End of the year!

Wow.  I’m so, so, so far behind on posting to this blog.   Here’s another attempt to do some catch up before the year is over, so this will be a bit random as things come to me.   Hopefully I’ll do a New Year’s Eve post reminiscing on 2012 in general so I don’t want to do that now.  I just want to talk about what’s happened since the last time I posted.

For one thing, Thanksgiving happened.  It was a blast.  My nephew from Denver came down with his wife and two daughters and stayed with me for three days.  The girls are shown clowning around in the picture below.   My parents and sisters and brother and his wife and son came to the new house also on Thanksgiving, so I had a houseful.  We had a big Thanksgiving meal – my parents essentially bringing the contents of their kitchen with them and cooking in my kitchen.  If you’ve read this blog much, you know my idea of cooking involves a microwave, so you understand why my parents had to bring so much stuff with them.   It was a lot of fun, and felt like a good way to break in the new house. 

This year I decided to put up a Christmas tree, which is something I haven’t done in a lot of years, but again, I wanted to break in the new house.  Plus I have so much nice space for a Christmas tree.  And so many ornaments that I’ve collected over the years and been saving in boxes in my garage.   So I put one up, which you can see in the first picture.   I’m enjoying it a lot.

A couple of weeks ago I had a brief power outage and it kicked my sprinkler system out.  Since I have it set to only water every third day, it took me about a week to realize it wasn’t working.   I’m very proud to say I figured out how to reset the system and get it back running again – just in time to turn it off for three days of freezing weather.

Snow!  I walked out last Monday morning and had a nice layer of snow on my lawn, probably less than half an inch, and big, fat, wet flakes coming down and layering on me as I walked to get my paper.  I was totally surprised.  Yes, the weather had called for a slight chance, but I ignored it since their ability to predict snow here is notoriously low.  It was my favorite type of cold weather.  Pretty, and around just long enough to say “oh, look, snow”, then it’s gone.   I’d be okay with it going back to daily low 70s for the rest of the winter now . . . which it seems to have done for now.  

So that’s basically what’s been happening.  My lawn service has switched from mowing and weed whacking to leaf blowing and garden cleaning. 

Oh!  I almost forgot a piece of big news!  My old house rented!  Yup, there are people living in the old house as of December 1^st.  My agent’s taking care of all of that, so I’m letting him deal with it.  I’ll just be glad to be getting some relief from carrying two mortgages.   Yay! 

I'll be doing a bit of traveling over the Christmas Holiday, seeing relatives who are coming to the metroplex, and relatives in east Texas and relatives in Colorado.  It'll be a little whirlwind, but should be lots of fun too.    I'll try to remember to take pictures.

Back to the house

So many things have happened while I was posting about vacation that it's hard to decide where to start.  I should at least explain some things I guess.  Like, why I replaced the wood floors, when originally I wasn't going to, or what's going on with the old house.  Hmmmm.  Let's see what I can cover today.

To back up a bit, it's kind of ironic that I was looking for a house that I didn't have to put any work into.  Or at least that's what I blatantly stated when I started house hunting.  And I ended up having the interior of the new house completely re-done.   I couldn't help it.  I fell for this house big time, pretty much as soon as I saw it.  It's such a cool house.  This picture of Addy at the  back door gives you a feel for what the early morning light is like in that second living area.  And then as I began to change things the changes became a boulder that just kept rolling and gaining momentum.  Before I even put the contract on it, I knew I wanted to have the entire interior painted, but as I looked at other things I kept thinking, 'I should have the tiles re-done in the bathrooms before I move in'.  Then 'I really should replace this carpet before I move in'.  After all, I said I'd do the carpet in the old house immediately after buying it and it took me 9 years!  I knew if I moved in first it would get postponed indefinitely.  So I decided to do those things before moving in, but I hadn't planned to do the wood floors.  Then the Saturday after closing I came over, and the kitchen floor (which is wood) was destroyed from water leaking from the refrigerator connection.  The damage had been hidden by the previous owner's refrigerator, plus when they pulled it out, the tap no longer turned off and had been dripping continuously onto the floor.  I couldn't patch just that section because the floor in the kitchen is contiguous with the floor in the second living area.  It would look patched!  So I gave up and replaced all the wood flooring in the house too.  Total interior re-do.  I have to say though, I'm very pleased with my house now.   

Plus I hired a landscaping company to mow and weed whack and trim the shrubbery, basically to keep it landscaped, so that makes me even happier with the house.  Coming home on Thursday and having it all neat and trimmed is wonderful.

So what's going on with the old house?  Well, I hate to admit it but that lawn I was so proud of is totally dead.  I simply didn't have time to go down and water routinely and it's been hot and dry.  I hired a leasing agent, but so far the place is still empty.  I had the interior repainted and the exterior cleaned up a bit last month so I'm hoping it will rent now.  It's simply a sad case of bad timing that I started trying to rent it about the time the housing market softened up and people started buying houses again rather than renting.  My agent says we've had a couple of applications for renting, but not from anyone who he would recommend I rent to.  So we'll see if it rents now that it's cleaned up a bit.  I still go down there periodically and mow the weeds, since the grass is basically all dead.

So that's what's been going on.  The cats are finally completely settled in.  As you can see Zoe likes the rugs on the floor of the pantry.  Zoe has also located a wonderful hiding place outside in the backyard under one of the bigger shrubs where she is really completely hidden despite her color.  She lays out there for hours on end watching the birds.  So both cat-girls have their favorite places and have made it their house.

I'm having family over for Thanksgiving, so I'll probably tell all about that in the next post.  See ya then.   

Parks 5 - Arches and Canyonlands National Parks

It's kind of amazing that I've spent 5 posts talking about the vacation this year.  Or maybe not amazing when you consider I could probably spend 5 posts talking about each of these National Parks.  At any rate, this post should tie up the trip.

Probably one of the most well-known arches found in Arches National Park is the one in the first picture in this post.  This is Delicate Arch, and I can tell you it's only "delicate' from a distance.  This is a big formation.  Yup, that's me standing under it. The hike up to it is not long, so we often do the hike the morning we're leaving to go to Colorado.  We still get up well before sun up, drive out to it and leave on the trail before the sun rises.  Usually that's because we're leaving after we get back down, but also there's a massive, steep section of slickrock that's a serious climb going in and better done without the sun beating down on it.   This year we weren't leaving but we had other plans for later so we did it early anyway.

This year we ran into a new problem on this hike - mosquitoes!!!  The damn little bugs were THICK out there.  So thick in fact that they essentially chased us up the trail.  It's not that they didn't allow us to stop for breaks, although they didn't.  We couldn't even slow down and did the hike much faster than usual.  And reaching the top wasn't an escape from the damn things.  Everyone up there was slapping and swinging at them.  Perhaps later in the day with the sun well up they wouldn't have been such a problem, but then I've never had a problem with them before in the  early morning.

We didn't stay long on the hike. 

The second picture is the other arch that Arches is probably most famous for, Landscape Arch.  This one is also on the hike out to Dark Angel but I had room for the picture here.  The arch itself is fenced off because the erosion under the arch itself got bad, but honetly, it's such a long arch that any closer and it's hard to take a picture of.

That afternoon we drove over to Canyonlands National Park.   I've never stayed in Canyonlands.  It's more primitive than the other National Parks in Utah - less developed.  It has some amazing vistas though and is worth going to see, but was something of a disappointment this year because the haze was so bad.  The amount of junk in the air from the Colorado and Utah fires got worse as we moved east across Utah, and it was most noticeable in Arches and especially this day in Canyonlands.   You can see that in these last tow pictures.

These pictures are from the formation that is one of the most famous from Canyonlands, Mesa Arch.  I love this Arch because of the changing perspective you get of the structures in the background distance from it.  So the first picture shows the Arch from a distance up the trail and you can see what look like large formations behind it in the distance.  The next picture is those same formations but with the picture taken through the arch when you're standing at the arch.  Amazing, huh?  They go from huge behind the arch to tiny in the distance.  I just love perspective.

So that was our vacation.  We did some more minor shopping this afternoon and then left the next morning for my sister's place in Colorado.  Overall it was a fabulous trip, and if you've never been to any of the National Parks in Utah, I recommend you remedy that lack.  You will not regret it.

Parks 4 - Arches National Park

I was originally only going to do four posts about the vacation and the parks and finish them up with this post about Arches and Canyonlands, but once again I have more pictures than I can comfortably fit into one post.  So I decided to do Arches in this post and then a combined Arches/Canyonlands post next time.  That lets me use more pictures.  And really Arches has so many unique rock formations that it needs a couple of posts to display all the cool pictures.  All the National Parks in Utah do, now that I think about it.

This picture is of one of my favorite formations in the park.  It's called Dark Angel, and I don't know what it is about it that attracts me, but I just love this hunk of rock.  It juts up out of its relatively level surroundings and seems to be Lord of all it surveys.  I will be seriously sad the day it comes tumbling down, but then maybe I  won't  still be around when that happens.  And lest you think this is a minor piece of rock, this next picture is me standing at it's base.  Yes, squint a little and you can see me there at the base to the left.  This is a frigging huge chunk of rock.

Anyway, we arrived in Moab on Saturday and unlike our usual luck, we couldn't check into a hotel early.  Usually we get lucky enough to be able to check in early, but maybe because it was so crowded everywhere this year, we couldn't check in until almost 3:00 pm.  So we went into Moab dirty (before taking showers) and began the marathon shopping.  I LOVE shopping in Moab.  Some of my favorite tourist shops and jewelry places are in Moab.  We shopped for multiple hours then ate at the Moab Brewery.  Also one of my favorite places, because I like microbrewery beer, especially the Scorpion Pale Ale that they brew here.  Then we finally went back to the hotel and took long, blasting showers and became slugs for the rest of the evening.

Sunday morning we got up about 5:15 am and drove to Devil's Garden to hike out to the Dark Angel.  We began the hike before sunup and actually stopped on the trail to watch the sun come up.  The sky was really gorgeous, what with more clouds than usual and more haze than usual.   Like Angel's Landing, the hike out to Dark Angel and back is another favorite of mine.  It runs across and between the rock "fins" and it's not incredibly strenuous, although much of it is considered "primitive" hiking.  I guess because in areas the trail is less well laid out than your usual National Park trail.  It's fun though.  On the way out to the Dark Angel you come to the Double O Arch, which is two arches, one above the other one.  That's me standing in the lower arch. 

We start this hike as early as we do because by the time you're coming out, it's HOT and there's very little shade on the last part of the hike coming out.  By the time we get back to the car, we're incredibly ready for the iced down blue Gatorade and the air-conditioned car.  Then you have a 12 mile drive back to Maob.  We also stopped at the Visitor's Center near the entrance.  The Arches Visitor's Center is way cool.  I always stop at all the Visitor's centers because it's interesting to see how they change each year and what new things they have.

Then we went back to Moab and did more shopping and eating and then became slugs in the hotel  -  my friend studying and me writing in my journal and clearing 400 emails out of my work email inbox.  This sign is at the foot of the Dark Angel, so I thought I'd use it to end today's post.  Next time:  end of vacation.
 

   

Parks 3 - Capital Reef National Park

I have always had something of a soft spot for Capital Reef because it was the first Utah park I ever stayed in, and that was 19 years ago!  Hard to believe I've been going to the Utah parks for that long now.  I still really like this particular park. 

We arrived in Capital Reef National Park on Thursday morning, set up camp and then went to the Gifford House.  This is a little historic farmhouse that they use as a semi-museum, semi-souvenir store.  Our campsite this year was only a short walk from the Gifford House so as soon as camp was up, we went over there.  They also happen to sell small one-person pies that my friend has been dreaming about since before we left on this trip.  So we got pies, apple and cherry, and ate them first thing.  Then we went to the Visitor's Center and then back into Torrey for ice and Subway sandwiches.  Torrey's the closest place to get ice for the ice chest, and usually I have a massive fast food craving by the time we hit Torrey and am really looking forward to those Subway sandwiches.  This year we were especially lazy and  spoiled and ate out a lot rather than cooking at the campsite.  My fast food craving wasn't strong, but I still enjoyed them.

Like most of the parks in Utah, Capital Reef has some amazing rock formations, well worth seeing.  The first picture in this post is of a formation called the Castle, and it also shows some of the amazing rock colors in the area.  One of the things I like about the park though is the stark contrast between the rocky formations and desert, and the very green and fertile campground and area around the Fremont river.  There are fruit orchards there and massive old cottonwoods, and the campground is green and peaceful, with the sound of the river rushing by.  This time of year it's usually muddy and rushing also, from the afternoon thunderstorms.

We spent most of the time in Capital being lazy, driving scenic routes and visiting the petroglyphs.  Friday morning when we got up we hiked the short (1 1/2 mile) Fremont Trail.  I've been wanting to hike it again ever since I went up it 19 years ago, and try to take pictures to compare to the ones I took back then.  But usually we only spend one day at Capital Reef unless we're doing the Navajo Knobs hike.  So if we only spend a day, it's too hot in the afternoon  to go up that trail by the time we arrive and set up.  And if we stay an extra day and hike the Knobs, I'm too tired for the extra mile and a half.  So this year, just to do that hike, we stayed an extra day in Capital Reef without hiking the Knobs. 

I did get my pictures, but now I have to find the original ones I took back in 1993.  The picture looking down at the campground also shows another problem we had this year that was increasingly noticeable as we moved east across the state.  The atmosphere was very hazy from the summer wildfires in Utah and Colorado.  Late in the trip when we got to Grand Junction on the western side of Colorado and were pointed east into Colorado, you couldn't see the mountains at all! 

Of course that means we had plenty of time to be lazy, and drive to scenic overlooks like the Goosenecks and do scenic drives.  The mosquitoes were really bad this year, especially here at Capital Reef and at Arches, so here we used the car to escape the little demons.  I guess it's been a wet year out here.     

While we were visiting the petroglyphs we saw a gray fox bound up over a rock pile.  This time neither of us was fast enough to catch him on film though.   My friend did take some video of a group of tiny bats flitting and feasting over a wet part of the campground where the mosquitoes were really bad.  You can actually catch glimpses of them in the video. 

Saturday morning we got up and broke camp and drove to Moab.  We stayed in Moab and hiked in Arches and visited Canyonlands, so my last vacation blog post will be about those two parks.
 

Parks 2 - Bryce Canyon National Park

We arrived at Bryce on Tuesday morning, found a campsite in the Sunset Camp ground and set up camp first.  Then we immediately went and took showers.  Bryce has a small general store and public showers and after two+ hot and sweaty days in Zion, it's high on our list of things to start with at Bryce.  Then we did some shopping at Ruby's, ate lunch, and because it was rainy, we went to drive the scenic overlooks and do "rainbow hunting".   I've never actually seen a rainbow at Bryce, but since the rain storms are interspersed with sunlight, I figure I will one day so we keep looking.  Plus if it's raining, rainbow hunting is a nice way to stay in the car, driving from scenic point to scenic point.  

This particular day we drove through a pretty massive storm, including some nice hail.  Luckily it wasn't big enough hail to do any damage to the car, but it was a heavy storm.  Afterward we stopped at several overlooks, and at one point I said, "Get out and take a picture of some lightning."  The first picture in this post is the result of that.  My friend had some great luck with pictures on this trip and she snapped that one just at lightning struck.

The bad news about that particular storm is that it went through the campground while we were away and the rain must have been horizontal.   Everything under the canopy was completely saturated and muddy from the mud splashed up by the rain.  We have actually gotten spoiled by that canopy.  We've been leaving stuff out under it that we used to put away in the car or tent before the days of the canopy.  And apparently we've been lucky not to have any really heavy storms before this.  This storm taught us that the canopy is only so protective.  Lesson learned.

An interesting thing about the trip this year is that everywhere was swarming with people.  Last year when my sister and I went on this trip there were very few people everywhere we went.  This year there were masses.  Last year we went 10 days later, so I wonder if that made the difference, or it was just a heavy year this year.  It was very noticeable at Bryce because it took us four times going back to finally find a parking spot at the Visitor's Center to be able to get in.  Another interesting phenomenon was the number of non-English speaking people.  This is almost always true, but this year as we sat in the restaurant at Ruby's, we realized that EVERYONE around us was speaking French.  There were no other English-speaking customers in the restaurant besides us.  I was a little surprised by that.  I knew that that area of Utah is a favorite vacation spot for Europeans, but usually you hear some English as well.  And usually there's some German mixed in.  

After the rainy Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday turned out to be picture perfect.  We hiked our favorite route - park at Sunrise Point, walk the rim to Sunset Point, hike down part of the Navajo Loop, then hike the Peekaboo Loop, then come back through Queen's Garden and back up to Sunrise Point.    It was gorgeous.  The pictures of the hoodoos and the pine with the twisted trunk are from this hike.

Wednesday afternoon we shopped more and were lazy in the campsite.  We also took pictures and a small video of a small gray mole/gopher type critter who was clearing out a burrow entrance about 20 feet from the campsite.  The picture above is his head in the burrow entrance.

So Bryce was gorgeous as usual and the weather wasn't even too cold for me.  Last year it was about 42 when we got up in the morning.  This year it was only about 56, so not too bad.  We got up Thursday morning, broke camp and drove to Capital Reef National Park, which will be my next blog post.

Parks 1 - Zion Canyon National Park

I'm back!  Vacation was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!  I was going through my pictures and my friend's pictures and I realized I have so many pictures I want to share that I cannot possibly do it in one post.  I decided to do a post for each park instead.   That means I won't be talking about the new house for a while - which is probably all to the good.

The first park we always go to is Zion Canyon National Park, so I'll talk about Zion first.  Zion is in the southwest corner of Utah so it's usually hot and this year was no exception.  One of my absolute favorite hikes is in Zion though and it's become something of a tradition to go to Zion first and start out with the  Angel's Landing hike.  This year that hike almost kicked my ass, but I went into this vacation tired and stressed, so I shouldn't be surprised.  Luckily, I'm coming out of it rested and only minimally stressed, so that's an improvement.

Anyway, Angel's Landing is one of my favorite hikes because the last half mile is more of a climb or what I call a 'scramble' than it is a hike.  There are steep drops and chains set in the rocks to help you get up in places.  It's great fun although it takes some energy.  I nearly didn't have enough this year.  I think I'll try to be a little less tired going into this vacation in the future.  Anyway, the first picture is taken near the start of the point where you begin the scramble, looking up toward Angel's Landing itself, with me crossing one of the narrower points of the trail which has significant drops on both sides.  The second picture is looking back down on that narrow ridge from further up the trail.  It's just a great hike, but you definitely need to be okay with heights to do it.

Once you get to the top you're greeted by multiple small rodents.  This little guy is one of the chipmunks, but there are also rock squirrels up there.  All of them have become very used to people, especially in places like Angel's Landing, which is a popular place for people to go.  Actually, come to think of it, the parks were all very full of people this year.  Last year we went a little later and had more places to ourselves - including being first up on Angel's Landing - being the first to reach the top.  This year we were about the fourth or fifth group to get to the top, and it stayed busy with people up there.  

The view from the top is amazing in both directions.  This picture is looking down canyon and you can see we had some clouds.  We had rain in Zion one day this year, but even with that helping, it was miserably hot.   We pulled out all of our beat-the-heat tricks, including shopping for long periods of time, eating inside in restaurants, and driving up to Checkerboard Mesa, pulling out at all the pullouts to stop and take pictures.   The drive to Checkerboard Mesa and back can last around 2 hours if we take our time, and that's 2 hours in an air-conditioned car.   My friend and I have actually seen bighorn sheep on this drive on two occasions over the years and this year we got a real treat.  Not only did we see a small flock of sheep again, but my friend got a video of them, including two of the rams hitting head on - with a sound like a cannon shot!  It's an amazing piece of video.  This picture is of one of the rams and one female.  

Other wildlife we saw in Zion besides the  bighorns and chipmunks and the ubiquitous lizards included tiny toads along the trail where it runs by the river, which I've seen in Zion before but not on the Angel's Landing hike.  We also saw a white rock squirrel near our campsite, but it was camera shy.  The pictures I got were not good.   And of course we saw lots of little bats at sunset and sunup.   I'm not good enough to get those on camera either.   

So we arrived in Zion on Sunday, set up camp and did shopping, hiked Angel's Landing on Monday and did more shopping and touristy driving, and then broke camp on Tuesday and went to Bryce Canyon National Park.  From Zion we begin working our way back north and east across the state and Bryce comes next so Bryce will be the subject of my next post.  See ya.