Dog Lake, part 2 (sort of)

This isn't actually about Dog Lake, but it is from that hike. This is something fun.

About a year ago (October 17th, the photo thing says), J and I went hiking and we had our picture taken together. I probably posted it on my blog somewhere before, but this is the picture:


This year we took a new picture together, on the same hike, in the same month, in front of the same sign.

It's kind of like those drawings where the pictures look alike but you have to find a certain number of things that are different between the two pictures. For instance, in the first picture we're broken up; in the second picture we're married. In the first picture, we have no dog to enjoy hiking; in the second picture we have Chalcy.

I kind of think we should go back every October and take another picture there. Then, someday it will be kind of neat to flip through our pictures and watch ourselves age and things change. We'll see.

(Isn't that cool?)

Chalcy + Paley = BFF

Chalcy (our new puppy) and Paley (my cat) are best friends.

(Well, Chalcy thinks so, anyway.) (Sometimes Paley thinks so too.)

They're working through their differences.

Paley was initially afraid of Chalcy. She was about the same size as Paley when we brought her home*, but Chalcy looks kind of like our renters' dogs--Chalcy looked more like the lab, but was about the same size as the min-pin, like some terrible combination of Paley's two mortal enemies. Our renters' dogs are MEAN**. And they CHASE her. We kind of expected Pae to be afraid of the puppy.

Pretty soon after we brought Chalcy home, Pae realized that Chalce was not the same as the other dogs. Chalcy would notice Paley and try to go be with her (like the other dogs (!!!)), but as Chalcy would scamper toward Paley, the puppy kept tripping on grass. And then, Chalcy would get near Paley, and the puppy would suddenly lose interest in the cat because she would suddenly notice, OH WOW, A NEAT PIECE OF GRASS! So Chalcy would lay down--right by Paley, but totally disinterested in her--to chew on some grass, or whatever. Chalcy was not exactly quite the same threat Paley was expecting. So Paley started trying to sniff Chalcy, and a little bit tolerated Chalcy sniffing her. Within a few days, Paley started to rub up against Chalcy sometimes.

Chalcy liked Paley, because they were about the same size, and Paley is black like Chalcy (and her missing littermates), and Paley has a tail. Chalcy licks Paley, so Pae knows that the puppy likes her.*** Since Paley is a friend, Chalcy always wants to play with her. Her littermates always wanted to play, so Paley must want to play too, right?

This is how their interactions usually go:
1. Paley rubs up against Chalcy, or comes to sit near her.
2. Chalcy gets excited. Chalcy licks Paley and nestles her head into Paley's side. (Paley is ok with this.)
3. Chalcy begins to suck and chew on Paley's face/side. (Chalcy is little rough with Pae, but Paley is willing to tolerate it, because it's obvious that Chalcy is trying to be friendly, and not trying to be mean.)
4. Chalcy starts to play-bite Paley, which Paley will sometimes put up with.
5. Paley gets tired of playing too rough. She yowls and smacks Chalcy with her paw.
6. Chalcy is excited about the new smack-each-other-with-our-paws game, and starts wagging her tail. Chalcy backs up a couple feet, and does that playful-puppy thing, where her bottom is up in the air, with her tail wagging, and her front is crouched down, ready to pounce on Paley. Chalcy jabs a paw towards Paley a couple times.
7. Paley playfully bats her paw at Chalcy's paw.
8. Chalcy tackles Paley and pins her down to chew on her.
9. OH NO! Paley does NOT want Puppy Fun. (Also, Chalcy is quite a bit heavier than Paley, so being jumped on hurts, or is uncomfortable at least.) Paley yowls and hisses. If Chalcy does not move quickly, Paley will GRAB onto Chalcy's front leg with her claws, and Pae begins biting Chalcy repeatedly, while she growls. (GET OFF, DOG!)
10. This hurts a little bit, but it is Puppy Fun too, so Chalcy enjoys it for a minute, and then it hurts a little, so Chalcy will back off, or Paley will jump out from under Chalcy (to go sit a few feet away).
11. [Repeat.]

As I've been typing this, it sounds a little mean, but everyone is playing, and nobody gets hurt. When Paley is really done playing, she will go climb a tree, or jump up a fence, or hop up onto the car, or go somewhere else Chalcy can't get to.

A lot of times, Paley and Chalcy will play on opposite sides of a fence, batting at each other through the fence. Sometimes they'll run through tall grass. Paley will run through the tall grass, and stop somewhere, and Chalcy will run though the tall grass to "catch" her. Then Paley will run somewhere else a couple feet away and crouch down, and Chalcy will bounce through the grass to find her again, and the game continues. It is a game for both of them--Paley loves all of the attention from Chalcy.

Sometimes they're not too interested in playing, and they'll just lie down near each other, a couple feet away. Usually Paley will come sit kind of near Chalcy and I, and after a couple minutes, Chalcy will take whatever she is already chewing on ("Tug!" or "Stick!") and go lie down near the cat, so that she can keep chewing on her toy, but also be near Paley.

In the past week or so, Chalcy has realized that Paley does not like to be jumped on, so now Chalcy catches her by standing above her, instead of knocking her over. Paley likes this better (of course), so she is willing for longer.**** I think they will be better friends as Chalcy gets older and learns to be a little more gentle. Paley sometimes gets tired of Puppy Games. She does like Chalcy, though.





* Except that Chalcy's mass is all bulk, and Paley's mass is all fur. So. Not exactly quite the same.
** To cats.
*** Chalcy also licks the calves and the goat, so they know she's different than our renters' dogs, too. She likes them, and they are friends.
**** Chalcy still loves to bite Paley's tail (because it is long, and it moves, and it is covered in FUR!), and she loves to bite Paley's ears--this is tricky, though, because Chalcy's mouth is bigger than Paley's ears, so she ends up biting half of Paley's head. This is not Paley's very favorite game.

I am not a Professional Striper.

It's been another busy week for us.

(Every week is, though, so that's nothing new.)

Last Monday, I striped our parking lot. The lines were really faded, so it seemed like a good idea. The previous owner told us it was one of the best things he ever did, and he said you can call up a company and they'll come out and paint the stripes for like $100.

Here is a "before" picture:


But we only have 7 or 8 stripes, so I was like, "NO PROBLEM! I'll just do it!" Because I have experience with that sort of thing, anyway.*

So I found out that there was striping paint that you could just buy(!)** at Lowie's or HD, to do parking lots. Piece of cake! It's called "Striping Paint"*** because it's for making stripes. And it would seem like stripes would always be for parking lots, but it turns out there are SO MANY USES for striping paint.**** In fact, striping paint is such a big deal that there is a whole secret code for what colors you're supposed to use when you stripe things. [The legend (key?) is on boxes of things, in case you don't know it. One example is, you don't use red paint for painting parking lines.] They also make marking paint, which can be used for stripes. It's more popular for marking gas lines, or power lines, or trees to cut down, though.

So anyway, I really looked into it and I saw online that you can paint stripes with either a striping machine thing, or with a marking wand thing. The difference is, the striping machine (about $100) has four intense (all-terrain! (I think)) wheels, to keep things really straight, and the line you spray can vary in width. The marking wand (about $20) just has a little wheel to keep things as straight as you can draw them.

I decided that I was not a hard-core enough parking-striper to buy a special striping machine. The wand would work for me! So I went and bought my can of striping paint (to cover 250 ft! Wow!), and a wand. I bought some pink plastic DON'T GO HERE! tape, so that I could block off the parking lot and our tenants would remember NOT TO GO THERE.

On Friday I posted a sign on everyone's doors to say:
1. We're re-painting the parking lot stripes on Monday!
2. Please move your cars by 8:30 am and don't plan to park in the lot again until 7 pm! (Because I knew I would probably be there at 9:00 or so, and I wanted to give them a little extra time to be moved. Also, the paint said it would take 8 hours to dry, so I wanted to allow myself an hour or so, just in case it took me longer to paint than I thought it would, plus plenty of time for things to dry.)
3. If you don't move your car, I reserve the right to tow it, at your expense. (To emphasize that it was important, and just in case.) Buuut, please just plan to park somewhere else, pretty please.

It was a great sign! It even had a border and a giant can of paint in the lower corner, just like people would expect.

So on Monday morning, I gathered my striping paint, and my marking wand, and my pink tape, and some masking tape (just in case!) and I headed off to the property.

A car was still parked there, but two of the other tenants who were home had moved their cars to the street. (Good job, guys!) The car was parked on one end, so I decided I would just block it off, and then if I could, I would paint around it. And if not, then I would knock on doors and ask whoever it was to move it. Or maybe paint another day. Towing cars is pretty mean, I think.

So I put up my pink DON'T GO HERE tape, and I stretched it from the fence on one side, allllllll the way across the ends of the parking spaces, down to the mailboxes. I tightened it so that it would remain as taut as it could for being stretched so far with no support in the middle.

I started laying out masking tape, so that I would be able to see my lines really clearly. The existing lines were pretty worn out, so I just wanted to be sure that I did a good job, and kept the lines pretty straight.

I taped up one line and part of a second one, and then I ran out of masking tape.

Oh well! No big deal!

But the tape didn't stick too well (because it's an old parking lot, and the asphalt is gravel in a lot of places now). So I would use my hand to brush the little rocks away, and tape it down where it was coming up. I also brushed the rocks out of the parking line area, because OF COURSE if you paint lines on gravel it's going to look pretty bad pretty quickly.

I was ready to go!

I pulled the marking wand out, and I assembled it, by attaching the wheel. It popped right in! Good!

I read the instructions. Twice. And then I shook the can (vigorously!) for a full two minutes after I could hear the little metal ball inside. I took the cap off of the striping paint, and put the can in the wand, and I think I lined things up right, and I went over to my taped line, and I lined it up straight in the middle of the space to be painted. (You've got to be careful with lining things up when you're using a wand instead of a striping machine, but it's just a sacrifice you have to make.)

I pulled the trigger on the wand, and...


Nothing happened.

I rolled the wand back and forth, and click, click, clicked the trigger.

Nothing.

I picked it up, and looked at it, and I wondered if maybe I hadn't lined it up right. Maybe I had mixed up the thing something was supposed to be parallel with, and it wasn't working right. So I turned the can around, and put it down, and centered it...

And nothing happened when I tried to stripe that time either.

So I looked at how it was working. The little lever needed to hit the top of the paint can, and it seemed like it did, but it just wasn't working. I sprayed the striping paint, to be sure that it wasn't unusually difficult, or clogged, or something. It worked.

Hm.

I called Rust-Oleum to see if we could figure it out together, but they were currently experiencing a high call volume. So I stayed on the line, but I continued trying to get it to work.

After several minutes of it not working, and several minutes of Rust-Oleum queue music, I headed towards Lowe's. Obviously there was either something wrong with my striping paint, or with my wand. Maybe the wand thing that pokes the top of the can wasn't assembled facing the right direction.

Halfway to Lowe's, Rust-Oleum answered. I explained the problem, and explained that I was on my way to the store, to see what was wrong. The Rust-Oleum girl was like, "OH, well, I know exactly what your problem is." I told her, "Oh! Great! You do?"

Her: "Yes. You see, you're using the marking wand with striping paint. That's not gonna work. The tops are shaped differently. That's why it isn't working. That's not gonna work. With the marking wand you've got to use marking paint."

Me: "Ohhhhh, so if I want to use striping paint, I need to use the more expensive machine. See, I'm new to this. I've never done this before, and it's just for our little parking lot. So I just thought stripes were a kind of marking, so they seemed like the same thing to me. [Chuckle.]"

Her: "Yeahhh. ... No, you can use the marking paint, though, and that will work for you."

Me: "Even for parking lots? The lines won't be as good though, will they? I thought the marking paint was for like, marking gas lines and things. Can I still get crisp lines with the marking paint?"

Her (reassuringly): "Oh, yeah. The marking paint works for parking lots too. It won't last quite as long, and it won't be quite as crisp of lines as you would get if you were using striping, but..."

Me: "Right...that's understandable."

Her: "But. Yeah, you can still get that crisp line you're looking for."

Me: "Ohhh, okay. Well, I guess I'll do that, then. That should work. I'm still driving to the store, so I'll just plan to get that instead, and now I don't need to figure out what's wrong. [Chuckle.] Thanks."

Her: "Okay. And don't get mad at the people working at the hardware store for it, because that's what you bought.." [Or something like that.]

Me: [Confused.] "What? Oh. ... No. I'm not a mean customer like that. I'm just going to get the marking paint instead. ... All right. Thanks for your help. Have a good day."

Her: "You too. Goodbye."

I wasn't like, angry on the call, so I don't know why she told me to not get mad at the hardware store. But, whatever, it was nice to know what the problem was.

So I got to Lowe's and I went in, and I grabbed a can of (white) marking paint, and some masking tape (just in case), and I hustled back to the parking lot.

I could see that the top of the paint was totally different, just like she had mentioned. I shook that paint for a couple minutes, got it centered on my taped up line, and started spraying.

And it sprayed!

But...it made such a skinny (and semi-transparent!) line that I had to go back and forth, back and forth to get to the sides, and to make it opaque enough. I taped up the second line the rest of the way, and I started spraying that line. And then, I ran out of marking paint.

After 1 1/2 lines!

[Please note: most of the white in the picture is masking tape.]

Good grief.

So I could see that marking paint was not going to work for me. It didn't look very good. The lines were not crisp at all (except for what the masking tape did), and they weren't very solid, and I went through the stuff SO fast. It wasn't even all that windy! And I had brushed the gravel away!

I drove to Home Depot and got myself a paint-striper. I bought another can of striping paint, too, just in case.

And I drove back, shook the can (vigorously!) for two minutes, and put it in the machine. It worked! I ended up needing to brush away gravel on all of the stripes, and that was a pain, but our parking lot is re-striped!*****


So, I'm pretty happy with how that all went. Now that we own a marking wand and a striping machine, plus I used three cans of paint (1 marking, 2 striping), the job cost us about $150 plus 3 hours of time (instead of $100 and no time). So, it was not the most profitable decision, at least for the short-term. But now I know what's up--I know the difference between marking and striping. And if anyone wants me to paint parking lines for them, I have the tools!

(It kind of makes me want to set up a race. Because I could maybe find temporary marking paint, and then it would be just like what they use for 5Ks and stuff. Not sure what I would raise money for, if I had a race. But I should probably think about that, since, of course, the only thing people really need in order to have a race is a marking wand, right?)


SPOILER FOR MY NEXT POST:
When I finished at about noon, I hurried home to take Chalcy outside, and then I hurried over to J's parents' house, because J's dad had volunteered to fix sprinklers with me.



* One time, (in California) I was walking over to the grocery store from the little Italian restaurant where I worked, and there was a guy re-painting the STOP letters on the asphalt, in the parking lot. I'd never seen anyone do that before! So I stopped and asked him about it. He was using a (big!) stencil and some paint, and rolling it out. It was pretty simple, he said. He offered to let me do one of the letters, and I DID. I thought it was kind of cool. So, I have a lot of experience with this sort of thing, actually, you know?
** As long as you are 18 or older.
*** (which I always confuse with "Stripping Paint" so it looks more risque than it actually is, but what would "stripping paint" even be used for anyway? Usually stripping is removing, not adding, so like, for removing paint from walls, I think you use a stripping solvent or something. I don't know.)
**** Like painting aisles. Or basketball courts. Etc.
***** Except for the one paint line by the car, because I ran out of paint right then anyway. (And the store was all out. And I was tired of doing that project, because I thought it would take like an hour, and it was already almost noon.)

Update #1

We're married!

We were married at the Jordan River temple on 20 March!

This is the only picture I have so far from our wedding.* It is a picture of us arriving at the temple, taken on my phone, by someone we don't know, as we were trying not to be late.


Our reception was at J's parents' house, and it went well.

We spent Saturday and Sunday nights at The Kimball, in downtown Salt Lake, and then on Monday we flew down to southern California for the rest of our honeymoon. We stayed at a resort on the beach, in Oceanside.

This is a picture from our visit to the San Diego Zoo:
We had a second reception in Walnut (CA) on the following Saturday afternoon.

We flew back that Sunday, and since then we have had many, many fun projects. Some of our recent activities have been:
- me moving in.
- finishing taxes.
- a LOT of cleaning and organizing. (But lots more to go...)
- flooding our house, and trying to fix the roof.
- meeting with roofers, and replacing a portion of our roof.
- building a new area for the chickens.**
- pruning trees.
- tiling linoleum under the kitchen counters (to cover the concrete and reclaim some kitchen space).
- school projects.
- more school projects.
- weaning the calves.***

Those are the things that come to mind. Hopefully sometime soon I can begin to blog about recent things in greater detail.

Some upcoming projects include:
- writing furiously for the next day or two and then,
- hopefully, hopefully, most-likely graduating this Friday.
- Mom visiting for my graduation.
- participating in South Jordan's green waste collection day thing by hauling branches we pruned.
- actually (finally!) cleaning and organizing our house.
- getting started with ag water.
- implementing more of the Nourishing Traditions ideas into our diet. (To try next: sprouting our grains and using fresh flour for recipes.)
- learning to use Quicken better.
- finding a job.
- building raised garden beds? (maybe?)
- building some furniture.
- getting a puppy!****
- starting a compost pile.
- getting a goat? (may be delayed until next year)
- cleaning/painting the barns?
- fencing off the larger pasture area. (For calves as they get larger, and/or if we get a goat.)
- mayyybe getting more hens, since this is the right time of year. We're also considering a couple turkeys, for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

We have a lot going on. For now, I've got to get back to schoolwork. I'm still finishing a big paper.



* Jess and Mitch kindly shared some of the pictures they took, but we promptly laundered the SD card. So we haven't actually seen them yet.
** Since the calves were eating the chicken coop.
*** While we were on our honeymoon, the people that we paid to feed them felt like they were skinny, so they fed them twice as much milk as we told them to (and as the package said to.) So we had to like, double-wean them, because first we had to wean them down to the recommended amount, and then we had to really wean them. Not their favorite, but they like grass now. We also dehorned them, and castrated them. Worst day of their lives!
**** NOT allowed until the house is completely clean and organized. It will probably be a small dog (since J likes small dogs better and since it will be an inside/outside dog and our inside is not huge) but it may be a big dog (because I think I like big dogs better and if it's inside/outside anyway, if it has too much energy, that can just mean it's time to play outside.) If it's a little dog, it will probably be a mixed breed one (a yorkie-poo/chorkie/pomchi/yorkie-pom/porkie, etc.) because those are cute and have the benefits of mixed-breed dog (eg, better health and temperament). If it's a big dog, it will probably be a great dane. We'll see.

Wedding stuff!

I'm not a very consistent blogger anymore, but that's okay.

We've been busy like crazy!

1. We had our engagement session with

our photographer! It was a lot of fun. We loved it. My future in-laws are having Greg from Photography by McKenzie shoot J and I's wedding. And bridals/groomals. And engagement pictures. (J and I met McKenzie and Greg at the Grand America Bridal Fair*, and we just thought they were fantastic. And then they had great specials for March. And then it turned out that Roger & Anne had McKenzie do their wedding, too. Small world.)

We did our engagement pictures in Lehi, Utah. Our gallery has hundreds of pretty pictures, which we just love, but several good ones are posted on McKenzie's blog, right here. We ended up deciding to send one of the ones on her blog, but I won't say which one so that it will still sort of be a surprise when people get their invitations.

2. We also got our invitations! Erin helped me design them, and I love them! I had Mercurio Brothers letterpress print them, and I couldn't be happier with how they turned out. They're gorgeous. To save money, I had them printed on smaller paper ("A2") instead of 5 x 7 paper, which I had planned to use. I also bought (smaller "A2") envelopes locally (at xpedx) instead of paying to have them shipped, and paying even more to have them rushed so that I could start addressing them. I did want the envelopes to be thick, though, so they are. We had inserts digitally printed (much cheaper) by Alphagraphics; they point people toward our wedding website. I wanted to line the invitation envelopes, but envelope liners get kind of (okay, very) expensive, so instead I lined the envelopes myself. I used 3 1/2 rolls of wrapping paper that I bought at the dollar store, and it just happened to be the perfect shade of blue! Partway through the envelope-lining project, I had some (much appreciated!) surprise help from J's mom and J's niece.

3. We've been assembling invitations. I wanted to write the addresses in calligraphy, but paying $2-3/ envelope was totally out of the question so I decided to do them myself. So I started addressing envelopes v e r y s l o w l y a while ago. I got a lot of them done, but we're still collecting some addresses. (My calligraphy is getting better and better! Now that I'm about done writing addresses, I'm getting pretty good at it. So. If your address looks a little, uh, messed up, know that it was written by hand, with so much love.) We sent one big batch of invitations out on Friday, more invitations out this Monday, and we have another batch of invitations ready to go out tomorrow.

We ordered our pictures from Ritzpix.com, and since the invitations were smaller, 3 1/2 x 5" was the size we wanted! We picked Ritzpix.com because they have a deal every Tuesday and Wednesday where you can get 3 1/2 x 5" prints, same-day, for 6 cents per picture. (Instead of 19 cents per 3 1/2 x 5" picture from them on other days, or 12 cents per 4 x 6" from Costco, which we would have needed to be trim.) That was our kind of price!

4. J ordered and received his tux. He was going to rent a tux, because we're not just so fancy that he needs to keep one. But, he was going to have to rent it for bridals/groomals (this Saturday), and then for a whole week from our wedding (20 March) to our California reception (27 March), and it was going to cost more to rent it for the three events than it would cost to just buy a brand new one online (at Buy4LessTuxedo.com). So instead of paying to rent a tux, J has his very own, brand new tuxedo, tuxedo shirt, man jewelry (= cuff links and button covers), and shiny man shoes, and he gets to keep all of them. He didn't try on the tuxedo shirt, man jewelry, or shoes, but he did try on the actual tux, and it looks really snazzy. As his future wife, I know that it will be my obligation to seek every opportunity for him to wear his tuxedo, and it's a duty I'm prepared to accept.

5. I picked up J's ring! It's... Hm. Well. I don't remember what it is, I guess. I think it's Tungsten with a band of silver around the middle? (Maybe?) I don't know. It looks very nice. And we got a very good deal on it, which was one thing that we wanted. (Although, not as good of a deal as Jess and Mitch got, unfortunately.) It looks very manly, but also pretty enough to look like a wedding ring. We both really liked it.*****

6. We got our marriage license! On Friday! We were really excited about it, actually. I asked the lady if we could take a picture inside the building, in front of the Marriage License bulletin board, and not only did she let us, she offered to take the picture for us!**

7. We had our Bishop's interviews! This Sunday! Tomorrow we get to meet with our Stake President. (Since we are choosing to be married in an LDS temple, we need to have interviews to obtain special temple recommends.)

8. Jess threw me an excellent Bridal Shower! I don't have any of the pictures from it yet, but we had a great time. She had printed up some of my favorite engagement pictures and she made cute decorations, and we had little chicken salad sandwiches, cream puffs and lots of fruit and vegetables, and a bunch of my favorite people came. Highlights included: a mad-libs game about how J and I met; a game where everyone wrote down a problem in marriage on one paper and a solution to the problem on another paper, and the papers were jumbled up and read so that problems had funny solutions; and fresh strawberries and pineapple. I loved being with friends from Provo that I hadn't seen in a while.

9. Also this weekend, J and I celebrated our one year anniversary, of when we first met***. For Valentine's Day we went to Rubio's (on 13 Feb, actually), which is where we met up for our first date, but I don't really care for their food all that much, so instead we went to JC Penney to spend my $10 free JC Penney money (which randomly came in the mail) on red shoes to go with my wedding dress, and then we made**** little chocolate cakes (which I had been craving) and worked on invitations (of course). We did talk about some of the neat things from the first year of our relationship, though, and we expressed our love for each other, and hopes and excitement for this next year together. It was really nice.

I really need to get back to homework, so I think I will.

* (More stories about the bridal fair to follow, probably.)

** Getting our marriage license was the best government experience J and I have ever had, I think. The ladies in the office were super efficient and friendly, and didn't make us wait much at all. When we went over to pay, one of the other ladies raced over to swipe my card before our main lady could get to it. It really was a race. When would people race to help you at the DMV, you know? (They smiled and told us we were a nice couple. Which, you know, they probably tell most couples, but that's fine.) Also, our marriage license cost $50. J and I agreed that our marriage license was a much better value than vehicle registration fees.

*** J is much better than I am at remembering these--we have anniversaries for when we first talked, when we first actually went out on our first date, when we first became a couple, when we had our first kiss, etc.

**** J doesn't have an oven, since we're cheap and we don't want to spend money to replace his, so we used his toaster oven. It actually worked all right.

***** It has no diamonds. J kind of liked man-rings with diamonds, and we've had an ongoing joke about how he wants one that matches mine. I think I sometimes embarrassed store-people when I would suggest rings for J that were thick bands that were clearly still bride rings. We knew it was a joke, though.

Another Utah Co-op Saturday!

At the end of June I had another Co-op Saturday (they're always the last Saturday of the month). I blogged about it a few days afterward but couldn't upload my pictures, so I'm finally just now added the pictures and finished the post.

I decided to take pictures of the process so that you know how awesome it was. Except, we kind of slept in, and we may have gotten there during the last 10 minutes.

My Standard Share was the last one left, so they collected it for me (so that they made sure I got everything I was supposed to) and put it in a box with my name on it. And called to remind me to pick it up, in case I had forgotten. Nice.

Everyone was delighted to pose for pictures when I asked them, but the pictures don't really show much food, because almost everyone had already picked up their food. Oops.

Standard Share $23

• 1 lb. lean ground beef
• 2 lbs. chicken thighs
• 4 6oz. boneless center cut pork chops
• 1 lb top sirloin fajita strips


• 6 peaches
• 7 plums
• 6 oranges
• 2 avocados
• 1 bunch broccoli
• 1 romaine lettuce
• 3 bell peppers
• 1 bag carrots (2 lbs.)


• Stone Ground's Artisan Wheat Loaf
• 16 oz. red beans

So here's how it works on pick up day:

1. You walk in and go to the first table. This lady asks your name and looks to see what you ordered. She gives you a colored piece of paper that corresponds with your share (Standard, Half, or Harvest), which lists the items that you get. If you ordered any of the extras (I ordered a like, 2lb thing of honey for June, and a Nutty Guys Sampler Pack for May, and for August I'm getting a loaf of sourdough bread), she gives it to you.

2. Then you go to the line of tables that matches the color of your paper. Everything is in order. Your little paper tells you how many of each thing to take, but there are also signs in front of each thing. You add all of the stuff to your bags. (Which you already brought. When they call, they tell you to bring bags. If you really wanted to, you can include reusable bags as part of your order. They sell them. But theirs are spendy.)

3. The table behind me is for exchanging stuff. If you don't want something included, you can trade it for something else! Since I was like, last the only thing left is a bag of beans. Usually there is a whole lot of stuff to choose from. Also on this table, you write down your volunteer hours. You can bank them if you do more than 2 hours.

4. Then you check out. You tell the lady your name, she looks it up and repeats the things that you should have gotten. ("Standard share and honey?" "Yep!" "Okay, initial here.") Then you initial to say that you got your stuff.

5. You take your stuff and go home. You make tasty meals.

(There is an eggplant on top of my food! One lady there was getting the Harvest Share, which has extra vegetables, and it included 2 eggplants. She didn't know what to do with them so I made some suggestions as we were grabbing our stuff, and she offered me one. Nice!)

So, anyway, it's too late to order for July, but I thought it was still worth posting so that you can see what it's like to go pick up food from the co-op. It's seriously still my favorite thing. I'll blog about it again in a week when I get my food for July.

Chicken Coop!

Yesterday J and I got a chicken coop!

We're really excited about it. Our chicks are starting to fly now, and J does not want to come home to chickens (and their poop) all over his house, so it was time to think more seriously about our chicken coop, or makeshift chicken coop.

We were originally going to buy one at IFA when we bought hens (which they didn't have), but they were dang expensive, and SRSLY, they're just chickens. So we've been watching Craigslist and KSL for used chicken coops or doghouses, or anything we could turn into a chicken coop, and checking out sweet sites like BackyardChickens which have coop ideas and lots of fun advice about keeping chickens in the backyard.

But the tricky thing is, J and I both have lots of other projects we're doing. And as much as we like fun things like being creative and constructing stuff, we know that our talents lie elsewhere. We want our chicken project to be pretty simple, and we don't know how to cut plywood, and we don't know how to make egg-collecting doors on the back of doghouses, and we needed something that we could move...so we completely abandoned all ideas of building our own coop. And we called on a couple things from online, and in the end we decided to buy a custom chicken coop that some guy was selling online.

It was almost half the cost of a similar one that IFA was selling. We called the guy, because it looked like there were no nesting boxes (I told J maybe we could use those plastic shoeboxes? To keep things simple?) and the guy said he would include them. Get this: we called early yesterday afternoon, and when we went over yesterday evening he had installed nesting boxes for us. Like, perfect ones which he built! with wood! just for us! We were pretty pleased.

I asked if he had a chicken coop like the one he had built, and he said that he did, but ours was better. I asked if we could see his chicken coop, and he obliged. He took us back into his backyard and showed us how he had it set up, and what was the same and what was different, etc. This part was especially cool because I recognized that a couple of his hens were Buff Orpingtons like ours! I asked him about the others and he also had Araucanas, like us! They were gorgeous. And huge.

The guy said he used to build houses. For people. But now fewer homes are being built because of the housing market and economy, etc. He had built his family a chicken coop and people from his ward all wanted the plans for it, and I guess it's been really popular, so he decided to start selling chicken coops. J and I thought it looked like exactly what we wanted, so we bought it. He told us to keep his number so that if we ever needed anything for the chicken coop we could call him, because he has the right tools and parts, etc. The guy helped us load it into the back of the truck, and we strapped it down and took it to J's house. [His name was Aaron. His ad on KSL is here, and we would totally recommend him to anyone in the Salt Lake area who needs/wants a chicken coop. Also, if someone wants something in particular--something bigger, or modified somehow, he's your guy.]

On the way I thought of something:

"Uh, J. This isn't going to fit through your gate."

J's backyard has a big wooden fence with a gate that opens at the top of his driveway. But the chicken coop is 4'x4' * which was not going to fit. The chicken coop is pretty lightweight, though, so we decided we would just lift it over the big fence.

Exceepppt, then we tried to carry it back there, and I could barely lift it to carry it, and I was definitely not going to be able to hold it (even just to keep it balanced) on a wobbly fence, above my head.

We decided to carry it to the fence, and it almost fit. The bottom part did fit, but the roof hangs over, so it didn't fit through. I suggested we remove the gate, because if we took the like, door of the fence off, it would fit though just barely. And so we removed the gate, and we took the chicken coop into the back corner of J's little yard.

And then we put the screws back in and hoped that we were quick enough that J's neighbors wouldn't notice.

So instead of building a chicken coop, our plans are to:

- paint it. (Red and white! Of course! ... But I have left-over red and white interior paint...so will that work? We don't know.)

- put a roof on it, maybe. Depending on how much it would cost us, and how much weight it would add, and whether a wood sealant would be just fine.

- figure out how to do the thing at the bottom of the coop where it's like sawdust and it composts and still keeps things dry.

- add a perch, which we realized we thought it would have, but now we think we may have been confusing it with one of the other ones we thought of buying.

- build a little fenced-in chicken run.

- buy four hens that are laying or about to start.

*Funny story: We were on our way to J's parents' house for the Memorial Day BBQ, and to borrow his dad's truck (because J has a cute new little red car that would no-way fit a big chicken coop) and we were driving and I saw a 4x4 truck and I was like "Ohhh, good thing the truck will be 4x4! That's the perfect size for the chicken coop!" Because, you know, the coop is 4 feet by 4 feet. And J didn't really say anything. And then he was like "is that supposed to be a bad joke?" and I was like, "Um, no. What do you mean?" And he said "You're really serious?" And he explained that 4x4s are not 4'x4's; they're vehicles that have four-wheel-drive. And then he pointed out that some trucks still say 4x4 on them but the back doesn't look like it is 4'x4'. But, in my defense, the chicken coop did fit perfectly, so the truck was a 4x4 that was 4'x4'. And also, people say "two-by-four" to talk about size for wood, so it was totally reasonable to assume that 4'x4' was the standard size for a truck bed. We laughed a lot about that, though.

Tulip Festival at Thanksgiving Point

I've been hearing a lot of radio commercials for the Tulip Festival at Thanksgiving Point lately, so on Saturday we went. Saturday was actually supposed to be extra-special, because it was going to be Dutch Day. I was excited about that, because there was to be a costume contest, traditional music, and other stuff going on.

Jess and Mitch came with us. We went in the afternoon, and by the time we got there, not much was happening for Dutch Day. I saw one lady dressed up. Jess said they saw a couple others, when we arrived. [We did get to hear a little bit of traditional music (although we'd had our fun by then, so we didn't stay long), and we passed up the opportunity to paint little wooden shoes for $3. ]

However! Thanksgiving Point arranged for it to be cold and rainy, just like it probably is in the Netherlands, and that was pretty impressive. We rented a golf cart, which made our visit quite pleasant, partially because it kept us dry, because we got to see everything within the amount of time we felt like being there, and also because it was super fun to drive.

The gardens were lovely. The signs and commercials and everything said they had over 250,000 tulips. Apparently, they order the tulips directly, from Holland. A sign in the bathroom said that if you like what you see, you can place an order with them by 30 May, and on 1 June, when they order for next year, they will add your order to theirs so that you can grow lovely tulips directly from Holland.

We wondered what they do with all of the tulips, and apparently they have to take them all out every year. Otherwise, they wouldn't know what would pop up where next year. So they remove them and sell them.

Anyway, it was all very pretty. The festival goes on until 2 May. It's $10/adults, $6/kids, $9/seniors, and I think golf carts are $25, and worth every penny if it's rainy or if you don't feel like walking, or if you like speeding (THERE ARE NO SPEED LIMITS!!! WOOOO!!!), and especially if you have four people.

As promised...

As promised, here is the other ad that I enjoyed from the 18 Nov 1950 Colliers:

Jagged Edge Retreat

I've been meaning to blog about the Jagged Edge Retreat since there's really not much about it online.

My stylist is Cara, and I like her a lot.

The whole place is fantastic, actually. The salon is painted blue, and there are these giant trees all over. Each of the stations is made in basically the same style, but the wood and details about each of them are all different. It's totally a trendy place. I think most of the stylists have tattoos. They use Redken products.

I started going several months ago. I had Jess find a place online; I was actually thinking of a particular place downtown, but I couldn't remember what it was called. She found this one, and set my appointment for me, and I went. It ended up not being the place that I had wanted [thought I wanted?], but when I walked in, I immediately loved it. Although I had been planning on just getting a haircut, I knew that it would be a waste to leave without having them do color.

Back then, I had been doing my hair at home and it had gradually become more red than I wanted, and then I had kind of matched my natural color... kind of. My hair was growing out and you could see the part that was dyed and the part that wasn't, but I don't think people noticed unless they were looking closely. So I told Cara that I wanted something different, but I really didn't know what, and I showed her a couple magazine pictures of layered haircuts.

She suggested highlights to bring it all together. I said that was fine, but that I didn't want to look like a zebra. My first stylist back in California used to do my highlights, and I kind of felt stripey, especially looking back at pictures. Cara understood.

And that was the beginning of that. I liked Cara because she had so much personality! (She still does.) We chatted a bunch, and I was having guy problems back then and she was the one who sang "just gotta keep on keepin' on" which I still think about sometimes.

When I went back, she totally remembered me. She remembered where I worked, and my mission in Italy, and the guy problems, and everything. And she asked all about it, and we picked right up where we had left off. She has a little index card that she uses to keep track of the exact amounts of color she does each time so that she knows how to get the precise colors we do for me.

And that's how it is every time. We're friends. At the beginning we talk about what I want, and plan out my hair, and I always leave a couple hours later feeling like my hair is artwork. Right now we're doing blonde highlights and dark brown (...lowlights?), mixed in with my normal hair color and the caramel that we used to do. I think it looks smashing!

They also do extremely trendy hairstyles, like whoever you know who has amazing, amazing hair, except better.

It is kind of spendy, but for people who Googled this and just want to look awesome, it's totally worth it. And for everyone else, I wanted to share pictures, since the place is super random.

[Also, PS, they are usually busy-- I took the pictures at my last appointment, which was a late appointment, and I decided it would be nicer to avoid pictures of other people since I knew I was posting them on the interwebs. (Except at the front, because they were there and I wanted one of the front anyway.)]

Garden 2.0.09

Even though a week ago it was still snowing here, when I went grocery shopping at Smithy's last Saturday they totally indulged my desire to pretend it's spring by having a Start Your Garden Indoors! display.

They had seeds for everything, and those little peat moss things (or fake peat moss since using real peat moss is Bad for the environment) that expand so that you can start seeds indoors. In all sizes! I could start a few seeds, or a lot of seeds, or a ton of seeds. Of anything.

And even though I do know it's not really spring yet, I totally bit. I bought it ALL! Well. A lot of it, anyway. I won't need more seeds for a long, long time.

I knew I wanted to start growing fresh herbs for my kitchen (I think this was even on my 101 list), so I got the Kitchen Herbs kit, which came with six little pots and seeds for Basil (mmmm), Chives, and Parsley.

And then I chose the seed growing kit that had 72 cells (instead of one with 50 something or 30 something.) And I chose seeds. I'm growing: cilantro (which is also coriander. Who knew?), rosemary, mint, oregano, thyme, onions, cauliflower, broccoli, cantaloupe, arugula, celery, peppers, and mixed lettuces.

Here are some of the lessons that I learned from my garden last year:

- Buy little plants instead of using seeds, especially for tomatoes and strawberries. Otherwise, it takes all season for them to grow to be big enough to give fruit and then there isn't enough time for them to grow things before fall.

- Don't plant anything outside until after it's done snowing.

- The little pods that are not just dirt (so that you can plant them in the tiny pot they grow in) are cool, but they make me feel concern for the roots that aren't strong enough to break through.

- Even though seeds are tiny, you don't have to plant a whole lot for them to grow.*

- Thinning a garden is not fun, because you have to take little plants (!) that worked so hard to grow from being teeny tiny seeds (!) that are totally viable (!) and just throw them away (!)

- Science has a lot figured out, but God has even more figured out.

- Plants need sufficient light to grow. If the package says it needs direct sunlight, partial sunlight for a few hours isn't going to cut it.**

Anyhow, I got the stuff, and I planted it. I planted the little kitchen garden first, and then I planted the other stuff. I came up with a plan so that things would stay organized:

I used my label machine to make little labels for some of the things on the sides so that I would remember what was where on the actual thing.

And then I put it up on the plant shelf in my kitchen window and left it.

AND THEY GREW!

I planted this stuff one week ago, and here are pictures from today:

I still need to figure out who had the garden in front of our house last year. We have a triangular space about 1o' x 15?' that someone used for gardening last summer. If it was the girl who used to live where I am now*** then it's my garden now. If not, I may have to fight someone for it, I mean share nicely. In either case, I plan to get a bunch of pots for outside since Krista's garden thrived last year, and hers was in pots, and mine didn't and wasn't.

* But that didn't keep me from planting several lettuce seeds in each cell. Because they're just so tiny. Annnnd, now they're all growing. Of course.

** Hooray! I have great sunlight at this house.

*** Likely, since she had a ton of plants in this apartment--hanging, on shelves, in pots outside.

Body Worlds 3, part 1

Yesterday I went to see Body Worlds 3 at The Leonardo, next to the Salt Lake City Library. I'd been wanting to see Body Worlds since my mom showed me an article about it in the Smithsonian magazine, a long time ago. It's been in Salt Lake since...November, maybe? and the exhibit is ending this weekend, so I finally went.

It's kind of a spendy exhibit; for me to see it (as a student) with an audio guide it cost me $26. I had a $2 coupon, which I was going to use online until I found out that there's a $2.50 service charge if you purchase tickets online. So I would be paying an extra .50 to use the coupon. I decided I would just take the coupon and buy my ticket in person. When I tried to do that, they told me that the coupons are valid online. Not at the ticket office. AND, not only that, there is a $1 service charge to buy tickets in person.

Whaaaat...? So I paid full price plus my extra dollar to buy a ticket at the actual thing. I think that's stupid. You're not supposed to have to pay a box office fee to buy museum tickets. AND! Furthermore! You could say that they have to pay to employ people at the box office, or something, except that they are volunteers. The people at the box office and the people throughout the exhibit are all volunteers.

I think the exhibit was worth $12 for students, $15 for regular admission. And no box office fees in person or online.

Still, I'm glad I went.

One of my coworkers volunteers there, and I asked him if photography was allowed. He said it absolutely was not. He said that if anyone caught me taking pictures, they would take my phone away and make some volunteer delete all of the pictures from my camera. It felt like a challenge to me. I got about 70 pictures. No flash, of course. And my phone doesn't click when it takes pictures. (My coworker was impressed.)

I won't post all 70, because that would be a really long blog post, and you'd probably feel like I did at the end of the exhibit--like I'd seen the same thing 70 times. But it was still kinda neat.

This is the nervous system:



Okay, so what they would do is, inject veins and capillaries with their plastic stuff, which would harden, and then use enzymes to eat away the real stuff. So this picture below is the blood flow of a brain, like, molded from the inside of veins. Using the plastic stuff this way makes it so that you can see better what's actually going on, and smaller stuff is more visible. Or something.


This is one of the ones like they're famous for. It's an archer.
One of the big themes of the exhibit is STOP SMOKING. These are normal lungs and smoker lungs. (Also in the lungs section, they have an I QUIT box where you can throw away your cigarettes and make a commitment to stop smoking then and there.)

Another one of the famous ones...

They had a whole section full of babies. They had fetuses from all different stages, and that section was really interesting.
After the room of babies, they have a case full of placentas. The funny thing about this was, there was a family next to me where the mom was holding her daughter, and the girl was young enough that you would probably still count how many words she knows how to say. She pointed at this one and said excitedly, "A pizza!". Her mom was amused, and so was I.

This one was of a woman pedaling, but they cut her in slices the long way. Very interesting.


This picture shows the basic layout of the exhibit. Veins on top. Cases down the middle. Posters on the sides, with nice quotes about the heart, or excerpts from writing about the heart, or QUIT SMOKING stuff, etc, and occasional big boxes on the sides with the bodies doing interesting things that these exhibits are famous for.

This one I really liked. It was a guy balancing on three balls, and then one arm reached up above him and he was balancing all of his internal organs. I have other pictures of this, but I felt like I already was putting a lot on here.

The veins, etc, of a rooster. (In the background you can see the same thing of a baby lamb.)
There was other interesting stuff too, but downstairs I think this was the coolest one. It's a couple, and out of the guy's back is his brain and all of his organs, and out of the girls back is her brain with all of her blood stuff (kind of like the rooster, except a person.)

The other stuff I want to post from the exhibit is not part of the exhibit at all; it's stuff from the end of the exhibit. It includes examples from the "What is your favorite body part?" wall of tiles, and also from the "Body Secrets" wall, where people were invited to post secrets about their bodies. Interesting.

Anyway, there were a lot of other things that I didn't post, and I highly recommend visiting the exhibit this weekend if you haven't been yet. I think they're doing an open-24-hours thing to finish stuff up, so you can make time for it at like 3 in the am hours, when you were just planning on sleeping. It was pretty cool.