The River of Fire!!

So!! For the Fourth of July, Mark and I were invited to have dinner with our friends the Petersons. They are REALLY nice people and they live right down the street from us. Sister petterson lives in the middle, and her two daughters live on either side of her house (they call it "the compound") :o) They are SO funny and so welcoming and all around fanTASTIC people. We sure love them. So! They had us over for dinner, and we brought out friend from work Elizabeth with us. They had a lot of people over, and the food was DELICIOUS. I really like any holiday that involves food and spending time with people that you love :o) Sadly, we had to leave early to go to the fireworks.

Mark LOVES fireworks. He told me that he thinks he has seen fireworks every year of his life expect for the two when he was in Ecuador. :o) I, on the other hand, and not to fond of them since I am kind of scared of explosive on fire things. But! We couldn't break Mark's little heart! So off we went to the "RIVER OF FIRE!".

We got their and waited for it to get dark:This is the two of us and our friend Elizabeth!

No one really knew where the fireworks were being shot from. Typically they were shot from the bridge, but this was the first year they were changing location. So, we re-parked the car closer and closer to the bridge in hopes that we would be able to be REALLY close to the fireworks :o) Marks likes to be able to feel the fireworks going off. Then you REALLY know you have been to a fireworks show.

...pretty sunset...
...not yet dark enough.......FIREWORKS!!! HOO-RAY!!!

It ended up that we didnt get close enough to the fireworks as Mark would have liked, and we could see another firework show across the river at the TRAC stadium that Mark thought was cooler, but we had a LOT of fun still! I sure like taking pictures of the fireworks!! I kept wanting Mark to look at the pictures of the fireworks...then I realized that its WAAAY better look at the REAL fireworks!!! :-D I like how when you take the pictures of the fireworks they make little explosion streamer lines :o)



Here are some more pictures of the fireworks for your viewing pleasure!:

Sunday Walks!

One of the things Mark and I especially like doing (when we have the time) is taking walks or bike rides on Sunday afternoons. This was especially nice in Richland as we had that fantastic bike trail right by our house :o)
There was lots of cool things to see. Plants, cool toys in the park, and always lots of people in the parks and on the water having lots of fun. There are LOT of fun things to do on a big beautiful river with boats and toys! People would be out with their dogs and throw sticks in the water and the dogs would go and get them. A few times we stayed and watched people play with their animals, I think it is so cool to watch dogs swim in the river. We would walk down to a park bench and sit on the bench swing together and talk. The first time we went there were LOTS of ducks on the shore, so after that we ( I) would bring bread on our walks to feed the ducks. I was REALLY excited about feeding the ducks and ESPECIALLY the geese since my sister The Goose is at home and I can't feed her ;o) But, alas, the geese and ducks were no longer out after that first adventure! We think it is becasue as the summer wore on, more and more people were out, and the birds got wise and stayed on their island. This didn't prevent me from faithfully bringing bread whenever we went and diligently look for ducks and geese. Sometimes we would see them waaaaaaaaay out in the water and I would yell real loud "HEY!! DUCKS!!! HEY WE HAVE BREAD!!!!" and then enlist mark to help me lob gobs of bread in their general direction (since he is a much better bread lobber than I am :o) But essentially...no...we did not get to feed any ducks:o( On one occasion we got pretty close to feeding some ducks. We found a little family of ducks in this stinky little side pond so I climbed down into the brush to get close and toss the bread to the ducks, but momma duck was REALLY good at being protective, and whenever I got close to throw it, she swam away...and she swam away ....and she swam away... :o(

*sniff sniff*

BUT! there is always next summer! :o) Mark is such a wonderful, patient man and he helped me try to feed the ducks EVERY time we went! :o) How thankful I am to be sealed to him, and how wonderful it is to be able to make such happy memories with the greatest guy in the whole world!!
We really liked the plants and the sun sets on the river :o) So pretty!!!

Anniversary Pie!!

Woo-HOO!! :-D

So! Mark and I were Married on December 21, 2007. For those of you good at calendar-ing, this means that our 6 month anniversary would land on?....(drum roll please)...ding! ding! ding! thats right! June 21st!

If you got that right, you are more astute than Mark and I (mostly the "I" part in Mark and I) :o) SO! yes, Mark and I forgot our 6th month anniversary...until we were sitting on the floor on Saturday night...at around 9pm...finalizing our talks for the next day...when we stumbled across our anniversary date as we were deciding who would be introducing us in their talk and saying how long we had been married :o) Mark pulled out his phone to settle the matter and see exactly how long we had been married and... oh! why look at that! we have been married 6 months TODAY! :-D

Ha ha, how funny! I guess that goes to show how low key Mark and I are. In retrospect, it WAS a really nice anniversary, even if we didn't KNOW it was our anniversary. We didn't have too many things to do that day and we got to spend a lot of time with one another, and we slept in, it was all around a wonderful day :o) How funny the way we remembered though!

Good thing Mark figured it out, I was WAAAY behind the times trying to convince him that no, 6th months from December is in JULY not JUNE silly Mark!...(it really is in June though, mark told me) ;o)

SO! to celebrate: The next day we had anniversary pie! :-D And since my husband is so wonderful and so nice and so stinkin' handsome...we had BLUEBERRY anniversary pie!!


Now THAT, is a delicious looking blueberry anniversary pie if I must say so myself.

It had an almond and cinnamon and brown sugar butter crumble-ly stuff on the top :o) mmmmm....nummy...
I liked it...
Mark liked it...

...all in all! it was some pretty good anniversary pie :o)

Bar-B-Que Time!!

So! Mark and I lived by a park in Washington. We thought this was pretty cool. Among other things, at the park, there were tables and chairs (something lacking in our house for the summer). So! On one of the first weekend we were there, we invited our neighbors to have a bbq with us at the park! :o) This was our grand solution for having people over for dinner, without having to ask them to sit on the floor. I was SO excited! I made potato salad, and pasta salad and we had pork chops that had been marinating and we had nectarines to cook on the grill for desert with a raspberry glaze! Unfortunately, our neighbors had to cancel...but it turned out to be for the best! You see...Mark and I are not very experienced coal barbecuer's:


We gleefully lit the flames...
...analyzed the flame properties...

..had a passerby take our picture... (said passerby was a really nice lady who stayed and talked with us for a long time too :o)...

...watched the moon rise higher and higher, while it got darker and darker...and all the people around us were getting up and leaving... most of which were armenian. They were having a giGANTIC armenian bash, which looked like lots of fun! Kids were everywhere, they were all playing, and they were speaking really really fast in their cool armenian ways...while we watched our meat sit there... Then the sprinklers came on...then people REALLY started to leave! :o) ..we didn't get wet, and yet SOMEHOW, all the excitement did NOT help our meat cook any faster...

...upon further analysis of the coals, we concluded that they just were not hot enough, and there just were not enough of them! The food was still raw, and we had been there forEVER! Granted, we had only put 20 coal under the meat (and by 'put 20 coals under the meat' i mean we 'painstakingly staked, accounting for proper ventilation, 20 coals to put under the meat' )... WHO KNEW that you needed lots of coal? OOPS!

Lesson learned: when you are stingy with the coals...the bbq is stingy with cookin the meat...
So! we finally decided to cut our losses and go home and cook the meat on the stove :o) GOOD THING WE DIDN'T HAVE GUESTS! THAT would have been REALLY funny :o) So, all in all, we had a lovely time at the park, I got kinnda grumpy (it happens when Im hungry, sadly) and we came home and cooked it on the stove and had a fabulous meal. We learned an important lesson about bbq heat distribution, and we now know to make sure there will be food before we invite people to eat it with us :o). AND not to eat near sprinklers.

OH! and i ALSO learned not to leave bacon on the stove while I go upstairs to wake up mark :o) Inevitably I will stay up there too long and the bacon will burn thusly:


I ALSO learned not to lift said burned bacon out of the pan with a plastic blue fork. You cant tell from this picture, but, as appetizing as this greasy bowl of half-burnt-half raw bacon looks...it looks TWICE as appetizing with little bits of blue plastic melted fork floating in it. Lets just say that one minute I was lifting the charcoaled bacon mass from the pan to more closely examine it and the next i was dodging the oozing, dripping mass of bacon and melting fork as it dripped back into the pan and sent hot grease popping everywhere. OOPS! Good thing I only cooked half the bacon. ;o) Mark and I had a good laugh about that. Ah! What culinary adventures we have! (please don't let this story deter you from accepting a dinner invitation with us)

Here are some more pictures of our first BBQ!!:

Fishing Endnotes

ISN'T MARK SO CUTE!?!

:o) As you can see, Marks love of fishing started at an early age :o) He especially loved to go fishing with his daddy and grandpa!

For those of you who asked, the fish he caught in washington were kokanee salmon. It is a lake variety of salmon :o)

ANYWAY, I wanted to share a 2 more stories about mark during girls camp:

Story 1: The sunday after I left, I walked mark through making a roast over the phone (there had been a full breifing before I left, but just in case, I was talking to him while he did it) so that he would have food when he came home from church, and left overs for the week. :o) He did a great job! But searing the meet was a liiiiiitle problematic...and lets just say our frying pan will never quite be the same :o) [Our Bishop asked mark to come over for dinner when he found out that he was by himself! That was really nice, and Mark really enjoyed getting to know them better and not having to be all alone on sunday afternoon!]

Story 2: Mark also went shopping while I was gone, and what did he buy?? Cereal and Ice cream :o) Surprise surprise!

I sure love my husband, and I was REALLY glad to come home. Girls camp was great (there was a tornado warning two nights, flooding, and the sirens were going off--a new experience for me) and my aunt Lauren was REALLY great in giving me a place to stay before and after camp and taking care of me :o) But more than anything, it was SO wonderful to be back with mark again after it was over! I debated putting a girlscamp post up... but decided against it since it essentially would be a small novel I am pretty sure. Girls camp is always such a special experience--for leaders and for girls. It is so wonderful to be in a place where you can have the spirit so strong all week and have a lot of fun without any distractions from the world. You really get to know people, and you have a lot of fun! I was with first year girls, and it was a really, really wonderful experience :o)