6 Months and We Still Love Each Other

That's right! Kyle and I have officially been married for half of a year. For our 6 month anniversary weekend we took a trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It's a cute tourist town, near a nice ski resort. We looked up a lot of interesting things to do while there but it turns out we were there during the "off season" so pretty much everything we were interested in doing was not happening. . . except for one thing . . . disc golf! Disc golf is Kyle's newest, and I'm pretty sure absolute favorite, hobby. So before we left he looked up to see if there were any disc golf courses. It turned out to be an awesome course that ran through a ski slope. So it was a hike, we definitely got some exercise, and it was a lot of fun.

self-timer shot of us at a basket

kyle has great form! just look at how his jacket is swishing from his rotation!

I, on the other hand, look like I am trying to fight someone, gotta get that arm down

just trying to show how steep it was at parts, we t-off at the sign and the basket is up at the far-side of that dirt pile. the picture doesn't really do it justice.

Anyhow, it was a really cool course. The view from the top of that hill was quite pretty as well. Of course we didn't spend all our time at the course, we walked around the town too which was fun. They had some interesting shops with very interesting crafts and stuffed animals (the kind that got hunted). So here are our other photos from the trip:

us by the famous antler arch, there are actually 4 arches and we couldn't decide which one to pick but after we picked one we realized we chose the right one, the only one with the "Jackson Hole, WY antlers :)

kyle sitting on a bear. there were lots of random things like this between shops/on the sidewalks.

And that is our trip to Jackson Hole!

odds 'n ends

So, Kyle is now volunteering at the hospital in the physical therapy department- he's gotta get so many hours accumulated to apply for grad schools. He came home the other day with an awesome, very official name tag. So I took a picture to share.


Kyle says it doesn't, but I still think this badge gets him through locked doors and into restricted areas ;)

Also, we've gotten our craft on a little bit lately. We've had the idea to do this for a while but we just finally got around to it:

Officially it is called "alphabet photography" but we just refer to it as "something cool for our house that we made." Can you tell what it says?! We went around town and took pictures of things that looked like the letters we needed. My two favorites are the I and the Y. The I is a door and window from the Tabernacle down town. The Y is the front brakes of Kyles bike, he was doing some repair work and had to take 'em off for a bit. After we took the pictures it just took some Photoshop and the right frame (which actually was a pain trying to find, but it worked out perfect) and voila.

One year older and wiser too

I'm now 22 years old! We had friends over for cake and ice cream to celebrate. Below is me + my birthday cake. Kyle thought that by putting half of the candles on one end and the other half on the far end, that he could prevent me from blowing them all out with one breath. . .

. . . but I got all of them :) And for my gift Kyle got me (us) a Mac desktop!!

Which is SO nice, my laptop is very slow and has already been resurrected twice. This desktop is much faster and should last a lot longer. Also, it's the same computer that I did design work on while I was in school, so I'm excited to get the Adobe Creative Suite (photoshop...) and design some awesome stuff again. 22 has been great so far. Thank you Kyle! (thank you grant money!) Thank you friends for coming to have cake :)

Updated, Finally! (summer 2010)

:) It's been a very long time since I've gotten on to blog and tell everyone what's been going on (sorry!). I've intended to get on a lot. . . if that counts for anything. Well, since a lot has happened I'm just going to choose the things that I have the best pictures for to share :) It'll keep things more interesting I think.

One Day
So, I got the chance a while back to take a roommates engagement pictures. I was really nervous but I ended up having a lot of fun and getting some good pictures too! I'm going to post a few of my favorites:

b&w

muted color

this is the picture they sent us in their announcement

So, maybe one day I can do photography on the side! I'm still more confident designing and editing than I am taking pictures. . . but, all I need is a little more experience :) (thanks Amanda and Arlin for getting me started)

Ranch
This summer Kyle and I got to go to his grandparent's ranch in Panguitch, UT. He had always told me about the ranch and everything to do there and finally I got to go too! It was so relaxing and fun. I really regret that I didn't take more pictures while we were there. We got to ride four-wheelers, fish, eat tasty food, go on a scavenger hunt, make bows and arrows, hike, see some Indian hieroglyphics, visit some Indian caves, play games, relax, etc. Below are the few pictures I have:

this is me swinging on a gate, one of the pictures for the scavenger hunt :)

this is the collection of flowers that Kyle and I gathered for the scavenger hunt, we gathered the biggest variety by far, and we got pricked gathering some of them off of cacti and sticker bushes!

On one of the days while we were there it was especially rainy and everything was very wet. I finally convinced Kyle to take the four-wheelers out and "go mudding" with me. We rode along the trails and found some great puddles. We came back wet, cold, and VERY muddy (just like I wanted!) It was a lot of fun. This picture was taken on my phone so it's a little fuzzy, but you can see the mud on our faces! Overall, we had a ton of fun and I can't wait to get to go back some day. Thanks to Kyle's family for inviting and entertaining us!

Wisdom Teeth Out
I also got my wisdom teeth out this summer. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but it still wasn't very fun. It was so scary to go in for my consultation and have them explain to me everything that could possibly go wrong (like having my jaw lock for a couple of weeks, being partially paralyzed...) and then having to sign the paper that says "sure, I know all of this can happen, but I accept the risk, go ahead." It made me miss the days when mom got to know the risks and sign the paper. So here is what my face looked like post-surgery:


as you can tell, one side was obviously swollen a lot more than the other (yes, both sides were swollen, the one side is so fat that the other side almost looks normal, hehe). When I went in for my check-up they doctors were both amazed that my face wasn't bruised. . . Anyhow, thanks Kyle and Sarah for taking such good care of me. When I got home I crashed on the couch but Kyle still changed my ice packs and gave me my meds like clockwork. And while Kyle was at work, Sarah did my laundry and made me delicious soft food like scrambled eggs :) This was in August and I'm just barely to the point where I don't still have to rinse/swish sometimes to get food out of the holes that were left. Crazy.

Camping/Hiking/Fishing/Fun
Upper Palisades Lake
We went camping with our friends Mark and Natalie in Swan Valley a while back. We camped one night, got up the next morning and hiked the Upper Palisades Lake - 14 miles round trip! Go us!
This was our 1st camping experience together! We stayed in Kyle's old scout tent which was too small for us to stretch completely out in. . . and then when we woke up in the morning we had the pleasant surprise of being covered in lots of tiny black flecks that were shedding off of the tent bottom, hehe. . . Needless to say I insisted we get a new tent. We finally got one and have gone camping again since in a larger, non-shedding tent :) (no pictures from that trip though) Kyle and I were in charge of breakfast the next morning and we made some pretty awesome campfire pancakes! We are now experts at campfire pancakes. Last time we went camping, just the two of us, we forgot the flipper- so we are both also experts at tossing the pancake up, flipping it, and catching it on the other side!
After breakfast we packed up and started hiking.

This is the 1st lake we came to on the hike, the Lower Lake. Very pretty.

Finally we reached the Upper Lake. Such a huge lake! We hiked around the top of it until we found an okay spot to get to the shore to have lunch and try some fishing.

Look at me cast! haha

Master Fisherman Kyle

We were casting and casting and we were having no luck. So Kyle decided to just put the bobber on, toss it out and see what happened. He tossed it out, sat down, we started talking. We were trying to be very diligent in watching the bobber. But we must have gotten distracted because we looked out and we couldn't see the bobber. . . . Kyle: "Where did the bobber go? Why did it sink? That's so weird. Where is it?" Me: "Um, I dunno, doesn't that mean there is a fish on it?" Kyle: "What, no, why would it disappear like that?" . . . so he goes over to the pole to try and find the bobber. Low and behold, he starts to pull it in and realizes that I was right - bobbers don't just disappear for no reason - there was a fish on it! Kyle tried to reel him in but the fishy got away. Now Kyle knows to be a little quicker when he realizes the bobber is gone, hehehe.

At the end of those rocks is the lake. . . And the red shirt that you see poking out of the trees is Kyle, holding on to a very long blue rope that is tied to a very tall tree. Yep, Kyle found something to help him feel like Tarzan. :) He took a swing which got him quite high off the ground. The guys thought about using the rope to jump into the lake but decided against it because 1)the water was cold, and 2) the fall would have been quite far.

Fishers of Nature Park
Sadly, the only pictures I have of us actually catching fish are from Nature Park- the duck park here in Rexburg. The fish are not big. We catch them and throw them back.

fish-kisser! hehe. just kidding.

my fish was bigger than Kyle's!

Kyle has gone on other, 'real' fishing trips with some of his guy friends and we have actually had fish for dinner once, good fish! I feel confident that if we had to, we could live off of the land. . . (maybe).

Tandem
I've always wanted to try out a tandem bike! We got the chance to rent one from school. It was fun but tricky. We rode around Rexburg for a day. We tried to get pictures of ourselves by putting the camera on timer. . .

the approach

not sure if what part of us made it in the picture, did pretty good though!

finally, we ran into Sarah near the cheap theaters and she took a real photo for us :)

Ross Park
In Rexburg we are lucky to have the "splash park." The splash park is a tiny water-fun area for kids (and there are always tons of kids there) at one of the parks. It has a couple of small slides, water shoots up from the ground and you can run through it, and there is a bucket that fills up and dumps. A couple of summers ago, Kyle and I would frequent splash park. We would dodge the kids and "get soaked" . . . something about being married seemed to make us feel to mature to go back to the kiddie splash park. . . That's when we discovered Ross Park. Ross Park is in Pocatello and has a lazy river, a large slide, a lilly-pad obstacle course, large slide, water basket-ball (which was a lot of fun), and it is definitely not just for little toddlers.

crossing the lily pads!

floating the lazy river- Sarah came with us and took this pict.

So that is the update of our summer adventure! I'll get on again SOON and give you the most recent update. :)

Pow Pow

There is a new pesky plant growing rapidly among the Idaho wildernesses. The shiny red plant baffles scientists, is considered a threat to local wildlife, and has recently had a bounty placed on it. . . This is how Kyle and I ended up hunting the ferocious Dr.Pepper plants (hey, anything for a little extra money, right).

Ok, you are right, there is no real Dr. Pepper plant. We did have a good time setting them up and shooting at them though. Kyle was pretty excited to use his gun he brought back from Cali. We went with friends Shane and Sidney. After setting the cans up on the tips of the plants I couldn't help but think that they it looked like a field of Dr.Pepper plants. It was hard to tell when we had hit the cans though. But when we went and checked them out they were pretty peppered so I guess our aim is alright. Next time we want to take full soda cans and shake em up before shooting at them. . . . Kyle's such a cowboy:


We had fun :)

honeymoon

For our honeymoon we went on a cruise out of San Diego!! The cruise ship stopped for a day in Catalina and a day in Ensenada, Mexico. Of course, we also spent a lot of time on the ship itself. The top picture is at one of our elaborate dinners. Funny enough, we ended up sitting at a group table (we had requested a table for two) right next to another newly-wed LDS couple! haha. There were 4 couple total and so half of us were LDS. Anyhow, the dinners were nice and the waiters would always have some song/dance prepared to entertain us. Also, if the found out that it was your birthday or honeymoon you got extra attention! Woo-Hoo. So this is where the story behind the above photo begins. Our waiter (romeo) found out that it was our honeymoon so one night at dinner we got sang to: "Happy Honeymoon To You" . . . They draped the napkin over our heads and told us we had to kiss during the whole song. Haha. Funny people. The ship also had fun shows and things. When they would come in a clean up our room they would leave us towel creations like the one below.



Our day in Mexico was awesome. We took a tour to the blow-hole and shopped around a market street. We had a chatter-box tour guide who told us some crazy stories about everything (how she tried to feed her kids healthy, how whales feed their babies, how to properly eat a fish taco, how to bargain with the vendors. . .) The first photo is of the vending street. We had fun looking around their shops. But man, they really wanted you to buy something. By the end of our shopping adventure Kyle had gotten a new wallet ("Gucci" none the less, haha ) and I got a pretty sweet purse too! They tried to tell me my purse usually sold for $200 and that for me it would be only $90. Hehehehe. I wanted it for $15, they wanted me to pay $25 minimum, I ended up paying $20. So that was fun.


Below is one of the fish tacos that we ate. They were soo good. And now for a quote from our tour guide: "You know the sharks in the ocean? The ones that usually eat us . . . Well, here we eat them!" So apparently the meat in the fish tacos is actually fried shark. The tacos were really good.


The picture below is of us at the blow hole. The water you see behind us is spraying up through the blow hole. I would try and put up a video but the videos from my camera are always huge and I doubt it would up-load . . . anyway, it was really neat. The water shoots up way high.


The next few photos are from Catalina Island. It's a cute little island! Kyle and I rented these electric bikes. We could pedal (but they had two big battery packs on them so it was way heavy to pedal them) or just switch them to full-power. We got them for an hour and pretty much saw the whole island on them. The bikes were one of my favorite color and I'd always wanted to try a powered bike so it was a lot of fun. We had a blast. Those battery packs are lethal though. I still have two scars on my shin from where I would hit part of the pack while swinging my leg over to get on the bike :) Haha.


Asides from the bikes, we took a tour on the semi-submerged submarine that you see in the photos below. From the inside we could look out the windows and see tons of fish swim by. It was cool because the submarine was also equipped with these big red buttons at each window. The button was labeled "fire." You could pay a couple extra dollars to have your fish-food-torpedoes loaded. When you hit "fire" the torpedo shoots fish food out of the ship above your window. There were lots of hungry fishies.


And that's how our cruise went!! You can kind of see it in the photo above, Kyle had a cold sore that week. I got accused a couple of times of punching him in the face or injuring him in some way. This wasn't the case. Hehe. Yep! That's our honeymoon in a nutshell!

april 17, 2010

We got married on a beautiful day! Everything went smoothly which apparently is not always the case (today when I went visiting teaching we ended up swapping wedding nightmare stories . . . I just listened because I really had nothing to add). Thanks so much to all of you for your support and help!