A Tropical Thanksgiving - Better Late Than Never

This year for Thanksgiving, Mindy, Jeran, and I planned a dive/snorkel trip down to south Florida.  For some reason we thought it would be more fun to surprise you all with pictures from our tropical vacation instead of telling you our awesome plans... I'm not even sure why we did it that way, and I think it was my idea.

Florida sunset over the ocean - I'll never get tired of them

Anyhoo, I ended up having to work on Wednesday, so I flew down to Ft. Lauderdale that evening where M&J picked me up, they having departed from North Carolina the day before. We made it down to Key Largo latish that night and went to bed.

Thursday - Jeran woke us up early, and we ate breakfast before going to the dive shop, Silent World. We signed waivers, etc, and went to meet their boat at the dock. We were in a group with four other divers as well.  The first dive was excellent for me, but not so much for M&J.  I was enthralled by the very close-up coral, cool fishes, the moon jellyfish, and the fact that I could snorkel without choking on "icky-bicky water" every two minutes (it was closer to every ten minutes). According to the divers, however, the coral and fishes were rather common and the water was very murky and cold.  We did see the famous "Christ of the Abyss" statue though, which is famous.

I snorkel! Also, breaking the air bubbles from divers is kinda fun.

 The next dive was better - much higher visibility and warmer water. The ocean floor wasn't quite so near to me, so I didn't get to examine the coral so closely, but the City of Washington wreckage and the schools of big barracuda fishes made up for it.

City of Washington wreckage

That afternoon we came back to the resort (a little place called Rock Reef Inn) and got ready for Thanksgiving dinner with the owners and all their guests. It was...interesting. The rule for dinner was that you couldn't sit by anyone you knew, especially not your spouse, so Mindy ended up sitting on the opposite side of the room from me and (sitting kitty-corner to me) Jeran. I especially liked the homemade key lime pie.

 Friday - Awesome snorkeling! It was just us three on the boat, so the captain took us back out to the elbow reef where the second dive had been. We did two dives right near the same area as the City of Washington. This was the highlight of the trip for me - we had seen some sea turtles from the boat, so we were hoping to see some once we got in the water. I ended up seeing six sea turtles that day! (Well, at least four different turtles on a total of six occasions). I even got to swim along side one for a good ways, ending when it chomped up a jellyfish then turned and looked at me. 

Face off with a turtle - I had to remember not to reach out and
\touch it  (push it away)  because it was so close to me!

This is when snorkeling was better than diving, because Mindy and Jeran saw only two sea turtles instead of the six I saw. And then there were my two sharks - a small reef shark and a nurse shark. It was surreal to see them swim along the ocean floor and think that I was so close to a shark! I didn't have a camera, but this is what they looked like:

It's really hard to describe the experience of snorkeling (and I would assume, scuba diving). You get to peek into a world that you've only ever seen in aquariums, but it's so much more vibrant and alive. The current of the ocean pushes and pulls you constantly, and the coral is constantly swaying back and forth in it. There's no such thing as a moment when nothing is moving.

Saturday - We had planned to drive north along the coast to Jupiter where Mindy and Jeran would do another dive and I would hang out at the beach or something. But the dive shop there called and cancelled because it was too windy. So we ended up going to the Miami zoo instead. It was really quite a large zoo. I finally saw a koala! It was sleeping, so it just looked like a gray ball of fur (not food!).

Then on Sunday we drove back to Atlanta, entertained by Jeran's new game of "create movie plots from this title and main actor/actress." We should probably quite our jobs and become movie writers. 

Fun Weekend at Mindy and Jeran's

So, this is rather lazy of me, but I liked Mindy's blog post so much, you can all just go read hers again. http://supona.blogspot.com/2012/05/fun-weekend-with-jessica.html
 It was a really fun weekend, and so worth the drive to get there and back. I love living so (relatively) close to them.

Something Like Spring Break

Since it's been about four years since I've had a spring break, this past weekend was a fun little experience for me. Some friends from church really wanted to go to Savannah or Charleston for the weekend and invited me. It ended up being me, Maurine, Christina, and Holly.

Maurine, Holly, me, Christina

SO MUCH FUN!

We drove down on Friday evening and came back Sunday afternoon. 

Some of the random fun things that added to this memory were: each of us brought a bunch of snacks to share - mostly sugar, I discovered Zaxby's for the first time (chicken fast food place, but very different from Chik-fil-A), a bunch of college kids also on spring break, a fire alarm going off at the hotel.

Saturday was packed with all sorts of goodness:

Going to the beach

 Flying kites

 Getting rained on

 Walking down River Street in Savannah

Exploring the candy stores 

 Eating at The Cotton Exchange (fried cheesecake!)

Walking around Forsyth Park

It was really pretty with the rain/mist and the Spanish moss hanging off the live oaks. I love this city.

Sunday we drove back after watching the morning session of conference at a nearby church building. Could a weekend get any better?

Surprise!

This weekend was super fun. I drove up to Durham to surprise Mindy for her birthday!

I left on Saturday morning and drove 6 hours to Durham (but I was too enthusiastic about it, and got a speeding ticket. Sad...) Knocked on the door, "Surprise!" Her face was priceless. She had no idea I was coming. Jeran's a good secret keeper.

We went to dinner, made muddy buddies (and laughed insanely while doing so - I only laugh like that with family), and watched the old Star Trek IV. Sunday we went to church, made lunch, opened presents, and I drove home. Even though we didn't do much, it was still one of the funnest weekends in a long time. I loved surprising Mindy and being with her on her birthday. And I love being with family. 

Making stir fry for lunch

Cooking stuff from me. Very exciting.

Forget-me-not angel from Mom

Picture frame from Kara

Visiting Virginia

Since moving to Atlanta, one of the things I have really been wanting to do was drive to Virginia and visit people I know there from my internship in summer 2010. While I am much closer than I was in Utah, it's still about a ten hour drive each way. Or eleven hours if I split it into two drives and spend a night in North Carolina. I tried it both ways.

I had decided to go up on Presidents Day weekend, because I need the extra day for the long travel time. And then I decided in order to see everyone I wanted to, I needed another day. Luckily my boss seemed to have no problem giving me that Friday off as well (it's our slow season right now, so that helps).

I actually stayed in Durham on Thursday night with Mindy and Jeran's friends, Mary and Adam, since Mindy and Jeran were in Utah visiting. It was kind of nice having the drive split up in two, and talking to my mom all the way through South Carolina helped, too. I really enjoy the bluetooth feature in my car that allows me to talk to people while I drive. Legally. Talking to people really makes the driving time disappear - on the way home I had plentiful time to talk to many people, so that was very fun. This was the first long solo road trip, and I was quite happy that it went so well and really didn't seem that difficult.

There were four main groups/people that I visited with: The Care of Trees office in Dulles (where I interned), the Anderson family (where I lived), Ryan Royston (best friend), and the Jenkins (good friends of the Andersons and now mine).

My visit to TCOT was rather impromptu and unannounced. I just drove over for fun, to see the once-familiar route and hopefully be able to chat with some old coworkers. Luck was with me, and I arrived at the office just near the end of the day, so I was able to surprise everyone with my random visit. I talked with Jeremy (boss and friend) for a while, but also Dave, Dean, Mark, Doug, and Ron as they were coming back from their work days. It was fun to see them again, and to know that I could go work there whenever I wanted - according to Jeremy.

I spent a lot of time at the Andersons', since that's where I was staying for the weekend, but we didn't really do anything together. It was more casual than that, like I belonged there and it wasn't at all different for me to stay there. It was a whole lot of fun memories though. Like the picture frame on the wall with the store-provided photos, or the chocolate crispies for breakfast.

Ryan and I spent quite a lot of time together. Dinner on Friday night at IHOP, where we compared our nice new cars and dealership stories (he'd gotten his car that day, so it was fun to compare notes. Our cars are quite similar). Saturday afternoon we went to McKay Used Books, Inc in Manassas. SO FUN! They have so many books, movies, music, everything. We spent hours there. I ended up buying some movies, a famous buildings of the world book, and a beautiful big book of Sherlock Holmes - it has every single Conan Doyle story, and it looks like it's never been opened before. Fun! Then we had dinner and watched some movies (including the home video his little brother had just finished editing together. I rather liked Thor, but watching Count of Monte Cristo just makes me upset at how completely inferior it is to the book. In every way. It was so good to see Ryan again - it's been almost five months since I've seen him, and two months since I've spent significant time with a close friend who's not also a family member. It was sad to leave because who knows when the next opportunity to visit will be.

I spent Sunday evening with the Jenkins' at Pemberley (that's what their house is called. They're both very big Jane Austen fans). We had a nice pot roast dinner and visited for a while.

I really loved my visit to Virginia, it felt a lot like being at home. Not home home, but a home. Very familiar and comfortable, lots of friends and family type people. I wish I could visit again soon, but it's a really long drive and I have so many other places to visit and explore.

Rosemary Beach

I have several things to post about, but I don't feel like putting them all in one, so I'm going to write several different posts today, in the correct order. Hopefully, I'll keep up better in the future.

The weekend before I started work, Kara and I went down to the beach in Florida with her friend Michael and his son Alec, and met up with some more friends the next day. That was Jan 12-15. We were there for the 30A Songwriter's Festival. I eventually figured out that 30A is the highway that goes through that section of beach towns, which finally made the event title make sense to me. Lots of different songwriters/musicians would play at different venues along 30A over the course of the weekend.

This is where Rosemary Beach is in Florida, on the panhandle part near Pensacola:

 It was an interesting experience because (a) I have never been to a songwriter's festival and am really not all that knowledgeable about music - a lot of it sounded all the same. And (b) despite the general ideas of "Florida" and "beach," it was really not that warm. Between 40 and 50 degrees during the day, and much colder at night, which was of course when we were sitting and standing around trying to appreciate the music. But in all fairness, the beach part was still beautiful, and the music experience was quite fun. It even warmed up to about 60 degrees on Sunday and I was able to sit on the beach and listen to conference talks on my iPod.

One of the funner parts would be when Kara convinced me to go on a run on the beach (twice). Then it was only "barely too cold", instead of "way too cold." (Apparently, the fact that I'm from Utah does little to protect me from getting cold, except maybe when Alyna texts to tell me that it's 2 degrees there. Then I feel marginally better here). Running on the beach is interestingly hard, or I'm just way out of shape. Probably both.

Here's some pictures from the trip:

Jellyfish!

My conclusion was that we should go to the beach sometime when it was actually warm.

Accomplishments of 2011

2011 has been a very busy year for me, and very eventful despite the lack of blog entries. Here are a couple of the things I’ve been up to:

· Run in three races: Moab Marathon, Moonlight Half Marathon, Las Vegas Ragnar Relay Race

Before starting the Moab Marathon with Andrew, Ryan, me, and Carolyn.

At the finish line of the Moonlight Half with Beth Hansen.

The team for Las Vegas Ragnar.

Been in 15 states: Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Illinois, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Missouri, Virginia.

· Been in 7 countries (if you count Scotland as its own country): USA, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Holland.

Looking over London from the top of St. Paul's Cathedral.

Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland. One of my favorite days!

Our detour to Canada. On the way to England.

At the zoo in Frankfurt, Germany.

· Competed in three tree climbing competitions (Chicago, Utah, Hartford)

Climbing in the Student Career Days competition in Chicago, IL.

Accepting a prize at TCIA competition in Hartford, CT.

· Interviewed with several tree care companies, received and accepted a job offer from Bartlett Tree Experts.

· Achieved my International Society of Arboriculture arborist certification.

· Graduated from BYU in Landscape Management.

· Got a commercial driver’s license (Class B CDL).

· Driven to Georgia to live with my aunt Kara in Atlanta.

· Bought a new car – 2011 Mazda 3.

I really hadn't realized just how much I've done this year until I was doing this blog entry. It's been a crazy year full of travel and adventures. Here are some more pictures of the year:

Boating at Lake Powell with Paces

BYU Tree Crew Summer BBQ

Having fun at the wedding of Amanda Bates and Josh Eskeets

Wicked! And in London!

Erilyn and I went to St. George and Zion's Ntl Park

Date to see the lights at Temple Square