Christmas Decor

I was pretty excited to decorate for Christmas this year. I guess it's because it's my first year to decorate my own space. I've always been in an apartment (or at Kara's) and headed home for Christmas. So this year was exciting. Here's some of what I did for decorating:

My first real Christmas tree!

Paper star from a Pinterest DIY.

Gold pinecone (and I collected all the pinecones!)

Cinnamon ornament (Pinterest, of course)

I have a mantle this year!

Wreath - with bows and pinecones!
First attempt at making a wreath, it turned out well, I thought. 

Balcony garland - I had no idea what I was doing, but it looks ok.

Camping Weekend

This last weekend we had a fun, adventurous camping trip with Mindy and Jeran to the North Carolina highlands. Friday night we arrived at a nice little campground called Blue Bear Mountain Camp. Mindy and Jeran were nice enough to arrive earlier and get a fire going.

It's an exciting life.

On Saturday morning, we headed over to Grandfather Mountain. On the way up to the top, we stopped by the nature museum and the wildlife habitats. We had a lot of fun watching the bears and otters. There were eagles and deer as well, but those were slightly less exciting. The cougars weren’t visible at all.  The black bears were funny. One really liked yawning and sticking her very long tongue out. The biggest one liked to sit and clean his paws, walk through the pond, sit back down in his exact spot, and clean all his paws again. Over and over.

We drove up to the parking lot for hikers and got ready for our crazy hike up to the “Mile-high swinging bridge”. The hike was pretty steep with lots of switchbacks, and the path was mostly big rocks like steps. The bridge was AWESOME! Its total elevation was 5,280 feet, but it’s suspended only 80 feet above the gorge. It was pretty swingy though. The bridge takes you out to a rock outcropping, where you can look over the valleys below. Except that one side of the valley was completely covered with some low clouds. My phone lost power pretty quick, but luckily Mindy and Jeran were being good photographers.

We then decided to hike back on a different path, but then decided to keep going to Macrae Peak. There was some pretty crazy hiking, with ladders tethered onto stone walls and cables to help people up steep areas. Also, once we hit the ridge of the mountain, it got kind of windy and pretty chilly. We kept going to the peak. And it was stunning. Awe inspiring. And quite cold.

When we finally made it back to the car, my FitBit said we’d gone 5 miles and 129 floors!

We spent most of the evening hanging out around the campfire and chatting. Mostly because we were really tired and it was downright chilly. Like, 35 degrees with 20 mph winds. Chase even conceded to sleep in the tent that night, instead of in hammocks like we did the first night. (FYI – I find sleeping in the hammock very comfortable, and Chase knows the secrets to making it not so cold).

Our camp with hammocks. 

Sunday morning we packed up and headed our separate ways. We headed towards Asheville via the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was a bit crowded, being a nice sunny Sunday with beautiful fall colors, but it was definitely worth the extra time. We paused in Asheville to visit Grove Park Inn (amazing!) and eat lunch and headed home. It was such a fun trip filled with gorgeous sights and some crazy adventures. Let’s do it again!

Fall colors on the Blue Ridge Parkway

Apple Picking

Do you know what I love about fall? Just about everything!!! In fact, I've yet to decide there's something I don't like about fall. Even though the leaves falling means a lot of extra blowing at work, it's totally worth it to have the cool weather, changing leaves, fall foods and flavors, wearing jackets, etc etc etc. I've been making pumpkin stuff for a month or two now (pumpkin muffins, mostly. They're so good, and you can eat them for breakfast!), but I hadn't done much with apples. Until this last week. I made apple crisp for Chase's birthday and it made me remember how much I LOVE apples and apple recipes. So I made a resolution that Chase and I must go apple picking!

We went up to the little town of Blue Ridge, GA, to the Mercier Orchards. It was rather packed, and there was a long line to pay, and another one for the tractors taking people up to the picking site. Totally worth it. It was a nice day, a bit on the warm side, but it had that smell of autumn in the air. It smells like falling leaves and chilly mornings and a bit of cinnamon. We had lots of fun climbing between rows of trees trying to find the perfect apples to pick. Cameo, fuji, sun crisp (my favorite!), mutzu... Just a few of the nice varieties we found. It was also very amusing to people watch. There were old couples, hippies, families with young kids, groups of teenage friends, all sorts of people. The best moment was when we were waiting in line for the tractor back to the barn and we were watching a little boy ahead of us.
 He was probably a year and a half old. He would take a bite of an apple, and then spit most of it out. Then he spotted an orange cone next to the line, and that seemed like the perfect spot of the bit of apple that had just come out of his mouth. Upon discovering that it was perfect, he took another bite and this time he leaned over and put his mouth to the cone and spit the bite in (I couldn't hold in my laugh at this). This was repeated two more times before he discovered another cone which soon received the same treatment. But where did it go? So he had to tip the cone over and inspect the bottom. His mother intercepted him as he tried to stuff what was left of his apple all the way in the cone. Little kids are just hilarious and I love watching them.

Here's some pictures of me and Chase at the orchard.

And yes, I'm wearing Oriental Trading sunglasses, because
they're all I had in the car and it was BRIGHT.

Crazy, Wonderful Life

So, most of you know I got married this summer. Yay! I've been meaning to write posts about the bridal showers, the dinner in Utah, the wedding and reception in Atlanta, and the honeymoon. Yeah, hasn't happened.
Mostly, I'm just crazy busy with work and work and married life and spending time with Chase's family (his brother just left on his mission - quality time was required before that sad day!) and making food and trying to get to bed at a decent time (Chase does not share my views on appropriate bedtimes). When I do get a few minutes to sit down and write, I usually figure Thank you notes are more important. But I don't want to work on them today, so here's a tidbit of a blog instead.

Aunt Kara hosted a bridal shower for me on May 11, 2013. Mindy even came down to celebrate!

Chase and I flew out to Utah on May 30. I went through the Logan temple to take out my endowments on June 1, and that was followed by a big family/friends dutch oven dinner. (For which the food was fabulous and the decorations just amazing).

All of my loving and supportive family and friends at the temple.

The wedding was on June 21, 2013 at the Atlanta, GA temple. We had a wonderful photographer, Holly Jones. I loved her work!

My wonderful bridesmaids: Kalie Larkin, Erilyn Heintz,
Alyna Briscoe (MoH), and Sarah Hafen

The reception that evening was at a historic park nearby, Heritage Sandy Springs. (Did we get pictures?)

We went on our honeymoon to a cabin belonging to a Smith family friend in the North Carolina mountains, near Cashiers. It was beautiful and cooler and had lots of waterfalls nearby!

Employed Once Again

It's nice to be an active member of the work force again, even if my body is quite accustomed to this whole going to be and waking up on time thing yet. I now work for Fockele Garden Company (pronounced  folk-lee). It's a high-end landscape company that does design-build-maintain for residential and commercial clients. I'll be working with their maintenance division out of Atlanta. We're working on building up the Atlanta division, and hopefully I'll soon be taking on a leadership role. It's all very exciting. I've been doing office training these last two weeks and I can't wait to go and work in the field this week. I'll definitely write more about the job soon, but I thought I'd just throw this out here so ya'll would know what's up in my life.
Click here for Fockele Garden website!

Wedding plans are getting on pretty well, too. It's great to finally be "officially" engaged!

Last Day at Bartlett

Today was my last day of work at Bartlett Tree Experts. It was a kind of difficult choice to make, but I'm confident it was the right thing to do.
In January, I told my boss that I was looking into other job options. He was really good about it and offered a contact or two into my field of interest (botanical gardens, namely). Then, around the middle/end of January, he came up to me and said, "We need to figure out when your last day of work is going to be."  I replied that the end of February would be a good ending time for me because I'm going to Utah for a week in the beginning of March. He didn't seem too keen on that because he pushed right ahead and said, "Well, I have a new guy and I want him to start on Feb 11, so let's have your last day be Feb 8. Is that alright? Great. Have a nice day!"  Great.
My (rather half-hearted) attempts at networking with the people I need to apply to didn't yield much feedback. It's been difficult to apply myself to the job search, because really, I have much more exciting things to plan for and research on the internet (although that, too, seems to be going really slowly right now). But I'm kicking it into high gear next week and hope to have something lined up for when I get back from Utah.

 So, last day. I worked with Nick and Jaime. Jaime has been my consistently favorite coworker, so it was nice to work with him on my last day instead of someone less likable. We worked at a little family cemetery in Lilburn. It was kind of cool, and I liked the symbolism - last day of work=cemetery, etc.

 The work was easy (raise up some red-tip photinia that were hanging all over the drive and remove a smallish pine tree and dead oak spur), and the next door neighbor provided our entertainment for the day:

      He came over demanding that we turn our machines off and tell him exactly what we were doing and nobody wanted to be able to see the cemetery and dead people don't care what it looks like and we don't need a bucket truck to do that removal and we'd already been over in his property cutting stuff down [false, btw] and WHY WERE WE STILL CUTTING STUBS?! 

We had to get the sales rep, Art, over to talk to him so we could just do our work and not incur any physical altercations. I was pretty amused. Not a bad last day of work, really. I didn't get to say goodbye to everyone, but other than that, really not bad.

I find cemeteries to be pretty peaceful and interesting places, overall. There were headstones there from 1980 back to 1863 or earlier. That's pretty cool. This was the coolest one I found:

A WWII soldier, died in Italy in 1943. 

As a side note, I really enjoy Atlanta this time of year, because we start getting spring flowers blooming. Here are a few pictures from recently.

Lots of daffodils are starting to blossom right about now. 

Cherry blossoms! Pretty common now days. 

Ok, so not a flower, but it was an incredible sunrise from Monday morning. Seriously, the sky was hot pink and this picture does it no justice at all. 

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.