Saturday, July 28, 2012

Hey Logan, Are You Lost?

I think so was my reply to my old college chap Ryan Anderson.  The Andersons are an institution in the little green valley of Monroe, UT. None the less my BE-EH-Utiful wife is a local and knows her way around.  Every year that we've been together we've made our own little trek to Monroe to celebrate Pioneer Day (the largest local holiday).  We awoke bright and early at 6:30am and drove straight there to get our spots on the correct side of the road (tsk tsk Kristy). Everybody was surprised that we came because we said we weren't on account of the both of us working the day before and after. Meghan was especially surprised when there was a creeper with a large camera taking unsolicited photographs of her marching in the parade.


The Parade was spectacular as usual. The two best floats are the old tractors which Sydney thinks my dad should get into it. and the pooper scooper though I'm not sure they are an official parade entry but they sure are entertaining for their rather long procession duration.       
This one captures the essence of the small town celebration.
John Deere was a True Patriot
Yeah, Monroe is classy like that.
This guy is a real farmer he drives a tractor in flip flops
He's doing so well.
We stayed the whole day hung out with the family we even bought a hot dog at the park from Jacey to support the freshman class at Big Bad South Sevier High School, Go Rams! We tried to catch up with Jacey and Justin at the Concert at the Middle School before the Awesome firework show but he was sitting way too close to the band and I was not going to hurt my ears for that long listening to that woman sing. So we moved back about 200 plus feet to a more comfortable decibel, and we didn't see them the rest of the night but we had a great spot for the fireworks. The Fireworks in Monroe are great they are very bright and you are really close to the action I recommend them to anyone.  We drove straight home and got home at 1:00, makes for a long day and a rough day at work but it was worth it.

On a side note Mama Holm is selling her prized 1994 Buick Regal Custom.  It has a plenty powerful 3.8 liter V6 engine, powered leather bucket seats, and comes in a charming sea-foam green.  The perfect car for the needy high school student.  Low blue book value of $1300 offering a $100 discount for cash.  Hurry this inventory is priced to move!

Girl's Camp

I headed up to Girl's Camp after the last day of teaching summer school on Thursday.  Just one of my many interesting duties as a Beehives adviser.  I'm not really much of a girl's camper and never really have been.  I think I might have gone 3 years when I was in Young Women's, but I found that camp is much more enjoyable as a leader who can come and go as she pleases and pick and choose activities to attend:)

I got my hair braided by the talented and beautiful Cam.
 Proof that I went to Girl's Camp 7 months pregnant.  My belly was somewhat of a novelty to girl's I have never met before. 
 I felt really really old signing them off on their certifications.
And these are the leader bunks, the girls' ones looked the same only their section was much larger and slept 27 girls instead of 6.  The top bunks are seriously like 6 feet up there.  They were kind to me and I slept on the bottom.  Oh and the bathrooms were in one of these storage boxes too and they flushed and were SO NICE!

Aside from eating deep fried donuts at 10pm and puking in the night with Breauna it was really fun:)  Yep, I only threw up twice with this pregnancy until girl's camp.  Now my total is up to 4:) Oh the memories.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

What that Storm looked like at our House

Logan was home teaching, so I took some pictures because I didn't think he's believe me if I just told him:)

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Home Economical

 Since my sister and mother have been giving all my father's tomatoes away to strangers on Facebook, I thought I had better go over there while they were both gone and get some for Sydney and myself.
We started the day with big plans we gathered two grocery sacks full from the resting location on my fathers infamous wood burning stove and went to the store to purchase other supplies for the gallons of product we thought we would end up with.  Little did we know three hours of time and 30 kilo-watt hours later we would end up with 3.5 quarts of juice and 3 pints of spaghetti sauce.  Not the gallons we were imagining earlier.

We broke Sydney's mother's cardinal rule of not eating what had sealed but since we were planning on having spaghetti for dinner we tried a bottle that's why some are missing from the picture.  It was good and we were delightfully surprised, especially since we got discouraged when my mother told me there wasn't a recipe and we had to use one from the internet (not from pinterest).

Much of the time and electricity were used to heat up this massive water bath of my mother's.
The picture doesn't do it justice we have no idea how big it is, but it is way more than our ceramic stove top can handle. It seems silly to spend well over an hour heating the water up to boil the bottles for 20 minutes then dump the water out.  We could have bathed a dog or a large toddler in that thing.

Then if that wasn't enough Sydney had this idea to make cantaloupe jelly, to save some of our delicious cantaloupe.  It tastes good, but we would rather eat the three batches of apricot jam we made three weeks ago.  I think the jelly would have been better if we had found the recipe on pinterest:).


Next weekend we'll probably attempt to make grape juice and some jelly any one that wants to come help is welcome.

Old Lady to New Baby

We have been slacking not posting about the most recent room make over that we have done.  This was the office room of my mother's while she lived here.  She had decorated during the phase of her life when she was watching several hours of home design shows on cable networks (i.e. Design on a Dime, Trading Spaces).  Any who it was painted very thoroughly in two shades of "Old Lady" green.

 It's not just my mother even Sydney's mom likes that color, in fact she recently had "Old Lady" green vinyl siding put on her house.  When we moved into the house I personally found this room the most offensive, but we painted the faux finished blue kitchen first because Sydney loathed it. 

The reason for changing this room is because as most of you know we will be having a baby boy in September and this room is the only other bedroom upstairs with us, and no son of mine is going to live in an "Old Lady" green room.  The color I chose and Sydney consented to was orange, we picked this before we knew the gender thinking it was non-cliche gender neutral color.  After we found out we were having a boy we still wanted the orange room and went with it.

It took us over a week to finish it because of the well glued on wall paper and the ceiling was painted green, and then all the molding was an off white shade of green.  Many stages and coats later; the orange took 4 coats of paint/primer paint.  Which by the way we tried the new Glidden duo paint/primer it worked fine for the white and grey colors, but the orange was runny. So if you're going bold, stick with the Behr it's the better paint anyway. 

We got it all done and it looks great.  We still have some decorating to do and quilts to make but we should get it done before the baby remembers that his room wasn't decorated.

Friday, July 13, 2012

Still Getting Goodness From Our Garden

We planted a pretty big garden this year, and except for the beans and tomatoes and cucumbers we did pretty well.
We had a big haul of asparagus as usual, and a real bumper crop of summer squash and zucchini.  We did okay on corn and bell peppers, and the cucumbers produced but weren't edible.  Except to my mom, her taster must be broken:)  We had bad luck with tomatoes as one 6-pack was mislabeled and was actually cherry tomatoes, and the other 6-pack all died except for two plants.  And the beans died without ever producing anything.

This, however, is my favorite crop.  We took a chance and experimented with growing cantaloupe.  It was really touch and go for a while.  And then there were baby melons and I was scared to get my hopes up, and then one was ripe and I was worried it would be nasty like the cucumbers, but it wasn't.  They are delicious. Check out that monster in the back!