Strawberry Jam

Steve and I made strawberry freezer jam the other night. It is soo yummy, I was a little nervous because I have never made jam before but it was surprisingly easy (We used the Sure-Jell reduced sugar Pectin... if anyone was wondering).

This post is mostly because I am procrastinating writing a paper. I am taking this independant study history class and it sucks and I suck at doing it... can ya tell?

Lake Powell

So I realize that all of my blog posts lately are inundated with pictures but I just can't help myself! So please understand that with lake powell we compiled everyone's pictures and had like 1040 pictures to choose from, I really consolodated! But here you have it.....

The first week of June we spent a week in lake powell with Steve's family, his Canadian cousins, and our brother-in-law, Jordan's family. There was like 22 of us on the boat. It was so much fun, we played on the boat, played a lot of cards, ate good food and enjoyed time with our family so much. I have decided that Lake Powell really is one of my favorite places to be.

This was our home for the week....

And this was our playground....

This water weenie ride actually turned quite bad, Michelle (third girl back), and I hit heads on one of our crashes and it actually burst her ear drum! It was the first day in Lake Powell... She took it like a champ though. She seriously didn't even cry. I always knew I had a hard head!

The boys came away with no injuries, if you can believe it.

I really tried to talk Steve out of cliff jumping, he didn't listen of course but it made a pretty cool picture, eh?


Here most of the boys and Racheal swam over to a cliff in our little cove (I know you can't tell it's a cliff but there is a drop-off into the water.) They climbed around for a while and then thought it would be really cool or really manly to push big rocks into the water to make big splashes.... it was highly entertaining to watch from a distance.

Steve is such a great wakeboarder, it's so fun to watch him do crazy stuff that I would never even think of trying. He loves every second of it though, it looks like quite a rush to be so high in the air!

Laura and I took a crazy tube ride together, we went through the biggest waves. We seriously could have been in the ocean.

Hangin' on....

But not quite hard enough!

This lizard was the ugliest lizard I have ever seen, it hung out right outside of our houseboat, but everytime someone went to look at it, it ran away. Finally we got a peek at it after a couple of days of chasing it.

Steve and his first time wakesurfing


I drove the houseboat for about five minutes, and retired after complaints of not being able to go in a straight line. I'm pretty sure I am not meant to drive boats!



Over the week I had to have played at least 10 or more games of rook. This is our last day and I finally won my very first game ever of Rook. What an exciting day!



We went on a really cool slick rock hike on Sunday, It was really pretty. Calvin (the dog) killed a lizard on this hike, it was pretty sad. Poor lizard...


Best Part of the Trip...
Last year at Lake Powell I spent the entire week trying to get up on the wakeboard. I finally got up for the first time on the very last day on the very last boat run of the whole trip. I basically spent the week doing this.... (the picture below)



But this year at Lake Powell, I was able to get up and I got a little adventurous and I jumped! I got some air going into the wake! It was really exciting, I have never really gotten air anywhere besides a trampoline. I have to say that wakeboarding is so much more fun when you can actually get up! Woohoo!

Brittany's Graduation and Yosemite National Park

The Wednesday before memorial day weekend Brittany (my littlest sister) graduated from high school! We were able to make it to her graduation. She had a solo and did sooo good! I am so proud of her. She literally amazes me, I could never get up and sing in front of so many people. I am bummed too because she is going to BYU in the fall and we have gotten to see her so much! Congratulations!

Yosemite

Over Memorial Day weekend Steve and I went to Yosemite with his family and their family friends the May's. These memorial day vacations are a long-standing tradition in his family. This last one was the 21st! We had a ton of fun in spite of the weather hanging between 40 and 50 degrees with intermitent rain the whole weekend. The only day that was sunny and nice were the day Steve and I got there (65 degrees), and the day we left (60 degrees)!

The whole rest of the weekend, the weather looked a little something like this...

We did a hike up to Vernal Falls which was only like 3 miles, but probably 3/4 of a mile is walking up 600 steep, wet granite stairs. We all felt it the next day. The nice thing was the falls were so beautiful it was worth it to climb all those stairs.
One day we went to see the Giant Sequioa trees. I had never seen them before but they were so unbelievably huge! None of these pictures really do them justice but if you ever get a chance go check them out, you might not believe your eyes!

This tree looked like the jaws of death, that's why we're scared. We could have been eaten :)

Steve's birthday was spent rafting the Tuolemne River. It was like 40 degrees and raining the whole day! One of our guides said that was the coldest he has ever ran that river. Needless to say, everyone tried as hard as they could to stay in the boat and not to fall in! I had done a little bit of rafting before and thought I sort of knew what to expect, ummm no. I had no idea! This river had all the way up to class 4 rapids, I had never been in such crazy water!

Keeping up... not catching up!

I have made a new resolve to keep up with the blog thing! So yesterday we went on another hike in Sabino Canyon. We went with our friends Amber and Scott, and had a lot of fun. We decided that it is probably our last one there until the weather cools down. We are going to have to move our hiking to Mount Lemmon. Mount Lemmon is always like 25-30 degrees cooler at the top than Tucson is. It is a summer haven! Anyways, the desert was still beautful. All of the cacti are blooming right now and there is still a lot of green plants. Steve became Mr. Artistic and took like a million nature photos, but I have to give him credit a lot of them turned out really cool. I survived this hike much better than the last one. Probably because we were only there for about 2 and half hours!

So I realize there are going to be a lot of pictures but I just want you all to know that Arizona can be pretty if you see it the right way!

This time I decided to just bring frozen ice packs to keep myself cool. It turned out to be a great idea! I was much more pleasant this hike!

We saw a ton of these little lizards running around. Steve wanted to catch one and bring it home but was afriad they were poisonous. We when got home we looked them up and found out they are called collered lizards, and they aren't poisonous. Upon finding that out, Steve has decided that collered lizard would be his pet of choice and keeps asking me if we can get one!

Woah, it's been a while!

Like I said in my last blog (that happened 2 and half months ago!) I have issues with keeping my blog updated! Ha so here is my third attempt at playing catch-up! So, since our last blog the following things have happened......

Spring Break

We spent spring break here in tucson and Steve's mom came down and spent the week! I have to admit I did have the mother-in-law jitters that everyone talks about. I made sure our apartment was super clean and all that jazz. But the '"jitters" were really unneccesary, Sandra came and we had a fantastic time! While Steve was at work Sandra and I got pedicures and ate out and shopped! Then, Steve took a couple of days off and we went to Mount Lemmon and hiked around a little bit and ate pizza at a famous little pizza kitchen up there! We also took our first hike in Sabino Canyon.

This is the beginning of our hike, as you can see we all started out happy...

The canyon was a beautiful desert scene when we went, everything was flowering and so gorgeous

Like I said, I started the hike happy but soon became hot and uncomfortable, this is me attempting to stay cool, hence the sunglasses, umbrella, wet hankerchief, and camelback.

This is me getting my hair and back wet because I couldn't stay cool! My mother-in-law took care of me! I started getting really quite miserable at this point....

So this is like the biggest saguaro cactus we had ever seen, so I am your reference point. I was really miserable, so I put the my camelback in my mouth so I didn't have to smile! I was being such a brat!

Finally, like 7 miles later we made it to our destination 7 Falls. It was beautiful. It took me a while to admit that it was worth it. I had to be miserable for a while! Poor Steve and Sandra!

Steve LOVED this place... now he is just wondering if I will ever go back!

Easter

For Easter, Sandra gave us this nice basket and instead of an easter egg hunt we had a easter basket hunt. Steve won, dang it!

We got these cool really strong magnets in our basket, notice the end fingers, the magnets are just staying there! (ok i think its cool anyways)

For the rest of the weekend, we went up to Mesa to spend Easter sunday with my family. We had a family get together and we saw the Easter pageant at the Mesa temple. It was really fun to spend time with both of our familes at the same time! Sandra left on Tuesday morning, we were so sad to see her go. We had so much fun together. I feel very fortunate to have a mother-in-law I can love so much! We hope she comes back!

Mom's Birthday

So my mom's birthday was the end of March and my dad and little sister were going to be out of town. So Steve and I went up to Mesa and took her flowers and stuff to make dinner! She was super surprised and really happy. We were so excited to surprise her! Happy Birthday Mom!

Pima County Fair

We babysat for a couple in our ward for a night so they could go to the fair, and they ended up giving us a free admission to the fair! So we went and it was really fun. We saw all kinds of animals, (they even had elephants!) and we walked around all of the 4-H animals there were the craziest looking llama's you've ever seen! We saw some trained bears and African acrobats, and ate a funnel cake which was very tasty! We had a lot of fun.

This particular llama liked Steve a lot, I missed when he was trying to give Steve a kiss!

Just me being a dork!

Kiersty, Seth, Laura and Scott's Graduation!

So Kiersty graduated from BYU-Law and Seth graduated from BYU on April 25. Originally Steve and I weren't going to be able to go but at the last minute we bought tickets to go! We didn't tell anyone except Seth we were coming so we basically just showed up on the doorstep and surprised everyone! It was so much fun. My whole family was there so we spent the majority of the weekend with them, which was great because getting everyone together doesn't happen very often! We were able to spend a little bit of time with the Hales when we got there which is always fun. Scott and Laura were both graduating with their Master's degrees so we were happy we got to see them too!

Yep, we still love eachother

The happy graduates

Steve thinks he is a rockstar...

She was really tired...

Yeah for cute colored flats!

So Brittany decided to go to BYU for college, (which makes Steve so happy) so steve took her on a tour of campus and she bought the same BYU t-shirt that I have! It was special!

"Wakeboarding"

Last weekend our friends Troy and Nancy invited us to go wakeboarding! We were pretty excited to get in a run before Lake Powell. So the only lake near tucson, Lake Patagonia, is really little and like an hour away from us. So we drove all the way to the lake and apparently after May 1st, Saturdays and Sundays you aren't allowed to tow people. So we couldn't wakeboard! It was tragic. But we had a nice boatride and caught some sun so it wasn't a waste. Troy and Nancy's little 9 month old daughter Erica kept us pretty entertained. She was a lot of fun!

Nancee and Erica- she makes the funniest faces! We were laughing all day long!

Just me and Steve havin' fun!

Most Recently...

So most recently in our lives, on May 14, we hit our 10 month anniversary! I seriously can't believe it has already been 10 months, but at the same time I feel like we've been married so much longer! Also, Steve made a design at work for the tank round that he works on. It was tested and it worked! There is still a lot of testing to be done and stuff but there is a chance it could go into production. So we were really excited about that. Also he got promoted from and Engineer 1 to an Engineer 2. So it means he now has more responsibility and he is moving up! I am so proud of him he is a great engineer! Also I just finished school today. Well, I am done for a week and a half before I start summer school but I am so happy to be done with this semester. It has been kind of brutal, but I guess a good learning experience. This last school year is the first time since like the 7th grade I have been able to maintain a 4.0. I am really happy about that. I didn't think I would ever do it!

So in honor of my year of 4.0 Steve bought me a digital piano! I am so excited I have been dying to play the piano for a while now but never had a place to play, so it has been wonderful being able to brush up on those skills that have greatly diminished! I have given Steve 2 piano lessons and he is doing great. He can already play 4 songs and practices everyday! My little prodigy....

That is our lives up to this point. Basically we are soo happy and enjoying life! I couldn't ask for more really. Steve is such a great husband and so supportive of me in everything I do!