Graduation Month

Here it is October already and I am stuck blogging about May.  The only thing I remember about May is all the studying I did.  I took 14 credits of upper division biology classes to finish up my degree.  In addition to my finals, I had projects, tests, and papers to get done.  The picture below was my very last day of school.  I was almost late for my lecture and so Chase did not have time to change lenses on the camera.  This is the wide angle lens so I look kind of short.

At Fresno State, there is a general graduation for everyone, individual departments have graduations for their students also.  Instead of a graduation, the biology department had a banquet.  It was the week before the big graduation, so my parents could only make it to one event and I asked them to come to the banquet.  The picture below is me with the friends that got me through microbiology, organic chemistry, and evolution.

The picture below is me with my parents.  

The big graduation was for all of the departments on a very warm saturday morning.  All of the graduates had to wait in the sun for an hour and a half before being led into the Save Mart Center.  This picture was taken as all of us were being led onto the floor.  Can you pick me out?

After the graduation, my grandparents threw an amazing party for me and the fam who came.  I lived with them for the first two and a half years of my university studies and they call me their daughter.  

Chase bought me the beautiful roses, which matched my tassel quite well.  

I am very glad to be done with my degree, especially since I had to visit the biology chair four times my last semester to get my credits smoothed out.  I have applied for the UC-Davis Physicians Assisting program and hope to hear back from them soon about interviews.  Keep your fingers crossed!

April Fun

 I was putting off writing about April because we did so many things.  For my very last spring break at Fresno State, I went to Utah by myself to hang out my sister who was going to school at Southern Utah University in Cedar City.  I drove there on Friday (and got stuck in random traffic jams in the middle of the desert) and we went traveling on Saturday morning.  

We started in Zions National Park that is right next door to Cedar City.  We hiked to the Weeping Wall and hiked to a waterfall coming off a rock.

There is a tunnel that separates the two sides of Zions.  One side has red rock and the other has grey.  This is a picture of the east side.  The mesa in the background is called checkerboard mesa because of the cool grooves in the rock.

That afternoon we drove by Lake Powell and through Monument Valley.  The white spots in the picture above are Native American trailers and houses.  They were right up on the base of the rocks.  It kind of cheapened the view.  That night we slept in a little campground with four other groups.  When we were about to go to bed, Katie locked the car and then shouted.  She had locked the keys in the car. We had to ask the neighboring campers, and the camp host to help us get the car unlocked.  It took about forty minutes.

The next day we drove to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado.  I had never been there and loved it. The windows and doors were so small.  I could not believe how small they were.

That night we drove to Arches National Park and hiked to the viewpoint for the Delicate Arch which is on the Utah license plate.  Notice the wind?  Katie and I camped in one of the only remained campsites, because the Moab rock crawler weekend was happening.  It snowed that night and poor Katie almost froze.  I had to keep knocking snow off the tent.

After it snowed for an hour and a half, it rained for another hour and melted all of the snow.  We thought we wouldn't be able to do any hiking, but we got to everything.  The above picture is the Landscape Arch.

Here is Katie scrambling up the trail.  It was so windy while we were hiking.  We were adopted by a nice couple from Alberta who took pictures of Katie and I at the cool arches.  We had to cross a rock dragons back that was eight feet wide and twenty feet down on both sides.  It was blowing 40 miles and hour.

This is the last arch we went to.  We drove back to Katie's apartment after this because we were both tired.  I left Utah two days later after walking around her campus and eating vintage ice cream sodas from a soda jerk.

The day after I got home, we met the other part of my family at Big Bend State Park by the coast.  We went on a ten mile hike with them.

We saw lots of banana slugs.

My mom was not able to make the whole hike, but here are those who did.  Left to Right: Fabian (the German exchange student Luke was exchanging with), Jonas (the year long German exchange student), me, my dad, and my brother Luke.  Chase is taking the picture.

That night, my parents went to a hotel and left us with the boys.  Chase played a climbing game with them with the giant fallen redwood across from our camp, and he played monopoly with them.  While playing monopoly, a raccoon stole trail mix out of Fabian's open backpack and ran up a tree.

Two weeks after the hiking fun, it snowed in the mountains.  We took advantage of the snow and went for one last cross country ski jaunt.  The dog loved it.

Chuck and Sam snow shoed.

One of the lakes behind the Miller's house

One of the trees shedding the snow after the storm.

May is next and it won't be as long, I promise.

Well...

It feels like I am always playing catch up on this blog.  Well, this post includes the March activities.  Since it is the middle of June, it might not include all of the activities that we did.

March was a very odd month.  It started out dry and Chase got quite a few rides in in the orchard behind his parents house.  He said that the mud was perfect.

 The week after the above picture was taken, Chase went on a winter camping trip and ended up in a winter storm camping trip.  It snowed at least two feet in one night.  It started after they set up camp and Chase had to continually knock snow off his tent during the night.  I spent the night at his parents house and starting at eight in the morning, every thirty minutes his dad would ask me if I thought that Chase was okay.  I had to keep assuring him that Chase knows how to drive in the snow, especially in his truck with huge tires.

The snow was still on the ground the next weekend, so we decided to cross country ski down a forest service road that we had been eyeing.  We parked our car down at the Shaver Lake Marina and had the Miller's drive us to the top of the hill.  It was awesome, except for all of the small streams crossing our path.  We had to be careful and avoid the rocks.

We also managed to finally finish the bedframe for his parents.  It turned out absolutely beautiful as you can see.

With his half of the money that we earned from making the bed, Chase bought a new Jones splitboard.    There is a map of Alaska on the front.  It is called a splitboard because....

It splits into two skis!  The board is meant to be used as crosscountry skis to ski up the mountain and then it clicks together to snowboard down the hill.  Chase's hero Jeremy Jones designed the board and owns the company that sells it.  He is still missing a couple of pieces.  The skins to make it cross country ski and the "pucks" that his bindings hook on to.  With his birthday coming up soon, maybe he can get all the pieces.

April is next!

So, this has been on my to do list for quite a few weeks.  We did one big trip in February and the other weekends we stayed at Chase's parents and tried to finish the bedframe (it just needs to be varnished!)

Our big trip was to Joshua Tree National Park (we went there for our honeymoon also).  It is two hours east of LA, which means that it was a five hour trip for us.  We took Sam with us so Chase would have someone at his level to climb at.  We drove down there on Friday night and camped on BLM land on the side of the road.  Immediately after entering the park, we decided to find a camp spot.  Good thing we did because we got the last one in the campground that we wanted.  There was a jeep right behind us who barely missed it.

Joshua Tree is all about the rock climbing.  Saturday was spent climbing various rocks, and even I got in on the action, though there are not any pictures of me climbing.

This is the climb that Sam and Chase are going to do after Sam gets back from his mission in two years.  They wanted to do it, but we ran out of time.

Chase and I holding hands in the Real Hidden Valley (not the salad dressing).  This little valley is completely surrounded by rock walls and cattle rustlers used to hide their stolen cattle in it.  Notice all the snow?  It snowed two nights before and it was still cold!

Chase at sunset (my favorite picture of the trip)

Our beautiful little camp spot.  Can you spot our tent?

Sunday morning Chase and Sam climbed the headstone, which was a short walk away from our tent.  It is very popular and one of the highly recommended climbs.  They loved it, but I couldn't do it because of the exposure.  Can you spot Chase?

After climbing the headstone, we climbed a small mountain near our camp called Ryan Mountain.  It had a thousand feet gain in a mile and a half, but it was slick, wet, icy, and muddy.  It was super windy on the top and we were using the yucca as a windbreak while we ate our potato chips and granola bars.

After Ryan Mountain, we drove to the Chollo garden (pronounced choyo).  They were some pretty scary cactus.  Every needle had a little barb at the end.  Don't worry, Sam didn't eat any of them.

After the Chollo garden and another rock climb, we walked around skull rock and found a really cool rock garden.  We added a rock or two each and found this beauty,

A mermaid with a dead cactus as her head!

Chase got some really cool pictures at the rock garden.  That night, it was soo cold that there was frost in the tent at 7 pm.  It got really cold.

The next day (Sunday) we drove home and spotted this awesome sign in Apple Valley.  I usually only see these signs for pizza or gold places, but apparently if you suddenly badly need an urgent care, you can follow the sign!

The only other exciting thing in February was my 23th birthday.  I didn't have a party like last year, but went to Red Lobster with Chase and had a cake on the weekend with Chase's parents.  Pretty low key.

Stay tuned for the post on the weather we had this weekend!

January Fun

Here it is, another month has gone by without me sharing our adventures.  I started my very last semester at Fresno State in January, and so we have had some very busy weekdays and weekends.

One of Chase's best friends, Scott got married to his beautiful bride on January 14 and we were invited to the sealing.  It was at the Oakland temple, so we stayed the night before at Chase's Omas and Opas in the Bay area.  It was a beautiful ceremony and reminded Chase and I of ours three years ago.

They had a gorgeous reception the next Saturday where I ate so much food that I almost exploded.

Chase has been surveying all over the valley since he started work at Bedrock Engineering over a year ago.  During the second week of January, he had to survey the bottom of a canal that is going to be given a bed of concrete during the summer.  The day that he surveyed, he went and bought brand new wading boots.  He wandered into the mud to survey and promptly got stuck.  Every time he moved, he got deeper and deeper in the mud.  He called a guy from work who sent the Fresno water people out to get him.  After 45 minutes of waiting, they pulled him out with a rope attached to their truck.  Chase and his dad went out the next week to pull out the boot that was still stuck.

Chase has finally finished fixing his two dirtbikes.  He only has to put new plastic on the 2003 one (this is the 2008), because he broke it in a crash before we got married, and then he can sell both of them to get a new one.  Anyone need a dirtbike or two?

 We are almost done with the footboard we are making for Chase's parents.  It only needs to be polyurethaned.  As you can see, the headboard is chugging along also.  Chase finished grinding the rest of the vertical boards for the headboard this morning.

 Is anyone else having really weird weather?  The past two weeks we have tried to go cross country skiing but the snow is so icy from melting during the day and freezing at night that all I do is fall down.  The weather here has been unseasonably warm, Chase was able to rock climb last weekend after we had gone cross country skiing.  I am hoping that it will start snowing pretty soon.

Even though it is almost the middle of February, here are a couple of the things that I am looking forward too: Valentines day, President's day weekend Joshua Tree National Park trip, and my birthday of course!

December Catch Up

I don't know about the rest of you, but our December was very busy, and we are just barely getting back to some semblance of a routine.  This post contains a small smidgen of what we did in December!

 Our anniversary is December 27, but we usually celebrate it early because we are normally with family on that day and this year we celebrated it on the weekend of December 3.  We went to Monterey on Saturday, and on the way there, we went to the outlets in Gilroy.  Chase got a pair of tennis shoes for the first time in years and I got a new pair of shoes and a pair of pants (I seem to go through pants faster than any person that I know).

 When we got to Monterey Bay Aquarium, we found out that it was free college student day, so I got in free and we only had to pay for Chase, plus we found free parking about a mile away from the aquarium.  It was felt great to save so much money!  Our favorite tanks were the jellyfish, the seahorses, and the deep sea tank.  We couldn't get a decent picture of the deep sea tank, but it has tuna, hammerhead sharks, a sunfish, and a giant sea turtle in it.

This is a picture of the shore next to where we parked.  I wanted to eat seafood that night, because we were right next to the ocean, but one restaurant that was recommended to us had a three hour wait and the other had nobody in it, so we went to Chili's where I had some of the best fried shrimp ever!  

 We stayed in a hotel next to the ocean in Seaside and ended up watching three consecutive hours of Storage Wars.  We are totally addicted to that show now.  In the morning on our way back home to go to church, we stopped at the ocean and watched a bunch of old surfers trying to surf (we were late to church).

The middle of December consisted of finals, papers, and stress (me) and work for Chase.  We are working on building a bedframe for Chase's parents.  They gave us half the money for the bed in early December and I immediately ordered cross country skis for myself.  They are awesome (more on that later)!  On December 22, we left to travel to Utah to be at my parents for Christmas.  We stopped on Donner Pass off the old highway and slept on a turnout in the car.  The next morning, we woke up, scraped off the ice from the inside of our windows, took pictures from the top, and drove on.  The picture above shows Donner Lake.

 Highway 80 between Donner and Reno was closed just twelve miles before Reno because of a big crash and so we ended up following our trusty Garmin on a road that we thought would take us through.  It started out as a great smooth road, but we ended up going 10 miles on a dirt road through a mountain pass in our little Elantra.  Both ways of the 80 must have been closed because I have never seen a dirt road have so many cars on it.  We stopped in Reno to see our friends the Ellison's (which we saw on our way to Genoa in September) and the two oldest girls put a bead in my hair, to match theirs.

 After the Ellison's, we put the pedal to the metal because we realized that we were not going to get to my parents house until late if we didn't hurry.  Above is a picture of the Ruby mountains Chase took during the THREE hours he let me drive.  He didn't let me drive the whole trip back.

On Christmas Eve, Chase tried to climb the Wellsville's (mountains by my parents house) by himself, but ended up coming down after a mile because he saw mountain lion tracks and he heard rocks move.  He wanted to see if a pond by the railroad tracks about a mile and a half away from my parents was frozen, so we went over there.  The pond was frozen, but it was behind a fence, so he didn't skate on it.

During the summer, my dad and brother put in a fire pit in the backyard, so on Christmas Eve, we went out and roasted giant marshmallows on it.  My parents have a German exchange student staying with them this year named Jonas.  He is awesome! We had the greatest time with him.  This is him with marshmallow goo all over him.

 The only snow we could find was in the sinks up Logan Canyon and on Hyrum Dam.  The day after Christmas, we went sledding on new sleds from Walmart in the sinks, but the three new sleds immediately broke, so we used the plastic pieces to sled on.  I took them back to Walmart and the first thing the employee asked me was "is everyone okay?"  Needless to say, I got our money back even though Chase didn't think I could.  The picture above is me on Hyrum Dam (there is about a foot and a half of ice under the two inches of snow).

The day after skiing on the dam, it rained and the snow melted.  This is the dam after the snow is gone.

Chase, Luke, and Jonas went geocaching a couple of times.

Our last night in Utah, we went ice skating at the Eccles Ice center that they built for the Olympics in 2002.  Chase, Jonas, and I are pros, Katie was good, but Luke had problems.  Katie and I took turns helping him, but by the end of the night he could skate by himself.

We left Utah on Saturday the 31 of December and met Chase's family in Beatty Nevada.  Chase and I slept on a windy hill above Beatty with Lehi the dog while Sam, Chuck, and Judy stayed in a motel.  I slept in the car because I was freezing and when I woke up in the morning, Lehi was under a blanket on Chase's cot.  He had bit off his leash in the middle of the night.  Above is a picture of me in the badlands under Zabriske Point in Death Valley.  We hiked down from the point through many canyons.  It was fun.

 This is badwater after sunset.  Badwater is the lowest point in the western hemisphere and those are salt formations.

 That night we slept at our favorite camping spot, Texas Springs and the next morning, Chase, Sam, and Chuck went to take pictures at the sand dunes while Judy and I slept.

 Usually we drive back to Fresno through Bakersfield, but because of the no snow situation, we were able to go over Tioga pass into Yosemite.  There are three lakes at Tioga pass and usually they have snow on them when they are frozen, but this year was an anomaly and we were able to skate on them.  Chase had a goal to skate all of three of them, but I only skated on the lower two, because the wind at Ellery Lake was freezing.  The picture above is me on the second lake, Tioga Lake. Tenaya Lake had tons of people on it.

Skating on Tenaya Lake (Judy took the picture).

I am working in a lab at school right now and volunteering at the hospital.  I am starting up school on the 18th of this month and it will be my last semester at Fresno State!

Hopefully you enjoyed my suuper long post.  Adios till the next one!