The Beginning of our Trek

Well, we recently started out on our new adventure in life together. Having recently graduated from BYU-Idaho it is now coming time for my internship in Connecticut. Many people have been asking for a blog or record of what we do over the summer, so I'm going to try and keep up on my Blog (until Ashlyn breaks down and agrees to start a family blog :)

The time is approx. 11:30am on Friday, May 7th as Ashlyn and I finally fill up the gas tank in our super-poo in Ogden, UT to start the long drive to Wisconsin - Ohio - Connecticut. The camera is tucked securely away in Ashlyn's Dufflebag, but amid the long list of other things we've had to do over the past 2 weeks, snapping pictures hasn't exactly been on the top of our priority-list.

We spent two days driving. First day 10 hours of driving from Ogden to Hill City, SD. When we woke in SD we went and saw Mt. Rushmore. After some site seeing we started our long day of driving. After 12 hours of driving we arrived in Marshfield, WI. We nearly ended up in a Marsh because there was a Bridge Out and my GPS took us on a bad detour... hee hee...Sorry, but we don't have any pictures of that scary adventure.

Photo's

Hey, So i'm trying a new thing where I submit some of my photo's to a contest. The winner can get a scholarship, money, or a new camera. i'm hoping for the scholarship to help pay for school this summer, but whatever. follow this link everyday (or every 8 hours) and vote for this photo! thanks alot!!!

Planet Beautiful Brickfish

News News News

Hello Blogspot World! It's been a while since I updated my blog, and quite a bit has happened since my last post. The most important thing is that I'm going to be married to a wonderful girl on March 21st in the Logan, UT Temple. The proposal was a lot of fun, involving a poetry book and a partially hollowed out Dictionary. I hid the Ring inside the dictionary, within the Definition of the word love, and then i set the book on a shelf in the BYUI Library. I gave Ashlyn the poetry book with a note to read some of the poems and then a note that had the call number of where i put the dictionary. Then I went and hid behind some shelves and waited for Ashlyn to come (and to make sure no one took the dictionary). When she opened to dictionary i came around the corner and asked her to marry me! How magical is that!? haha we both love books and i figured it would be a memorable way :)

So over the christmas break I flew to Ohio (getting stuck in the ATL airport for 10 hours on the way) to see ashlyn and meet her family. It was a great experience and I really enjoyed meeting her family. It's quite a diverse family and anyone who knows me understands that I love diversity! I flew back to Salt Lake on Christmas Eve and spent christmas morning with my Aunt and her family, then drove back up to Idaho that afternoon.

On Dec 29th-Jan 3rd I went on what our school calls "Winter Summit" which is a 6 day 5 night winter camping and backcountry ski trip up in the Teton Mountains. It was QUITE the experience. I never stepped on the ground once for the whole trip, there was constantly 3-4 feet of snow under foot. The snow probably wasn't as nice and fluffy as we wanted, but at least it was good to get out. I was snowboarding on a fairly new kind of snowboard called a "Splitboard" which transforms from a snowboard to Cross-Country ski's. In the backcountry there aren't any chairlifts, so anytime you want to go DOWN the mountain, you have to hike up! Amazingly, someone has created a thing called "skins" or "tractor skins" that stick to the bottom of your ski's and act as traction as we hiked up the mountain. Needless to say, hiking in all of your snow gear with a pack on is quite exhausting, but i feel that i came back in better shape than i left in! haha. we ate deliciously warm food every night as we all took turns cooking for the group. There was about 9-11 people up there depending on the day. Most days we had some sort of Avalanche Training and on one night we had a little Talent show. On new years eve we celebrated new years with a little dance party (little being the under-stated word) and all went to bed by 10pm haha. Winter summit was definitely an eye opening experience, and I learned skills and determination that I know will overflow into the other aspects of my life. I'm goin to try and post an album of those pictures on picassa, when i get a link i'll come back and post it. or i'll just post this slideshow! sorry there's no captions... i'll work on that...


cheers everyone!

November Update

So it's November, one of the best months of the year. Think about it: great football, beginning of basketball, great food, great birthdays, fall colors, maybe some snow, it's all just so awesome!!! i think i'll go ahead and show some of these great things in my pictures... : i've learned and developed an immense love for photography. I'm not a pro or anything, nor do i have any of that nice photography equipment, but i do have a camera that i love and it seems to take amazing photo's. a quick family update, as i'm writing this, i got a text from my family about Lynn's surgery going well, they seemed to have fixed the sac in her bac. so thank goodness for that. well, picture time!!.... Those are some pictures that I am contemplating posting for a picture contest... we'll see...

LEIGH LAKE! CANOEING!!

aloha!!



so i think that should show up as a cool slideshow... hopefully it will. otherwise just look at those cool pictures below. i just got back from Leigh Lake in Grand Teton National Park, and it was one of the most beautiful campouts i've ever been on. we canoed in across String Lake, and then through Leigh Lake to get to our campsite which was across the lake from these beautiful 6000 ft mountains! It was too cold for me to sleep, so i got up really early, all bundleded up in my sleeping bag and blanket, and sat on the beach waiting for the sun to rise and reflect off the mountains. there was a nice layer of fog which provided for some beautiful effects, and eventually it brightened up and the stillness of the lake provided some awesome reflections. i'm very glad i invested in a new camera last week... yay :)
side note: while i still have memories of Hawaii i miss, there seems to be plenty for me to get involved in out here in ID.... :)

So i want to put up alot more pictures, but don't really know how. I'm thinking a slideshow would be the easiest because going through and adding one by one is kind of a pain. any suggestions??

Breaking Dawn or Camping

So let's just say that I've been a busy boy the past couple weeks. Being in Idaho has increased my desire to be outdoors and doing stuff like camping, hiking, cliff-diving, bridge jumping, rafting, etc. so this past weekend I was torn by the release of BREAKING DAWN. but have no fear, i managed to appease both appetites. I bought the book for an amazingly low 13 dollrs at wal mart on saturday morning and spent a few hours reading it throughout the day. I had to work though, and I was also invited to go to a bon-fire/ bridge jumping. *(the lesson i learned from that is to always be aware of who you're going with. for instance, i don't ever want to go with city-dwelling folks who dont' have any idea about nature or have any respect: for instance, starting a huge bonfire, throwing gas on it, almost burning veryone around the fire, and then just leaving before it's put out. not anyone i ever want to hang out with again) so saturday night i spent some more time reading, as well as most of the day on sunday when i wasn't at church. then late on sunday night, aroudn midnight, my buddy and i decided to go camp cuz neither of us had work the next day haha.
so we went to this place by the Palisades which we had been to before, arriving at around 1am, starting a fire cooking some brats, and then deciding that we're too lazy to set up a tent so we just sleep in the back of my car. a couple weeks ago we had serenaded a neighboring group of campers all night, and then woken up and jumped a 60 foot cliff.... this time though, we just woke up and looked for a better place to camp the next time around.

anyway, then i came home and proceeded to finish Breaking Dawn on Tuesday morning. which amid all of my working, and playing, i feel is quite an accomplishment. and let me just say that the book was AMAZING. different then the first three, but still the same. alot of good stuff in it. wow, i just.. yeah, it's good. haha intense and action packed!!

Want to see a Magic Trick?? BOOM!

So on saturday i had the privilege of going and seeing The Dark Knight. Yes finally, the long anticipated day arrived and i was able to go see it. First let me say, i was fully ready to pay 9.00 to see it, but as it happened, i knew someone who knew someone who got us all in for free :D haha

So the movie IS AWESOME!! anyone who's seen it will appreciate and probably cringe at the magic trick joke. The graphics of the movie were incredible, the story was twisted and developed, (albeit long in some parts), and the characters were amazing! My only hesitation is the same one from the first batman (begins), in that i don't like Christian Bales voice when he becomes batman... the low gruff-type voice.

Heath Ledger, RIP... he made this movie. There wasn't a single second that I knew it was him playing the part. I thought they seriously got some crazy psycho guy to come play the part! He played that part like a CHAMP! It was so intense that there were times when i was like, whoa, is this for real!? It kind of saddens me to know that we'll never get to see is acting-genius in any more films. But at least his film will hopefully end his career on a high note!

I give it three thumbs up, and 5.5 out of 5 stars. Don't take your little kiddies, there were some very disturbing images. lol. and yes, be ready for the long haul, you dont' really notice it very often, but it is almost a 3 hr movie....