So I have noticed that even ugly box stores are scenic here…
I am sure that I look funny takinig pictures in a parking lot but I have sort of got in the habit of doing it everytime I see a scenic “Big Box” store, I think it is sort of funny…
Look at Jas being good with his canvas bag!
Jason has just left for his 3rd 30 hour shift, I woke up with him this morning because I feel a little worthless sleeping in when he has to go work for so many hours without sleep. Plus it is going to be another hot day here so it is nice to be up early before the heat sets in. I have been keeping myself busy while Jas is on call, on Saturday I went trail running…
I worked on addressing our wedding invitations I really am enjoying using the rubber stamp (Hollye designed the invites and stamp you can check more of her work here!)
Later in the evening I went over to Nancy’s and helped her prune her herb garden in return for my help I was able to take a bunch of herbs home with me to dry…
Oh yes there are a lot of herbs indeed and see those lawn chaises in the background?! Our landlords (we shall call them the Preacher’s for privacy sake) gave us those for free! They are about 50 years old I think but they have been kept in storage and they are in perfect condition they need new cushions though because the ones that they came with are sort of covered in mildew but for now I think throwing a towel over them will do just great. I need to work on getting the patio area set-up. The Preacher’s are funny landlords, sort of nosy at times but I think they actually really like us. Last Saturday they were over in the morning measuring the garden beds so that they could buy us some soaker hoses, this was very nice of them but since I was not expecting anyone to be over that early I had the side door open and was still in my pajamas. When I heard someone call my name I thought it was Jason trying to be funny and talking with an old lady voice but it was just Patty Preacher wanting me to go outside and help them hold the measuring tape. Luckily we have not had to water too much since we had a huge downpour on Sunday which resulted in this…
Later that evening it turned into this…
Jason took a much better picture of the event which you can see on his blog here. So Jason has been getting home from his 30 hour shift around 1pm the following day he then takes a 2 hour nap and then he has told me that I must force him out of bed so that he doesn’t get “sleep inertia”. Well, waking him up is not so easy to do, for one I feel bad but also Jason is not so easy to reason with when he is sleep deprived and although he has told me that I must force him out of bed and save him from this “sleep inertia” it is like he turns into a totally different person and he tries to trick me into letting him sleep longer even though he has told me prior to going down for a nap that I must not listen to him when he is like this. Anyway, the reasoning behind this is that if he sleeps more than 2 hours than he will just be groggy and actually will not be “refreshing” himself, he then is suppose to go to bed semi early that night and get 8 hours, or at least this is what they told him and the other sorry residents during a lecture on “sleep” during the first year of residency. Here is a picture of Jason eating his post-call lunch after I had to drag him from the sleep inertia demons…
Sad, is it not? Anyway, that is what is going on here guess I should get moving before it heats up.
Jen did awesome! Steph was able to go the meet and she updated me with her progress throughout the day on Saturday. Jen placed second in the long jump with a jump of 15.5 feet, she ran the 100m in 13.4 seconds and advanced to the finals which were Sunday, on Sunday she got 4th place in the 100m and the top five advance to regionals! She also did well in the high jump with a jump of 4.3 feet, I need to clarify again what place she got in the high jump but I do know that she is going to be advancing to regionals in all three events! This means in two weeks they will be holding the regional junior olympic track meet in Salem and Jen gets to compete! Very exciting news, I am so excited for her!
Thinking of Jenna today as she competes in the Junior Olympics in Seattle! I wish I could be there to see you jump Jen! This was Jen’s first year running track (she is going to be starting 8th grade in the fall) and she did awesome! I was lucky to be able to go to her track meets while I was home for a while in April and May. Jenna swept the district track meet in her running and jumping events, she got first in the long jump with a phenomenal jump of 15.7 feet! She also ran the 100m and took first in that as well and she overcame her fear of the high jump and took third in that! Luckily Jas was able to get some great pictures of Jen in action…
Here is a picture of her crossing the finish line in the 100m…
Here is Jen in the high jump…
I am so proud of her for overcoming her fear of the high jump after having split her head on the supporting bar during one of her meets in the spring; she is such a determined little athlete! Good luck today Jen!
Yesterday morning I got up early with Jas to wish him a good first day (30 hour shift actually) of doctoring, I even took his picture!
After he left I decided to go on a walk around the neighborhood to try and find the hidden Glen that Nancy told me about, I also wanted to try and spot some of these since they are all over our neighborhood, I am hoping to lure them to our backyard…
(Side note, check out the strip of grass in this person’s driveway, sort of a neat idea I think, catches oil or things that might drip from people’s cars!) We did spot some Quail in our backyard one morning before we put our bird feeder up but haven’t seen them since, we have been sprinkling seed on the ground in hopes that they return. We have been calling our birds “customers” which started when we put up our bird feeder and I was sitting outside and waiting (patiently) for some birds to come, when one finally came Jason had just come outside to see what I was doing he started to talk to me but I had to shush him so that he wouldn’t scare the bird, I whispered “shhh, we have our first customer!” and it has stuck. I found the secret Glen (Bonneville Glen), it is just two blocks up from our house, it has a nice stream and tree covered path…
I think it will be a perfect daily running spot and a great place to go on hot days and cool off in the shade. Later in the day I went on a walk to Michael’s, it was more of a death march than a walk since I left in the heat of the day. I needed to get an ink pad for my stamp so that I could start assembling our wedding invites, along the way I walked through Sugarhouse park, look at our mountains!
I am enjoying getting to know our little neighborhood so much to explore! I like how they stamp the sidewalk with the street names here just in case your neck is stiff and you can’t look up, so thoughtful. This is our street 
Yesterday I made sushi for the first time on my own, I had learned from Erin when I visited her in Eugene a few weeks ago. I surprised Jas with California rolls and some mock spicy tuna rolls for dinner (used canned tuna, Sriracha sauce and a touch of miracle whip). The nook served as a good work station, I think it will be a great space for baking, probably won’t have the itch to do much of that until fall when it cools down.
Sort of amazing how fast you get full on sushi, I was good Erin and didn’t eat any of the scraps while I was making them! I think they turned out pretty good…
Jason was concerned that the pictures of the nook were not doing it justice so he wanted me to take a picture of him lying down on a bench so that you all can see just how huge and wonderful it is :) I took this picture this morning before we went on our hike…
This morning we met up with some of the new residents and went on a hike in Mill Creek Canyon, I was surprised by how many trees there were, I don’t know why but I was worried that Utah wouldn’t have enough trees for me but this hike was very reminicent of an Oregon hike…
It was a nice 5 mile hike with a good viewpoint of the valley but it was sort of hazy so hard to take a nice picture…
Jason starts in the ICU tomorrow, I probably won’t be starting my job until July 5th, I have a lot of things on my list that I am trying to get done before then…trying to finish up a baby cocoon for Alyssa, a belated knit wedding gift for Kelsey and Michael and some other knit gifts that are surprises for a handful of well deserving folks. I also made plans to help out my new neighbor Nancy with pruning back some of her herbs and drying them. Nancy is an avid organic gardener and freespirit with a lovely garden, I think she is going to be fun to live next to and learn from.
On Friday I found out that I got the job at the University Hospital on the trauma/acute care floor. I am really excited to start working, I have been feeling sort of like a slug lately since I have been in limbo. My start date is most likely going to be June 29th so I have one more week of freedom before I enter the working world. It will be nice and sort of funny to be working at the same hospital as Jas, we will be able to hopefully eat dinner or lunch with each other on occasion and more than likely I could have to call/page him about one of my patients sort of weird but at least it won’t be scary! We had planned to go hiking/camping this weekend but we were rained/stormed out so we ended up staying home and doing things in our neighborhood. Saturday we had a lot of rain and during a lull we went outside to inspect our plants and make sure none of these were munching on them….
Okay so we didn’t actually find this baby on top of the Mama but couldn’t resist posing them before we disposed of them in the trash can. These two were actually not an immediate threat to the plants since they were under the bird feeder on the opposite side of the garden munching on some fallen seed but still snails surprisingly can cover a lot of ground so we took no chances. Today Jas and I went mountain biking, it was my first official time mountain biking it was a huge workout. We went on a really long trail with a lot of steepness, it was hard but fun and I am sure that I will be sore tomorrow. The trail that we went on took us behind the University hospital and then popped us out into a really nice neighborhood on the other side, here is a picture of the Hospital where both Jas and I will be working for the next three years…
And here is a picture of me looking quite pathetic and only half way done with our ride but happy to be on pavement and not teetering on some rocks and a cliff, some how Jason always seems to capture the best of me…
So I know that I was going to post some pictures of the inside of the house so here is one to tie you over, this might be my favorite thing about the place, the kitchen nook…
As you can see my phone with a cord is conveniently located near the nook so that I can sit and talk comfortably inside my cozy little space. Last night I was lying down on one of the nook benches and decided to look at the underside of the table, I am not sure what I was expecting to find maybe some old paint chips I don’t know, but what I found was the handwriting of a young girl proclaiming her love for different boys, luckily she dated each entry so it was interesting to see her go back and forth between who she was “in love” with at the time, here are a few quotes from the underside of the nook:
1941 ET loves DH
1945 Elaine Thorup loves Richard Young & Peter Richards
1946 April, May and June Elaine Thorup loves Jimmy Pratt
1946 Elaine Thorup loves Peter Richards
Those are just a few of the love proclamations I found, I thought this was so cute and it was sort of bittersweet thinking of the young girl who wrote these who was probably in her early teens at the time might be in her late 70’s now. I love old houses and all the stories they have to tell. This reminded me of the wooden pole (actually a supporting beam) in the basement of my middle school/high school friend Lindsay’s house, our group of girl friends use to scribble similar “love” proclamations on the pole, it has since been dry-walled over but Lindsay told me that she likes to think that someday someone will find our messages just how I found Elaine’s
Yesterday evening we hiked Ensign Peak which is apparently the butte that Brigham Young climbed to look out over the valley and plan the city of Salt Lake he apparently said “this is the place” when he saw the view and envisioned the plan for the city (just a little SLC history for ya!). It was a quick steep jaunt to the top, there were a lot of people up there, since it is a special place for the LDS folks there seemed to be a lot of church (or ward groups as they call them) up there talking about the history of the viewpoint. It was a nice view despite the clouds, we have been told by many people that Salt Lake is having some very unseasonable weather, lots of rain and thunderstorms which is keeping the foothills nice and green. We like to think it is Salt Lake’s way of welcoming us to our new home (for the next three years) but I think it might be short lived because highs in the 80’s are in the forecast for next week which my tomato plants should appreciate!
This was my second time driving across the country this year and my fifth time doing it all together, each time I have done it I have gone different routes so I am seeing new things. When we moved Jas out to Ohio four years ago we actually drove across Canada which was the most scenic of the treks by far. I didn’t take very many pictures of the beginning of the trip since the Midwest is pretty uneventful as far as scenery goes, on our second day of driving we stopped in Kansas at a park for a while to stretch our legs and so Jas and his Dad could play a round of Frisbee golf. The park had a weird layout for how huge it was there wasn’t any kind of main access area but it did have a corral of Buffalo so Kathy and I hung out with them for a while trying to get a good picture although the double fence made it hard to get close to them.
As we were driving through Eastern Kansas heading into Colorado we had to drive through a huge system of storms. There were a lot of weird looking clouds and the severe weather alert kept coming up on the radio announcing warnings for different counties which was scary since we didn’t really know what counties we were heading into since we didn’t have a map!
Later we looked up the name for the clouds that we saw; these are Mammatus clouds and they are indicative of very unstable air.
It was a very eerie experience driving through those clouds feeling like a tornado was going to touch down at any moment and send us flying to our deaths. When we got to Jason’s Great Aunt Jeanne’s later that evening we watched the news and there were 5 confirmed tornadoes in the same area that we had been driving through. We spent two days at Aunt Jeanne’s in Denver, she is a very neat lady full of spunk reminds me a lot of Grams I think those two would get along well together with their love of gardening and abundance of energy, here we are having lunch out on her back patio…
Jason had interviewed for residency in Denver as well and Jeanne tells us that she was hoping for us to get back to Portland but if that didn’t happen she was secretly hoping for Denver, I thought this was funny since Grams had told Jason and I the same thing after finding out that we were headed to Utah she secretly was hoping for Columbus if he did not get into the Portland program. Jason and I drove to Boulder in the afternoon and did a quick tour of the Flagstaff area, it was a cloudy afternoon so the views of Boulder from up there and the surrounding mountains were not the best but it was still fun, here is a picture of us sitting on a boulder looking out at Boulder.
Lots of really pretty wildflowers in bloom up there, it is always fun to see what the different kinds are compared to what we have in Oregon…
The next day Jas, Kathy, Dan and I went to the Denver Botanical Gardens which was fun but I think we all agreed that they had nothing on Butchart Gardens in Victoria B.C. The tropical gardens are always my favorite, reminds me of living at the OSU Greenhouses, here is the inside of an Angel’s Trumpet (Brugmansia )…
The next day we left Denver and headed through the mountains towards Utah…
We arrived in Utah took us about 9 hours to drive from Denver to Salt Lake there are not many large towns until you reach Provo.
Surprisingly the truck was able to back up into our narrow driveway making unpacking a little easier…
I love our new home, there is so much for us to explore here I am sure three years is going to wiz right by. Dan found a system of trails that is within walking distance from our house; here is a picture of Jas perched on a rock chair looking out over the valley…
That is all for now but there is more to come, pictures of our trip to Antelope Island, Scenic shopping experience, New foods to try and of course Pictures of the new place all put together!
that we will be living at for the next three years! Jason and I are all moved into our house in Salt Lake, with much help from Dan and Kathy (Jason’s parents) we are almost completely unpacked and it is starting to feel like home. We arrived into town on Wednesday from Denver last week We were able to get just a few things moved in Wednesday night (after 9+ hours of driving who wants to unpack?!). Thursday morning I had an interview at the hospital for a trauma/acute care position that I am really hoping that I get. The Interview went really well so we shall see what happens, I really like the University hospital, it is nestled right next to the foothills and every patient room has a view of mountains. It seems like a really nice place to work, lots of happy people taking care of others plus I would be able to ride my back to work and then perhaps take off on some trails for fun on the way home! Dan had fun exploring the hiking/biking trails in the foothills, he found a really neat hike that offers an amazing view of the valley and larger Wasatch moutains to the South with some natural “rock chairs”. Kathy and I worked on decorating and creating a nice “flow” in the house while Jason and Dan did some extensive yard work to get the place looking like people actually live here! It was great having you guys help us move in, our little garden looks great and so far the snails are not getting to the plants although I am not sure that my “Eco-friendly” Slug and Snail repellent is tough enough for them! We don’t have internet at the house yet but we will soon and then I will be able to update with some pictures from the roadtrip, our visit in Denver at Jason’s Great Aunt Jeanne’s house as well as some pictures of our new home. We will be taking visitors soon!
