Cow Appreciation Day

Since we are moving to Lubbock, I have joined the "South Plain Sisters" google group to get the insider of West Texas. One of the ladies emailed us informing that last Friday was "Cow Appreciation Day". This group has been helpful, but they went above and beyond the call of duty with this email. Rumors have told me about this day, but I didn't know how it worked or when it was. All we had to do was dress like a cow "head to hoof", and we would get a free Chic Filet-A meal. I immediately told Mike when he got home, and he loved the idea. I was so excited to dress like a cow that I was prancing around our apartment in my costume. My favorite part was the long johns that I wore. I just couldn't believe they gave us a $16 meal for free. Life is good.

To: Garret Barber and Dave Meyer

I let my wife go shopping on her own, and she comes back with this. Good thing I'm moving away from my Talahassee friends. I don't know if I could show my face in front of them again. Supposedly it was about the colors or something.

The Bachelor Life

So Katie has been out of town since Wednesday and will be until Friday, and I've reverted back to my bachelor ways. I figure that its my duty to remind all you married guys what it takes to live the single life again. Here is my very important list of things needed and things not needed for living without a woman.

NEEDED THINGS:

1. A Man Place. This is a place where you can sit down all day long and do nothing. It's a place where your body melts in its sheer laziness into an inanimate object. It serves as your table, chair, study, clothes bin, and even your bed sometimes. Mine is my couch.

Now you may be asking yourself, "Is that all Sunday's dishes sitting by his Man Place?" The answer is yes. I never said that a dishwasher was needed, did I?

2. Basketball shorts. I believe this is self explanatory. It didn't take me long to remember that no other form of leg ware is needed for enjoying life.

Nobody is stopping me from going outside in basketball shorts and a polo.

3. 2% Milk. Because its so much better than 1%.

4. Pepsi. This is always a need--woman or not.

5. Food. This mostly consists of cereal.

Notice the bag on the left. That bad of Golden Puffs was full 3 days before this picture was taken.

6. Unlimited supply of popsicles. Because nothing screams, "I'm a man living alone," like dried popsicle sticks stuck on the counter.

THINGS NOT NEEDED:

1. Razor.

2. Toothbrush. No, no, no, I'm just joking...but seriously.

3. A made bed. Why make it when its just going to be messed up again?

Anyways, there you have it. How to be a bachelor. Its not easy work my friends.

PS. I'd like to thank all those who have kept me company during this last week. Robert and Megan Potter have done more than enough to make sure I've kept myself busy. Mark for being kinda cool. My mom for inviting me to my sister's house for dinner.

Summer Greatness Part 3

So here are so more pictures of our trip, specifically the Road to Hana. There were so many waterfalls and pools to swim in. We drove the through the jungle in an open top Jeep (I called it my Barbie Jeep). We couldn't bring our camera to a lot of the really cool places. For example, there was there hike where we hiked up to the first two waterfalls, swim through a pool to get to the third, and scale up the third waterfall to get to the fourth. It was so incredible.


If any of you have seen Lost, they boys were reinacting the scene where Michael has to hide from the smoke monster and was calling for Walt. We were pretty disappointed when the smoke monster didn't show up.


Typical Garrett to have a bag of something in his hands. He was pretty attach to those Chex Mix.


This is one of the many black sand beaches on the island. We actually camped at one of them overnight because there was too much to do on the Road to Hana to make it back to our hotel.


This is a bayan tree. They are crazy. Their branches grow out and drop shoots down to add more roots to the tree. They can get enormous. I will show you another picture of a bayan tree in another post that took up a whole city block.


I just thought that our family and friends should see the reason why I married Mike. I know your jealous because not everyone can have a husband with such a nice behind.


This was the entrance to the bamboo forrest at the Seven Scared Pools. I never have seen the tops of bamboo before. This picture doesn't get the whole effect, but these trees look like they could have come straight from a Dr. Suess book.

The bamboo reminded me of a prision cell with all the bars on the door. This is my "I can't believe I'm in jail" face. Good thing I didn't go into modeling.

Hiking through the jungle. Sorry I couldn't get the picture to stand up straight.

Summer of Greatness Part 2

As much fun as Arches was, we weren't going to stop there. We have always wanted to do a big vacation before medical school because once we start school we won't have the money, time, and freedom. We through out a lot of ideas but ended up deciding on Hawaii with our friends, Garrett and Nicole Barber. To prepare for this trip, we watched the first season of Lost (we kept making Lost references throughout the whole experience. We decided that Mike was Jake, I was Kate, Garrett was Locke, and we never could get a good character for Nicole). Here are some of the photos from the trip. I can't post them all, so I will continue this post another day.

Here we are waiting at the airport. We had to wake up at 3 am UT time and didn't go to bed until 1:30 am UT time that night. We were so tired.

That first evening, we ate at "Da Kitchen" that served Hawaiian dishes. I had the salted pulled pork. Mike had the famous Loco Moco (we will make it for anyone will is very hungry and has a tough stomach). Garrett and Nicole ate the pork that was cooked in the leaves. It was all so cool.

We went on a guided boat tour to go snorkeling at the Molokini Crater. It had such colorful corral, however Nicole and Mike got a bit green in the face from the boat ride.

We spent a lot of our time on "our beach". It called it our beach because we went there almost everyday and there weren't many people there. We have so much fun on it.

These are the pictures of our epic sand castles. We spent 1 1/2 hours making them. I don't know if the picture does it justice, but they were huge!

Summer of Greatness

Since this is our last summer in Provo, we decided to finally do all the lists on our Provo "bucket list" before we leave. Out of the five years that I have lived here, I have never visited any of the National Parks. So we kicked the summer off with a trip to Arches with our friends, Sam and Heather Shannon. We are gone camping with them over Memorial Day Weekend that last three years now and have enjoyed every trip.

We camped on top of a butte which made the whole experience. We didn't see or hear many vehicles and our view of the area was grand (well, for being red rock at least).

Mike and Sam scaled up Balanced Rock, almost making it to the part where the giant rock is jointed. We saw other people up that high previous, but when we came back to the car, a park ranger chastised us for damaging National property and would have ticketed us if we had gone just a bit higher. We wanted to replied, "Well, put up a sign that says 'No Climbing'", but instead we sheepishly apologized.
I don't know why I posted this picture when I look so gross without my hat on.

Right after this picture was taken, my hat flew off. Thank goodness this guy our age caught it. As I was yelling back thanks, he chucked the hat off the ledge. . .well that is what it looked like. It was one of Mark's roommates who saw us, but I didn't recognize him from a distance. It was really fun at meet up with Mark and his roommates for the last hike of the day. I'm was just so grateful he didn't turn out to be a punk.

I feel sort of like a snob saying this, but I honestly thought that Delicate Arch would be larger than it was. I mean the Utah license plate makes it look so massive that I was slightly disappointed. Though it was still pretty amazing to see it.

Our summer continues with our vacation to Hawaii and a family reunion in St. George. But I will get to those tomorrow.

Anatomy Unit

Since State testing is over and we have covered all the State's curriculum, I let my students vote on the next science unit. I really wanted to teach anatomy, so I have been planting that seed in their mind all year all. Good thing it won, because the second place was the ocean and I don't know a lot about it (I probably would just fly Karl out to teach it). We started learning all the muscles and then how the heart and lungs work. We video taped our process drama production of an oxygen molcule's travel through the heart. To end the unit, I went to the slaughter house and bought sheep heart and lungs for the kids to dissect. Mike came in to help with the dissection and talk about career options if you like anatomy. Here are the pictures of the dissection.

I consider it a success when no one vomits, though by the end half the class was in the hall from queesiness. We had to quickly disinfect the whole room afterwards because we were having a pizza party from the janitor (yes, on the same desk that we dissected a bloody heart).