I've been busy.

Remember me mentioning heading up the school carnival?  That kind of took over my brain the last month of summer.  It turned out fine.  I shamelessly stole pictures off the PTA blog to show you.  I was too busy to shoot pictures myself.  Although at times I wanted to shoot myself.

 The Blowups.  We get sponsors to help cover these.

 Concessions.  we had snow cones, cotton candy, and popcorn.

 Basket auction.  We also had a raffle of a BYU basketball signed by the team.  Yes Jimmer too.

 

We served dinner.

 

And had plenty of carnival games.  It looked like rain but it didn't.  Perfect weather. I was pretty happy with the results, but last week I went to a PTA meeting where they raised twice as much money doing a Walk-a-thon.  Huh.  Oh Well.

 jeff and I went to Park City for an anniversary trip right after the carnival was over.  We were able to stay right in a big resort for a week.  The condo was beautiful.  I felt like I was staying in Pinocchio's house.

It looked like a little alpine chalet with all of this carved wood and European fixtures.

 

We hiked to the top of Timpanogos Peak our first day (only 4 hours to the top! Most people take around 6.  I felt very speedy). 

We also did a hot air balloon ride. I loved it.  We've been going to look at the balloons on the 4th of July for years, but this was the first time we went up in one.

We spent one day riding the lifts up to the top of the slopes and then riding down on mountain bikes, but I'm not going to tell you about that because a thunder storm started and it didn't end well :) The rest of the time we were running, shopping, and eating at some fabulous restaurants.  Try the Mustang  if you're ever up there.  We also bought some olive oils and balsamic vinegars at the Mountain Town Olive Oil Company

So fun in there.  We tried just about every kind, then bought the Tuscan herb olive oil and the lemon (delicious); and then bought the wild blueberry balsamic, and the blackbery ginger.  Oh.My.Gosh.  I can't describe how yummy.
Anyway you know how I said the acupuncture cured my graves?  It didn't last.  I might be getting radio-iodine after all.  I'm not too happy about it.  I'll come back and write about that, Ari's new cochlear implant (on the other side!), some canning and dehydrating projects, and of course, our Faaaaaaabulous Halloween costumes.

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Running up City Creek.

Jeff and I won a free hotel weekend. It was Jeff's birthday in June and he asked for free babysitting from my parents for his present.  I don't know if my mom is snowballing me, but she said they just read the whole time so it was easy.  One of the big attractions of staying with Gramma and Grampa is going to their library.  Can I just say in passing that it doesn't speak well for Mapleton that we've GOT no library?  I know we've got the Utah county bookmobile housed here but pickin's are SLIM there.  Scores of multi-million dollar houses but we can't spring for a decent library?  Rant over.
When Jeff plans the weekend in Salt Lake it goes a little differently than mine does.  His big goal is to veg in front of TV and movie screens.  Mine is to see and eat as much cool stuff as possible.  We hit up Starbucks for breakfast oatmeal and that was the extent of our eating out.  Oh well.  We saw a couple of cool movies, more on that in a sec.    One thing we always agree on is the workouts.  We had a 9 mile run scheduled on our training plan for Saturday, and jeff suggested running up the City Creek trail.  It was honestly hard to believe there WAS a trail right near downtown, but what as cool run!  We started out running up west temple past the salt palace and art center.

We turned up north temple where you first see the creek as part of the landscaping in front of the "meganacle"

Soon the creek enters "City Creek Park" which is beautiful by the way,

and through a really neat historical district.  Sorry for the blurry pics, I didn't really stop to take them with my phone, just slowed down.

Then the real trail started, and the creek got big and scary.

Up through a canyon, and onto the Bonneville Bench trail.

Here's Jeff up ahead of me (he's much faster usually, but especially when I'm taking pictures).  Then my camera shut down on my phone because it was supporting my audiobook at the same time and freaked out.  oh well.

 

 The first movie was Potter.  Fabulous.  Just fabulous.  I'm a major Potter nerd, and have read all of the books multiple times, AND listened to the audiobooks --all of them -- multiple times.  I was so excited for this movie.  Usually when this happens, the movie can't live up to your expectations, but they pulled out all the stops on effects.  The best part by far though was watching Snape's memories.  This is probably my favorite part in the whole series, but watching it on the screen, I was sobbing.  I felt so stupid while I was doing it, knowing these are fictional characters, and telling myself that over and over didn't help one bit.  I was completely drawn in.  Jeff kept patting my arm (probably hoping I'd stop embarrassing him).

The next movie we saw was Captain America.  Can I just say, the photoshop/CGI stuff was amazing!  Never again will I watch a movie and lament that an actress is so skinny --impossibly thin.  It IS impossible!  Look what they did to Cris Evans!  Plumps when you cook 'em.  :)

Good show, classic superhero movie.  It was done by the guy that did the Rocketeer, and it felt like that.  Corny, old-fashioned fun.  Stick around after the credits, there's an Easter egg you'll be excited to see after.

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Merry Salt Lake City Christmas

 Jeff and I got to go for a night away this week courtesy of my brother and sister-in-law who watched our kids for us.  We love to go to a certain Hilton downtown because of the great gym.  The problem is the rooms aren't super nice.  Nice, but not fantastic.  I wish I had a picture of that gym.  The hotel website only has a picture of the cardio machines --which as we all know are the LAME part of a gym (but they do have tv's on them (yay).  Anyway, we decided to go to the other Hilton this time because the gym looked pretty good (are we nerds or what?) and the rooms looked much better.

The cable machine was gone when we got there, and some of the free weights were missing, but we got in some great workouts anyway.  I'm voting for the old Hilton next time. We were a bit further away from the city center, and so we got some nice walks in.  I've always lived in the suburbs, except for a brief time in South America, and so I love walking in the city because I feel like I'm in a romantic comedy.  Have you noticed they all seem to take place in New York City?  Except "While you were sleeping" -Chicago. Last time we stayed downtown, we witnessed a drug deal within a few feet of us.  That wasn't so romantic comedy-ish.

 

Every year the LDS church lights up Temple Square in the center of downtown Salt Lake, but this was the first time in a few years I got to see it.  Can you see me?  I'm the little dark shadow in the foreground.  That's the big LDS temple on the left --all made of hand carved granite. They light up all of the trees, running the lights up and down each branch.  I think I'd kill myself if it was my job to light up all even one tree.  Look:

 Can you IMAGINE?!? Hours and hours.

 

I've got the crappiest digital camera in the world, but I wanted to show you a little of our walk downtown. This is Main street.  All of the sidewalks are made of granite, and there are these cool clocks, and the trees are lit up too.  I could almost imagine the jazz soundtrack in the background.....

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The Hugest Bestest Aquarium in the World.

Hey! What's that little swirly green thing to the left? Is it a piece of kelp? Is it an alien? No it's a SEA HORSE! Click on the picture to see up close. I know I say my favorite animal is the giraffe, but these little guys may be a close second. Sea horses have their own big room in the Monterey Bay Aquarium and no wonder, they are so fascinating. These "Leafy Sea Dragons" were the star of the show. With their tank in the very back, like a centerpiece for the exhibit, you really had to push a little to get space to see them. People would stand there forever watching. Did you know it's the boy sea horses who get pregnant? They had some pregnant males there. It made me really happy in a mean sort of way.
Here's feeding time in the kelp forest tank. The diver under water had a microphone inside his "helmet" to talk to the docent standing outside the tank, and a bone conduction listening device to hear the docent talk back. I'd heard of these bone conduction things before when we were fitting Ari with her hearing aids. Here's a link to the hearing aids, and I'd guess they'd work similarly to what he was using.
These are the same jellies we saw outside in the bay. The ones that hunted Jeff down.


Barnacles. They really do look like that with their little feelers poking out. We had a guy in college (I studied Marine biology) that could do a great barnacle imitation. Remind me to show you what it looked like sometime.

I had to include at least one blurry picture of this guy. He was bigger than Jeff. Bigger than I. Bigger than Jeff and I together. He also seemed to want to make friends since he kept coming over to the side of the tank to say Hi. That, or maybe he was hungry.

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Road trip, a French Bakery, and The Marine Mammal Protection Act

Go ahead and laugh foodie friends. It's typical that the first highlight of my time in Monterey was a little French bakery where we went a couple of times for sandwiches, bread, and the finally for some amazing pastries. This was only about half of their selection. We got a nice healthy (healthy sized!) sampling our last day there.
One of the reasons I wanted to go back to Monterey (I lived there for a semester in college) was my memory of diving around the bay accompanied by seals and sea lions. They're just like dogs: friendly, playful and curious. Every time I talk about playing underwater hide-and-seek with them though, someone always brings up the scary "Marine Mammal Protection Act" and how you're not supposed to bother them etc. etc. We paid "Dave" to take us out in his little boat to go diving, and guess who followed us out there and swam around with us the whole time? I swear they LIKE to be around people.

I could write a whole post on my crazy brain and how it kept telling me a sudden storm was going to come up and swamp the boat (not a cloud in the sky), how a sneaky current was going to sweep me out to sea, or worst of all, I'd panic underwater ("am I panicking yet? am I panicking yet?") and accidentally kill myself with compressed air. But I won't. Suffice it to say, I did the dive, and I'm proud of myself. If only there were some sort of pill I could swallow to shut my brain up at those times.

Ummm...my sister tells me they DO have pills to quiet voices in your head....I hope I'm not to that point yet.
Isn't she beautiful? This is a sea lion not a seal (sea lions have ears). They don't play as much, but they seem to be great at flopping all over docks. They had to put barriers in all over the dock so the sea lions wouldn't take them over.

If you look close, you'll see a bunch of jellyfish. These ones were brown and white, but we also saw light blue and clear ones. We weren't too worried about being stung, because the water was so cold we had on 7mm diving suits covering every square inch of skin except for maybe an inch around the mouth where your regulator goes in. So on our second dive, Jeff gets a killer attack jellyfish that goes right for his face, and he got stung above the lip. (not really --they randomly drift) What're the odds of that?

This is the other thing about Monterey: it's incredibly romantic. It's so beautiful and picturesque. It looked like Pirates of the Caribbean could come sailing right out of the harbor any minute. Cold and foggy in the mornings until the sun burned it off, the mist only made it more mysterious and endearing.

Jeff really wanted to see the Redwoods, so we took a day trip up through San Francisco to Muir woods. I REALLY wanted to see Chinatown though, so we drove around and around San Francisco for close to 2 hours looking for it. I saw some great views and learned how to run the GPS thing on Jeff's phone, but by the time we found Chinatown I just wanted to move on.

We got to the Redwoods so late, they let us in for free. That was cool, but it made the woods "lovely, dark, and deep". We didn't see the banana slugs either because it was pretty dry there by that time of the year.





Don't they look like flowers? Huge huge flowers.

I still have to tell you about the aquarium, so come back tomorrow (or maybe the next day if I don't pull it together in time).

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First day : Park City and the Hotel Monaco

Jeff and I have been saving up our sky miles for --forever and finally decided to cash in for our anniversary. First we were going to go to Costa Rica. Then we realized we had to set our sights a little bit lower, looked at swimming with the whale sharks in Cancun or Isla Holbox, then decided with hotel and everything, continental U.S. was going to have to do it for us.

I spent a spring semester in Monterey studying marine biology when I was about 20, and have wanted to go back ever since. It's been a long time! This was my opportunity. I planned our trip out with 4 nights in a hotel there, with a day in Park City and a night in Salt Lake right before we left.

Jeff and I got some deal off of KSL to try the two Park City ziplines, and the alpine slide. Soooo fun! here's a link showing some grandpa going down the zipline (it was drizzling a little so we didn't get pictures or video) and here's the info on all of the rides up there. Jeff wanted to race, but I knew (from my Jr. High physics class) that if he weighs more, the momentum is going to be on his side so I didn't agree. Yeah, then I beat him both times. No, I don't weigh more than him!
After Park City, we spent the night in the Hotel Monaco. What a beautiful building!! The top picture is from the foyer right where you walk in. These two are from the main lobby. Jeff said he didn't feel really comfortable there, and I think the decor was geared more towards women or gay men. Secretly I didn't feel hip enough for that place either but kept it to myself. Does it mean anything to anybody when I say it seemed like Rocky's (the old SLC mayor's) crowd there? Later we walked to the Gateway for dinner, and coming back, watched a drug deal in progress on the corner by the hotel. I think we're going back to the Hilton next time.



Remember Deja's post about matching? Here's a question for that crowd. How do these all prints match in one room?? But they did. This was our room and it was beautiful.

Two queens. No king rooms left. That was a bummer. I need to say how grateful I am that they upgraded us from the "two fulls" room we were first put in. We just messed one bed up, and then the other since we wanted our money's worth! I'll post about Monterey tomorrow, so come back.

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