Celebrating 1 Year of Wedded Bliss!!

We took off on Friday the 8th for a roadtrip for our 1st anniversary. We stopped for a picnic at battleship rock (which is NOT the rock behind us) on our way to Bandelier National Monument.
(sorry the pics are so flattering but it was pretty warm out there!)

Here's Bandelier....I especially was SO excited because I have wanted to see cliff dwellings ever since we moved here. There are a couple parks around here that have them. This was not the best one, but it was still really cool. Someday we will make it to Mesa Verde!

They say the area was so perfect because the Anasazi could easily scrape away the condensed volcano ash to make the caves for their desert homes, but right in the valley, there's a little river and it's as green as can be 100 feet from the red rock! So farming was easy. Amazing to see the 2 completely different geographies together.

Friday night we went to a nice dinner and stayed in "Nuke City." Saturday we took a scenic drive up around Taos and came back down through Santa Fe. We found this on the way. It's called "Ghost Ranch" and became Georgia O'Keefe's summer home and she painted many landscapes from here. The owner of Johnson & Johnson had a summer home here in the 1900's and it's now a library. There's a whole little resort down the road and you can camp and hike here. It's in the middle of nowhere, but kind of cool.

Here's a close up of the previous one....I don't know what kind of people live out here in the Boondocks

It was VERY windy up here and I was trying to keep warm while Micah set the timer...
we ended up with this fabulous picture of the 2 of us

Unplanned, the route took us right over the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge outside of Taos!
When we went skiing with Brandon & Erica this winter, we tried to find this bridge & couldn't. Micah was so ecstatic when we drove right over it & lamented that Brandon & Erica didn't get to see it with us :(
It's one of the highest in the nation!!

Right after we got home, we saw a trailer on TV for the new Terminator movie. We knew it was filmed in NM (there's a lot of the VLA) but we were excited to see our new favorite spot in some of the action scenes!!We wanted to ride the world's longest tram in Albuquerque that Saturday night, but we could only get tickets for the following weekend, which we will post pics of later....

Gradution Videos

Graduations Galore!

We were able to go up for BYU Graduations for siblings Bryce & Tiffany!

what a crazy, fun-filled, busy weekend, but we sure were glad we got to
be there for their big day!

TWINS!!!
So we were sitting as a family with some of Bryce's in laws, and Cris comes in late with Best & Tanner....a great-aunt-in-law looks a little confused and comments something like "I thought he was graduating!" Still fooling after all these years...

I thought Bryce's hat 'design/message' was pretty creative! See if you can blow up the picture and find him!
Bryce & his sister-in-law Melissa

Bryce & Lisa are expecting?!?! (emphasis on Bryce this time!)

so sweet bath boy!

who needs a TV when you have youtube???

Trav makes this great face every time a flash goes off (check out the video)

Micah gets ready for Tiffany's ceremony

Tiffany shows us the bugs she found during cleaning checks...
just kidding. She has a cool job at the Bean Museum classifying and pinning bugs so she showed us a real 'behind the scenes' collection!

I requested to see the Katy-dids...of course! (and butterflies)

Can you see what 'famous person' took this pic with Micah?

Here's a closer up

Cousins also graduated!
I bumped into Little Heather here too!

We also took pit stops at j-dawgs, hiked the Y right before the ceremony with my family, made candy, went to a big dinner at Los Hermanos, visited with Uncle Tom, enjoyed the scenic drive up and back & saw cool exhibits at the MOA-the guy that does the I SPY books has a fun exhibit there, plus another half of the exhibits are all made out of trash!

Ode to BESTY!!!

I found these mysterious pics on our camera when we got back from graduation and didn't want them to go wasted! Thanks ;)




I found this book at the library and had to get it for fun! I read about 2 pages and couldn't really get into it (it's just not as good as the real modern one)...but it sounds like you could really relate to this chick! There was even a chapter about Aunt Ruth :)

Projects & Ongoings Lately

In case you were wondering about this first pic, that is a REALLY high score. I used to be able to beat Micah, but no longer can touch him...Since we only have the trial version, every time we turn the game off, it deletes the high score, so we had to take a pic....Hence the pic

We've been trying new recipes and this was a GREAT one from
Lisa A.S. It looks pretty, too, huh?

Micah noticed this one morning on his way out to work at told me to come see it. I went back out and took a picture a few minutes later. We didn't realize that this was so cool until I heard about how rare an occurance it is later on the news.

Freezer Jam (hopefully the jars won't crack in the freezer)
and canisters that match my Kitchen Aid!