to grow plants. At least that is what I have suspected for a while. I brought in a pot with sweat pea seeds two Mondays ago. When I came in this Monday, two of the seeds had spouted. Over the past 5 days I've watched the little seedlings grow. I've caught myself staring at the little plants throughout the day. I've missed having a garden so it is nice to have a plant to love again.

Hawaii Day

To beat the winter blahs we had our annual Hawaii Day at work.

Here I am with some of the girls I sit near. (Everything I am wearing belongs to Brandon)

I decorated my friends bamboo plant to make it more festive.
And I decorated my desk. (this is a picture AFTER I organised my desk. It was a disaster area most of the day)
I put up a map of Reunion. That is the island Brandon spent most of his mission on.
Here is a pic of me and my desk. (The afternoon sun made the pic turn out kind of bad)
Everyone at work got pizza and fruit for lunch. Here are the empty pizza boxes.

It was a fun day and totally made me forget about how cold and crappy the weather has been.

Snow Shoeing

Two years ago Brandon decided to make Snowshoes. He made them and we used them once. They were fun, but they had some technical problems that had to be worked out. Brandon solved those problems and we took them out for a second run on Saturday. This was our hike for the week.

Here is Brandon acting like a outdoor-wear model.

Here is his black eye (Construction, Ice, and Re-bar don't mix very well)
Anyway, we loaded up the jeep with our camel pack backpacks that we bought for Christmas and the snowshoes.
We spent about 15 minutes trying to remember how all the straps go together.
I bought new snow boots so my feet were nice and dry.
The right shoe in this picture is the only one made out of raw hide. Brandon realized the string works just as well and you don't have to work with it when it is wet.
We were hiking in Logan canyon on a little side road that leads to a girls camp. It was snowing pretty hard, but was super pretty.

The shoes still had some quirks so we ended up taking them off and hiking on foot on a little path.
The snow was very deep.
We found a tree to shelter us from the storm, and ate lunch under it.



Then we walked back across a little bridge.

When we got back to the Jeep it had been snowing for about an hour and a half. This is a picture of highway 89.
It was a great hike.

Two Winter Hikes

We've been keeping up on our goal to go on hikes every weekend. We've had to be a little creative though since it is January.

On January 9th we went to the Logan River Trail. This is a section of the Logan river that is right by highway 89 as is comes into Logan from the south. It isn't much of a hike, but you take what you can get in January.

Still it was really pretty



Brandon's always on the look out for somewhere to build a shelter.


We walked back to the Jeep on the train tracks. (Yes I know it is illegal, but that hasn't stopped me before)
Then on the 16th we went up Green Canyon. This is the canyon where we had a photo shoot a couple months ago. It is completely different in the winter.
For one there are TONS of people up there in the winter. The road is inaccessible to cars but it been packed down so cross country skiers can use it.
In this pic you can see the smog of Cache Valley down below.

After our hike we met a friend at the ice skating rink. This rink is in a park that they flood when the weather is really cold. If the cold weather holds we will go there this Saturday as our hike. If it doesn't hold . . . well at least I got this pic.
And here are some macro shots of the rime ice that covered everything last week. I was lazy and didn't take pictures until it was melting, but I got these in time.

My Dad's Blog

Some of my favorite bed time stories as a kid were the stories that my dad wrote about his own childhood. Up until now only family members known about them, but now he's starting to upload them onto a blog for other people to enjoy. Even though I know all of these stories by heart I found myself re-reading them as if I had never seen them. I thought some of you might be interested in reading them as well so here is the link to the blog.

Planning

[Update May 6, 2014: If you found this post through Pinterest.  Welcome!  I'm glad you are interested in my epic vacation around Utah.  This post is about things I planned to see on my vacation in 2010.  You can read about the actual trip by visiting my travel blog, 51 Cent Adventures. Here is the link.  http://www.51centadventures.com/2014/06/southern-utah-road-trip.html ]

Since January can be a pretty boring month I'm already planning our anniversary trip for this year. It started off with just the idea to go to Arches National Park, but now it is going to include about 7 National Parks/Monuments/Recreation Areas and about 10 State Parks. Here is the circle we are going to make around Utah.Just to drive the whole route would take 24 hours and 7 minutes. We plan to do it all in 9 days.

We plan to hike approximately 63 miles too.

Here is a list of all the places we plan to at least stop at (click on them to see the info pages):

Territorial Statehouse State Park

Zions National Park

Red Canyon

Bryce National Park

???? Kodachrome Basin (a little off the route so we might not go)

Escalante State Park

Anasazi State Park

Capital Reef National Park

Goblin Valley State Park

Glen Canyon National Rec (Hite Marina)

Natural Bridges National Monument

Edge of the Cedars State Park

Newspaper Rock BML site

Dead Horse Point State Park

Canyonlands National Park (Island in the Sky District)

Arches National Park

Dinosaur National Monument

Utah Field House of Natural History

Red Fleet State Park

Flaming Gorge National Rec

We would go broke on all the individual fees so thank goodness the Federal Government sells a pass to all the federal sites for $80 for a whole year. And the State of Utah has an annual pass to state parks for only $75.

I can't wait!

[If you want even more vacation ideas check out www.51centadventures.com to read about all the other interesting and inexpensive places my husband and I have visited.]