A Simple Existence

This past week my life settled into a very simple little routine. Which left room for very little else.
5:30 (ish)AM Wake up and get dressed. Eat breakfast and pack lunch.
6:45 AM Work.
5:00 PM Home. Collapse onto my bed for a few minutes before getting up to shower. Check email, etc.
7:00 PM Dinner.
8:30 PM Get ready for and go to bed.

Eat, work, shower, eat, sleep. Simplistic, right? It's been kind of nice, not to have other things to worry about, and to be going to bed so early. Who needs a social life, anyway? I do have some time on the weekends to do other things. Friday night I went to a church dance (not so fun, actually. But I was being social!).

On Saturday morning, Kara and I ran in a 5K road race, which was pretty fun. I haven't run a 5K since high school, I'm pretty sure. I've only done longer distances, which makes the 3.1 miles seem almost laughably short. However, I haven't been training very well (a big surprise to all of those who know my training habits...) and really had no idea how to pace a 5K. It turned out ok. My mile splits were: mile 1 - 9:00, mile 2 - 8:27, mile 3 - (about) 8:00, last .1 mile - about 0:44. For a total time of 26:11. Not a PR, but it is up there with my better times from high school. Cool, eh?

Other things that spice up this life are the weather - it's hit 80 degrees, but now we're back down to a high of 45. I've been informed that this has been a remarkably mild winter. Lots of rain, a little bit of sunshine. Friday night brought a huge storm including several lightning/thunder combinations that woke me up in the middle of the night. Spring is definitely here, whether it's supposed to be or not. We've had daffodils and magnolia blossoms out for several weeks now, as well as more subtle signs like silver maple blossoming, leaf buds swelling and even breaking, especially on sweetgum. More recently it's been obvious, including redbud trees blossoming, cherry trees, red maples flowering, crocus, hyacinth, and tulips, and the viney yellow jasmine. I love spring and all the spring flowers!

I'm sure I'll have more spring flower pictures to post soon!

Weather is bipolar, but spring is definitely here!

The warm spring weather makes me so happy! The cold and wet spring weather not as much. Unfortunately it seems to go between the two types very often, and very drastically. For example, I was at work on Friday, and we were cutting down a spruce tree at the MTC. When we started this job at noon, it was sunny and quite warm. By 1:00 it was snowing like crazy, so we took an extended lunch break. By 2:00 it was cool, but drier, so we finished that job. Around 3 or 3:30, it was sunny and started to get warm again, at which point it also began to snow again. Craziness.

Lately, I've been very aware of the little signs of spring. Leaf buds forming on the elm trees, flower buds breaking on the silver maples. Crocus flowers popping up everywhere, daffodils and hyacinths coming into bloom. The little splashes of flower color and new leaves make me so happy! I'm SO excited for it to be spring/summer again! Today I went for a walk in the sunshine for like, 2.5 hours, and got a little suntan line - yay! It's all just very happy.

Perfect Day

Since yesterday was wonderfully perfect, I must write about it, and explain why I call it perfect.  

First of all, I got to sleep in.  Until almost 10!  I haven't slept in that late in...a couple of weeks, at least.  Then our ward breakfast was cancelled, so Mindy and I made a big breakfast of hash browns, eggs, sausage, and toast.  It was delicious!  

Jerin came over, and we decided to go on a hike.  (Mindy and Kayla had both left for the weekend, at this point).  We drove up Provo canyon, stopped at Bridal Veil Falls, because I've 

never seen it, and then drove up past Sundance.  There was still too much snow to hike

 anywhere up there, but we had fun driving on the curvy mountain road, and got out and took some fun pictures.  Then we drove back down the canyon and went over to Rock Canyon.  We hiked up the trail a ways, but on our way back, we had a fun adventure hiking on the stream bed.  We did some scree jumping - jumping from boulder to boulder - and climbed over or under big fallen logs, etc.  After that awesome fun adventure, we had a picnic at the fields near Wyview [where we live] and threw a frisbee around.  The weather was so beautifully nice - around 60 degrees, and sunny, hardly any breeze - that we tried to be outside as long as we possibly could.  

 

Then I went to IFA to buy some gloves for tree climbing (success!) and did some homework (not 

as successful!)  Then Jerin came over and we ate some Banana Cream pie to celebrate Pi day!  It was delicious.  

And last, but not least, swing dancing!  I got there around 7, when the lessons start.  They taught us the Shim Sham, which is a sweet line dance created by Frankie Manning (who pretty much originated swing).  We practiced our team routine a bit too, since we'll be performing it on Tuesday (i'll try to get someone to video it).  Fun dancing, plus, Em Hardman showed up!  It was so much fun to hang out with her and Jessame Peterson.  

All in all, it was a wonderful, glorious, perfect day.  Being outside with such great weather, plus swing dancing to finish it off - what more could i ask for?!