The Reading Nook

So I launched a second blog yesterday in order to write reviews of books I've been reading. I've only posted once but I figured I'd announce it on here so you could check it out, if interested. The site is called The Reading Nook and will be updated as often as I finish a new book and write a review on it. I am part of a program called Blogging for Books where I am sent a copy of a book in order to read it and review it. I will post those reviews on my new blog for books as well as reviews of other books that I may be reading at the moment that aren't involved in the BFB program. Feel free to comment there if you happened to have read the book I've reviewed with your own comments/ideas about the book or if you have questions that my review didn't cover and want to know more about why I felt the way I did about a book. I have a friend who is constantly reading (like reads more than one book at a time while bowling, she's amazing like that) and she inspired me to start reading again. I used to read non-stop. Now with work, marriage, church, exercising, etc it gets harder to keep up but I'm attempting to get back on the boat. So head on over there and check it out and hopefully I'll pick up my reading so more reviews will be posted! Happy reading to all! :)

I decided to post some of the videos because I wasn't sure if it was easier to go to the link provided or just see them on here. I think seeing them on here is more fun, in my opinion. So, I'll stop being lazy and get them up here. Maybe a few a day. There are 15...that's a lot.












I was breathing really hard in that last video because I had just come down the hill. :)

Warm Days....Cool Nights

This New Mexico weather is a-w-e-s-o-m-e!!!! The days are hitting the mid to upper 60's, it's nice and dry, and the nights are in the 30s but with the dry air it doesn't feel that bad. Jack and I have been wanting to find some patio furniture in order to enjoy these gorgeous days and from what we've heard, gorgeous summers with highs in the 80s, so we headed out on Saturday looking for a good deal. We found what we thought would be perfect at Home Depot but it was a bit pricey. Jack decided to put his haggling hat on and talked to a lady there about possibly giving the set to us for 20% off. Before discussing with her he told me he needed to make sure he had the walk-away power in case she didn't come through with a discount and that we couldn't be so set on getting it that we'd pay full price. To our surprise after mentioning how much he wanted off the set she agree without hesitation! Woohoo, 20% off and that sucker was loaded into the Flex! We got home and our friends Jeremy and Kimi stopped by so we roped them into helping us set it up. After getting it all put together we all headed out for some yummy steak at Outback (Jack and Jeremy's favorite) and enjoyed some NCAA watching. It was a fun time. Then we decided to put our new furniture to the test. The nice thing is, the table doubles as a fire pit so Jack and Jeremy went gallivanting in the woods for some firewood and we enjoyed a nice fire outside while chit chatting. If you don't want a fire going there is a nice cover for the pit and the table is one smooth piece easily used for eating dinners. It's great! We love it and are looking forward to enjoying more time spent outside this summer. The next thing on our list to find is a nice big umbrella to put out there. The days aren't as hot as in NC or TN during the summer but the sun is definitely more blazing so getting burned happens a lot faster and easier out here (bring your sunblock if you're coming to visit!).

The roaring fire :) The seats are very comfy!

We had the far 2 seats pulled close together so we could see the bball games on TV :)

Our lovely Aspen that we are eagerly anticipating blooming soon. The night sky was so pretty!

no flash, you can really see the pretty night sky in this one. love it out here!

So, who wants to come visit next?! :) Come one, come all!

Wolf Creek

So I'm feeling pretty yuck today...stomach bug got me fierce. However, I finally uploaded all the videos from our recent snowboarding trip. I'll eventually get a longer post up with details about it but the short story is...we had a blast. Thankfully the hill had just gotten 2 feet of powder so falling didn't hurt (unless we decided to fall on the cat walks, I think all four of us had at least one spill on them) and we got more experimental and worked on going through the trees and trying out some blacks. What an awesome trip. Hope you enjoy these videos. To see them, check them out here. Just go to the right hand side of the page to view the uploads and click the "see all" button. Then go from there. The first one is titled "Dave and Dan warming up." Hope you enjoy!

And for more pics (here) am I getting lazy or what?! :) hahaha

What's up ahead!

The blog has gotten a little cold lately simply because....I started working!! What an answer to prayer. Thankful for my job. I'm excited to be working in the local hospital in the ICU and since it's a fairly small ICU setting I'll be in I get to experience a LOT of new types of patients I've never worked with. My background is cardiac nursing and that truly is where my heart is (haha no pun intended) but now I get to work with pediatric patients (never done that before) all the way up to the oldies. It's fascinating to me! Last week I had a 2 month old and a 5 year old! What a huge change from what I'm used to working with but I LOVED it :). It was different having a parent there assisting with things, asking all the questions, etc and that will definitely be something I have to get used to but for the most part it was fascinating to me to do an assessment on a baby (had never done that except in nursing school and those babies were healthy) so I know I have a lot of learning to do but I'm excited about it. I have 2 more weeks on night shift and then I'm back on days from there on out. Honestly, I function really well on nights but days work out better having a husband and all :). It's nice, Jack and I carpool at times to work if he wants to get to work early so that's fun, too! But because of all this, sadly the blog got neglected. However, I'm going to work hard on keeping it updated on what we are up to.

We are looking forward to our house guests that arrive TONIGHT!!! I'll spend the rest of today getting the house cleaned (thankfully the guest room is good to go!) and then bright and early tomorrow morning we are headed to Pagosa Springs, CO for some snowboarding fun! Wolf Creek Ski Area is some of the best snow in CO and it's awesome because it's so much cheaper then all the fancy, popular places (who wants to go were it's crowded anyways?!?). They just had a storm roll through yesterday that dropped about 2 feet of powder (awesome) so we're gonna spend Friday and Saturday up there. Thankfully Jack and I have been freshening up our skills on our own ski hill and have been working on our moguls and our blacks so we're confident we can at least keep up with our friends out there! Jack and I have also been working on jumps and have landed a few of them. Haha, there's this one run that connects to another run that was always fun to jump when you transitioned but just the other day as Jack came down the hill he mentioned to me, hey did you see that sign that said "no jumping?" Hahah, nope! Oops. That's ok, there were other places to practice. We've also been working on getting comfortable going down the hill with our right foot forward (goofy footed, since Jack and I normalyl both go down with our left foot forward) so that we could easily transition from one foot to another. We worked on it for a while going down some blues and were both actually getting pretty good at it (man, talk about taking you back to the first day on the slopes, it was like learning how to snowboard for the first time all over again) so we were going faster and whatnot. Well I had a pretty hard fall at one point, caught my edge and hit my face on the ground! Haha, I came up and was a little shaken but thankfully nothing really hurt except for my chin and my cheek that hit the ground so I shook it off, told Jack about it, complained about it on the ski lift ride up but then just forgot about it. By the time we got home I had some nice scrapes on my cheek and chin and it was a little puffy. Oops! Jack and I laughed because it looked like I had gotten in a fight. He told me I can't be doing that often because then people may start to think he was beating me! "Sure, Becky, you "fell" snowboarding again..." :) Jack also had a pretty hard fall that day as well. No fault of his own though. We had just come off a black and were tracking over to one of my favorite blues (Old Burro Runout) that's full of moguls and Jack was just about to head down the run and I was about 10-15 feet behind him when I see this skier come off a black just above the blue completely out of control. One leg was way up in the air, her poles were flying in all sorts of directions and it was like watching in slow motion. She came across the trail I was on and slammed into the back of Jack! She wiped him out. He fell and literally landed right on her head (I don't remember if she had a helmet on or not) and then they went sliding off into the trees! I came up to find out if they were ok. Thankfully neither was really hurt (maybe her pride was a bit) but poor Jack was stuck on top of her. The only way he could get off was to put all his weight on top of her and roll his board off! I felt bad for her. She said sorry and mumbled something about how deep the snow was as she collected her gear. It was pretty funny later as Jack and I were discussing it :) So we got back on our boards and headed down the mountain. Jack couldn't stop processing how it happened. Anyways, all that to say...we really enjoy snowboarding and can't wait for the fun filled weekend ahead of us. On top of it all, Jack turns 30 on Saturday!!!! We'll be coming back from CO but I'm hoping we'll get to celebrate with some friends around here :)

And one last note...still excited to be working through my Bible reading plan. Almost through Leviticus. It's harder to keep up now that I'm working but I'm thankful that God has put it on my heart to keep this up this year. Two and half months in....slow and steady :)

#2 and #3

So yesterday was my older sister's 2nd wedding anniversary and today is my twin's 3rd wedding anniversary! Congratulations to both of them. Marriage is super hard work as all three of us girls have learned but fighting for and restoring and resolving to press forward in marriage is the most amazing, humbling, Christ-honoring thing! Jack and I were talking about marriage the other day and he made a really good observation. He stated, "You know Becky, marriage is so counter-human. Our nature as sinful beings is to just walk away, run, leave, etc when times get hard. I mean look at culture, if two people fight what do they do? They leave each other. They say, eh, that's too hard, what's the point in fighting for that? I'm just going to move on to the next best thing. The next easy thing. But marriage, the true, tough it out fight for it stick together through anything until death do you part, is so not what our nature wants to do. You can tell that it's totally a God thing. The picture of marriage, being the representation of how Christ loves the church, His unconditional, unfailing love that is there no matter what, is amazing, but MAN is it hard work!" (ok, so maybe I paraphrased what he said...he's way more eloquent than I am or than my memory is, haha) But I totally agreed with Jack. This was said after we had come through a particularly nasty fight/arguement (hello, we're human, of course we still do that sort of thing...ugh) and gosh, during those times it's so easy to just want to give up and walk away. BUT God gets the glory when reconciliation happens, when true forgiveness comes and when a married couple stays together. Thankful for a loving husband who has loved me graciously for the last 5+ years. Thankful for my sisters and their wonderful husbands and praying for married couples to fight hard for their marriage, because we all know that Satan just wants to destroy that picture!

Beautiful Tracy :) Feb 28, 2009

Beautiful Debbie :) Mar 1, 2008

Happy anniversary!!

Grand [Canyon] Adventures!!

Soooooooooooo this last weekend Jack and I vacayed in the...... GRAND CANYON!!! :) It.was.awesome. (For all pictures, feel free to click on them to enlarge them to see it better. Sorry this post turned out to be so long!!)

We left Friday night after Jack came home from work and gave ourselves a 30 minute window to pack and hit the road...we almost made that goal :) We swung down through Albuquerque and picked up some Chick-fil-a (a must if we are in the vicinity) and then we were off to AZ!! We arrived in Flagstaff around 11 and checked into our hotel room. It was cold out but no precipitation had started but as we watched TWC the forecast showed snow was on the way! We woke up Saturday morning to about 5 or 6 inches already on the ground but that didn't deter us!

Aloha snow! :)

We loaded up the Flex and we were off on our adventure. After grabbing and quick lunch at Wendy's and getting gas for $3.92/gal (ugh) in Tusayon, just outside the park, we were off to see the views...or so we thought :) While eating our lunch the snow started to come and come quickly.We ended up getting over 16 inches of snow on the trip!

On our way!

The roads began to get covered very quickly.

And this was our fantastic view the first day! :)

We decided that even though we couldn't really see any views we'd still check out the Canyon Rim Trail that meanders along the top of the canyon.

Jack standing where we suspected there to be a neat view... :)

After we went out for a mile or so we decided to turn back and head back towards the gift shops and whatnot. We enjoyed looking at things in there and checked out one of the lodges. We noticed they had early dinner there so we decided to go back to our room and get ready for an early dinner. It's nice that we could pretty much walk to everything in the Park so we grabbed an early dinner and called it an early night.

That ball of ice fell out of the bottom of my ski pants when we got back from our hike!

The next morning we decided to go for a drive around the park in hopes that we could see something fun/interesting. We were hopeful because the forecast called for partly cloudy skies so we thought maybe we'd get a glimpse of the canyon!

We walked over and got this...still no major view but we could see a bit more!

But we're good sports so we took a picture in front of it anyways.

Then on our way back to the car (because we wanted to drive around a bit) we saw this... :)

So we went driving and took a picture of the train and El Tover.

We enjoyed this because it reminded us of our Flex!

Then as we were driving down the road Jack hit the breaks and yelled out, "LOOK!" And there she way!

So we literally ran out to the overlook scared that the clouds would come back before we could get pictures!

It was gorgeous!

After snapping some pics at the overlook we decided we would head back to the lodge and get changed in order to attempt the Canyon Rim Trail again. We decided, no matter what, we would hike it out for a ways and stay out until sunset in hopes of getting some good pictures. We dressed really warmly, took extra clothes, food and water and off we went.

View from the trail. The clouds rolled back in but we weren't deterred!

Off he goes :) It was a winter wonderland!

At times the snow was up to our knees. Talk about a workout!

And BAM, the clouds rolled away... for a while :)

So we snapped pictures as fast as we could.

And loved the views that would come in and out of focus.

This was at Mojave point, we stayed here about an hour taking pictures...it was COLD and WINDY!!

Love that you can see for so far away and see the CO River.

Then the clouds rolled back in, but that was ok, we were gonna stick it out.

This view was from Hopi Point, one of the best sunset spots on the Southern Rim.

We loved the shadows and the colors.

One of my favorite pictures, I love how it's blue. Almost looks fake to me.

We tried to capture as much as we could before the snow and clouds would come back through. This was before a larger front came through before sunset.

Snooooooow! We toughed it out quite a bit. Snow, sun, snow, sun, snow, sun...etc, and wind!

One last glimpse at Hopi Point before we called it a day and started back toward the lodge.

The beautiful sunset covered in clouds, it was still gorgeous.

We saw these guys on our way back to the lodge :)

So after a full day and a bit over 8 mile hike we decided we'd head back to the hotel and make some dinner reservations. We decided to live it up on our last night there and had dinner at El Tovar. We both enjoyed the Filet Mignon and it was amazing! It was probably the thickest cut filet I have ever eaten before and it tasted soooo good! We decided the next morning we would get up early and head out to get pictures of the sunrise. Since one of the best locations for pictures was on our way out of the Park we packed up and headed out really early.

On the drive to the lookout point...one of my favorites :)

The moon was still up and the sun hadn't started rising quite yet.

First peak of the sun hitting the tops of the canyon.

Jack trying to stay warm. We stood out there for a couple of hours and it was about 13*!

More sun hitting the tops. We it was beautiful.

The watchtower.

Jack really loved the pinks and blues. It was so pretty!

One of my favorite things was seeing the clouds cascade over the canyon rim!

The sun was really starting to rise and cast some pretty cool shadows!

Our new Argentine friends snapped this one for us :)

Trying to keep warm!!

These little guys sure were fun to watch :)

After snapping quite a few pictures of the sunrise we finally decided to make our way out of the Park and head back to Santa Fe. On our way back though we decided to grab lunch at Joe & Aggie's Cafe in Holbrook, AZ. It was used for inspiration for the movie Cars (the animated movie). We enjoyed some down home cookin' and then we were back on the road to see the Petrified Forest National Park and the Painted Desert.

Located on Historic Route 66.

Standing in front of some painted desert and petrified forest!

It was so beautiful. And no civilization as far as the eye could see!

These were called the Teepees.

Loved the train, Jack sped so I could hop out and get this picture. It went through the heart of the Park.

This old car is sitting on pavement from the old Route 66.

The Painted Desert. It was gorgeous!! :)

After we took in all the sights it was back on the road to Santa Fe. Jack conked as soon as I started driving (before I had even made it on the highway!) and slept for a majority of the drive back. It was a pretty drive. We are very thankful to be living in such a neat area of the country. We're also thankful that the Grand Canyon is just a half day drive from our house! Awesome!

For the full Facebook album if you aren't on FB. This is only a portion of all we actually took!