Midwinter (Tribute to Christina Rossetti)

Snow on snow, snow on snow

Quiet farmhouse

Cat in sunbeams

Girl in hat, woman in blankets

Fuzzy, sleepy

Lighted tree

Top Withins

My friend Heidi lives in England, and recently took a trip out to Top Withins. Those of you familiar with the Bronte sisters will recognize the feeling of this place. She took this picture, which has fascinated me since. I could look forever at this tree.

Saturday Night

Christina gave a full post to last Saturday night when we got together with our husbands. Kevin and I love keeping company with the Christina and Dave--we always have such fun discussion, complete with good stories and light sarcasm. It was a blast to have dinner, play games, and celebrate Christina's birthday. What's more, these are the first pictures of the inside of our home--you can even see our photograph of Courthouse Towers in Arches, as well as our other friendly visitor: Poe.

Book Review: Eat, Pray, Love

I read Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir, Eat, Pray, Love a few months ago after Rachel introduced me to it. I didn't intend to do a book review here, but this is the type of book that I've kept with me for months, and after Christina reminded me of it yesterday, I figured that I had to do it.

Read is not really the correct word, as I listened to the audio book read by Gilbert herself. She was amazing, adjusting her sound for the voices of the people in her life, and capturing the subtle ironies that I found delightfully amusing.

Apparently, this book has captured the attention of many women. I confess I don't watch Oprah, and haven't had much of a chance to keep up on how this book has impacted others. But I can talk of how this book resonated with me like a week spent with a cosmic twin turned spiritual mentor. Gilbert tells her story of how she came to spiritual crisis, and how she worked herself out of it (through eating, praying, and loving) over a few years time and exotic journeys. Never before had I heard of a woman being so confessional--so honestly forthright--about the demons that haunt her, and then to have such a clever and witty way of examining them. As a childless woman at an age where everyone around me is desperately "baby hungry" (odd term, isn't it?), I stood refreshed at her confession of not wanting children--at least not at according to everyone else's time table--and the sincerity in which she felt and dealt with the issue. Her coming to terms with God, and with meeting God for the first time (and second, and third), was beautiful to me in its openness and liberality.

The Autumn Wolrd of Calvin and Hobbes

Calvin and Hobbes was the comic strip that I felt a special connection to as I grew up. I'm a cat person myself, so there was always a love for Hobbes, and I think the many sides of Calvin are quite reflective of the complex human psyche. My favorite strips, however, occurred in the woods that Calvin wandered, and in which he made his existential ruminations. I envied him for existing in a world where wilderness was so close to his home, as in the Salt Lake valley we usually have a distinction between our wilderness, our foothills, and our residential areas.

On my last trip to Chicagoland (really, they call it that), I stayed in an area that reminded me of Calvin's world. Here small lanes divide up the woods, and houses appear almost randomly throughout the forests. I took the afternoon to drive around and experience autumn here, and I even saw a large owl.

At the home where I grew up, we had our own bits of wilderness. We had a stack of oak trees in the back yard in which my dad made a platform tree fort; there was an old mountain road that cut into the hill above our neighborhood that provided a place for us to get great views and spot wildlife; and there was the mouth of a canyon with all that comes with it: the creek, a reservoir, and an old mill. I suppose that's not a bad start to imaginative childhood wilderness, but when I look at this picture, it reminds me that there's something special to actually living right in the woods.

Fall in Big Cottonwood Canyon

Admittedly, this comes a little late, but here are our fall pics from Big Cottonwood Canyon. Despite the drought, which drains the trees and dulls their color, we still found beautiful patches this fall. Isn't it odd how it just creeps up in little patches?

Genius at Work

I use the grade-level readability tool in Microsoft Word at work all the time. It evaluates my vocabulary and sentence complexity and tells me how difficult a particular document is to read. As I am usually required to design things to reach and eigth-grade reading level, I'm distraught over this new reading rating on my blog. As I teach technical writing at the university level, I believe good writing (technical writing, at least) is very simply conveyed. It looks like I need to work on practicing what I preach, assuming that this tool is real.

But you can't take the little girl out of the grown-up lady

As long as I had to dress up at work, I thought I'd do something I'd love.

Happy Halloween!

October Update

Thanks to the few of you who told me you were missing my blog. This month has been crazy. This week I'll make my fourth trip to Chicago for work in the last 9 weeks, for starters. I've got the Delta flight schedule memorized between O'Hare and Salt Lake International. I've also been without a decent bedroom for... what is it... three weeks now? Kevin and I have been painting, and today we're getting our floors sanded in both bedrooms. The pale blue carpet in the living room (new when we moved in) is going to have to stick around for a few more years. Even if it is "so eighties."

First, Chicago. Well, if you can imagine how fun it would be to sit next to multi-level marketers for three hours on a plane, then you can start to imagine how fun my last trip was. Combine that with flight delays, exorbitant printer's costs, some unusual client experiences, and 20 minutes of local network news taping me in airport security for their B-roll is what I had to look forward to. I seriously do not like to be taped on camera.

To cope with all the stress and clutter, I made it up Little Cottonwood Canyon Thursday night. The October moon was full and beautiful, and it lit up the snow-covered cliffs. I went all the way to Alta, but of course the road up to the Albion Basin parking lot was closed. I unrolled my windows and let that cold woody air in. I decided I have to get a cabin one day.

I'm in the mood to write today because tonight I'm going to one of my favorite events--the family pumpkin carving party. My brother and sister-in-law host it with their beautiful kids, and this year we'll be joined by my other brother's family and my sister's new baby. Halloween is so much more fun with kids around.

And last, but not least, tomorrow Kevin gets sworn in as an official attorney and member of the bar. I feel as proud as Bridget Jones. Congrats, Kev.

Fiery Furnace from Above

This is something we use in my family for reminiscing. If you can see it, enjoy!

Cedar Breaks Photo Journal

Wildflowers at Devil's Castle Peak

Kevin and Dad with summer wildflowers in front of Devil's Castle Peak at Albion Basin. We invented our own hike up toward the mountain and back toward Cecret Lake. My dad says this is his new favorite hike.

Underwater Pictures

I think this is the last of the Hawaii posts. Kevin bought a disposable camera in a waterproof case for us to take to Hawaii so that we wouldn't ruin our other camera. Here are the highlights from the roll:

Our first snorkel spot by the Aquarium on Maui

Some fish

Angel fish and a rainbow fish

Sea turtles

A playful couple

And...

Some kind of Sea Monster.

Day 7:Pearl Harbor

We had to plan our last day in Hawaii more carefully, because our flight left at 10:00 at night, and we didn't want to be wearing wet swimming suits home on our red eye flight. Kevin read about a short drive up the mountain from Honolulu that was supposed to be sort of like the Road to Hana on Maui, so we decided to do that. First, though, we stopped by Leonard's bakery for the second morning in a row to get some malasadas diliciosas. Some of the best baked Hawaiian goods are from Portuguese sailors, including Hawaiian bread, but these malasadas were something else: sugar, cinnamon sugar, or banana, coconut, or chocolate filled. Here's a great shot of me and the Leonard's bakery dumpster.

And here we are driving up the road to Round Top, above Honolulu.

And this is what the road was like as we drove around. It sprinkled on us a bit, and the whole place smelled like flowers. I'd love to live up here!

In the afternoon we decided to go to Pearl Harbor. It's free to get in, but Kevin and I decided it was worth it to spring for the $5 audio tour as we went through the museum and waited our turn to see the film and ride the boat out to the Arizona memorial. I think the audio tour was totally worth it. I'm a bit of an NPR-junkie, so I've grown accustomed to learning through listening to compiled audio snippets and vignettes told by those who experienced these attacks over 65 years ago.

I'd been to Pearl Harbor once or twice before, but this time it had a lot more meaning to me. Before I was so young that I accepted history as fact and didn't question why things happened the way they did. But this time I was immensely curious to know why the Japanese thought it would be a good idea to bomb the U.S. (we had stopped selling them oil and had closed off the Panama Canal to them, so they thought they'd take out our Pacific fleet and then quickly take over all of the resource-rich French Asian territories before we had time to regroup), or why we hadn't detected the planes coming in (we thought they were our own planes coming from California), or why Japan joined with Germany and Italy (with the invasion of France, these French colonies were ripe for the picking by Japan).

Here's what remains of one of the gun towers of the sunken USS Arizona.

This was also a neat experience for me because my grandpa served as a colonel in WWII in Asia, and despite that I've always studied and learned more about the European side of the war, and here I got to immerse myself in a totally new perspective.

Days 5 and 6: North Shore

Going to the North Shore of Oahu was my favorite part of our vacation. My brother and sister-in-law had recommended spending a day on the North Shore, and I'm so glad we did. This place was so great for what Kevin and I love about Hawaii that we decided to come back the second day and basically do everything all over again! So that's why I'm combining these two posts together--the only difference is that the second day my sunburn was so bad (see pictures below) that I wore a shirt and shorts the whole day, and we did a lot less swimming.

This day couldn't have gone more perfectly. We started off by going to a bakery in Haleiwa and then snorkeling at Shark's Cove. I'll post underwater pictures from that later. We then drove past the Beach Boys-famed Waiamea Bay (where in the winter the waves measure 20 feet from the back--that's 40 feet from the front) and went to Sunset Beach, which is our favorite beach. We snorkeled and swam a bit there and then returned to Haleiwa for lunch and delicious shaved ice. One thing we noticed about the North Shore are these stickers, "Keep the country country," which essentially means that they don't want to ruin the lax feeling of the North Shore by building a bunch of uppity resorts. And I think this remote, relaxed feeling, this private beach feeling, is what made Kevin and I love this place so much.

After lunch, we headed to "turtle beach," where the water is a bit more shallow, the water a bit more algae-like, and where sea turtles love to congregate. We saw one on the shore and about seven in the water as we snorkeled around. They're a threatened species, so we couldn't touch them, but we could go right up to them and sit next to them and they didn't mind! The only concern of mine was that a big wave would push one into me.

After turtle beach we decided to grab some picnic dinner at the supermarket--a baguette, pre-sliced meat and cheese, Coke, and an Asian salad--and then head to Ted's Bakery for some famous coconut chocolate cream pie to eat on Sunset beach inbetween wave jumping and watching the sun go down.

Days 3 and 4: Maui to Oahu and PCC

The next two days of Hawaii were very busy days. Kevin and I woke up early at our Lahaina resort to take one last dip in the ocean that was right outside our door. As I've mentioned before, the water in Hawaii is oh so warm, even at 7:30 in the morning. We swam for about 45 minutes, and then headed in to shower, pack, and head off to the airport. We arrived around lunchtime in Honolulu and headed out to our Waikiki hotel. Here I am on the balcony.

We spent some time getting settled in, and then decided to walk around Waikiki. This location has a completely different feel than any place we'd been to on Maui. For one thing, it's crowded. There are tons of tourists here. Everything is in both English and Japanese, and it's very upscale. It would be a great place for high-end shopping, as we had Prada, Saks, and many other of the like right on our street. Our hotel was also right next to the International Market (a large flea market), which was a lot of fun (and a lot more affordable too!). We grabbed some lunch there and kept on with our walking tour.

We ate at a great restaurant right on the beach, and they even gave us free dessert because we told them we were celebrating Kevin's graduation from law school. That was one thing that we were constantly asked on this trip: Is it your honeymoon? Your anniversary? One guy who was selling surfing lessons on Waikiki asked us if we were celebrating, and I randomly replied, "Yes. We're celebrating our love," all seriously. Ah. Great times. After dinner we walked along Waikiki and watched all the surfers while the sun went down.

The next day we planned to go to the Polynesian Cultural Center all the way out in Laie. Our guidebook described Laie the farthest place from Waikiki in both geography and culture. The town is very predominantly LDS, complete with an LDS temple, BYU Hawaii, and the Polynesian Cultural Center, in which 70% of their employees are BYU Hawaii students. We stopped by BYU Hawaii first to see what the campus was like. It was humorously strange the way that the carpets, tables, chairs, and even building exteriors were so much like the BYU Provo campus. It really felt like I was back in Utah. We stopped by the bookstore where I picked up the Jack Johnson CD I love and Kevin got a shirt and hat. We were pretty disappointed they didn't have Hawaii-specific BYU pens, notepads, folders, etc., but it's all on a pretty small scale. After that, we hopped over to the temple to tour the grounds.

Straight down from the temple is the beach with a famous arch where a Tsunami blew a hole right through a fin. I was captivated by the way the water hit the rocks. That figure moving around way out there is Kevin.

After that we headed over to the Polynesian Cultural Center, where they are set up in eight or so little villages representing the various regions of Polynesia (Hawaii, Tahiti, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand, etc.). They go to a lot of detail, and the buildings in those villages are even made of the same materials as their real-life counterparts. We watched cultural presentations of pit fires, stick-started fires, palm tree climbing, coconut husking and cracking, guitar and ukulele playing, and lots of dancing. Below is a shot from the afternoon canoe show, where each village presents a couple of traditional dances on canoes.

And here's Kevin outside a Fiji building holding a Noni Fruit. He has this thing with the Tahitian Noni building in Provo, with the very large picture of the guy blowing a conch shell.

When we were through touring the villages, we headed off to our traditional Hawaiian luau (rated the best by the guide books, despite the lack of alcohol) where we sat with some really nice people from Ohio and ate a pig that had been roasting underground. After that we went to the night show, where we saw more dancing from the different islands and men who danced with fire and weren't afraid to sit on it. Lots of fun laughs.

Day 2: Road to Hana Part 2

Back to the Road to Hana. This was honestly one of my favorite days in Hawaii, and even if we go back soon, I would do this drive all over again.

My favorite part of this drive was a tiny village called Nahiku. Kevin and I drove down the road there and parked across from the park and the little village church, which reminded me so much of little pioneer churches you see in the Midwest.

We walked further down the road and over a bridge to a beautiful view of the ocean. What was so great about this spot is that off to the left and down about 15 steps there was a little shady freshwater waterfall and pool separated by some boulders from the ocean. It was so awesome, and I think we could have spent all day there.

Back along the Hana Highway, we stopped in a the Black Sands beach at a state park and got out enough to get some very big grains of black lava sand in our sandals. Apparently these beaches are formed by harsh waves crashing against the lava, and they are formed in a matter of days. Most don't have a safe bay to maintain them, so they usually quickly fade away, although this particular one has been around for centuries.

We stopped by Hana Harbor for some hamburgers and continued on to the "Seven Sacred Pools" in a National Park there. I first heard about these pools on a Meg Ryan movie, IQ, but apparently the name was totally a marketing ploy (there aren't seven distinct pools, and they've never been sacred as far as we could tell). This was a great hangout--more waterfalls and freshwater pools overlooking the ocean. It was the weekend, so there were a lot of locals there swimming and it was a bit crowded. We were satisfied with this as our destination and turned around to make it back to Lahaina for some quick pasta and a restful night's sleep.