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)

Fishies and Fishin'

2 weeks after we got to Washington, I flew back to Indiana to go to girls camp with the girls from our Branch. For those of you who don't know, Mark and I attend the 4th Branch of the Lafayette Stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It is a Spanish branch, and we love it there (kinnda hard for me since I don't speak spanish very well, but that is ok, we are working on it!)

So! while I was off having lots and lots of fun with the girls in Indiana:o) Mark was left all alone by himself :o( Oh no, poor Mark!! But! Not to fear :o) Mark has some friends in our ward in Washington who looooove to fish. Since Mark loves to fish, this worked out great :o) This particular weekend they had a fishing excursion :o) The only problem was the weather wasn't cooperating, and it was freezing.

Here they are, all bundled up, in the middle of June on a boat in Washington. My handsome husband is on the bottom right :o)

They left at about 8 on Friday night, got to the lake about 10, fished all night until they caught their limit at around midnight, then fished the next morning until they caught their limit again, and then left to drive home and clean their catch. They used corn to catch the fish, chupe corn, and the fished loved it. :o) Mark said he was having problems at first because of his fishing line, so he only caught 17...but that is still a lot of fish!! Between the 4 of them, they caught 77 fish.

And there they be!! :o)

The fish were really, really yummy :o) We were invited to go over and have a fish fry with Jason and his family, it was really, really nice and a lot of fun. :o)
And there they are! The mighty fishermen!! :-D

Here are some more pictures of the fishing and the cleaning of the fish:

Painting!!

SO! This is the story of the house: Mark and I didn't know that we were going to be going to work at PNNL until, oh, a week or two before we needed to LEAVE and BE there. Yeah. This means that we had to find a place to live... on short notice... on the other side of the U.S. ... and we only wanted to be there for 3 months. In short: this was a veeeeeery tall order. So, we called, and called, and CALLED, apartments, people, real estate agents, Bishops in Washington, ANYONE to try to find a house. We decided though, that if we were supposed to go out there, Heavenly Father would help us find a house. So, we kept calling. The turning point came when we were at a kinkos ready to fax in a housing application for an apartment complex that we really didn't want to live in, that wouldn't be able to process our application in time for us to be there anyway. What happened was this: A lady called us back about renting her house, just before we faxed in the apartment application and told us her house she had rented to a guy in Texas...but she had looked in the newspaper for us for other peoples houses...AND she had called them to see if they would rent on short notice and only for three months...AND she had a list of three houses that would rent to us and their phone number if we wanted to call them. :o) WHAT an answer to our prayers! We called Patty (who became our land lady) and she said that she had a few houses that we could live in...if we could paint them :o) I was so desperate and relieved at this point I probably would have made a deal with Rumpelstiltskin so we said yes we would paint!

SO! This is the house we stayed in and painted!! :-D (and, in which we discovered that painting is not so fun...)

FIRST: we had to take off the awful wall paper.

Here is a close up in case you didn't believe that it was awful. The downstairs wall paper and the stairs came off pretty easy, but the up stairs paper was IMPOSSIBLE to take down. Eventually, Patty had to hire someone to take it off. And then to fix the wall underneath it, which had rotted :o( BLECK!! I guess thats what happens when you live in an old house!!
Amazingly enough, as awful as that wall paper was, it was a TOTAL improvement to the BRIGHT GREEN that it covered. Oh yes. YIKES!!! Form what we can tell, once the ENTIRE HOUSE was this green color. OH. MY. GOODNESS....I'm so glad we didn't live in it then. ;o)

Next, we primed the walls that had wall paper on them (the rest of the walls in the house were already white-ish)
here is a picture of mark edging the ceiling. He is SO nice. He edged the ceiling, and I filled in with a roller and edged the other corners with our super -nifty-edging-contraption-thing that made me an endging SUPER HERO!! :-D .Without the edging thing I doubt we could have gotten the house painted since I cant edge free hand like mark. It was the coolest! I think I have painting ADD. This, I have found, is not a very good technieqie for painting. I would paint a little here, then get boared of the view, then move to another wall...then another. I learned (very quickly) that this is not so good, and makes it look...yucky :o( We needed to put 2 coats on everything anyway though, and Mark showed me how to do it nice and even, so it looked real nice when we were done. (we dont have any pictures of if being done. We finished the night before we had to leave...and then we still had to pack... uh oh!!) :o)
I also really like writing notes to my husband :o)
...and drawing him pictures...
Here I am sporting the lovely paint mask since paint fumes make me REALLY sick, and then i am no fun to be around :o( So! the mask helps a lot!!
So! We had to paint. A lot. Actually...thats all we ever did :o) Pretty much. Work and Paint :o) We painted the first weekend we were in town...and like I said, we were still painting the night before we left. :o) OH NO!!! We had ANGELES who came and help us though, the Greer-Short family. They came and helped us paint, and then the night before we left Sis. Greer Short came AGAIN and stayed a long time and helped us paint some more, and clean...and pack. What a WONDERFUL family, and I will tell you about them more I promise. But for now, the bottom line is, there was a lot of painting this summer, and this is what it looked like :o)

Here are some more painting pictures!!

"Can you tell me how you get, how you get to...."

...Sibert Street!! :o) Our place of residence for the summer!
This is the house that Mark and I rented :o) We lived on the left side of an "A" house that was built 'round-about the 1940's. (let me explain the terminology)

Richland Washington sprang up around in the 1940's because of the Hanford site located to the North of Richland. "Hanford" is the site of B Reactor (among others), the first large scale nuclear reactor that was built for the production of the plutonium used in the Trinity device and Fat Man and (I think also) Little Boy in WWII. The town of Hanford, originally a farming community founded in 1907, was chosen as the build site because of three main reasons: 1. it was isolated, 2. it had an existing railroad spur, and 3. its located on the banks of the Columbia river (...that is an over simplification, but thats ok). Building Hanford was INCREDIBLY labor intensive, and at the peak of construction in 1944 the construction camp housed over 50,000 people!! Anyway, I could talk a LOT about Hanford [especially the cool reactors they have there that they are cocooning, (I even go to walk through B reactor and sit in Enrico Fermi's chair! I think my IQ raised from sitting there, I am pretty sure...) ] But I wont here. Maybe I will tell you later. :o) The BOTTOM LINE is, is that there was a LOT of people transplanted to the area to work on building and then maintaining the reactors--but, understandably, the government did not want workers living ON the construction site long term (for obvious reasons)--so permanent housing was built to the south in Richland.

Richland was also a small farming town at that time of around 400 people. BUT!! (here is the story part) by 1945, it had been TRANSFORMED into being able to hold 17,500 people!!! OH MY GOODNESS THATS A LOT OF HOUSES ! The houses that were built were "alphabet houses" meaning there were 5 or 6 floor plans used (A, B, C, F, G, etc.)...over, and over, and OVER enough times to house 17,500 people :o) Now there are more houses in Richland, and the Tri-Cities is a really nice place to live. There is a Large LDS community there, and the Columbia River Temple (SO PRETTY!!) and we really really really love it there :o)

So! we lived in an "A" house--which is Richlanderish for a two story duplex house with a basement. :o)

In the paper people will list only: " 'A' house for Sale", and you will have a pretty good idea of what the house will be. :o) Saves on add costs I guess!

Here is a view of our street from one way...


...and from the other other!!
If you walk down the street in the first picture...then through the park...and cross another street...you will be at the church!! We LOVED walking to church, it was really nice :o)

If you walk down the street in the second picture...you run into the river!!! :-D That hill looking thing is a raised bank that has the bike trail on it. THAT is the bike trail that we took to work! :o) It goes right up to the lab :o) and it is SO PRETTY!! The Columbia River is, I think, the PRETTIEST river in the world. Since it is Glacier melt water, it is really blue--and REALLY cold. :o) Not all muddy like other rivers that will remain nameless at this time... ;-)

Here is a picture of us in the park by the river (that is part of the bike path behind us, and you can see some of the river).

here is a picture of us on the trail going for a walk
here is a sun set on the river...

...and here is another sun set. Man did we like that river! Richland is a great place to live and it seems like a wonderful place to raise a family :o). Our neihbor, Doug Strong, was the Parks and Recreation director for Richland. He and his wife were really nice people :o) We got to hear a lot about parks and recreation stuff that I never knew about. People in Richland are proud of their history (for the most part) and proud of their community. They have a lot of really nice parks by the river, and people are ALWAYS in them :o) A lot of the things that people do revolve around the river :o) I wish we would have taken more pictures so you guys would know more about what a lovely place Richland was. Sorry! (Now we know for next time!)

Anyway! This is where we lived for the summer, AND (here is my final plug) if any of you are looking for a place to move to and you would like to work at a DOE lab-- THIS is the BEST one to work at :o) (no offense Los Alamos and Sandia...but hands down that is true) . What a wonderful place to have spent the summer!

Washington or Bust!

So! Mark and I spent our summer '08 in Richland Washington on internships. We packed up our house, packed the car, and said goodbye to Lafayette as we headed to Mark's Parents house. :o)

(yes, this is kinnda embarrassing that there is a box of tampons right in this picture, but this demonstrates why Mark likes to drive so much. He doesn't understand how I can have all these things down by my feet :o) so every time that we would switch driving, he would clean out the bottom feet place, which I REALLY appreciated...and then I would manage to mess it up again before we would switch back! I have decided though, that its not necessarily my fault that things always get messy when I am near them... who am I to withstand that inevitable force of entropy?? See? Not my fault! Law of nature... ;o) )Here we are at Mark's Parents house!! We got to stay there for a bit and visit. It was really nice to see them:o) We tried to get up one morning to drive becky to school..but we were waaay to tired. :o( I don't think I have ever seen mark so delirious, but then again, I don't wake him up very much. Come to think of it, i don't EVER think I have woken mark up, its ALWAYS the other way around! Waking people up=no fun i have decided. :o) Anyway, we were really, REALLY tired from packing (mostly mark since he carried all the heavy stuff, poor-poor mark!) but we DID manage to tell her that we loved her before she went to seminary :o) Mark's dad gave him a really nice blessing that helped us to be brave leaving IN for the summer :-D


And thar she be! The open road!

We drove, and drove, and drove. And drove. Our plan was to drive straight through the night and switch drivers. This was frustrated by the fact that we never REALLY decided we were doing that or not...so I felt bad for sleeping while mark was driving...so when it came around to be MY turn to drive...i was REEEEEEALLY tired. Oops! We ended up stopping for 3 hours at 1:00 in the morning at a truck some place between here and Salt Lake for a little pit stop, and then we got back to driving till we got to Salt Lake!

We stayed one day with Marks Aunt and family and saw Michael and Lindsey (and witnessed when she told the family that she was going to have a baby), and then we stayed another day with Auntie Shaun and their family and got to see the twins and it was really nice to see them. By really nice i mean WONDERFUL!!!! :-D We also found out that Aunt Shaun was coming up to the Richland area, and that we would be able to see her and everyone AGAIN before the summer was over! WHO-RAY!!


Another pit stop. Mark had never been to Sonic before. (Or i think only once, in NM). While we were there, I thought we were going to be eaten alive by the seagulls. I was throwing them crackers out the window and they were swarming the car. :-) Pretty much, i rolled down the window a crack, tossed the goods, and then rolled up the window and yelled "Run away Mark! Run away!!" :o) It was pretty fun.

Here we are getting car crazy! I don't know if you can get cabin fever or not...but look! Mark let his beard grow the WHOLE TIME we were driving across!! Let me explain why this is such a big deal: I love marks beard. Every vacation, he lets it grow for me :o) then, when we have to go to school, or work, or the temple, ....pretty much the real world... he shaves it off again :o) This means that whenever we get to see Marks parents, or the people where he grew up, we are on vacation, and he lets his beard grow, and his family always gives him grief about it. :o) They think he looks scraggly. I think he looks like a leprechaun.
Here is us on the top of a "mountain" in Oregon, pointing towards the Washington boarder :o) We are a few hours away!!
The Washington state line!! ...22 miles to go....
Tri-Cities!! We made it!!!

It is important to note here that Mark got us across the United Stated of America without any problems. My job was to get us from Kennewick, to Richland (about 10 miles away from one another). I failed. :o) We got lost. :o) Well, not LOST lost, we just took the way that I took on my bike ... which is not, necessarily, the best for a car ... lets say :o) So, it took us a while to get there, and I kept saying things like "No! no wait... ok, this is good, this is good, i remember that building, yeah...yeah! and this stop light looks familiar...ok, yeah! we're good. go straight."

And what did we do our first night in Richland? Got taco bell :o) We went through the drive through, took our food to the bank of the Columbia River, and ate it right at sun set (that was a coincidence, but it sure was nice :o) We waited to meet Patty (our land lord) and she showed us the house.

In essence: Mark and I had a lot of fun driving across the U.S. and we were ready to stay in one place for a while.

Here are some more pictures for your enjoyment of our adventures, in case you wanted to see more scenery we passed through:

Purdue in the Spring Time

Now, we all know that I am a Lobo at heart, and always will be. BUT. I DO have to admit that Purdue campus in the spring is one of the most beautiful things I have ever experienced. This point, however, must be tempered with the fact that as it is so miserable in the winter, and winter is so long, that when suddenly *POW!* spring is here! ....you are helplessly overwhelmed with joy and happiness :o) Often, this can be dangerous. For example, wearing a short sleeve shirt since the sun is shining and there is green grass outside, may not be a very good idea. In a sane climate this may indicate warm weather. Not so in Indiana. In Indiana, this is just a freak coincident. The grass is green ALL YEAR ROUND EVEN IN WINTER (even under snow! it keeps the grass insulated and watered so it is always green--VERY freaky phenomena) The rarity is that this coincides with the sun being out. :o) Gosh I love that sunshine though!! When the sun started coming out more (well, at all) I found I would just sit and stare out the window at the blue sky and clouds in my math class--and smile :o) I didn't catch a single word the teacher was saying after that point(maybe thats why I didnt do so good in that class?)

anyway! This has all be a prelude for the main event: SPRING PICTURES!!!! :-D


I mean, come on! Doenst this just prove my point?! This tree is almost like Mother Nature started throwing confetti as soon as the thermometer raised a few degrees. And these flowers were big. Like, small dinner plate big. Yeah. I know. :o) I put one in my hair (but it wilted real quick. How sad)


Here is another just really cool picture of a tree.

I am putting in a slide show of a few plants. I must explain that there are not that many. I had to take my cameras on campus, between classes, to take pictures, in the midst of throngs of students hurrying to get to class. And then I had lots of homework to do. And no time to take pictures. So! I took a picture of a few plants, and I plan to take more next time (becasue i wouldn't remember how badly I wanted to take pictures of all the pretty flowers untill i was looking at the flowers and then it was too late to grab the camera that was at home :o) I am learning though. In short, there are MILLIONS of types of flowering trees EVERYWHERE in IN. It is almost like EVERY tree has flowers, and then it gets leaves. They are so beautiful and I wish each of you could be here for the spring. I will take better pictures next time! Promise! :o)

Apartment in Indiana!

Home!!! For a little while at least :o) :-D This picture may be a little blurry, but that is becasue we got to Indiana at 2:00 am :o) The sign says, "The Bluff's Apartments," our first home. :o) A friend of Mark came over and helped us unpack our mattress, and then we went to sleep/passed out from exhaustion. WAY too many hours in a moving van will do that to ya :o)



The next day some other friends of mark, Bryan and Amanda, came over to help us really unpack :o) Here is the aftermath of that event. Boxes, boxes, everywhere and not a place to sit!!



My parents were coming to see us two days later for the reception that we had in Muncie Indiana, so we had quite a time getting things so that everyone would fit :o)


We used the bag that our mattress came in to put all the packing material and boxes and trash, etc. in. :o) Here is mark taking it down to our trash room. :o)








Yeah. It was SO heavy, it tilted the camera :-D












This is the trash room. It merited having its picture taken since it is a pretty big deal to have a room where the dumpsters are so that in the winter, we didnt have to go outside to put our trash out. THANK HEAVENS!!! As it was, going from the apartment to the car to a building for class just about killed me from the cold. This is also where we kept the bikes. Buuuut, due to the cold, we never used the bikes that winter :o)

After we got a place for them to sit down, the next most important thing to get was food:


This is me at a much later point in the official "study position" on the couch in the living room. Note the carpenters glasses--which belong to mark--and the hat--which also belongs to mark :o) . I happen to believe that the glasses make my eyes hurt less when I wear them after staring at a computer screen for SEVERAL hours a day. And, its cold in indiana, so naturally you have to be bundled up, hence the fuzzy blanket. :o)

and...sadly...that is ALL the pictures i EVER took of that house :o( OH NO!!! I didnt realize this till I took the pictures off the camera. Dont worry, I have done a better job taking pictures of our new apartment.

So! Since I don't have pictures to show you how wonderful our old apartment was, I will have to try to tell you with words :o)

Here goes:

Well!! As I said, we lived in "The Bluff's" Apartments on the top of a hill (yeah, I know, a hill in Indiana, wierd) by a doughnut shop that has been around for YEARS called mary lou doughnuts --Mark even remembers going there as a kid. The apartment was surrounded by trees, and the animal shelter was very near us, so we got to hear lots of birds every morning, and lots of dogs howling too :o). The birds, I must admit, are the coolest in indiana. I had a bird clock that my grandma gave to me for my birthday which has a different bird call every hour. Growing up in NM, and not really having all that many birds, I used to wonder what "exotic" place people had go to to get those bird calls. Now I know they went to Indiana ;o). Mark would tease me that my clock "escaped out the window" when we would go to school in the morning because we would hear the same calls as on the clock :-D I was, (and am ) thoughraly amazed by this. I loved it. We moved there in the winter so there were no leaves on the trees at that time, but mark and I would sit on our couch on sunday afternoon and watch the trees sway. Yes. Sway. Our trees would sway in the wind. The trees towered over our apartment--and we lived on the third floor mind you--so apparently they were very tall and spry and elastically since they never seemed to break :o) they just swayed. That was pretty cool. It was really cozy, really nice, and we loved it there. Brian and Amanda lived in our building and we would go to the temple together in Chicago and have FHE sometimes together (the game and dessert part) and just in general be good friends with them. They are GREAT people and we sure love them a lot. :o) I guess a story that can sum up the ambiance of the house for you is this: Mark had gotten some sparkling cider when we were married, it traveled across the states with us in our luggage, and we planned on opening it for a celebration when we unpacked the house. :o) We were so busy with school, and since school started the weekend after we got there, we never had a chance to "fully" unpack. So! It wasnt until we moved that we drank the cider :o) The missionaries and people from our branch came over and helped us move the things from our apartment into storage, and we packed up our house in one day. This was nothing short from an act from on high since I was REALLY worried about getting out on time. One our last trip packing up our stuff, we opened the cider, and drank some juice, and talked about the memories that we had in that house (which, you may not think were many since we were only there for a semester, but it is really nice being married, and it is just nice to make memories with the people you love, no matter how simple they are.) We joked that maybe that would have to be a tradition of ours: drinking to memories and new beginnings.

Sorry it took so long to tell you guys about where I was living :o) but life was SO hectic last semester! When ever we got to a point where we could stop doing homework (note this is not that we were finished with it, just that we could stop, very important distinction) we would just spend time and talk with one another. One of our favorite things to do is watch movies. We gradually learned that starting a movie at 10:30 at night was not a good idea, no matter how long it had been since we had taken a break and watched a movie or how much homework we had done that day. :o) And, we love making pizza and trying new recipes and combinations. I will keep you posted on what the best crust recipe is so far ;o)

I will try to do better this semester at keep you all updates. I promise the teek! :o)

On The Road Again...

Yep! This title pretty much sums up the whole of mine and mark's married life together :o) It seems like the moment we got married...we were in the car going...and whenever we got to where we were going, we got right back in to go some place else! :o) Oh goodness!

So! Here we go with some pictures and stories of our motor adventures together thus far

UTAH TO NEW MEXICO!!
Here are some pictures of out trip down to NM after the wedding. We did it in one day, and didn't get into NM until about 11:30 pm or so if I remember correctly :o( That means that not only did we not get to see my family as soon as we had hoped, but the prettiest part of the trip (in my opinion)...was completely dark!! Mark drove most of the way, and when we got tired in some little town in NM, we stopped at McDonald's for milk shakes (a tradition of ours now on road trips :o) )


NEW MEXICO TO INDIANA!!
Here are some pictures of our trip up to IN from NM. We started later in the day than we would have like, road trip wise, but we didnt want to have to say good bye, and it took longer to pack the stuff than we had anticipated. :o) I had a LOT of stuff, and it took a LONG time to pack it. If my mom hadnt helped/packed most of it, and if my family weren't so good at helping, I think we still may have been back in NM. (not that thats a bad thing necessarily)



story: we were making it our goal to be able to take a picture of all the state signs of each of the states we passed through. We were doing pretty good...except for the fact that we passed through Texas, Kanasas, Illinois, AND Indiana in the middle of the night! :o) Cameras (at least ours) don.t work too well at night. This is why in SOME of the pictures look like little blurry blobs of light :o) In the captions, there should be some translation for you from "nocturnal blur" into "english" ;o)

Story: since we decided to take the pictures of the states signs, and we passed through texas at night, that means that Oklahoma was the next state on our list. Note in the pictures that a "rest area closed" sign precedes the "Oklahoma" sign. I didnt see that the rest area was closed, so I was convinced that we could pull over and have our pictures taken WITH the sign; mark was convinced that it was closed and that we couldnt. Long story short, I didnt have the camera ready when we passed by since I thought we could stop, so we whizzed right on by with out a picture. "But Wait!" you say, "I saw a picture of the Oklahoma state sign in your slide show?...how can this be?". Weeeell...mark drove down the road about 5 miles, then turned around at the next exit and drove back PASSED the sign about five miles to the NEXT exit to turn around AGAIN...all so that I could get my picture :-D What a PATIENT man I married!! He is so wonderful. I think that is what made it so funny that half the signs we didn't get since they were in the dark :o( but by golly did we get that oklahoma state sign! ;o)

story: For some reason, there are about 5 instances of "The Worlds Largest Cross" or "Largest Cross in the Western Hemisphere" on the side of the road from New Mexico to Indiana. I don't know why this is. Mark said he had seen the same thing in Ecuador, but I don't think I have ever seen Enormous, 8-10 story high white crosses, with lights on them. I took pictures of this phenomena, and if anyone drives out to see us...you will know what I am talking about (very hard to miss)

Story: We took a detour into Kansas to visit Marks Aunt and Uncle Bob and Rima and their 4 lovely girls. They were really nice, and let us sleep there, and fed us, and visited with us. And THEN! :o) when we were getting ready to leave, we were cleaning out the car. There was this empty milk shake cup so I was filling it with trash...then I walked back into the house to say good bye and throw away said cup of trash....and after I said good bye, I realized the cup of trash was NOT in my hand and I had DEFINITELY not been to the trash can since I had no idea where it was. Yes. For all intent and purposes I had unintentionally "stashed" a cup of trash-in my husbands families house-who I had just met-and I had no idea where it was. YIKES!! When this realization came to me, I remember looking at my hands, thinking, and then slowly looking up to say: "Um...I had a cup of trash that I was trying to throw away...and I have no idea where I put it...I think it's in the house somewhere..." Needless to say, marks family thought that was a little weird, but they helped me look for it. We didn't find it. --The BEST part of the story is, we found it in the car about an hour later. :-D SO!! At the end of the day, we still had a cup of trash in the car, and marks family had a perfect idea of what a strange girl their nephew had married. :o) Two Birds ;o)

Story: At one point, Mark and I had gone to Taco Bell for dinner. We had left a soft taco uneaten, and it was forgotten in the moving truck overnight. The next day, we were really hungry when lunch came around, but we were in the middle of nowhere, so we couldnt stopfor food. I was rummaging in the bag of snacks that Nan had given to mark and I (which we LOVED!) for food whenI I came across this soft taco! It had been so cold the night before that it was completely frozen through. Being frozen, we figured it was still good. We turned on the heater and held the taco in front of the vents to warm it up. Yes. We held the taco in front of the vents , to warm it up. Then, we ate it. Still partially frozen. (after all, heater vents aren't designed with the heat output to re-heat food. :o)) How gross is that?!? *sigh*. Man do mark and I have a lot of fun together. It really it amazing that we are still alive. :o)

In general, I took a ma-ZILLION pictures of all the flat nothingness we passed through. It kinnda freaked me out at first, since there was just...flat. Lots, and lots of flat. I just kept snapping the camera! There is only a small fraction of the pictures I took on the blog to spare your attention spans :o) Now, flat is what we see all the time here now. :o) It is spiced up with corn and soy bean fields though. Gotta love Indiana. ;o)

Memory Lane

1. As a comment on my blog, leave one memory that you and I had together. It doesn't matter if you knew me a little or a lot. Anything you remember!

2. Next, re-post these instructions on your blog and see how many people leave a memory about you. It's actually pretty fun to see the responses. If you leave me a memory about me, I'll assume you are playing the game and I'll come to your blog and leave one for you.