'Tis the Season

Well, Thanksgiving is over and it seems like everyone is diving headfirst into Christmas! Personally, I like a little buffer time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Ya know, to let the turkey settle, finish off the leftovers, then maybe starve myself for a few days to get my weight back to normal...

I guess it never occurred to me how many people I know put up their Christmas trees and lights the day after Thanksgiving. Who knew?? I don't think I've ever in my life had a Christmas tree in the house before December, much less the day after Thanksgiving. Aaron and I both work on Black Friday every year so we never get our decorations up until well after December 1st. This year I feel like we're behind already! But I refuse to give in to peer pressure - the tree's not going up until we feel like it!

Now to figure out when I'll feel like it... I am going to admit something very shameful, try not to judge me too harshly now - for the past couple years I haven't really been looking forward to Christmas. I know!! What is wrong with me?? Sigh, I'm not a grinch or anything (no termites in my smile!), I just can't get into it. I think one reason for that is I feel like it's SUCH a busy time of year. There's something going on every weekend in December and it's stressful having to shop for everyone on the list. Especially when money is tight, as it tends to be for us at the end of the year. Another reason is that holidays are just hard in general when you're "child-free-not-by-choice." This will be Christmas number 3 for us hoping to be expecting, but not. Sometimes it's hard not to think about all the things we're missing out on by not having children.

So how do I fix my funk? Maybe Aaron and I need to start some traditions of our own. Something that will help me feel like the holiday is special and meaningful to us as a family, not just us as members of our extended family, and not as a reminder of what we 'should' have by now.

Yes, I think this will be a great year to start some traditions. And I'm taking suggestions as to what those traditions could be!

Thankful Day 3

Day three of being thankful already?? Okay then.

Today I'm thankful for doctors.

That's right!

I feel blessed that I really like all of my doctors. I haven't always, I definitely had to visit a lot of offices before I found the good ones, but it was worth it. The doctors I see now (and yes, I do visit some of them quite often!) are genuinely interested in helping me when I need it. And what a hard lesson to learn that not all doctors are that way.

If you're a fan of your doctor, don't forget to send them a card this holiday season and let them know they're appreciated.

Thankful Day 2

Today I'm thankful for... kittens and puppies!!!!

Well, okay not exactly. I'm thankful for PETS! I grew up always having dogs and I loved it. Now Aaron and I have our cat, Atticus, who is such a great addition to our lives. We picked him out together when we were dating, and although Aaron wasn't so sure he'd like living with a cat when we moved in together, he's pretty much head over heels now.

Not to get overly dramatic or anything, but I'm a firm believer that pets are members of the family, not just animals. They enrich our lives in so many ways, and I think they teach us as much as we teach them. I can't imagine our house without Atticus. :)

I might even give him a little piece of turkey on Thursday!

It's Not Just for Turkeys Anymore

My SIL, Brandy (on the right) posted this photo to her blog a while back and I just love it. In case you don't know, it's me, Aaron, his brother Noah, and Noah's wife Brandy. This photo was taken at Aaron & Noah's uncle's wedding back in... 2003? I think? Both couples had been dating for only a few months at this point. You can tell, we all look so naive, right? Haha! (This photo has nothing to do with my post, I just had it already loaded up in a blank blog post, so I thought I'd share.)

Anyway, Thanksgiving is in just a few days. The time of feasting and hopefully remembering and thanking God for all the things He's blessed us with. I for one am guilty of focusing on all the things I DON'T have (or maybe just one thing I don't have) rather than all the wonderful things I do have. Even Thanksgiving day is usually focused much more on the feast than the thanks. So this week I've decided to be consciously grateful. Yes, the whole week. Well, except for that comatose hour right after dinner, I'm giving myself a pass then.

Today, since it's Monday, I think I'll be grateful for my job. As tedious and stressful as it can be, I am lucky to even have a job in this economy. I certainly have enough friends looking for work to appreciate my circumstances. So as I get ready to head home for the day, I'll send up a little prayer thanking the Big Guy that Aaron and I have steady jobs that pay all our bills and keep a roof over our heads.

What are you thankful for?

Halloween - Is it Over Yet?

Aaron and I went to a Halloween party last Saturday, so to me it feels like Halloween is already over. Why is everyone talking about costumes and parties and whatnot?? Oh, right. The rest of the world isn't necessarily on my schedule. That actually explains a lot...

This weekend we're invited to three parties. It started off as two and a concert, and we just received the third invite the other day. We couldn't decide what we wanted to do BEFORE we started losing count of our options, so I don't know how we're going to make our minds up now. What we definitely will not be doing is staying home and passing out candy. I thought it would be fun last year, but since 50% of the kids that showed up didn't even bother dressing up, much less saying "Trick or Treat" or "Thank you," much less waiting until I opened the front door all the way before plunging their grubby hands into the bowl in my arms and retrieving fistfuls of candy (and no, I am not exaggerating), I think we'll pass on that this year... and pretty much every year from now on.

There's also a costume contest at work tomorrow. Somehow I don't think the "Zombie Pinup" costume I made for last week's party is entirely work-appropriate. And since my absolutely INGENIOUS and HILARIOUS costume that I made last year got the short shrift, and a boring, store-bought "Twister" (like the game) costume won for "funniest," I'm not really feeling the work contest either. (If you're wondering, I was "Static Cling" - I wore black yoga pants and a black t-shirt with socks, underwear and pantyhose sewn all over both, and I know I got more laughs than "Twister!" It was rigged I tell you!)

So yeah, I'm pretty much over Halloween. Aaron's excited to go party again this weekend, so we'll most likely end up doing something festive, though. By that time I'm sure I'll have caught the Halloween bug again. And if not, I'll just drink!

Still alive!

Well, I have been seriously neglecting this blog!

Not that there's been too terribly much going on in our little world. We went to a Dodgers playoff game a couple weeks ago, which is now pretty much a moot point since they got destroyed by the Phillies. But the game was great (even though they lost). I was amazed at the cameraderie - everyone in our section was chatting with each other, giving high-fives every time the team got a hit, it was really fun.

Other than that, we're just cruising along. I had my doctor's appointment last week and will be scheduling my laparoscopy as soon as we get approval from the insurance company. Should be no problem since we already verified that the surgery would be covered. I'm a little nervous because medical things, especially incisions, tools going inside the body, and stitches really freak me out. But if it leads to that elusive second line it will make this whole long journey worthwhile!

That's it for now, I'm off to sit in traffic for about an hour or so. It's looking pretty wretched out there!

Have a wonderful weekend.

What's New

Well hello there!

It's been a few days since my last post... Hmmm actually more like a couple weeks! Things are going swimmingly with Aaron and I. We spent the weekend cleaning the house and garage, and we have a friend coming over today to get started on re-wiring the garage. We can finally get rid of the SUPER efficient ball-and-tube wiring and get some electrical technology from the later half of the 20th century in there. Aaron will finally have his very own man cave soon. He's really excited. And I'm excited that there will finally be room to park my car!

In other news, I want to share some information about our journey to expand our little family. It has been really frustrating (not to say a tad heartbreaking) not knowing why we haven't had any luck in doing so yet. All of our initial testing has come back all clear, but there are still some other things to look into. Unfortunately, we've been kind of at a standstill until we can get better health insurance (which we'll have starting in January). There is one thing we have decided to try, though. I have some signs of endometriosis, which runs in my family and can cause infertility. The only way to find out if you have it is for the doctor to actually see it, which requires surgery. If the doctor finds endometriosis during the surgery, usually they can also remove some/most/all of it, increasing your chances of getting pregnant. Luckily, our current insurance covers this procedure 100%!

I have an appointment with my doctor to discuss it in two weeks. We're hoping to be able to schedule the surgery before the end of the year, and as odd as it sounds, we're hoping that the doctor does find endo, is able to remove it, and that we'll be on our way to parenthood soon after. Of course there is no guarantee that it'll work, but we feel confident in our decision to pursue the treatment. Okay, and a little nervous. We'd appreciate your prayers and support as we take this first big step in overcoming infertility, and we'll update you again in a few weeks.

Have a great week!

Save the Honeybees!

A fellow blogger recently posted about her weekend visiting some cider mills in her state. It sounded like such a good time, and got me thinking about what kind of fun Fall activities Aaron and I could do locally on the cheap.

And I remembered - there's a honey farm and honey tasting room out in Fillmore. Every time we pass it one of us says to the other, "We should go there sometime." So I googled it: www.bennetthoney.com.

Not only does this family-run business make award-winning varieties of honey, but they're also doing what they can to address Colony Collapse Disorder among the honeybee population. I've heard that honeybees have been mysteriously disappearing for the past few years but I didn't know much more than that. The Bennett's site has a short article briefly describing the various theories behind the honebees' disappearance, then it explains the most accepted theory and what the Bennetts are doing to eliminate the cause. It's pretty interesting!

I am terrified of bees (we have a bad history!), but I do know that they're an extremely important and irreplacable factor in creating much of our food supply, and I think it's important that everyone is at least a little educated on this issue.

***Steps off soapbox***

So anyway, I think we might be taking a trip out to Bennett's Honey Farm in the near future, if anyone feels like coming along!

The End: Zion to Vegas

Today is the most glorious day! I'm sitting on my own couch, drinking fresh-brewed coffee in my PJ's. Football's on TV and Atticus is lounging on the window sill. And we have no intentions of doing anything more strenuous than laundry all day! It's good to be home!

Now I present to you the final installment of our Epic Road Trip Extravaganza! (If you haven't figured it out yet, all of the photos here and on previous posts do absolutely zero justice to the cool stuff we saw. So just imagine everything to be 10 times cooler and bigger than how they seem here!)

This is the Virgin River at Zion National Park. It's a big part of what made the park look so dang amazing. Pretty impressive for such a small river!

The rocks/mountains at Zion were formed millions of years ago. The area used to be a desert with sand dunes up to 3,000 feet high! An ancient sea deposited minerals into the sand that eventually turned it into the sandstone mountains that are there now. Amazing!

Starting our hike up to the Emerald Pools.

On our way to the first pool! Aaron loves climbing on top of rocks. (Who am I kidding? I do, too!)

Almost to the lower pool. You can see how the water just trickles down the rock.

(Try clicking on the photo to see it larger.) This was taken from the path just past the lower pool, so we're up a little higher. You can see the drops of water coming right down the center of the photo, and the rail/path on the lower right side gives you an idea of how huge this rock is.

On our way to the next pool! This was a harder (much harder!) hike than up to the lower pool. We somehow skipped past the middle pool and went right on to the upper one. (We saw the middle pool on our way back down.)

The Upper Emerald Pool. The rocks go up much higher than what my chintzy little camera can capture! That's Aaron by the water, and some random chick getting in the way of my shot!

Not a bad view on the way back down!

Our second hike was supposed to be a short walk to the Grotto. Unfortunately, nature had other plans! A thunder storm passed through Zion when we got about halfway there, despite the shuttle driver's claim that there was a 0% chance of rain! We found a handy rock to hide under while we waited for the worst of the storm to pass, and got to listen to the thunder echoing off the rocks for about 10 minutes.

Here's a pic we took from our rock shelter. It rained hard! In the lower left there is the path we were on... now muddy and riddled with huge puddles. Not the best hiking weather, especially since I was wearing Converse! Once the heaviest rain passed we climbed down to the street and walked back to the lodge. We decided to head on to Vegas at that point since we were both wet and I certainly wasn't wearing the best shoes for hiking in the mud. We'll just have to go back some day!

Now, we've been to Vegas MANY times, but we drive out from the opposite direction of course, which is the most boring, ugly drive known to man. So we had no idea that just an hour or so on the other side of the city was this cool drive through the mountains!

The "beautiful" Vegas skyline! Once we got there we almost felt like we were already home, being only one short 5 hour drive away. We didn't do a whole lot, just had a nice dinner at a restaurant in our hotel, and did a little gambling and drinking. It was a fun, relaxing way to end our trip.

Thanks for following along!!

Denver to Cedar City, UT

Today is Zion day! And after that we're heading to Vegas, baby. I can't believe our trip is already coming to a close. It's been, literally, an amazing ride!

Yesterday's drive from Denver to Cedar City was very, very long, but also really cool! We're rushing out the door right now, so I'll just leave you with these photos:

Denver!

It's official - we like Denver. Not as much as we heart Ventura of course, but Denver is pretty cool and we've had a great time here! We'll probably be back someday to check it out in further detail. Until then, here's what we've got:

Oh yeah, first, here is a little taste of our drive from Iowa to Nebraska, in case you were really jonesing for some photographic evidence. This was taken before we got to the infinite flatness that is Nebraska.

We don't have any photos of our first night in Denver, but we went to a Mexican restaurant called Rio Grande for dinner (and tequila shots, of course), then wound up at the hotel bar. I had my first dirty vodka martini (my new drink of choice!!) and we had fun chatting with some locals and the bartender while watching baseball highlights. It was a great night!

Today, we started out with bagels at Einstein's, and then wandered down the 16th St. mall until we caught a glimpse of the state capitol building off in the distance, and we decided to make the trek to check it out.

Aaron had never been to any capitol building and I've only been to California's. They're pretty similar in design - lots of marble and stairs, with a big rotunda in the middle. We checked out the Congress rooms which were pretty cool, and just wandered around. Hooray for democracy!

A furry woodland creature carrying his lunch outside the capitol building.

Our first choice of what to do this afternoon was to visit the Coors brewery, but they don't do tours on Wednesday! Second choice was an old-fashioned candy factory, but it was a really short tour, so we opted to drive up to Fort Collins to check out the New Belgium brewery. It turned out to be probably the best choice we could have made. We got to try six different types of beer for freebies, and those who know me know I do love my beer oh so very much! And Aaron and I are particular fans of New Belgium.

Pretty cool beer bottle light fixture!

In front: Sunshine, in back: Dandelion. Both were YUM! I have to find out if they sell them in CA.

On the way back from the brewery the clouds were doing some very cool things!

After drinking, we went to Sushi Den for dinner on some friends' recommendation, and it was... well, average. But, it was sushi, and we like that! Tonight we're staying in, watching the boob tube and going to bed early. We have to get up early tomorrow because we have a long drive (over 8 hours) to get to Zion.

Good night!

Cedar Rapids to Kearney, NE

We were so sad to leave Cedar Rapids, and especially John yesterday! I have to throw him some major props - he really went out of his way to show us a good time and make us feel at home. And we had a great time! Thanks again, JB! We'll continue working on getting him to move back to CA. :)

I was going to post some pics, but we left the camera in the car... and well, the drive through Nebraska is really boring anyway. It is flat, flat, flat, and surrounded by cornfields for hours. We're about halfway through it right now (in Kearney) so we have even more to look forward to today! Right now we're about 5 hours from Denver.

So far the highlights from Nebraska are:

1. We stopped at a gas station where they had flat screen TV's mounted over the pumps playing Fox News, and then piping the audio throughout the mini mart and restrooms there. You don't see that in Southern California!

2. There were some really cute, big, old barns, lots of windmills, and lots of cows.

3. There was about a 3 mile stretch of road that almost sounded musical. And it was really loud! At first we thought it was something like the Honda Musical Highway but nope. It was just noise!

4. Our hotel is quite nice, and right across the street from a Quizno's (yeah, I'm a sandwich nut). We walked over for dinner last night and chatted up the employees there, who are students at the University of Nebraska extension. They were some of the friendliest people we've met on the trip so far. Oh, and they said the highway doesn't show their state well at all, so we shouldn't judge it by what we've seen from the road. We'll just have to take their word for it!

We got up really late today so we won't be in Denver until this evening (if Aaron ever gets out of the shower that is). We don't really have anything specific planned for the couple of days that we're there, but hopefully I'll at least have some fun pics to post!

Until then...

Weekend in Cedar Rapids

Well, tonight is our last night in Cedar Rapids before starting the trek back home. Here's a little taste of what we've been up to this past weekend...

Saturday morning Aaron's cousin John took us out on a nature trail. This froggy fella marked the beginning of the trail.

John is a great photographer! Most of these photos he took. It was nice to get a break from being paparazzi for a little while.

We walked through some amazing, colorful fields. Loaded with bugs! Unfortunately, the mosquitos made a meal of me.

A storm came through just a few weeks ago causing the Indian Creek to flood, and pushed this bridge several feet down the creek. Being the brave, intrepid explorers we are, we still crossed it!

I don't like bugs, bees in particular, so you'd be right in assuming Aaron took this pic. Not bad!

I had enough of the mosquitos by the time we were done with our walk, and booked it out of the nature trail as fast as my feet could carry me.

Later on, we headed to the park to attempt to fly some kites. There wasn't much wind, but John got his kite into the air for a little while.

Against John's and my recommendation, Aaron got really close to the geese to get this photo. Then he chased them. Luckily, seems like these geese were used to having people around and didn't attack like we thought they might.

In California, leaves don't "change color." They turn brown and fall off... sometimes. So I never knew that in other parts of the country leaves actually turn colors! This tree has a lovely case of autumn disease, leaving it half green and half red.

We ended the day with some delicious barbecue, a nap, and a night of board games with John's friends! It was so much fun. We didn't go to bed until almost 3:00 a.m. and slept in late today. Then we took a tour of Cedar Rapids and met up with some of John and Aaron's extended family. Which brings us up to right now! We're sitting around the kitchen shootin' the breeze and listening to the cicadas and crickets. Pretty much the perfect ending to the perfect weekend.

OK City to Cedar Rapids

We made it! We're officially at our furthest point East on our trip, and after this weekend we'll be on our way back home. I can't believe that it's almost halfway over! We're spending the next three nights at Aaron's cousin John's place in Cedar Rapids, and I have to say, his place is pretty freakin' awesome. I'll post photos of it later this weekend. For now, here's what we saw the past two days:

For Tracy - this is the drive to Oklahoma City. I love Oklahoma and have decided to move here some day. I just love that there's grass everywhere (you'll understand my penchant for grass if you've seen my sad, sad front yard). We drove into a storm (finally!) and got to see a pretty cool lightning show on our way to the hotel.

Pretty much every place we've been has just blown all of my preconceived notions away. I just wish we could have spent more time in all of the cities we've been in so far. This is one of the rivers we crossed while driving through Kansas. (OMG - there are rivers in Kansas? I thought it was just fields of wheat!) How cool is it that there are trees sticking up out of the water?

Yep, there are definitely lots of fields in Kansas too. :)

I completely forgot to bring the camera into the Royals-Tigers game, but here's a photo of the Missouri River on our way from the game to our hotel. The game was great - okay, the game itself was pretty boring, but we sat right next to two Dodgers scouts! Aaron chatted one up and found out he was watching the Royals' pitcher. He even asked what we thought of the team this year. It was pretty dang cool.

And here's our view from our hotel room in Kansas City. I really wish we'd been able to spend more time there, the city seems really cool. Did you know it has the second largest number of fountains in the world? Only Rome has more. Again, Missouri completely surpassed all my expectations. It is a beautiful state!

Okay, I drove from Kansas City to Cedar Rapids and Aaron was on paparazzi duty... unfortunately, he wasn't all that interested in his job so we don't have a lot of photos from this leg.

Iowa is full of fields! Lots of corn and soybeans. Even their sign says "Fields of opportunities". I, however, love fields, farms, ranches... It all seems very romantic to me, the idea of living on acres of land all to yourself. So I love it! And I can't wait to see more!

But for now, I'm taking a break with my Miller Light. More later!