Weather Report: Bliss and Angst

In case you can't quite figure out what that sad blob is supposed to be in the picture, I'll tell you: it's a spring flower covered in snow.  Frozen, death bringing snow.

We had two absolutely beautiful days over the weekend.  One of the days I actually sweat a little bit!  The week before that also had two beautiful days in it!  I actually wore shorts long enough to realize that I need to buy new shorts!

The other ten days in the past two weeks have caused my emotions to react as if under a pressure cooker.  Disbelief begun the weekend of a snowstorm on our second anniversary has developed into impatience and annoyance, then seething disdain paired with soul sucking despair, and hit their peak yesterday when it started snowing as I sat in class.  Yesterday.  May 17th.  Almost June. 

In case you have yet to notice, my house plants are like pets to me.  I left home and it was around 50 degrees, expecting that it would warm up after a thunderstorm and the humidity would do my little Phil Junior some good.

The last Phil died when left outside during an unexpected snowstorm.

I cut my school plans short to race home and get Phil Jr. out of the cold.  I'm relieved to report that he was still alive.

Late winter weather: you threaten my pets, you die.

Mothers' Appreciation Day

My mom l.o.v.e.s museums. I love museums too, and would usually spend more time in an exhibit than the average connoisseur. My mom takes about three times what I would normally spend in a museum.

Enter the Lehi Museum of Ancient Life. My mom has been there three times and has always wanted to stay longer. I told her that her Mothers' Day gift was that I would take her to this museum and she could stay as long as she'd like. If you know my Mother, you know that this is a weighty offer.

We headed down on Friday morning.  There was the teaching area that is usually for kids, the land mass movement room and introduction to fossils, then the star tubes and enter the beginning of life on earth (through pond slime GROSS!  but still interesting).  After pond slime enter microscopic cockroaches (which are the predominant form of life for a billion years or so) which turn into 6 foot long cockroaches and centapedes to boot!

I had been there a couple of times too, but my Mom liked to spend about 45 minutes in each room.  We looked at every exhibit, read every sign, and even spun the relative time wheel enough so I saw recognizable movement on the 100,000 year wheel.  We discussed how each of these evolutionary stages could relate to the Biblical creation story and tried to understand just a little more of how God creates life.

Carboniferous Era, Pensylvanian Era...etc.

She started slowing down when we got through the dinosaurs, and I was concerned that we'd miss the huge turtle skeleton and wolly mammoth rooms since we only had a half hour left until we'd need to be at dinner.  Turns out she had never been in those rooms and had never been there.  That was really fun to show her something that she had never seen.

My mom is really fun to take to museums because she looks at all new knowledge and drinks it in with excited eyes.  In places she's been before she reviews it and trys to turn it into understanding.  In something she had never seen before, it was absolute torture to drag her through 3 rooms in 30 minutes.  The last room was dedicated to pictures of life which has become extinct in the last century.  It's a really well organized museum, and I loved taking my mom there.  Happy Mother's Day, Mom.  I love you.

Graduation Ceremony

Was awesome.

I got all dressed up, it was a beautiful evening, my husband, my Mom and one of my brothers came down. It was just the Social Work school. I was really surprised how many MSW students I already knew and everyone was excited! It was on an absolutely beautifully crafted hall and the professors were lined up cheering for us and handing out high fives. It was rowdy and GREAT! The speakers were almost all people I knew, and I got to walk across stage and go to Dale at the end.

The next day we had a little gathering at an Orem park. Mom and I shopped and cooked awesome food all morning, and the weather was perfect for outdoor croquet and piniata whacking. I gave Dale a gift as a token thanking him for his support for 12 months of time shared and paper reviewing. He really was so good to me. Thanks for everyone who came. It was a great time.

Momma in Town: The Dishes...

Day Two.
When Dale and I first got married, I already had a hand-me-down set of dishes from a previous roommate, so we decided on getting more pressing things like cooking utensils and bedding with our wedding gift cards.  We've now been married two years, and I've spent the last 6 months saving up my fun money and shopping for dishes on line.  I finally narrowed down my list of possibilities to one set  of two colors.  I thought that this would be a fun thing to do with my mom, ... cause no one else really wanted to go with me to make the final decision on dish ware.

The plan was simple: walk in, pick up the dishes I had selected in the quantity I had chosen, and head on to a museum.  The execution was not quite so simple.

We walked in the store, and my mom immediately took an interest in an accent plate for my dishes. When I saw the set I had chosen in person, it turns out the "chili red glaze" which I had assumed was just a bad online picture was actually more of a deep maroon and was not what I had hoped for in my kitchen.  We immediately found a more red plate colored "paprika" (although how paprika is supposed to be more red than chili peppers, I have yet to understand), and went on the hunt for an accent plate.  We tried every red/yellow colored accent plate the store had in stock including this one, this one, and this one.  This one and this one were a little more tempting than the others, but I could go on, and you can understand how complicated this procedure is getting.  I finally decided on one, but when I got to the check out counter, it looked AWESOME with the red plates, but only a little impressive with the yellow.  Add that to the concern that the red plates didn't come in the same style as the deep bowls of the yellow, and ...

It was all very nerve wracking, but we came out with something beautiful:

 Forget that once I decided to get rid of the yellow plates, that made me itch to go back and consider other accent plates that hadn't gone well with the yellow,

And that the only piece of my original selection still included with these plates is the bowl.

I'm proud of them.  I always see sets like this in cooking shows and resturaunts, but I never know how they put them together!  It took us two hours to select, purchase, and pack the dishes, then another hour and a half to select matching table cloths and napkins, but I now have a beautiful dining room!

We had planned to do other things that afternoon.  Who knew buying dishes was a whole day event?  Anyway, thanks to my mom for going with me and encouraging me to try every option until I found the perfect one.  It was a lot of fun to be with you.

Momma in Town

For those of you who don't know, I have been in graduate school for the last year.  Even though I have six weeks of classes left, there is no summer graduation ceremony at my University, so, early ceremony it is!

The subject of this post is that my mom came in town for the week of the ceremony!

Day One:
I picked her up from the airport and had plans to take her to all sorts of fun places in Salt Lake.  We ended up talking on the couch, catching up on life events like England, Arches, job opportunities and my recent anniversary.  It was a nice catch up, and she didn't complain at all when the picture slide show continued until bed time. 
We did take a break to got to Red Iguana , ranked several years running as "the best Mexican Food in Salt Lake City."  Not quite glowing praise when compared to the best Mexican Food in a more southern border state like California, New Mexico, or Texas, but it is still quite good, and comparable to my favorite place in California, El Queso Grande, which I think is actually owned by Latin American people.  I encourage you to go to either of them if you're in the viscinity. 
While we were there, we bought Dale a Red Iguana shirt as his anniversary present.  Granted, the gifts he gave me were more elaborate, and in all measurable ways "better," but he does look really great in that shirt.

Surprises

My husband spoils me.  We had planned a trip to Arches on a weekend that happened to coincide with our anniversary weekend, and the actual DAY of our anniversary was on the following Monday.  Yesterday.  When Dale came home from work, he surprised me with:

Then a trip to Home Depot to pick out a new pet for us:


(I get really attached to my plants.  When the last one died I was TRULY distraught.  This one is named Phil II--Short for chloraphyl II.  The first Phil died when I left him outside on a snowy night.)

Then a toast to us back at the park where we had our first date in September 2008, and where Dale proposed back in February 2009.

While we were there, Dale suprized me with ANOTHER gift!  He bought me a soundtrack that makes my heart melt--How to Train Your Dragon--and then used it as the background music for a 16 minute slide show he had made of our adventures together in the last two years.  The whole compilation was really nice.  It had pictures of us exploring Los Angeles and Montana--where our families are--but also pictures from our trips to Las Vegas, Alaska, Wyoming, England, and local sites here in Utah.  We've had a lot of adventures in our two years together.

All of these gifts were tailored specifically to fill comments I'd made in the previous months.  I knew Dale was preparing a series of gift presentations, and when I asked him how he thinks of things to surprise me with, he responded "I listen to things that you say, and I write them down."

I love my husband dearly.

2nd Anniversary Weekend

Dale and I did Arches!  We drove down after work on Friday, camped in a TENT (which we hadn't yet done together), brought our own food and supplies, and spent 8 HOURS HIKING.  Yes, you read that right.  We saw about two thirds of what the park has to offer, including:

Double arch (Where I re-lived my childhood hike there and wormed through the rubble underneath)

Landscape Arch

And the iconic Utah Delecate Arch

The view behind this one was amazing.

Dale was a very sensitive husband when considering my speed and hiking intensity limitations.  He stopped with me, didn't tease me when I was wearing 7 layers in the windy hiking weather, and was his usual witty and chipper self.

One example of this: After the AWFUL night sleep I had on Friday where I seriously thought I could get frostbite on my toes (it was around 35, and I couldn't feel below my ankles for the ENTIRE night.  I didn't sleep much), on Saturday night Dale gave me the sleeping bag he had warmed up for me, then gave me an extra warm foot layer for the night, and helped me insulate the bottom of my sleeping bag with every extra piece of clothing we didn't happen to be wearing to bed.

It was all beautiful, and in general a great way to spend the weekend before our 2nd Anniversary.

We drove home on Sunday morning and collapsed as two cripples on the couch.  A tendon on the back of my right knee was aching like no other, whereas Dale's quads were ceasing in a way that communicated extreme disappointment in the central Dale decision making unit.

All in all, worth it.