What a day...

We played hooky from work 

(okay, so we both requested the day off weeks in advance)

Russ surprised me with some awesome shoes I've been eyeing

Got my ring cleaned

Ate lunch at Dick's

Went back to our spot at Manito park

Wandered around Petco oogling puppy toys for our little guy

I scheduled Russ for a massage

 (because everyone should get a full body massage at least once in their lifetime) 

Stopped in for some Mongolian food

and

Ate a year old cupcake.

It was the best anniversary, ever!

Every girl deserves to be loved the way I am. 

I love, love, love my man.

small things...

There is something wonderfully, rebelliously, optimistic about brightly colored umbrellas.

A successful Saturday

Today, I found a yoga studio! I'm ecstatic and anxious to start practicing again... 

Russ and I took a quick jaunt over to Minnihaha to climb.

Then we picnicked in the park and set up our slack line.

As we were goofing around, we noticed that behind a large tree a ways off, four little kids were tentatively inching their way closer towards us. 

We threw them a wave and before we knew it we were slack lining with a motley little crew of 4-8 year olds.

A good Saturday indeed. 

Another Skein Bites the Dust

Two down, two to go on my shrug.

Mayhaps I haven't actually picked it up and done anything on it for the last week or so...

but mayhaps not.

With Our Passions Combined!

We made our own rope tarp! 

Russ is an avid climber, and I love to sew.

So!

We took Russ' leaving his rope tarp in another state as an opportunity to make a brand new, light weight one.

Hello 3 oz(ish) Rope tarp.

And Russell did all the sewing, I'm so proud!

I haven't kicked the bucket...

I've just been crocheting. 

Okay, really I've been doing a whole lot of nothing. 

But since my leave from productivity ends Monday (the end is in sight!!)

I've decided to keep my fingers busy until them with my FIRST EVER crochet project aside from accessories.

A super simple shrug.

I'm doing it in Lion Brand Homespun 412 Pearls. 

It's an off white/faint tan and wonderfully nubby and soft.

In other words, it snags on my crochet hook every chance it gets. 

No matter, the bigger the piece gets, the more scrumptiously soft it feels.

....and honestly...

the closer I feel to my Aussie-home made-knitting-baking idol Jorth

Someday I'll be as amazing as she is at all of this yarn work!

hopefully :)

Enjoying the moment.

I'm impatient.

It is a fact I have lived with my entire life. I have never been so self-fooled as to claim any sort of sufferance.

---

I am always getting frustrated and caught up in what I don't have now:

my degree, a baby, a little house of my own, financial stability, heck; a job right now.

 as opposed to appreciating that which I do have:

The most attentive husband I could ever ask for, a loving family, a warm place to live, food to eat.

---

As I was nearing the halfway mark of my run tonight, Claire de Lune began playing on my ipod and an especially cool breeze greeted me from across a grassy field.

It was perfect.

---

In that moment, my breathing came easy and my uphill pace felt like a soaring accomplishment. I was exactly where I wanted to be and it was amazing.

Here's to holding on to the fleeting moments of peace and perfection to help us through the rest.

Road Trip Day 6 and 7: Yosemite

After going to the beach, we drove down through the Redwoods.

Literally, through the Redwoods.

And ended up in Russell's Disneyland otherwise known as the Yosemite Valley

We spent the afternoon hiking around and oogling the granite giants.

We then went for a swim. Since we had been road tripping, our car was a bit of a mess and we had a ton of food in there. I was worried about the bears until I saw how many people were around and figured there was no way a bear would come by all of the people. 

As we paddled around the river with about 150 others, a bear ambled its way right on past a group of Asian tourists (who later scampered through the woods in their bikinis, chasing the animal down trying to get a picture with it...seriously...its a bear, run! and not towards it!).

After that I was pretty paranoid about coming back to broken windows, so we headed back to our car and started trying to find a place to camp.

We scoped out camp 4, but it was full of families with hardly a climber in site (which really is the only romance of the pit hole known as camp 4), so we headed up the valley to a campground Russ and his buddy Dallas camped at when they were there. 

We lost the sun as we ascended out of the valley and arrived at the campground in pitch darkness. Finding flocks of children darting across the roadway in the darkness, led us to parking our car and meandering through the campground trying to find a spot to sleep. We found one open site and figured it was because a large Mexican family (30+ people) had gathered their cars nearby and were blaring Mariachi music to the stars and their local sleeping campers.

I hopped onto the table to wait for Russ to pull the car around when one of the Mother's from the large group walked up to me with a swarm of little kids running around her and informed me they were renting the space for the use of the bear box, she then opened it to show that it was packed to the brim with alcohol "food".

So, we headed out.

We ran into another family who was in our same predicament and they informed us they had just pulled their cars into the trees and were setting up their tents there in a non-site.

Looking at their chocolate smeared children holding giant marshmallows in each hand, I asked the dad (who was holding and eating a whole wheel of cheese, awesome) if there was a random bear box there. He said no, but it was OK they just put all of their food in their car. He then told us we could set up camp next to them. Looking again at his group of little bear snacks kids, we politely declined, drove away. Pulled over to the side of a road and slept in our car hoping the bears wouldn't break in and get our crackers...or rip through the chocolate covered children's tents.

---

We successfully made it through the night and climbed at Swan Slab (after meandering around trying to find a short cut to the Grack for a good hour), I got attacked by a giant bug; from which a kind old gentlemen saved me life by swatting it off my rope and stomping it into the ground. Russ got a little souvenir caribiner and promises to come back in peak climbing season when there were actually climbers in camp four. 

We then made our way out to stay with some family friends for the night and hit up SIX FLAGS the next day.

Road Trip Day 5: our fiasco in the woods

Instead of spending the night at Smith Rock after a long day of climbing, we decided to pop on over to the Oregon coast, since Russ had never been there.

We found a free campground in Coos Bay on our GPS and decided to make the four hour drive and set up camp around 11 or 12 that night.

---

I'm a little infamous for falling asleep on road trips when I'm supposed to be navigating (just ask Russ about our first trip to Leavenworth when we were 17...he'll gladly tell ya all about it) so, to prevent myself from falling asleep, I bought a Dr. Pepper.

This just happened to be the night that I found out that after I drink caffeine to keep myself awake, and after it fails and sleep starts to win the battle...I start getting really, really paranoid. 

Good thing I never did drugs. I'd be carazay. 

Anywho...

We find the dirt road turn off for the campground around 11:30 and head on into the woods. The road is extremely narrow, the sky has clouded over with fog from the bay nearby and the moss covered trees are starting to make me feel more than a tad claustrophobic, when the thought hits me.

...

What if big foot, friggin BIG.FOOT. comes and gets us?

I'm freakin out kids.

Full on, approaching panic attack, freaking out.

---

We'd been driving down the dirt road further and further into these spooky woods when we realize, we've already driven 40 miles, we have to turn around or the campground has to show up soon. We come to a fork in the road with one fork blocked off by a fence, so we take the road to the left only to find the road to have been plowed into a big open space with all the shoveled around dirt piled in front of the continuing road.

At this point, we admit defeat and begin backtracking to a spot where our GPS would work again. Russell keeps insisting that I can fall asleep,that he is fine, but I insist on staying awake blabbering like a skitzo fool.

When, all of a sudden, I feel something huge crawling up my leg.

"Okay" I tell myself. "You've been being paranoid, it's probably just a string or something".

So, I bravely and calmly move my hand towards the thing crawling on me, pretty convinced at this point that there is just some inanimate object on my leg.

Nope.

"Russell..."

"yea?"

"There's a bug"

"Did you get it?"

"No, Russell...there's a bug"

"...ok?"

Fully registering that there is a half-dollar sized creature scurrying its way up my flesh, I scream

"NO! RUSSELL, ITS A BUG! A STOP THE CAR BUG!"

and I smacked that bug right off of my leg. Russ slams on the breaks, turns on the cab light and hops out of the car while I scamper into the driver's seat just as the gargantuan beast attempts to crawl up and under the glove box compartment. 

Luckily for me, and unluckily for the giant stink-bug-beetle-satan-spawn, Russ is quick and pulled out his pocket knife, flipped out the pliers, grabbed its leg and flung it off into the woods to be eaten by Sasquatch.

When we finally got out of the woods and back onto a paved road, we headed straight to our newly-favorited-trusty camping spot...another Wal-Mart parking lot.

Luckily, the beach was gorgeous the next day and there were no more bugs in the car:

On to the Redwoods and the most Redneck experience of our trip...

Road Trip Day 4: Smith Rock

We arrived at Smith Rock in the middle of the night, only being able to guess at where the cliffs were. We couldn't see anything. After scouting around for a campground, we found a place at the Bivouac campground about 8 miles from the park entrance, pitched our tent, hunkered down and got ready for an awesome day of climbing to come.

There were giant, quarter sized, stink bug type beetles all over the campground, but no mosquitoes so it turned out nice.

Smith Rock!

Russ playing around on the base of To Bolt or Not To Be: 5.14a, the first 5.14 climbed in America on record. Note the lack of...anything to haul yourself up with.

We did several climbs on Cinnamon slab and got nice and toasted in the sun, had a quick shady lunch and headed over to the nearby gorge to find a crack to climb. We ran into a large group of French people who were just starting the climb (the only other people in the gorge, climbing the only climb we were interested in, the odds.)

It ended up being a horrible sketchy bust, so after that little fiasco, we washed our hands and feet in the river and decided to head out to the Oregon coast that night instead of the next day.

We made lunch in the car and we located a free campground just outside of Coos bay on our phones, set the GPS and headed out through Mount Hood National Forest and down some really narrow, windy roads that got a little scary after dark.

Seeing as how the day of climbing went mostly without a hitch, we should have known we were in for some sort of epic to make up for it.

oh yea, cliffhanger.