Countdown

I have a terrible terrible habit that I really need to break. This is it: I love to countdown "days until..."

For example, I count down days until the weekend, I count down days until my next vacation, I count down the days until my birthday or some big event, I'm counting down the days till Ryan is done with school... You catch my drift.

Anyway, I know it's a bad habit because before I realize, the whole year passes and then I have more countdowns. I really just need to sit back and enjoy each day, but my little OCD side really finds satisfaction putting X's on the calendar. So, this month of august, that's what I've been doing every day.

This month has flown by. I realized I've hardly been posting anything, probably because I'm so busy tending to the calendar in the kitchen. However, this next weekend, it's a week I've been waiting on for quite some time.... Well, since April.

1. This Saturday, my first half marathon.
2. This Sunday, we head down to Moab for a week. Rafting, biking, hiking, camping, eating!
3. And next Tuesday, hubs and my THREE year anniversary! Yep. It's been 3 years.

Even though august has been a slow month for us, I'll be much better on posting these upcoming events with you all once we are back. :)

ice caves

yesterday ryan and i tagged along with the cannon family to the ice caves. we hitched a ride with them out there and enjoyed a pretty view while we were drifted in and out of consciousness from heat exhaustion. let's just say the cab of their truck doesn't get much airflow back there. the kids decided to all jump in the back so we could go up front for the off-roding portion of the drive. only by this point, we learned that not only were we reaching a point of no cell phone service, but that the cannon's didn't fill up on gas before heading out and were close to empty! we turned off the air conditioner and richard went into gas-conservation mode by refusing to use the breaks at all. it made for a dusty bumpy ride that was all worth it in the end :)

We all had a lot of fun. After the ice caves we went over to the sand dunes and had a little dinner before heading home. Oh, and we had just enough gas to get us back into town. :)

lonely number 1

My husband has left me.

Not permanently, thank goodness. But it's still bad. He's gone to Colorado for a week and left me here to hold the fort down and keep the paychecks coming. Luckily, I was able to escape this weekend to SLC and see some friends that I haven't been able to see in oh so long. Silly me forgot my camera..ugh.. and didn't capture any pictures. bah hum bug. I'm sure i'll be down again soon. I was able to get some much needed shopping in and i know another trip will be in order sooner or later.

On a side note, my wonderful crazy beautiful friend Kylee introduced me to The Sweet Tooth Fairy. She is a cupcakeholic, yes they really do exist. It is the cutest shop with the cutest cupcakes. I almost prefer to just look at them because they are so dang pretty, but not as much as I prefer to eat them. FOR BREAKFAST nonetheless. Dont worry, we had some healthy cereal beforehand to balance it out. :)

This one was my FAV!

After my drive back home in pouring rain, I come back to bed and have the biggest smile on my face. My husband sure loves me. He loves me so much he left me a surprise in our bed. It's not as good as the real thing but it will do as a cuddling partner at night. :)

Pioneers

If you are not living in Utah or Idaho, you probably didn't celebrate pioneer day this last weekend. But, since we are living in rexburg, Idaho we had some celebration. We headed back over to St. Anthony where the parade was held and I'm surprised to admit this, it was much better than the 4th of July parade. There was a boy riding a camel. I'm not sure anything can top that.

just staring at my licorice. waiting for the parade to start. :)



First steak, happy.



Other news, Ryan finished school up and we had to celebrate his hard work. He took 18.5 credits and got all A's and 2 B's!!! He deserved an excellent treat and what was it that he wanted? To go to a new resturaunt in Idaho Falls that has all you can eat steak. I have to say, its been nice having him out of school. He has been great cleaning the house and cooking dinner. If only we can make this a regular thing...

Second steak, feeling sick.


With respects to the pioneer day celebration, they were playing the movie 17 Miracles at the movie theater. If you haven't seen it and would like to watch a church movie, we highly recommend it. It's based on actual stories of the Willie Handcart Company and i promise you that you won't leave with a dry sleeve. I noticed during a quiet part of the movie, you could hear everyone sniffling. Two thumbs up from Ryan and Elizabeth. Here's the trailer if you're interested. Watch it please. It will have you sold.

We ended the night with fireworks! Yes! I saw my fireworks for the year 2011. Remember I was in a coma 4th of july? This made up for it. We drove over to St. Anthony for a show, sat on the hood of our car and enjoyed the show. :)

St. Anthony

Well, if you ever find yourself wanting to go to St. Anthony, Idaho, you must go to the movie theater there.

We've decided we should branch out of Rexburg and visit some neighboring towns to see what they have to offer. This weekend we took the short drive to St. Anthony and I think this is a wonderful hidden gem that Ryan and I will definitely revisit. Roxy is the old fashioned movie theater. They have one screen and curtains hanging separating the lobby and the theater. They have a small balcony with antique chairs to sit on AND they also have some couches with the coolest fabric. Naturally, we were the only couple cuddled on the couch.

Everything about this theater is the absolute coolest. Tickets are $5 and they have candy for $1. Really, what's not to love.

There's also a resturaunt that we were wanting to try out, but we were stuffed from our picnic and candy that we had to pass. We'll save it for another time.

 

:)

Bragging on "how great my husband is" post: Beware!

Fridays are the best aren't they? And it sucks when you are in a bad mood for no reason which is what I was in yesterday after work. I got in this funk and when I met Ryan at the gym after work he could tell. He'll ask me what's wrong and I can't tell him what's wrong other than that I'm just in a funk for no reason at all. I can be very difficult to deal with sometimes. Ryan had to go work on some stuff and said he'd meet me at home. I was laying in bed when he came home and told me to close my eyes.

Some flowers and my favorite candy bar. Perfect. Ok, I'm feeling much better now! :)

Ryan just knows me so well. I don't understand how someone can know someone so much. The other day he surprised me even more. We were in our bedroom watching a movie and I ran out to the kitchen to grab a snack. I come back to the room and he knows I'm eating something. He asks what it is and I tell him nothing. This goes on for a few minutes and I keep telling him, "you'll never know!" I ran back again very quietly and sneakily to grab another bite of my mystery treat. I come back the THIRD time of going back to grab more and he finally guesses. He says, "Hersheys candy bar." WHAT???????????????????? Seriously, I have no idea how he knew. I went to go grab a treat and stumbled upon one in the cupboard. Sheesh. He's good.

I must not be busy enough with my 40hr work week. On top of working my job at the hospital, I was asked by the nursing department at BYU-I to fill in as Adjunct Faculty while we are here in Idaho. Sure why not? I'll be filling in as a clinical instructor for the students and helping with grading and odds and ends that the find for me. I loved my nursing program and it's great to be helping out in the program I graduated in. I was emailing some of the faculty and one of them said to call her by her first name now that I'm part of the faculty. That's going to take time getting used to that. I'm excited though and hopefully it will be a good experience. Let's just say fall semester is going to be a busy one for me.



BEAVER DICK PARK

Yes, Beaver Dick really exists. We went canoeing last weekend on the Snake River and the weather was SO perfect... and the water. For anyone who has heard about our tubing experience down the same river a few years back, this was much better. Long story short, we went tubing down Snake River 2 years ago and the water was so slow we were stuck on the river for 7 hours. We ended up grabbing our tubes and made our way through thick bushes covered in mosquitos to get to my sister-in-law's. It was a very traumatizing experience but we knew we had to do it again to overcome those fears. We just played it a little smarter this time and made sure the water wasn't at a stand still and that we floated in something with paddles. :)

I hope that picture of Ryan isn't too revealing. He was trying to get some sun on those thighs. Ha.

the 4th

I have to say, the 4th of July is one of my FAVORITES. Warm weather, BBQs, parades, fireworks. Does it get better? Ryan and I both had a 3 day weekend which made it even better. We took off camping on Friday and camped next to the Palisades river. Front row view of the river and GREEN fields and mountains. The sun shined all weekend for us and there's nothing more relaxing than secluding ourselves from the world and spending time doing NOTHING together. We never run out of things to talk about. :)

I'm grateful to have Ryan on our camping expeditions for two reasons:


1. He's a great cook which makes up for my lack of cooking... especially over a fire! We had scrambled eggs sliced fruit for breakfast, and he even made spaghetti with grilled corn on the cob for dinner. I think they turned out better than if we had stayed home and I cooked. :)



Much too early and much too bright for pictures



Ryan cooked and I supervised :)

2. And maybe more importantly, if we didn't bring dinner, I can count on him to catch dinner. Yes, my husband knows how to set up traps thanks to Bear From the show Man vs. Wild.

a 4 trap

We packed up and came home because we could NOT miss the Rexburg parade. Main street was PACKED!

holding Ryan's soda :)

Look at what we would have missed!

I wish I had some awesome firework pictures to post, but unfortunately, i passed out at 6:30 that night. I do that on occassions and that occassion happened to be July 4th. DANG IT! Sorry Ryan. He tried to wake me up and it just wasn't happening. Hope everyone enjoyed them for us. :)



Getting back on track

Training for my first half has been going peachy... That is until this past week where I practically did a 180 and completely went off my schedule. Its been really difficult to go running after work and have the energy for the long runs. It's been warm and running outside after work in the afternoon is not quite ideal. I'm debating to switch up my running times and start running in the morning. This would mean getting up around 4am. Yikes. I might do it for a week and then just suffer in the heat instead because I'll realize I would rather sleep in a little more than have cooler weather while running.

I'm feeling confident that I will be ready for my race. I've built up my mileage over the past 4 weeks and its nice to see I'm not dying after 1 mile anymore. Yay!

So long to my easier week of workouts. Tomorrow its back on. sigh.

Guess who's 27!

Guess who turned 27?? Thankfully, not me...yet. But my wonderful husband celebrated his birthday June 19th. For being so young he is mature beyond his years.

We went and got Mongolian food... his absolute favorite. I wouldn't say it's my absolute favorite but it does hold a special place in my heart since it's where he took me on our first date. Ironically we were seated at the same table too. :)

For anyone who has been, you'll know that it can be quite humorous preparing your bowl. Apparently, there's this unwritten rule that you can stack as much as you want in your bowl as long as it stays in. So people will tower the noodles really high you would think it was illegal. It's so bad, I had to have Ryan stack the noodles for me because I was too embarrassed to hand my bowl to the workers to cook it. What are husbands for?

BEFORE

If you're wondering why he has two watches on, I bought him two watches and he was
testing them out for the day to see which one he wanted. Clever huh? 

DURING

AFTER

Yes, I did eat some.

Ryan's fortune cookie. How can you deny the fortune from the cookie?

His actual birthday was on Sunday so i "made" him wear a birthday tag so everyone knew. I'd like to think he enjoyed wearing it but who knows. He probably took it off in priesthood for all I know. Oh well.

 

His actual birthday dinner was posole. A mexican dish he really liked on his mission and I thought it would be fun to find the recipe and make it for him. Huge success. We were both very pleased and very full. The recipe includes hominy and if anyone has every had that, it fills you right up! Next time, maybe just one green chili pepper instead of two. :)

We are heading down to Moab as soon as he is done with school to go camping and rafting. I've never been before so it's kinda a gift for both of us. :) It's legit to buy your spouse a gift for the two of you to enjoy together right?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HUSBAND!