What I did on my Memorial Day Vacation

It started off badly. Tim said he scheduled to get off of work 2:30pm Friday. I called him around that time to see if he was ready to be picked up. No answer. This means he is in a meeting or talking to someone. I put my phone in my pocket and waited for him to call back. He did, like 23 times. What I didn't realize was I didn't change my phone from silent from the meeting we went to the night before. ARRRGHH. I wondered what was taking Tim SOOOO long to call back. I finally checked my phone to see what time it was and saw that he had called. . . . many times. I was horrified when I realized. UGH. How annoying!!!

So, instead of leaving around 2:30pm as planned, we left more like 4:30pm. So it was dark when we got to Great Basin National Park. All the camp sites were filled. We needed to find BLM land but it was dark and we had no idea where to start.

After some badly given (or misunderstood) directions to one area of BLM land and advice that the Primitive campsites would be hard to find in the dark, Tim tried to give it a go anyway. They weren't that hard to find and we got a good spot. At like. . 10:30pm. We set up camp and ate dinner and were in bed like at 1am.

The next morning we ate breakfast and climed up to the side of a cliff. It was an unpaved steep climb but we all made it too the top. It wore us all out though. . not to mention the late night before.

We took a tour of Lehmans Caves. Pretty cool! Not MUCH cooloer than Timpenogas Caves, but a little different.

After the tour we were all hungry. We decided as we did food shopping before the trip we would bring enough for dinner and breakfast. If there were places to get more food we would stay two nights. If not we would only stay one. There were two VERY small grocery stores...more like convenince stores. They had ravioli but no paper or plastic supplies to eat it with so we took that as a sign to go home. We were too tired from the late night and hike to do anything but hang out at our campsite anyway. It was a grey and rainy day so that wouldn't have even been any fun. We did do a scenic drive up the mountain before we left though. It was quite pretty.

Monday the outdoor fun continuted. We hiked up to Stewart Falls in the Timpanogos National Park. Beautiful hike! A new favorite. We had never done it before. Two miles up and two down. I highly recommend it!

Our honest opinion of what we did see at Great Basin is that Utah is prettier. Nothing really blew us away with being more beautiful than anything we have seen in Utah.

We are now all excited to go on our annual summer vacation in June to Carlsbad Caverns with lots of fun stops there and back.

Three Reasons Lincoln May Not Be Mormon Tabernacle Choir Material.

Tonight Lincoln had his Kindergarden end of year program. It was a great show! The kids sang a bunch of songs that they have been learning all year. The best part of the show however was looking at the pictures Tim took throughout. . . (Lincoln is in the green plaid shirt near the middle)

The first is Lincoln dancing between musical numbers

Next is Lincoln harrassing the boy next to him. His "girlfriend" (girl in pigtails upper right) is looking on with disgust. The third is Lincoln bored out of his mind.

Silly Mom!

As we were sending children upstairs to bed I suddenly remembered that my job of homemaker was not done for the night. I had washed the boys' sheets and hadn't put them back on the beds.
ME: "Oh CRAP!!!!. . I just remembered I still need to make three beds before the kids can go to sleep" (Don't you LOVE that realization????!!!)
Sam: But mom we already have three beds! My bed, Lincoln's bed and Joe's bed. . three beds.

I guess I have THAT to be thankful for. Actually "making" beds would have been much much worse.

Found Keys and Aswered Prayers

Things like this happen to us all quite often. Then we forget about them. I wanted to record a simple but miraculous answer to a prayer today. I lost my keys. I looked EVERYWHERE! I looked in the morning and looked in the afternoon. I called places I thought they may have been left when I was out on Saturday. Nothing. I kept praying in my heart all day. . Help me find them PLEASE!
I decided to take a break for a while. As I was out checking on kids, the thought occured to me to take the trash out to the curb. I NEVER take my trash out before like 10 pm. Why not do it now though and get it out of the way. There was no way I was going to get any more trash in the cans anyway. But I had two more bags in the garage. I decided to try to stuff them in. As I opened the can I saw the bottom of my stuffed puffin's foot, the one attached to my key chain which was of course attached to my keys. PHEW!!!
I don't know how they got there but I know that If I hadn't decided to try to stuff in those last two bags I never would have found my keys. If I hadn't felt inspired to take the trash out in the afternoon instead of before I go to bed like I have done EVERY other time. . I never would have found those keys. It would have been night time. I never would have seen the little bird foot sticking out in the dark.
Thank Heaven for prayer and inspiration!

How Mole-hills Become Mountatins

Yes, I have been thinking about this kind of stuff a lot lately. It befuddles me and so I am trying to figure it out. You know how when you get a room clean. . I mean really clean and so you want to keep it that way right? You are putting away the littlest things to keep it looking nice. Wipe off the counter at the first sign of smears. You have seen the room's potential and you want it to live up to it.

Somehow though, a week or so down the road, that room is a mess again. At what point did you stop thinking it was worth picking up every little thing? At what point did you forget that you want that room as nice as it looked when you first cleaned it or at what point did you stop caring so much? I believe stress and tiredness may be the ones to blame.

When I am too stressed, I have other things to worry about that are more important than picking up those shoes or hanging up that outfit I tried on and decided against. It can wait until I am less occupied. I have noticed that when I have a lot on my mind, my physical surroundings just don't seem so important anymore. In this oblivious state, the little messes can get bigger and bigger without my noticing. I know when a big stress has been lifted or I am better rested because suddenly my eyes are opened to the mess around me and I start picking up little things again. I realize, that I have been putting up with that shoe that has been sitting in the hallway for a week now.

I also find that if I am tired or stressed a few dishes to clean seem like a sink full of dishes. One basket full of laundry feels like just too much for me to deal with. I just need a nap and I will take care of it later. I don't take care of that one basket and then it does become two baskets or 3 and suddenly it is so much that, the house work it's self has become the stresser. Suddenly I am swimming in an ocean of laundry and I wonder how I fell off that last wave of productivity.

Going back to my last blog entry, it is always the being too tired or having other stuff to worry about that gets in the way of pushing off and starting my day off right. Even if it is trying to avoid stress by procrastinating. I don't know how many times I have jumped on the computer to avoid that sink of dishes. Lets face it, a sink full of dishes is stressful!

I probably think way too much about housework. Maybe if I worked as much as I think about it, I wouldn't get so buried in it all the time.

Physics Lessons from Ender

I just finished reading Ender's Game for the 2nd or 3rd time. I actually can't remember how sad is that.

I loved it. A little darker than I remember but very very good. The most surprising thing I got out of it however was a little reminder in physics and motivation. I have been trying to figure out ways to stay on top of "the wave" of house work and there was a scene in the book that helped me out with this.

Ender goes to a school that teaches boys how to be fighters and commanders. They teach them through games they play in rooms with no gravity. He learns early on that in order to be in any control of his movements where there is no gravity he needs to push off with quite a bit of force. Some boys in his group just let go of the wall and drifted. They tried to move but couldn't get where they wanted to go.

What did I learn from this? If I want to accomplish anything in a day I have to start off with a push. I really can't sit down at the computer or go back to bed, or pick up a book at 9:05am and really expect to accomplish a whole lot that day. It might happen if I am really lucky but I shouldn't be surprised at all if I end that day feeling like it was total waste.

For the last two weeks I have been following this advice and I have accomplished more in the last week and a half than I have in a long long time. If I start productive, I can even take a break and nap or read or sit at the computer for a while and I will still bounce back later. Amazing!

Thanks to Ender's Game, I was reminded of the basic rules of housekeeping physics. Those who start working, stay working, people who are unproductive, stay unproductive.