Repainting bedroom

Jan asked for a new bedspread for Christmas, so I agreed, and she went and picked it out. That started a total revamp of our bedroom, with furniture painted black, trim painted white, and walls painted yellow and gray. It turned out great! Here are the before and after pictures.

Vacation to Mt. Rushmore & Nauvoo

These pictures are kind of in backward order, but we went on vacation to Mt. Rushmore, then on to Minden, NE (where we found the gravesite of my great-grandparents Willis Emery & Etta Melinda Green and my great-grandfather William Lafayette Brown). We then made it to Independence, Missouri on the 4th of July and watched fireworks over the Missouri River. We visited the temple site in Independence, then to Liberty Jail where Joseph Smith received some awesome revelations, then to the temple site at Far West, the site of the Haun's Mill Massacre, Adam-ondi-Ahman, and finally to the Amish community of Jamesport. the next day we went Hannibal, Missouri (the boyhood home of Mark Twain) and road on a riverboat on the Mississippi River. The next day we visited Carthage Jail where the Prophet Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were assassinated, and finally on to Nauvoo. We spent 2 days in Nauvoo, visiting all of the historical sites and doing baptisms in the Nauvoo Temple. We walked along the Trail of Hope where the Saints left their beautiful city along Parley Street, looking back on the temple on the hill, the dragging their wagons over the frozen Mississippi to Iowa. We were ready to go home, so we drove for 20 hours, driving 1,300 miles and reached home at midnight on Friday. It was a fabulous trip.

Summer was having a cow because these pictures weren't posted yet, so we put them up for Jan. - Kristie

Spring Painting

We had a lot of fun yesterday. Breezy and her friends splatter painted Seth's room, and Jan & I painted the family room and kitchen. We did it all in one day. Pretty amazing!

April 2009

We had quite an eventful April. In reverse order, because I forgot that the first pictures you download appear last - we attended the baby blessing of Nickolas Jensen (the second son of our friends Erik & Kari). I flew to California to attend the outdoor wedding of my stunning niece Kimmy Miller. It was a beautiful wedding. Earlier, Summer and Tyler came to celebrate the wedding of one of her best friends, Jenney Tenney. They enjoyed the wedding, but were glad to get back to the warmth of Arizona. Why? Because it snowed while there were here, and Breezy had her first soccer game of the Spring. A few inches of snow on the ground didn't stop her.

Arches National Park

Jan and I made a weekend trip to Arches National Park. As soon as Jan got off work at 1:30 p.m. we jumped in the car and took off for Moab. I wanted to get pictures of Delicate Arch with the late afternoon sun on it. We made it to Arches about 5:00 p.m. and hurried to the Delicate Arch trailhead. It's a 1.5 mile hike out to Delicate Arch with a 450 foot elevation gain, and we had less than an hour to get there. As you can see from the pictures, we made it with plenty of time to spare, although clouds were covering the sun. Jan has been walking 3 miles every day, and you could really tell she was in shape. I was glad we made the effort to get there Friday afternoon.

We stayed the night in Moab, and then came back to Arches the next morning. It was cloudy, but the weather forecast hadn't said there would be any rain, so we drove out to Devil's Garden and were going to make a 4.5 mile hike out to Double O Arch. We made it a little past half way when suddenly the clouds came rushing over us, hail started to fall, lightning flashed, thunder roar and echoes, and we were climbing on slickrock. It was really scary. You can see the before and after pictures of Landscape Arch. We very carefully hiked back off the slickrock to our car, grateful to make it safely. We thought we might be able to wait out the storm, but it just kept coming down, so we finally gave up and left for home. It was truly amazing to see and hear Mother Nature change so drastically so quickly. It was truly a wonderful adventure.

I saw these mallard ducks swimming on the water on my pool cover, and thought it odd that two females would be together without any males. Then i noticed that the beaks were different, and did some research to discover that duck with the yellow bill is the male in "eclipse plummage". I went to the website http://10000birds.com/the-eclipse-plumage.htm to get this explanation:

"Different groups of birds have evolved different “moult strategies”: raptors, for example, replace body feathers and wing feathers in a set order and over several years; many passerines (eg thrushes) keep their wing feathers into the second year of life but replace their body feathers in the first year. Ducks, though, shed most of their feathers twice each year, and in mid-summer most male ducks moult from the bright and colourful breeding plumage into a drab, female-like “eclipse plumage”. The reason for this is that ducks have a rapid but complete moult after breeding, dropping both body and wing feathers, and for a few weeks are completely flightless. Temporarily unable to escape predators by flying away, many male ducks have opted to do what the females do for most of the year and merge safely into the background (or, like eg Shelducks, gather in large flocks offshore or in the middle of large lakes.)"