Twenty WHAT!!!

This seems to me to be a great week to finally catch up and write about 2 weeks at one.  Why you might ask?  Because after our trip for our anniversary I worked 10 hour days at work and basically nothing happened.  There is one highlight.  You might remember the tree trimming rampage we went on a few weeks back... I still didn't get the picture ready... :)  Anyway, it was going to take us approximately the rest of our lives plus 3 years to get rid of that pile of branches.  We needed a wood chipper to help us out!  I looked online at renting one from Home Depot as that's the closest place around and it was almost $100 per day!  I only expected to need it for a day, but that's still a lot of money.  Then I looked at buying one from home depot, and Chipper Joe was only ~20 more!  It's a beast of a chipper and did a great job!  Reduced our huge pile to about 3/4 of a garbage can full.

That was a successful endeavour, and it's nice to not have a huge pile of nesting material stacked up by our house for the local wildlife.  Also, in the 3 or 4 days the branches were sitting on our lawn HUGE mushrooms grew up under them.  I can't believe I didn't take a picture, but they were at least 6 inches wide!

That was the most exciting thing until Sunday when it was MONICA'S BIRTHDAY!  We had a lot of fun on her birthday and she got lots of great presents!  Look how happy she is to eat brownies and ice cream!

 This week I sent out and email offering tutoring help to the youth in our ward.  I started my first tutoring too!  It went great!  And fortunately I still remember how to do algebra.  What a relief.

During this week I also introduced Monica to Risk after finding out some time recently she had never played it.  She loved it and wanted to play again and again!  We just played twice though... over I believe 3 days.  It was a lot of fun until the end when I couldn't roll anything but 1's.  I legit rolled snake eyes 3 times in a row.... It wasn't meant to be.

This weekend we went out swimming, which we were supposed to do last week for Monica's birthday, but we went to see Andrew and Tina run a half marathon and when we got back we were just too tired.  After the pool we picked up a few groceries that we needed, and that's basically the day.

Phew, finally caught up!  Feels good to no longer be behind.

2nd Anniversary!

Well.. I'm still a week behind.  Maybe I'll write todays post within the next few days (I try to not write twice in a day).  After Monica and I got back from Utah I had a blur of a week at work.  No matter how slow work seems like it's going once you miss a week of it there's always a lot to do!

The weekend was the real excitement.  We took a 3 day weekend in Colorado Springs.  Once we got there we went to HuHot because Monica loves it!  It didn't hurt to also have a birthday certificate that got Monica's food free.  It was a lot of fun, and a lot of NOT Mongolia.

When we got to the hotel they asked us why we were staying and we said it was our anniversary, so they gave us free champagne.  We didn't really know what to do about that, but we had one of those rooms with a kitchen and all, so we just put it in the fridge.  When we got back from HuHot Monica really wanted sparkling cider so we decided to see if we could go trade it.  They didn't have anything non-alcoholic in the liquid beverage department, but they let us switch it for ice cream.  Not too shabby as I'm pretty sure we both secretly wanted that.

The next morning we went out to they Cheyenne Mountain Zoo.  It was a great zoo!  They try to do various things to bring people closer to the animals and you can even pay to do special one on one activities with animals.

When we got there a sloth started climbing out above our heads!  There was a trainer there holding food to coax it out.  I have now witnessed that sloths are truly slow.  They also have really gnarled curly nail/claws.  Not to many people talk about that!  Also, they love green beans!  That's what the trainer had.  We watched the sloth eat for a while until green bean foam started coming out of it's mouth...

We got to the sea otters in time to see their "enrichment" time.  Nothing says enriching like a bunch of fish heads on a floaty tube.  I suppose this is why we don't live in the zoo.

In their Australia section they had wallabies that were out among the guests.  You had to stay off the grass, but if a wallaby wanted to be touched it could come to the path.  Needless to say they Wallabies were clinging to the far wall, but only a few feet away.

Fortunately they had a baby wallaby in a bag that you could come up and pet!  As I look at this picture I realize that a bagged wallaby is an interesting idea... but it was super soft and came with free hand sanitizer!

The best of the zoo was the snow leopard, which recently became my favorite animal (as I only recently found out they exist).  We got there for game time too.  They dropped a box that had a bag of meat in it for it to play with.  The snow leopard didn't seem to give it much attention.  Then it looked straight at me and started walking forward and suddenly pounced!  Lucky for me it didn't pounce at me, it jumped about 6 or 7 feet in the air and landed behind were it started on the box, and in the blink of an eye it was eating meat.  I'm not exactly sure how it got in there so quick as I may have flinched when it looked like a snow leopard was about to attack me...

That night we went to a nice Italian restaurant.  There was an old couple by us that go there every week.  It was really good food, and Monica and I got a picture together, but the lighting is quite unfortunate on Monica and makes it look like she was bleached...  I will forgo including the picture as today is Monica's birthday.

The next day we played some board games in our room before we had to check out.  We headed off for church which was only 2 minutes away!.. Well... Monica's phone got her location wrong, and then she thought the location reported as her address was the church address since it was a few minutes away.  When we got to "church" it turned out to be an industrial building...  We found the right place and got there only a little late, so that was fortunate.

After church we went to the place we were to stay that night, in a CASTLE!

We spent a while walking around the grounds because there is a lot of land around it.  It was also fun to look through the castle at the various decor.  This shower must be at least... 100 years old!

I also became great friends with the local knight!

And here we are out on the grounds in front of the castle.

After walking around the grounds for a while we headed down to Garden of the Gods, which was just barely south of where we were staying.

Awe-inspiring!

The next morning we hit up the links before returning home.  It was a lot of fun to go golfing again and I finally got to try out the golf mode on my new watch!  Sadly, my watch could not save my game.  Turns out if you don't golf for over a year you stop being as good as you were...

After that we came back home to take on another week, but I'll save that tale for another time.

two weeks back!

Sorry for the tardiness of this post!  Monica and I have been out of town for the last three weekends so it's been a while since I posted... possibly three weeks!

Well, this post will focus on the first week of this month when Monica and I went out to Utah!  I just found out I took a LOT of pictures, so that's good news for everyone.

I think my favorite part of the drive was when we passed this little gem.  Yup, a budget moving van towing a UHaul trailer.  I suppose there's nothing technically wrong with this, but what ever happened to brand loyalty?  I mean really, what's next?  Using Crest toothpaste with a Colgate tooth brush? Blasphamy!

On Saturday night we had a baby shower for Monica.  I wasn't there for much, but the left over food was great!  Here's a picture of... at least some of the people that came.  Sorry to anyone who left early.

Monday morning we headed up to a little outside Kamas to our cabin retreat with Monica's family.  It was a pretty nice place and we had a lot of fun, but I'll get into that later.  We must first start with this prize that was awaiting us in our room!

There were a lot of metal work things like this.  It's unfortunate you cant see it move, but it rocks back and forth and totally looks like he's catching the same fish over and over!  It was a spectacle to behold.

Melanie and Monica then taught me the perks of having a mirrored closet.  You can see here that Melanie is working on her levitation.  It was definitely a new experience for me.  My poor, sheltered, un-mirrored childhood!  For shame!

We went up to the Olympic museum in Park City one morning.  When we got there there were a whole bunch of people practicing ski jumping!  It was a lot of fun to see.  There were people of all ages and skills.  Some went off of bigger jumps, and there were even little kids that went off little bumps.  Jack and Sam loved it, and every time anyone went off a jump Sam would exclaim "Wowwie Wowwie!"

After the museum we went to lunch and then I had the privilege to go to the outlets with Monica.  We went into some maternity store which was super interesting.  On the plus side they had large fake legos!  Most of them were water themed so I built this wonderful underwater land scape!  I'm glad these clothing stores think up the essentials to keep everyone happy!

We went out to get family pictures since we were all out there, and Melanie needed help with her hair.  Luckily for her Monica is quite good at doing hair, and therefore, I am as well by marriage extension.  Behold, my masterpiece:

For reason's beyond me Melanie decided to take out the braid and let Monica do her hair later.  It didn't turn out quite as well.

I grabbed a couple pictures while we were out getting our pictures taken.  Here's one of Monica and I:

And the barn that we were by.

And this is really a picture of... some animal.  Look close down by the shed.  If anyone has the animal expertise to know what those are I'd love to know because after much debate we didn't know quite for sure.

And finally this picture:

We spent most of our time at the house playing various games.  This night we tried out a board game that Alan had that he'd never played.  It's based around a youtube show called Video Game High School, and shares the name.  There were a lot of parts to the game, but in the end it turned out to not be all that complicated.

The next day we went down to the lake.  We is relative as Monica and I never quite made it.  Right as we were getting ready to leave we got a call that it was way too windy and everyone was coming back.  We almost made it.  I made a very important discovery as I was putting the towels away that I grabbed.  One of the towels was two towels.  And those two towels had princess crown hoods on them!  Say what!

Since the lake got winded out we decided to head out and get some shakes.  We went to a place called Granny's which is about a block away from Dairy Keen.

The next picture doesn't show up for me... so I can't really tell you what's going on there.  I don't even know if it's gonna show up in the post, but I'll leave this comment and the potential of an unknown picture... Hope it's not embarrassing.

We also went for a tour of a candy factory.  Michelle knew the people who own the factory, and they were nice enough to give us a tour.  They primarily make caramels, and all the ones I tried were really good!

We tried to go for a walk on a path that headed to the lake later.  Unfortunately it was a HOT day!  About half way to the lake several people were not feeling great and turned around to head back to the house.  Monica, understandably so, was among this group and I offered to come back with her.  Thank goodness I did because who would Sam have talked all about rescue bots with if I wasn't there?!

When we got back we again played games.  Here's a shot of us playing Formula D.  It's a really fun car racing board game.  Jack joined us as he loves this game, and we didn't even have to help him that much.

I think my pictures hit most of the highlights of our stay.  And as I say that I remembered what the broken picture was!  We had a hearts tournament one night, and that's a picture of it.

It was a lot of fun, and definitely nice to take a break from work.

Saturday morning we drove over to my parents house to spend the day with them.  We played some games before heading to Cheese Cake factory for Monica's next baby shower.  The food was great and everyone had a great time!  We spent the night at my parents house that night.

On Sunday we went to church with my parents.  Monica started to feel sick so we ducked out early.  Once she felt better we packed up the car and headed back for home.  We finished up the 4th Harry Potter audio book and started the 5th!  That one's long enough to last us another 2 trips I think.

I don't remember anything eventful happening when we got home... so I think that's all!