Longer than I’d like…

It’s been longer than I’d like since I posted anything of interest. Here’s a quick update on life that’s slightly overdue.

Our last vacation ended and I immediately went back to work. I remind myself that I really should take at least a day of ‘vacation’ after our travelling vacations just to recover. Somehow the practical half of my brain thinks conserving vacation time by heading back to work is what’s best. Jason, on the other hand, had taken time off through memorial day to study for a test for work. I can’t remember the name of the exact certification but he took the first level of certification in order to say he knows more about stock options and restricted stock. (Mind you, I don’t really pretend to know what any of that means). Basically Jason’s company paid for him to take the exam, and he’d been studying several rather large nap-inducing textbooks for the past couple months. He thought it was a good opportunity so he finished up his pre-memorial day vacation time studying for his exam. So long as his #2 pencil worked on the scan-tron, he feels that he probably passed. Funny thing is even though it was a scan-tron test, we won’t get the official results for quite a few weeks.

We spent memorial day at the annual Baxter family reunion at the ranch in Logan. Jason’s grandparents have been gracious enough to host this event for quite a few years now, and it’s always good food and good company. The weather this year however was terrible. I spent Memorial Day wearing a down puffy vest crammed into a garage to stay out of the rain. We snapped this picture on the drive up to Logan. It is NOT supposed to snow like this on Memorial Day! Thanks again to Garth and Maydene for being such great hosts. They said this might be the last year they have the energy to host this event…I hope that’s not the case…if anything, so we can have one more reunion with excellent weather! 🙂

I’m back prepping at the restaurant. Most days I enjoy it. It’s definitely more drama free than my other actual job, but perhaps only because I’m not there more than a dozen hours a week. Between the two jobs I’ve put in a couple 50+ hour weeks lately, which is not something I’ve really done since college. I’ve concluded that I have less energy than I used to, and have become spoiled with 40-hour weeks. Our athlete training program is in full swing for the summer and it takes a lot of energy to keep the whole thing moving forward in a reasonable manner. Mix in some weekend events (open house, soccer combine, sport vision training conference) and it ads up to a lot of time at TOSH. The bottom line though, is that overtime is still highly discouraged, so if I want to make a little extra money the second job is the way to go. So far the two jobs are playing nice together for the most part, so I’ll keep it up through the summer and re-evaluate in the fall.

Tis the season for our cottonwood trees to drop copious amounts of cotton and crap on our (and most of our immediate neighbors’) lawns.

I snapped this picture of the cotton stuck in the grass. I love the shade our big cottonwoods provide, but I sure don’t enjoy the springtime mess they make. I somewhat shamefully hope for a windstorm when the cotton starts to fall, so it blows down the block to someone else’s grass. Tonight I spent some time sweeping the front sidewalks just to keep from tracking so much of it into the house. What a mess!

Our little garden is finally starting to come around. We’ve had a very unusually wet and cool spring this year. Our basement even started to flood so we had to go out and buy a new sump-pump! Mind you, our previous sump pump has sat in a dry hole the basement floor for the past 2 or 3 years. A record-breaking snow pack in the mountains this winter has led to some serious flooding danger this spring, so we’re actually quite fortunate the weather has stayed cool so the melt-off can happen more gradually. The only downside is that our garden is not on the schedule we were anticipating. The cool-weather loving peas got gigantic, while the hot-weather loving tomatoes were rather dormant for awhile. Now the peas are so big they are shading the baby tomato plants! Fortunately we’ve at least had less rain lately and the sunshine is helping to bring them around. We also have some baby sweet corn poking through the ground. As an experiment, we planted the sweet corn into a flowerbed on the back side of the house that really doesn’t seem to grow much of anything very well. So far I am predicting a very ugly and spotty corn crop at best, but perhaps I’ll be surprised and corn will thrive were none of my flowers seems to do well. Speaking of flowers doing well, I snapped this picture of one of our back flower beds the other day. Almost everything is blooming at once, attracting quite a bunch of bees and a few hummingbirds.

Look at the crazy things my Strawberry Pot plants are doing!

I think the only other news of note is that Jason’s hiking season has once again begun in earnest. He is again completing a contract for the forest service, hiking several thousand acres this summer and leaving me husband-less for many more weekends than I’d ultimately like. He promises the money should be better from the contract this summer, but I already know it will go to buying him a new vehicle and/or paying off my student loans. (It would be slightly more exciting if I at least got a nice pair of earrings out of the deal or something). On the upside, with some serious recruiting on the part of his cousin Ben, he thinks they will finish the whole thing much faster than last summer, even though it’s a bigger area. I’m hoping he’s right.

I think that’s a reasonable update for this time around. I hope everyone is well and is still enjoying following along. Feel free to leave me comments (other than spam!). 😉 I look forward to catching up soon!