New House!

OK, so we actually bought and already moved into our new house on June 30 in a Draper, Utah commmunity called Suncrest. We have been remiss to blog since we got back to "normal" life, although we're still having too much fun. We meant to post our AT Skiing excursion we did a couple weeks ago. It cracked us up skiing so late in June, so it was worth the picture. More pictures to come . . . some day

Through the Holiday Season

We've been up to a lot of things in the last couple of months, but we realized the other day that we haven't posted anything other than a couple of recipes for a while. Here are a few of our goings on:

• OFFER ON A HOME. We recently made an offer on a home in Suncrest (on the back side of Salt Lake's point of the mountain and above the city of Draper). The home is a cute three bedroom, with a little room to grow into in an unfinished basement. We love the neighborhood and location, which is set amid endless possibilities for backcountry skiing, hiking and mountain biking. It's a short sale, though, so who knows when and if we'll get it. In the mean time, we are renting some basement space in West Jordan from Kelsi's cousin Louise and Danny McCleve. We thoroughly enjoy staying with them and their three children.

• GETAWAY TO PARK CITY. In November, we had a really good time taking our Ryan and Julie's kids to Heber (near park city) for the weekend. We stayed in a timeshare with a swimming pool and played all kinds of water games.


• THANKSGIVING was delicious with Rusty's parents in Brigham City.


• JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS. Motab Christmas Concerts, helping out with Kelsi's sister, Emily, Holiday Party for nephews and neices, visiting with friends in town for the holidays, Skiing at Brighton for quarter price with the holiday food drive, and the births of Zenock Diehl, Lucas Diehl and Sophia Hansen.


• CHRISTMAS. We split our time between Kelsi's family in Salt Lake City and Rusty's family in Brigham and Logan. It was a delight to spend the holidays with family after missing last Christmas.


• SKIING AND SNOWBOARDING at Brighton and Alta... BTW, Alta is free everyday from 3 to 430 pm... not bad! Rusty claims that the picture below was of him, but Kelsi just doesn't remember taking it...
  


• NEW YEARS get together in Brigham City with Rusty's friends.


• SINGING. Rusty and Matt Toyn "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" in Matt 's ward. Rusty's brother, Kevin accompanied.


• TRIP TO SAINT GEORGE with Kelsi's father to see a home that Kelsi's dad is interested in buying.


• MEDICAL ASSISTING. Kelsi decided to expand her education in the medical field by getting a certificate in medical assisting from salt lake community college.



• CIVIL AIR PATROL. Rusty was offered the opportunity to be an assistant legal officer with the US Air Force Civilian Auxiliary, the Civil Air Patrol "CAP." CAP is a voluntary orgznization funded by the USAF with the mandate of assisting with surveillance and recon for homeland security and federal anti narcotics programs. CAP requires Rusty to wear a USAF uniform and comply with miltary courtesy, but as a civilian volunteer, he won't be subject to military laws or court martial. He is excited at the prospect of getting involved in such an exciting organization!

• UTAH CLIMBING CLUB: Rusty joined a mountaineering and climbing club that goes on monthly climbs and camping trips around the western US. He just went ice climbing to Maple Canyon, near Fairview, UT yesterday.

• OTHER LATEST: We scored a couple Sundance Film Fesitival tickets from Kelsi's friend from her past job in Park City, Tracey, and got to see a documentary about Cambodia's Khmer Rouge killings. It was an interesting film. Also, Kelsi can finally run again after nearly 4 months of being off her normal athletic enjoyment from an ankle injury in October. She also enjoyed a day snowboarding with her Aunt Bev and family along with her cousin, Louise. Kelsi's sister delivered her adorable baby, Lucian Heward, last week. It's quite the year for babies!

Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup

Louise (Kelsi's cousin who we're living with and one of Kelsi's best friends) and Kelsi made the BEST homemade chicken noodle soup tonight including noodles from scratch! Mmmm!

It brought back memories from when Kelsi & Louise's grandma used to make homemade noodles when they were little girls. The latest blog posts seem to be the gourmet cooking odyssey (not necessarily after Julie & Julia, but we want to watch that movie when we get a chance).

Here's the link to the soup recipe: http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1739,150185-255198,00.html

And the noodles: http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1627,146191-251199,00.html

Back to "Normal Life"

It's been a while, but we've been busy since the last post. In mid September we ran the Brigham City, UT Peach Days 10K where Kelsi's pace was 1 min/mile faster than the half marathon the week prior and faster than the last time she did it a couple years ago. Yeah! (Rusty runs with Kelsi, but would have no problem running faster!) Here we are with Rusty's family after the race watching the parade.

All of Rusty's family were up in Brigham City (where Rusty's parents live) for the Peach Days weekend, so we took our niece and nephew, Hannah and Ethan, fishing in a nearby creek and caught this fish:

The kids were having a great time until Hannah's flip flop came off her foot and was swept downstream. She was SO upset! Her Aunt Alice had just given her 4-5 new pairs of shoes for school JUST before we went fishing, so Kelsi said something like the following to Hannah: Well, think of all the beautiful new shoes you just got. And Hannah started whailing, but I LOVE these shoes! They're so beautiful! And I want THESE ones! It was kind of hilarious to the adults. But luckily the creek turned into a pond just a short ways down and Rusty and Nate (Hannah's dad) were able to retrieve the flip flop. So everything ended up OK - though Ethan also tripped in the creek and got upset from being soaked. In the end, they decided that they weren't interested in fishing again until they are bigger. "Maybe in 2 or 5 years."

A couple weeks later we went to St. George with Rusty's friend, Aaron, and his girlfriend, Jessica, where we went rock climbing then to Zions for some spectacular canyoneering. We had to rappel down 5 or so big drops. The last one was about 90 feet with about 80 feet just free hanging. Unfortunately, we didn't get any pictures since none of us had a waterproof camera and we had full submersed swims through pools of water at times.


A couple weeks after going to Saint George, we took our FJ on the Canyonlands White Rim trail. We should have also taken our mountain bikes as EVERYONE else on the trail was biking it. We did take a rapelling rope though and backed our FJ up to a drop about 60 feet, put the emergency brake on, then tied the rope to the hitch and did the drop which went to a place you could walk back. Rusty ascended back up the rope once using prusik knots with two ropes to inch his way back up by stepping on one then sliding the other up from his waist. Then he would put weight on the top rope and slide the bottom rope up and repeat. We also enjoyed sharing our rope with the camp next to us as one of the guys who'd never rappelled before gave it a go on our rigged up contraption. That was a lot of fun.

Here's a couple pictures along the trail:
Sheer drop off the the left of us:

The following picture is of Musselman Arch about a quarter of a way into the trail. You can walk across it, though it's quite narrow and a death drop if you tripped. I think we've heard insane stories of people riding their mountain bikes across the arch, though, we think it's officially not allowed. That's not something we would do! Even walking across it gives Kelsi the eeby jeebies! We decided to post a picture from almost exactly two years ago when we did this trail with Rusty's friends, Russell and Emily, since we could both be in that picture:

The following is Rusty's rigged up rappel off the back of our FJ:

Since the trend of this blog seems to be reporting every other weekend, two weeks after the Canyonlands trip, we enjoyed Halloween by getting our first dental check-up in a year and a half by Rusty's friend, Benji, in Brigham City (no cavities for either of us!) followed by a family Halloween party where we dressed up as a cowboy and indian.



Of course our nieces & nephews & friends kids were also all adorable, but we'll let you look at their blogs & facebook pictures. A couple of our favorites that we saw were a 3 year old ghostbuster and a 3 year old fairy including matching shoes:

Louise's daughter, Aaliyah

Nephew, Isaak

As far as "normal life" goes, Rusty's still working for the law firm and Kelsi's still looking for a job! Crazy market!