TurkeyClimbing {2}

That's right, we spent another year rock climbing!

We made a big breakfast and chatted with some of Chad's family while my family texted pictures back and forth all day. After we were thoroughly stuffed from breakfast we packed up some snacks and headed out to Green Valley. We went there because the hiking isn't as intense and it has my favorite easy climb.

Except it wasn't so easy. ha. I'm trying to get my strength back, and get rid of some of my "I'm sad and broken" weight and Chad is trying to use his left hand more to get all of his strength and range of motion back. Needless to say our climbs weren't as spectacular as last year, but we climbed and soaked up the sun and were sore afterwards :)

We thought ahead a little better this year and had a roast in the crockpot just waiting for us to get home. We also made an apple crisp/pie. We put pears and cranberries in it as well and dumped it all into a graham cracker crust with as much crumb topping as would stay on. Mmmmm. So we still managed to eat pretty well even though there wasn't a turkey in sight.

It was a wonderful long weekend. There was a lot of hiking, and we both couldn't have been happier to be outdoors.... hiking. We went to Snow Canyon, Green Valley, Gunlock, and cleaned the whole house lol. It was wonderful to spend time together doing the things that we love, reflecting on all of our blessings. Although it's been a rather horrible year we have a lot to be thankful for. We are happy, (getting) healthy and surrounded near and far by family and friends who love us unconditionally. And really, that's pretty darn good.

Go Hug a Tree

Around here every day is earth day! It's hard not to be grateful when you live in such a beautiful place. There is little else that can fill me with such a sense of peace, happiness, wonder and spirituality as the great outdoors.

Happy Earth Day friends!

"Natures peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees" John Muir

TurkeyClimbing

Happy December everyone!

Our Turkey Day plans sort of fizzled out this year, so there sadly was no feasting or family for us. Don't worry though, we made out pretty good regardless.



We kicked off the long weekend with a bit of rappelling and bouldering at Pioneer Park on Wednesday afternoon. Man did that work my baby arms! I had a slight meltdown before rappelling but managed to get over it.

For Thanksgiving the next morning, we woke up early and headed out to Chuckawalla. We mountain biked in to Turtle Wall where we spent the whole day climbing and swinging around. Our Thanksgiving dinner was a picnic lunch complete with turkey sandwiches. Close enough! We were there until dark and we had thoroughly exhausted ourselves. All we wanted was to go home, get in a hot shower and eat cake.

Of course we didn't have anything to make a cake with so we headed out to the Pre Black Friday madness. We stopped at KMart quickly and realized they didn't have everything we needed, so we tried WalMart. Wow, that was a huge mistake. I dropped Chad off at the door, he went in and then immediately turned around and came out. Ha. So back to KMart we went. Since the deals didn't start until 7 we got to be first in line, thank goodness it was 6:50.

We continued to search high and low for cool whip to make a delicious ganache to cover our cake in to no avail. We lucked out and ended up having some in the freezer, a Thanksgiving miracle!

Friday we took a break from climbing and headed out to do a little shopping.... for clothes to climb in of course :)  We wore them the rest of the weekend but will be sure to wrap them up in time for Christmas!

Saturday we went back out to Green Valley. Chad worked on his climbing project and I finished up mine. I tired a beast of a climb, for me, and made it to the top and the very end. I wanted to give up, and would have a couple weeks ago, but not this weekend! We both worked h-a-r-d. Sunday I was beat but we went out to Moe's Valley so Chad could boulder. I hadn't been back in the valley before and it was gorgeous. We both had a good time and by the end Rukia, Chad and I were dead tired.

So that's how we wrapped up our long weekend: exhausted, dirty, sunburned and just a little bruised and bloody. And it was absolutely fantastic.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We thought our Thanksgiving might consist of the two of us at home in our p.j.'s eating a giant chocolate cake and watching Christmas movies Frasier. And while we would have enjoyed that we did get a better offer ;) Ashley and Pat invited us to tag along with them to his mom's house in California. We happily agreed and before we knew it we were off to a new state, walking along the beach, eating Mexican food for every meal, watching our crazy dog play with Linda's fun pups, and eating way too much turkey. Yup, that's right, turkey. It's the holidays, we splurged and went nuts.

 

Some things we are thankful for this year:

free meals from Cafe Rio

friday night Date Nights

snuggly scaredy cat animals

skype
a fancy smancy camera

a husband who likes to snuggle while sleeping, even in our king bed

mountain bikes
a dishwasher
mountains and sushine
a wonderful home (with windows for the sunshine!)
friends and family who travel so far to see us

Happy Thanksgiving friends!

Five {Holiday} Things Friday

It's almost October, which I can officially let out all of my holiday crazy!!! Singing Christmas carols in July all of a sudden makes planning out a Christmas bucket list in (almost) October seem very much acceptable. Clearly I'm overly excited for all of them! Thanksgiving, Christmas, Halloween, Talk like a Pirate Day... What? You didn't Talk like a Pirate on September 19th? Ok, so maybe my Dr. was more into that one than me.

I am compiling lists of things to do for each and every holiday so that I can milk each and every one for all of it's goodness and glory! Thanks Pinterest for all of your ridiculously wonderful ideas and feeding my crazy!

Here's some things I'm digging for the upcoming Holiday Season:

1. Scarecrow Treats. There's candy corn, a cake mix and peanut butter involved. Sounds like a good time to me! Now I just need to make friends who also like candy corn so I don't have to eat them all by myself.

2. I think I'm gonna have to set aside some time to decorate sugar cookies. I love decorating cakes and cookies! Ridiculously cute and tasty? It's a win, win.

 3. Face Paint.  F-r-e-a-k-y. Now we just need to find a Halloween party to go to.

4. I made a Countdown to Christmas for Chad the first year we were married and it was a lot of fun. Last year we were in the middle of moving and it was crazy. This year we'll either countdown again or do this: The 12 Dates of Christmas. Or a combination of the two! Either idea is a nice way to sneak in as much celebrating as possible!

5. A Thankful Tree. What a cute way to bring in the spirit of Thankfulness all November long! Plus it's cheap, and when I say cheap, I mean pretty much free. woot.

What are you most excited for this Holiday Season? Crafts? Food? Shopping?

Share any fun ideas you have and let us all in on the action ;)

Labor Day is for....

 Labor Day is for.... Eating!!!  :)

We didn't have any sweet BBQ's or parties to go to over the weekend so we decided to have our own! We had a ridiculous amount of food and it was glorious. Mmmmm!

It was our 2nd attempt at Queso. This time went much, much better. We had nachos for dinner tonight smothered in left over delicious queso. Every meal will now have queso until we run out and cry.

 

 

We bought a Pomegranate and juiced it. It gave us 1/2 cup. Not a lot of bang for your buck here. No wonder Pomegranate juice is so freaking expensive!

Our house was literally 90 degrees by the time we were done cooking everything, our A/C couldn't keep up to save it's life. We were a hot, sticky, full and happy mess!

We hope you had a fun Labor Day as well, full of food, fun, family, and hopefully no work! ;)

Workless Monday!

Happy Labor Day!

I'll take any reason for a day off work! We were originally planning on going camping this weekend. Up to MOAB, Bryce Canyon, the Grand Canyon, somewhere sweet.

Yeah.... we stayed home instead.

The last time we went "camping" without a real game plan we ended up at Nikki and Matt's for a few days. We camped on their couch and played lots of Pretty Pretty Princess. It was a good time.

Unfortunately if we decided to bail on this camping trip we weren't going be an hour from someone we know. We would be out in the middle of nowhere with the bears. And the mountain lions. Plus we were planning on doing some night photography but the full moon killed that dream. We are re-planning for when the moon is cooperating and we aren't so exhausted. If Nikki and Matt were closer we would have totally "camped" there again this weekend.

After our crazy last week it was nice just to stay home. I cleaned, Chad studied. We watched movies, gave the pup a bath, took a long Sunday drive and just relaxed. It was awesome.

 

Rukia frekaing out from her bath. Girl hates to be wet.

We weren't able to go to the annual Labor Day party in Wacousta, we are a little far away, so we are having our own "party" just the two of us. Veggie burgers, potato chips and dip, deviled eggs and Strawberry Shortcake. Any excuse for potato chips.

Happy Labor Day!

A Crafty Weekend

Isn't it the worst when the weekend ends? Luckily for me I get a new holiday in Utah, Pioneer Day. I'm not still quite sure what they do to celebrate, all I'm sure of is that I got today off. I'm also sure that we used it as an excuse to abandon all reason and go on a mild shopping spree. It's Will's fault really though, we needed to get sheets for him to sleep on when he visits. Of course we went to Target to get them, and of course you can't leave Target with only the thing you went in there for. Here is my sad attempt at trying to get into Instagram. It took me way longer than I will admit to figure out how to upload this very important picture.

There were a LOT of craft projects this weekend. Lots of spray painting, painful trips to hardware stores, and one very long trip to Costco. There was not however, a lot of "meatless monday" cooking. The one attempt for Sunday night dinner ended with a pot full of burnt milk. Mmmmm, delish. Since I figured a recipe idea for grilled cheese was a little ridiculous I skipped it yesterday. Although it was fancy grilled cheese with tomatoes and avocados, well... fancy to us anyways.

Our first craft project all started when we found this awesome frame at our favorite (and usually overpriced) consignment store downtown. It was (surprisingly) inexpensive and we love, love, love it. We love it even more now that it's pink :)
 

  Chad spray painted it and then we went and took pictures up at the temple. Chad did his editing magic with it and we headed up to Costco to print it out. After 2 printing attempts, 2 slices of huge cheese pizza and 2 churros we finally had an acceptable picture. Since it was so cheap to print it out at Costco we figure we can switch it out whenever we take a picture we really love. We like how it turned out and finally have a picture of a temple in our home!

Project #2! Right above our stairs we used to have a big frame that held a bunch of pictures. It was a cheapy frame though and after falling multiple times it finally died and had to go. I didn't want to have to buy another one, as much as I like them I think they are overpriced. We started with spray paint of course! Chad painted another big frame that we had picked up at the Salvation Army. We picked up a piece of smooth wainscoting (had them cut it for us) and modge podge and headed home to craft it up.

I laid out the pictures, modge podged them all down, threw it all in the frame and voila! You could paint the background any color your heart desires to get a different look, but we kept ours white. We are really pleased with how well it turned out! We are also really pleased with how easy it was to put together! Love modge podge!

We also made a ridiculously cute jewelry holder but it's not quite done yet. This was far more painful and time consuming to make. The cuteness thankfully makes up for it. More to come :)