Family time in North Dakota!

This Christmas we are spending our time in North Dakota. Cory and Jolene live up there and just had their little boy so of course we wanted to see the new addition. My dad works up there too and because he got extra time off to come home for Thanksgiving to be there for his first grandson's birth, he had to work over Christmas. We were willing to make the long drive up to the freezing state of North Dakota. It's actually much lower than freezing, the thermometer reading in the car said 3 degrees as we were pulling in to Dickinson last night!

 

The cousins got to meet eachother! Stetson already seems to be beating up on little Gunther.

I sure love this little man! I am content with just holding him while he sleeps and can't believe how much he has grown in the last month since I saw him last.

 I am one lucky aunt to have two of the cutest little nephews!

 

Gunther was blessed while we were here. My mom crocheted his little outfit, complete with a bowtie and booties!

For Christmas this year I made my mom and dad their own books. I compiled family photos and each of us kids wrote some things to include in it. I love how they turned out and am happy I did it for them. You can tell my mom loved it because she cried, laughed, and cried a little bit more.

Successful Christmas!

One Last Epic Weekend Before the End of an Epic Semester!

It was a weekend full of firsts for this lady!
I went to my first NBA game(or any professional sporting event for that matter) on Friday night! The Utah Jazz took on the Raptors and the game was all I expected and more! I had an absolute blast. The Jazz won 131-99, we ate at Crown Burger...twice, and our group even made it on the big screen at the game! Dream come true!

Serious Face...

 

And then Sunday night I went to my roommates family dinner down by Salt Lake City. I have wanted to see the lights on Temple Square ever since my first winter in Utah and I was finally able to! It was exactly how I imagined it would be...beautiful temple, lights all around, happy people, and just a little bit of snow.

The pictures could never do it justice.

 

Just a few more firsts occured this weekend: I sang in my ward choir, tried my hand at painting pottery, watched my roommate perform a clogging routine, and completely paid off one of my student loans!
It was a wonderful way to wrap up another great semester here at Utah State! I'm only three semesters away from that diploma now...crazy!
I am blessed!

The happy things in life...just to name a few:

Family
Thanksgiving and having a reason to eat insane amounts of delicious food
Milk for $1.98
Cute jeans that make you feel great!
A great bishop and ward family
The most perfect little nephew
Four square with the family...even with the weird and gross rule
Running into the best people at the grocery store
Compliments on my handy work
Country Swing Dancing
Chocolate Milk
Working with wonderful people
Christmas Lights
Nice men at Interstate Battery that came to my rescue
Taco Soup
Kind Strangers
A handy father
Breakfast Burritos
Happy people
The pursuit of knowledge
Roommates

Friends who save me when I'm out of luck
Institute
A working car
Laughter
Doing better than expected in the Academic Quadrathalon

First Fieldwork Adventure

This weekend I was recruited to go with a Grad Student in the Soils Department at Utah State to do fieldwork near Vernal, UT. I've never been out to the field before so I was looking forward to a fun adventure and some good experience. Our purpose in being out there was to collect soil and plant samples from some of the retired oil drills that the oil companies had done reclamation on. Using the research completed from these samples will help determine better and easier practices that oil companies can use in the future.

The four of us (Shannon, Trevor, Kendall and myself) started off early Friday morning. They weren't going to let me sleep in on this trip so I was up and going at 6am. Yay! Trevor was the driver and with Shannon navigating us, using GPS coordinates that the BLM provided, we drove around rough dirt roads searching for our first spot. At 9:30 we finally found it! The only problem was that it was such an old drill spot that there were no longer any roads to get there. That required us to hike about a mile in to collect the 16 gallon sized samples of soil, some smaller core samples, and some plant samples, and then trek them back the mile to the truck while carrying all our equipment and going up a pretty serious hill. I think by the end of this site all of us were ready to call it a day and go home but we persevered and finished two more complete sites before heading back to Vernal. We clocked in with 13 hours for the day, making for four very tired and dirty individuals!

Our second day was a bit more eventful. We drove into an old wash in search of one of the sites and after going as far as we could and then hiking for almost a mile we decided that there was possibly an easier way to get to the site so we went back to the truck and drove out of the wash. About halfway out, we had a fight with a rock. Oh No!
The truck lost the fight and oil quickly started to drain from the front axel. Trevor drove like a mad man to get us out of the wash and on to the road before the oil ran out. We made it all the way to the main, paved road when we pulled over as to avoid ruining any of the bearings since we were about out of oil at that point.

We ended up getting a tow back to Roosevelt and one of the dealerships had the part we needed to fix it. By 4:00 we were back to Vernal without any samples to show for a long day of frustration.

And that technically concluded my weekend of fieldwork.

The fun wasn't quite over though! That night I got to see the best of Vernal. I went out with Tory on a fourwheeler ride up on the hills just north of the city. The views were great and the company wasn't too bad either :)

The cooler had a bit of an accident and one of the Rootbeers exploded all over everything. Made for quite the sticky mess!

Overall, it was a fantastic week in Vernal and hopefully I can go out there again sometime soon!