vacation

Today is the 1st day of my week off! It's been great. Will and I went to the gym together, I've got the laundry started, had a nice long shower this morning and now I'm sitting down to study with a mug of hot chocolate with marshmallows on top. I can tell this is the start of a beautiful break!

Fruit Pizza

Cait and one of her friends came over yesterday for the afternoon session of conference. We had Fruit Pizza for dessert. It was delicious.

New Skills

I've been busy developing all sorts of new skills lately. I can now do pelvic, breast, rectal, prostate, and hernia exams. I know you're all so excited. :) Don't worry I won't ask to practice these new skills on anyone, they are reserved for patients - who need them. I also learned how to do an exam to determine the position of a baby in utero and got to find a fetal heart beat. Pretty amazing couple of days if you ask me.

Still alive...

Clearly it's been a little crazy around here, we missed all of August on the blog. I am now well into my second term of PA school. I've survived my first anatomy test (last week) and am now gearing up for a dermatology test on Thursday of next week. Football season has started, so Will is happy. Just wanted to let you all know that we're still alive here in Portland.

HP 7 part 2

Will and I braved the crowds and went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 at midnight on Thursday. We went with a bunch of friends from the branch. The movie was action packed! We left to stand in line at 9pm. We made goblin gold (caramel popcorn) and chocolate covered snitches (rolo cookies) to make the wait more bearable. I had class all day Friday - it was long, but I survived - even managed not to fall asleep. We're glad this was the last Harry Potter movie as we decided it was our last midnight movie. This decision was reached when I asked Will what time we could go to bed on Friday night - it wasn't even 7pm yet.

PA school

PA school is great! It's been two weeks, we've had two tests - I passed both of them. I think it's safe to say we're off to a good start. I'm in class from 8 to 5 most days and then I study at home at night. So far we've learned to skin, hair & nails exam, vital signs, and HEENT (Head, Ears, Eyes, Nose and Throat). It's too bad I can't make it to the Passey family reunion this week - there would be so many people to practice on. Luckily my parents came down yesterday and spent a fun weekend with Will and I. I was able to take Dad up the aerial tram to school and Mom and I picked out new glasses for me. After picking Will up from work, we all headed to dinner and a lovely stroll around the Portland Rose Garden - which was stunning. To finish off the night, they all served as practice patients while I practiced the exam skills I will be tested on for Tuesday. I think life is off to a pretty great start here in Portland!

My Drawer

I know the question you've been wanting an answer to ever since we moved to Portland is "Will, since you've moved have you made any changes as to how you arrange your cloths?"

I'm glad you asked! As you might know, I'm pretty proud of my tee shirts. I don't just buy any old tee shirt and throw it on. If I don't find one that I like I'll just make one that I do. One of my favorite places to look at tee shirts is shirt.woot.com where they hold weekly themed contests and every Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 12:00am Central Time they post the winners of that week's contest. All the other days they just post shirts they like. Here are a few that I got:

Let Me Get This Straight

The Choice Was Not Hard

To the Top in the Style of DaVinci

I also got one for Sara: The Chemist

And here's the one I wish I had gotten... Tuesday is Gonna Be Rough

Anyway, as you might imagine I have a number of shirts. Luckily on shirt.woot's blog they showed a couple of ways to store your shirts and I went with the filing method. So far I really like it.

Table Goat

He's coming...

The Beard

Like any good recent BYU grad I had to try my hand (or face) at growing a beard. Before my mission I was not capable of growing a beard. After my mission I was not allowed to grow a beard. The fun thing was that Sara was probably more excited for me to grow the facial hair than I was.

Starting the evening of April 27th, the Wednesday before we left for out National Park tour I officially began my beard growing (That's right, I started the beard while I was still working for BYU). Above is how it looked the day that I shaved it Wednesday, May 18th. After three weeks I had experienced the beard and decided that it just wasn't my style.

We had a good run. During the shaving process I had to do what everyone does, see what I'd look like with a goatee and mustache. I really wanted to keep the 'stache but Sara said it tickled way too much.

Side shot, lookin' good.

See that towel rod in the background? I hung that.

How could you not want to kiss this amazing 'stache?

The Grand Tour

I know you've all been waiting, so here it is! Our apartment in Portland...

Living Room

Living Room

Kitchen (Will and I are quite pleased with our full size oven - the ovens in Wymount are tiny)

Kitchen (yes that is a dishwasher you see)

Bathroom

Office

Bedroom

Bedroom

Patio

Patio

The end

We are really enjoying this apartment. Not only is it fun to have a little more space and be able to paint the walls, but the location is great. It's a 12 minute walk to the bottom of the tram that takes me up the hill to campus. It's just a few steps away from the streetcar that takes us in to downtown Portland - lucky for us we're in the FreeRide Zone, so we don't even have to pay. It's right along the river front park, so we can take a stroll along with Willamette whenever we want. In fact, the other night they did fireworks on the river for the Rose Festival. Will and I left our apartment at 9:50, walked down to watch the fireworks that started at 10:00 and walked back home right after. It was beautiful and there was no traffic getting home! There's plenty of room so start planning your visit to Portland right now! We'd love to see any of you out here.

The big move

Packed up a read to go

I figured it was time I take a turn writing. Will and I were lucky and had plenty of time to pack up the apartment. We had everything boxed up and ready for the morning on May 12th. We picked up our Penske truck - 16 feet long and white. Then drove back to the apartment ready to load up. Bob came down to help make sure everything got loaded in right and balanced and a bunch of guys from our ward came to help load up. It was so nice to have all the help. Thanks! My friend Megan also came - she's awesome. You know you have a good friend when she helps you clean your bathroom. :) She and I cleaned and picked up donuts to thank everyone and then we were done. I couldn't believe how fast it was. It only took about 30 minutes to load the truck and about another hour to finish up last minute cleaning. We were sad to say goodbye to our first apartment but excited for our new adventure.

Will drove the truck up to Kaysville while I picked up Dad and Blake from the airport. They flew into to help us with the drive and moving everything in to our apartment in Portland. Dad and Will took the first shift in the truck and Blake and I drove the car. It was a nice drive. Will and I were able to meet up the Morgans outside of the Boise temple to say hi. We made it to Ontario the first night. The next day was beautiful driving, we drove along the Columbia River and finally into Portland.

Farewell Beloved Scooter

After three years of riding the Derbi Atlantis it was time to say goodbye. Although before we took it up to Kaysville it got a new transmission belt and some new 70cc pistons. It was like a new machine. It should last John a good while, hopefully through college for him. Brent bought it in 2002 so it should be good for another 9 years and 14,000 miles...

I was a little too slow getting the camera out of my pocket. You can see Sara starting to put her foot down. This was the first (but not the last) time Sara rode the scooter herself. She'll get some more chances when we visit home.

South of Campus

Right before we left we took the time to venture down to the hill on the South end of campus. If you haven't been there, you should go. If you've left Provo without seeing it, you missed out. We wished we had another week so that we could take some time to have a picnic and just enjoy the place.

A row of ducklings, they were swimming against the current. Sara's voice went up 3 octaves when she saw them.

One of several waterfalls along the path.

This is just behind the Testing Center. The grassy area is a little bigger than it looks in this picture.

We found this group done by the duck pond.

All along the path there are benches and even a few picnic tables. It is a great improvement from the old path that used to be there. Check it out if you're ever in the area (although most of the people that read our blog have left Provo...).

National Parks - Thursday

Wednesday night was rough. Really rough. It's a good thing plans can change. The original plan was that Erik and Aly Gunn were going to come down to Arches Friday morning and hangout with us and we had made reservations to take the ranger guided tour of the Firey Furnace. We were going have a great time.

Until Erik call Tuesday night saying that the show he was stage managing wasn't at all ready and that they weren't going to be able to make it down. That meant that now we really could change our plans.

We packed up early Wednesday morning (around 6:30am, it was a rough night) and took off for Arches. We were going to see if we could switch our reservations to that afternoon or possibly Friday so that we could take off early and sleep on something that doesn't bruise your hips (seriously, Sara had bruises on her hips). When we got there we were informed that they hikes are booked in advance and that there were no openings so there was no way to change them. We figured that would probably be the case so we had a back up plan. Hike to Delicate Arch and go home.

I had been to Delicate Arch but Sara hadn't. I remembered that it was big, I had just forgotten about how big it is. After carefully guiding Sara under the arch, we found out that she doesn't like it when there isn't a clearly defined path and the ground is sloped, we got some random guy to take our picture from a good distance away.

I'm the taller one on the right... I think.

Last hike, we're headed home!

Looking slightly more bearded

Tried a different angle than the usual

Arches is really desert-ey. The sun beats down on you and it's kind of hot, we were glad we weren't staying any longer.

We left the park at 2:30pm and by 5:45 we were back in Provo. But our journey was not complete. Leaving Bryce Canyon so early and quickly in the morning meant that we hadn't packed the tent up correctly and there was no way we were going to return it to Dad in the state it was in. I set it up and I found four caterpillars hiding inside of it. That was sort of expected, what we didn't anticipate was when we unrolled the rain tarp, to find 27 cocoons wrapped inside of that. We had knocked off most of them that we found under the tent at Zion but it's a good thing I undid the rain tarp or else Dad could have had some butterflies flutter out when he set the tent up the next time. Actually, it's too bad I knocked them off, that would have been a neat thing to see.

National Parks - Wednesday

Early Wednesday morning we packed up and headed up to Bryce Canyon. The second night on the ground was a bit rough, forgetting the air mattress was a mistake.

We got to Bryce mid-morning and in the Visitor's Center we ran into a couple that we met after hiking Angel's Landing. They were from Michigan, they were nice. We never saw them again.

Maybe it was because our last campsite was overrun by caterpillars. Maybe it's because we'd slept on the ground for two nights. Maybe it was because we were a little sore from hiking but when we started exploring Bryce Canyon NP it was like we had arrived at some luxury resort. To see the most amazing views all you had to do was drive to a lookout point, park the car, walk (max) 50 yards and there you were

I won't bore you with a lot of pictures but we have a lot that look fairly similar to this

Look closely, there's a beard growing on that face

This was Natural Bridge, all you had to do was park the car and take 10 steps and you were there.

From Rainbow Lookout, over 9,100 ft above sea level. At this point we walked up a short incline on a path and our heads started pounding from the dramatic elevation change that had taken place(4,500 feet or so).

It was fantastic. They had a little store where you could buy ridiculously overpriced food items (we splurged on some ice cream treats). There were showers, best $2 I spent all week. And right across from our campsite there were the cleanest restrooms I've ever seen in my life, and in the middle of the night they were toasty warm! There was also a small room with a kitchen sink and counter to rinse your dishes. We were living in the lap of luxury. It was too bad we only planned on being there one day, and that we were so sore from Zion, we could have spent more time there. It's just too bad we forgot the air mattress...

National Parks - Tuesday

Instead of hiking The Narrows we decided that we were going to buck-up and take on Angels Landing. To warm-up for Angels Landing we did a short hike in the morning to the Emerald Pools (no pictures...) ate lunch at the camp site sitting on the table top with out feet on the benches to keep the caterpillars from crawling all over us and then took off to start Angels Landing.

It's called Angels Landing because when it was first seen they thought the only people that could stand at the edge of that were the angels, because they could fly up there. Little did they know all you had to do was climb about a hundred switch backs to actually reach the top.

The end of the first set of switchbacks

The first Head Ranger of Zion was named Walter, he build a bunch of switchbacks. So many that the ones up to the top are called Walter's Wiggles.

Sara climbing the Wiggles

As we were hiking we met a grandpa and his granddaughter. We did the last of the wiggles with them and it was grandpa that convinced Sara that she could climb across the chains and make it further out to the Landing. Sara got through the first set of chains and then decided to call it good. I made friends with some Germans and we went all the way to the top.

Looking south, out of the canyon

Looking north, up into Zion Canyon

Sara was back down on this ledge. She said she could see me climb in my red shirt.

It was while I was at the top of Angels Landing that I had a chance to talk to a couple that had passed us on the Riverwalk Hike on Monday and passed us on the switchbacks. Each time we passed them Sara said, "Will, they look like Ken and Cynthia Hunt from Oklahoma." When I spoke with them I said, "this may sound odd but my wife thinks you look familiar, where are you from?" It turns out it was them! I took a photo of them at the top and they took one of us back where Sara was waiting.

Back down at the lower landing

After all of that hiking we were just about done for the day. We made two short stops on the shuttle, the last one was at one of my favorite monuments, The Court of the Patriarchs. Abraham is the peak on the left, Issac is in the middle and then if you look carefully you'll see Jacob on the right but he's the white peak in the background. The one in the foreground blocking him is Mount Moroni.

National Parks - Monday

So here was the plan. Monday and Tuesday were to be spent at Zion NP, Wednesday was going to be Bryce Canyon NP and Thursday, Friday and Saturday were reserved for Arches NP. We knew it was going to be exhausting but we were ready for it.

We left Provo in the morning and got to Zion National Park in the early afternoon. We set up camp and headed up the canyon on the shuttle to see the sites.

Outside the Visitor's Center

Our plan with Zion's was that we were going to hike The Narrows on Tuesday. We failed to plan for the fact that there was going to be the spring runoff. That meant that we couldn't do that. But it did open Tuesday up completely for some other fun hikes.

We rode the shuttle to the top of the canyon and there we took the path to where The Narrows hike starts

On the path to The Narrows

The walls of the Temple of Sinawva

We got to the end of the Riverwalk trail to the beginning of The Narrows. Yeah, the water was still running pretty high. The ranger at the Visitor's Center said that they didn't think people could start hiking up until the end of June.

Try wading in that...

We were going to hike up there...

So we didn't get to hike The Narrows. Oh well, plans can change. Zion National Park still has some pretty amazing views. Although Sara just scoffed at any water fall that we saw. She said that Snoqualmie Falls in Washington was more amazing so she can't be impressed by some falling water in a desert.

One thing we didn't plan on was the fact that there wasn't a hard April freeze. That meant that all of the caterpillars survived and were having a hay-day in the campgrounds. They loved the color green (I was wearing a green shirt and they kept on falling onto me from the trees, once I changed my shirt they stopped), and if you stood in place for too long they would begin to crawl up your legs. That was pretty good incentive for us to stay further up the canyon where they didn't hang out.

Nothing like bringing a giant green tent to attract them all.

I guess tires are a cool place to hang out as well.

After all of our planning we only forgot one thing. Our air mattress. Luckily we had brought two sleeping bags and some blankets as well to make a bed. It was still very hard ground. It was going to be a long week... but plans can change.

Sunday

The day of rest... more posts coming tomorrow.

The Dentist

Those who know me well know that I’m allergic to adhesives. We found this out my junior year of high school when Ann decided to wax my eyebrows over Christmas Break. My face exploded and I’ve never been the same since.

Because of my allergy to Colophony, a natural adhesive found in pinesap, I tend to avoid all things sticky; Band-Aids even give me a rash. Try as I might, ever since my junior year of high school I’ve had a pretty good reaction every year to something odd.

The week of finals Sara and I went to the dentist for our 6-month cleaning (we never miss it!). At the end of the cleaning instead of the mouthwash we got a fluoride varnish on our teeth. The varnish was pretty cool. You could eat or drink whatever you wanted without waiting; all you had to do was brush it off 4 hours after it was painted on. So I waited 4 hours then brushed it off before heading to work.

When I got home Sara looked at me suspiciously and said, “Have you been kissing anybody? Because your lips look red and swollen like you’ve been making out for a while.” To the best of my knowledge I didn’t remember this make-out session but my lips were red and swollen.

The next morning I called the dentist and spoke to the hygienist and sure enough, the varnish had Rosin in it, another name for Colophony, and I had it in my mouth for 4 hours! We went to the dentist on Thursday and so this was Friday, the day of graduation, and my lips were getting bigger. Looking back at the graduation photos you can’t really tell but after having the spicy Indian food my lips were huge on Saturday. Luckily we were already planning on heading up to Kaysville and Stacey was able to write a prescription for Prednisone and by Wednesday of the next week I was back to normal.

Sadly we didn’t take any pictures of the whole experience.

When I’ve had reactions in the past I’ve wondered what would happen if I got some pinesap or something in my mouth. Now I know, your lips get huge, your gums are swollen and painful and the hard palette of your mouth can’t stand anything touching it. It’s an experience that I hope is only once in a lifetime for me.

Graduation

Graduation day was great. I spent the morning working at Jamba Juice. I can say that Jamba treated me well over the three years that I worked there, best of all I got a ton of free boxes that we could use to pack with!

I skipped commencement on Thursday because all we could remember from Sara’s was the alumni guy saying something about CTR standing for Choose to Replenish and asking us for money. I even slept through the main speaker. We decided that Convocation was good enough, even if my Convocation started at 5:00pm.

I was able to fit my Kindle in my pocket so that during all of the speeches I could read that. I walked across the stage, received a standing ovation, got this beautiful photo taken:

And then sat and read for another hour and a half.

After some more great photos outside the Marriott Center we went to India Palace for dinner. It was delicious and spicy and late (Maren almost fell asleep into a plate of curry).