Christmas Vacation

Our winterwonderland!














I thought my homemade caramel latte looked cool this morning... anyway...















It has been too long since I updated this... thought since the last post was "summer vacation", this one should be titled "Christmas Vacation". :)
I am half way done with my masters degree in education!! Yes! I began that degree in July and I will be done May 30. It is tough working and then coming home to work on papers and reading about curriculum and education theory, but it's a good experience and I am so glad I am doing this before we have babies. It's a 20 month degree but the accelerated program gets it done in 10 months! I have survived a research project and a class on curriculum theory which I had never studied before and have realized that the job I have with our district coincides with a lot of the stuff I have had to study. It's made some papers and assignments easier which is good. I will spare the details about data and test scores... blah blah blah
Due to my school, we have basically stayed in Casper most of the fall and don't plan to go anywhere until Spring Break... Maui here we come!! Yay!
Here are some more pictures of our Christmas weekend... lots of snow and time to ourselves and family!! Hope you had a great Christmas and I hope I update more than every 6 months!

At mom and dad's house Christmas Eve night opening presents with everyone...



















At our house with Shadow's green eyes... I mean our little Christmas tree...















If we don't bury him... he eats all the snow we shovel. :)

summer vacation

I wish I blogged more, but hey... I am having too much fun roaming around the Rocky Mountain States road tripping with the husband. Here's a pic of a portion of Arches National Park. It's called Park Avenue...

Then we hit Las Vegas and saw New York there too...

Vegas is a weird city. If all the 'mega resorts' were missing... there would be a small little town with not much to do. However, they really do decorate nicely in those hotels... holy cow! It was very neat walking through all of them. Ceasars Palace, Mandalay Bay, and MGM grand were my favorite. These flowers were all over MGM and I thought there were cool looking...

That's all for now... I am going to go eat at a BBQ place with Nate in Kalispell, MT... where we happen to be now. I will hopefully upload more pics of our fun in Vegas and our other travels so far this summer at another time...

Some Pics

I finally found some time to put pictures on this blog and start an album on Facebook.


This is Hamilton Pool in Texas. We visited here with our cousins and uncle when we went down to Austin over Christmas. It is a pretty neat place.



This is the water from Hamilton pool flowing toward a river who's name I do not remember. The water flowed so slowly and it was green as ever. I had never hiked in a place like this. It was neat.


Here's Shadow and Nate at the dog park. We spend a lot of time wandering around doing nothing or getting some good exercise. Over spring break I walked here almost every day and it was nice. I wish it was right next to our house...


The Dog


It is still not quite spring here. This was a couple weeks ago, but the back yard still has snow in it.
We went snowboarding yesterday and it snowed all day with the really nice fluffy "champagne" snow as Nate called it today. We barely made it up the mtn in our front wheel drive car (thank you snow plow!), and by the time we went to go down the mtn, there was so much snow drifted around our car that we had to get towed out of the parking lot to the road where we then followed another plow down the mtn. It was awesome. It snowed all night up there and by the time we got up there today they had 30 new inches of snow in 24 hrs!!! It was really good snowboarding! The problem, besides being their last day open, was the line to get on the lift was about a 20 min. wait, so we only went down a couple of times and had fun, then went to Pizza Hut... So anway... it's still winter here, but I don't think for long. I am ready for nice moderate temperatures and lot's of sunny days. And now that the mountain has received ~70 inches of snow in the last 2 weeks, there will be plenty of snowshoeing to do for a bit. Anything to get into shape... i have goals. We'll see if I meet them. Nate has goals too... so we're trying to encourage each other. Alrightythen... I feel a little sense of accomplishment having put some photos on here and Facebook. Better go get ready for the week... goodnight.

Goodbye Spring Break

I had a really great week doing nothing. Ha... not really. I did a lot! I even went to work for a few hours on monday to get my desk cleaned up, file some papers, and get some paperwork done for my kidos so I can keep track of their progress in math tutoring. I got to visit my friend Hannah, tried to go snowboarding but it was too icy and hard, spent time with my mom and took the niece and nephew to The Science Zone for a while, saw my sister for a bit, and I got to have lunch with Nate everyday... but Friday. Instead I slept in and took the dog to the dog park to walk/jog while he played in the river and climbed his trees. I began a big project in our home office also. We got a file cabinet for cheap (legal size with 4 drawers) and I began going through our papers and pictures and began filing things so that we are more organized. I threw a couple of boxes... BIG boxes of paper and old junk mail away... i think that stuff has been around since we got married. I recycled old magazines and cleaned up our room of stuff that was just laying around doing nothing. The organization of the office may take a few more lazy days (whenever that will happen again) to really get done. I am contemplating having a garage sale in June, but... ya know. It may be easier to sell some stuff through the school district classifieds/email and then give all our junk to salvation army or some place like that.

Anyway... now it's Sunday night and I really need to write my "professional goal" and submit it to HR this week. Gotta love all the logistics of working for such a large employer. It's a good job though and I really do like what I get to do. I want to be at Bar Nunn again next year too and I am thinking about beginning my master degree in Ed. Tech. or Spec. Ed. and that may be easier if I am a tutor and not a classroom teacher. Someday I would like a classroom, and then a classroom in my house... with my own children. :) We'll see what God has in store for us!

And by the way... my best friend from high school had a baby a little while ago! He's a cutie!! Visit Colin, Stacy and Bennett's blog here.

OK... back to the spring break thing. It was a good week and I am thankful for the time I had to do whatever I wanted. It was much needed and I can't wait for June to roll around so I can experience this again. Nate is kind of jealous that my job gives me breaks like this. One of these breaks we'll for sure go somewhere and sit on a beach with some fruity drinks and do nothing for a week. That will be great and that will be a reason to post some pics... but who wants to see me in my sweatpants on the couch with a pile of papers and file folders watching The Office? See why I don't post pics. :)

Thoughts for the moment...

1. Is the chicken in campbell's chicken noodle soup real chicken?
2. I hate being sick! This is an annoying cold/flu...
3. I honestly wonder if I will be well enough to go back to school on Monday. It's that bad!
4. Why is it that I can blog, watch movies and look at Facebook, but can't get some much needed to do work done when I am sick?
5. I just want to go to sleep!
6. I have so much stuff to do.
7. I wish this coming week was spring break... but I have to wait another 6 days.
8. The Office season 1-3 are quite entertaining, but make me laugh too much which makes me cough... but I still enjoy the show.
9. Nate and I have been home since Wednesday afternoon after I took him to the hospital to get his white blood cell count. (minus the class I had today and eating at Barry's with mom)
10. I should go put my partylite order in.
11. Nate just made me laugh while I was blowing my nose and it made a whistle sound... good times!
12. will anyone read this?
13. I should put a link to this blog on my facebook.
14. Back to facebook...
15. 15 just seems like a more even number to end on even though 15 is actually an odd number. Weird!

I would like to post some pics of our fun time this weekend in Pinedale with Lyndsay and snowboarding, but I dont have the pics on this computer and the computer they are on is not hooked up to internet... or maybe it is... anyway, I don't have them on this computer. I hope to have them someday.
I decided that I could live in a place like Pinedale someday. It's quiet, no wind, peaceful, beautiful and not so busy... or so it seemed for the short time we were there. I like it. Nate and I probably won't live in Casper forever and now I am getting ideas of where I may really enjoy living. The lack of wind just turned the place into paradise even with a foot of snow on the ground. you don't realize how nice a place can be if there is no wind. Gotta love Casper. I am off to bed. Spent too much time reading this blog... http://mghinwinter.blogspot.com/ talk about a cool job! Nate and I could do this... and love it. You have no idea!!! We would love it! Good night!

Snow Day!

It's been a while since I logged on here... today is a snow day, so why not today? Actually, I am about to go to bed, but thought I would blog real quick.
Yesterday I woke up with a stomach ache and headache and just couldn't get myself to go to work, which was a good thing cause then I did get sick and slept until noon... crazy! So I felt better by yesterday night and woke up refreshed and ready to head to work this morning. I got out of the shower and looked out the window at all the blowing snow and thought, "I better check the school district email." What do I find? An announcement that school was canceled due to inclement weather, aka strong winds and very cold temps... it ended up being sunny most of the day, but the blowing snow was so bad I couldn't see my neighbor's house much of the day. Back to the story... I had already showered and just stayed up. I made a big pot of coffee after Nate left, put The Office season 2 in the dvd player and sat on the couch for about an hour. Then I decided to put Christmas decorations away, then vacuum, then move furniture to vacuum under it, then rearrange completely. I even got our "catch all" room cleaned up enough to walk into. The bed is even cleared off and if someone needed to stay at our house, they could do so. So it was a productive day for me. Next time we have a snow day... maybe I will attack our office and throw a bunch of junk mail and old papers out so i can use my desk again! I do wonder if we'll have another snow day tomorrow though... our roads are worse now then they were this morning. Who knows.

January is almost over! Nate and I have been able to go snowboarding a few times in the past 2 weeks. I thought I might have forgotten how to do it... but I am actually better this year than last year and sometimes I get really brave and just head straight down the hill... yikes... I'll get better as time permits. We've also began a Bible study at our church called Experiencing God and it's been a good way for us to spend time in our word and pray together each day. It is challenging in that we are memorizing verses also... so far so good! I better head to bed now in case I do have to get up early enough to drive on the bad roads to school... goodnight!!