Warning: PHOTO OVERLOAD

This is what I get for not posting in so long--an overabundance of pictures to post. So here's the extremely condensed version of the last two weeks of my life:

• Mom, Dad and Jen came to Moab to visit and take me back to the big city (aka--Provo)
• I graduated! Ok, so I "walked". I still have a semester left
• Brian graduated for real. Hence me walking now.
• Sara had a birthday
• I met my adorable niece Hailey
• Jen got her Master's degree
• I went home for a visit and we went on the lake five nights in a row (yes, I am sore but feeling better now, thank you.)
• And now I'm back in Provo, moving in and waiting for school to start/life to end (ok, so life doesn't end when school starts it just slows down. Or speeds up?)

Enter photo onslaught:

We went on a hummer safari. I have never heard my mom

and sister scream like that. It was amazingly fun.

Jen, Dad, me and Mom in Moab.

We took some normal pictures but

I just like these ones better.

Priceless. The picture--not the education.

Just ask Dad.

The whole fam. We even let Dave be in it with us!

Me and my cute sisters.

Jen won't actually be walking for her Master's degree but

the road there has been so long that she just had to

put on a robe and throw her hands in the air. GO JEN!

Oohing and aahing over Hailey. I'm sure it's hard to believe

that we spent most of the week doing this.

...and this. Give us a break, we're not so used to babies at

family gatherings.

And last but not least...

...me and the girl of the hour.

Phew. If any of you actually made it to the end of this post, thanks. You get a gold star! Adios for now.

Let me out!

Here's a picture of where I've been living this summer:

That's right--a double wide trailer. And just to make sure
we fit in with our redneck neighbors...


We have a toilet on our back porch.

So it's been quite the experience sharing this tiny, somewhat dilapidated space with 17 other girls. Mostly, it's really been ok. But this morning, I lost all patience with my summer home. I got up early this morning to get ready for work and walked to the bathroom. Sometime between about 12:30am and 6:30 am, the bathroom door had been ripped from its hinges. The top one was completely off and the bottom hinge was holding the door at a rakish angle by one screw. Shaking my head, I squeezed into the bathroom and attempted to close the door. But the door wasn't even the last straw--the lack of toilet paper was.

How many more days do I have to live here? SEVEN!!!! And they couldn't be over fast enough.

If it ain't broke, I don't own it

Well hello there. I've had some great things to blog about recently but I think when I explain my life as of late, you will realize why I haven't posted anything. Ready for the list of things that have recently BROKEN in my life? Here you go:

• my driver car door (don't worry, I figured out this one)
• my watch (I also figured this one out)
• my camera battery charger
• my computer

Yep, you read that right--my computer. One day, my computer screen decided to no longer illuminate. It was fantastic. Upon further evaluation, a local computer repair man declared my motherboard to have a short in it. Don't worry, it only costs about $300 to replace. For a computer that is three years old and has no battery life? Not worth it. So, a moment of silence for my computer please.

Alright, now that we're all teary-eyed I'll tell you the good news. Moab has an awesome library and I was able to get some pictures off of my camera card today. So I can share some fabulous photos with you. I know--I've made your day. You. Are. Welcome.

A couple weekends ago, Jenny and Ben came down to visit.
It was fun to have them down here. Here's some of the things we did:

We went bouldering. None of us had ever really been
before so here's Jenny trying her hand at it.
We went up into the La Sal mountains to attempt to do some climbing where it wasn't 115 degrees. Well, we got a little lost. And ended up walking about a half mile through an ice cold creek (with a very strong current I might add) and straight up things that looked like this:

And here's our victory picture. You can't really see, but behind us
is a canyon that looks like it has some climb-able walls but...we sure couldn't get to them.
Since our climbing venture failed, and we were up there anyway, we decided to check out Oowah Lake. It was beautiful. We skipped rocks on the lake until we couldn't handle the bugs anymore.
Apparently the rock I set the camera on wasn't exactly level. My bad.

A few weeks ago, a few of us went out to a place called Honeycomb Caves. It was a cool place. We just explored and climbed around in the caves for awhile. And I snapped this picture which, being the photographer that I am not, I thought was pretty cool.

Jen came down for my day of birth! It was lots of fun. These pictures
are out of order but...we got some snow cones because it was so blasted hot.

We ate lots of food (this happens to be a picture of my free
grand slam breakfast at Denny's on my birthday).

We went to Canyonlands National Park.
Again--unbearably hot. But fantastic views.

And we stayed at the slightly ghetto Motel 6.
And we may or may not have jumped on the bed...

And other than that, I'm either at work trying not to kill tourists, at the trailers trying not to melt away, or at the library attempting to understand biochemistry. Yep, I'm a busy girl.

Check out this Moab-ian sunset I caught the other night.

Pretty, right? Well, minus the powerline. We went up to the parking lot of a restaurant called Sunset Grill to watch it. Turns out...you can't be up there when the restaurant is closed. But we didn't know that so the guy kicked us out very nicely. Thanks man.

So the other morning, a few of us all had the morning off so we decided to go for a little hike to a place called Fisher Towers. I've heard great things about it and it certainly lived up to the stories. It was a gorgeous and really fun hike.

Here's the hiking crew. From left to right we have Jake, me, Mike, Makel and Krissy. If I look really awkwardly spaced from everyone it's because we used the self-timer on my camera and the rock I had it on took longer to jump off of than I thought. So, I didn't have much time to strike a pose.

It was a great hike. I highly recommend it. And don't listen to the trailhead sign. It says it takes most people three to four hours. But we totally did it in two. So...go hiking!

The Coolest Thing I've Ever Done

Pictures from today's post are brought to you by the letter P for the Pelican 1010. Micro Waterproof Case Series. This thing was completely underwater and repeatedly banged against rocks. And yet--my camera lives on, unharmed.

So I've been called hard core before. But I really don't think I deserve that distinction. I mean, people just throw that word out because I rock climb or because I run ridiculous relay races. These things, honestly, are not a big deal. I can name dozens of people that do way cooler things than me, all the time. Today however, I think I turned a new leaf. I did something today that I would consider--truly hard core. My good friend Ryan Pepper took me to Pleaides Canyon today. It's a slot canyon with about six waterfalls. The trail is up in the La Sal mountains of Moab (a popular place for locals where it's about 20 degrees cooler and there are no tourists). There's a little hike in through a beautiful aspen forest and then you rappel down the waterfalls and hike out the other side. Oh man. It was awesome. Freezing. But awesome.

This is the hike to the canyon through the incredible aspen forest.

Here I am, about to go down the first rappel!

Here I am....rappelling down a waterfall! Gosh it was cold. Just so you know, this first one was the smallest one we encountered. I actually tried to take a picture of one of the bigger ones but I couldn't feel my hands enough to generate enough pressure to turn on the camera. Don't worry--all feeling has since returned!

And there's Ryan Pepper, the man of the hour, going down on one of our last rappels. I think this might have been the one where his rope got caught for a second and he had to sit under a pounding waterfall of freezing water for a minute and get it unstuck. I wasn't sure he was going to recover from that one.

Rappelling Pleaides Canyon? Literally--the coolest thing I have ever done.

RFTC and Other Updates

It's almost midnight and I have no idea why this seemed like a good time to blog. I have to be at work in six hours. Oh well. Here goes anyway. Warning: the following post is simply a smattering of my life as of late. Chronological order is not guaranteed.

Last Saturday was Raft for the Cure (RFTC). It also happened to be my first official day as a river guide. I was a little nervous since this event involves about 350 people on the river who are all there to help cure breast cancer. But I safely and hopefully enjoyably, got my very own boat of ten people down the river. Due to my lack of a waterproof camera and copyright issues, I don't have any pictures to show you. Sorry.

So Saturday was a long day. The guiding part of it started at 6:30 am. Right from there, I went to work at the store for the rest of the night. RFTC also involves dinner and a concert at our store. I got to sit inside all night, hear the band and the joy outside, and stand at the counter. It was very boring. And I didn't get home until about midnight. One of my co-workers caught my mood quite perfectly in this picture.

I was so ready to go home.

I also ran the Wasatch Back relay again this year. Our van managed to get there super early again this year but that's ok. It allowed for great pictures like this one to be taken:

There were several of these that were equally as ridiculous. But I thought we looked the most bored in this one.

And here we are at the finish line.

The other day I finally bugged my boss about going on a sunset jetboat tour. We offer jetboat tours through a company here in Moab and last night I finally got to go on one! It was great. The boat goes about 30 mph down the Colorado river. It's a great way to see the scenery. And plus, afterwards they serve you this amazing dutch oven dinner. Holy smokes it was good.

The Colorado river by jetboat.

Yesterday I woke up and realized--oh my goodness. It is July 1st. I only have about five more weeks to live in Moab. And I feel like I haven't even scratched the surface of what this place has to offer. So I've decided that I'm actually going to go out and do things. Good idea, huh? So this morning, I hiked to Corona arch and repelled off of it. All in about an hour and a half because one of us had to be back to go to work. That was a fun sprint down the trail. Mom, this is the part where you avert your eyes...

See that little speck floating a few feet below the arch? That's me! A beautiful, and massive arch. Some of you may have seen it featured on Planet Earth, the deserts episode. Yeah, I'm cool.

Well hopefully, mostly due to my new found determination to do everything cool in Moab, there will be some great posts soon to come. But for now--that's all folks!

Famous

So once upon a time I lived in Provo. A girl in my ward happened to have a mother on the relief society general board. So when the time came to make a visiting teaching video for some big relief society training conference, her mom came to our ward and asked for all of us to come up with ideas of "what visiting teaching looks like" that they could take pictures of us doing. Well, I participated in a couple and made the cut! So I'm just letting you all know that I'm officially famous. Obscure relief society videos are definitely the first step to some big gigs. With any luck, this link will pull up the video for you. In case you have a hard time finding me, my roommate Jenny is teaching me how to play the guitar at about 25 seconds and I'm in a jogging party at a minute and ten seconds. Enjoy!