Sequoia National Park

Adventures in Sequoia

A recent camping trip to Sequoia National Park prompted my thoughts about camping.

Top 5 reasons why camping is better than being in an apartment:

1. Food always tastes better: We had quite the cuisine of tin foil dinners (due to lack of sufficient coals we were forced to adapt them to iron skillet dinners), peach cobbler, pancakes, sandwiches, hot dogs (actually polish sausage, which is definitely better after being roasted over an open fire)

2. Clothing: Why wear only one pair of favorite clothes when you can wear all the clothes you have in order to stay warm? Reverse strip poker can also help accomplish this task. Layer after layer of clothing goes on and really the loser is the winner because they can stay warm.

Many layers were the key to success while sleeping and hiking around

3. Clean air: My lungs got quite the rest from the LA smog during our wonderful trip to the clean mountain air. Even the fire smoke couldn't dampen the wonderful clean air.

The Great Western Divide

4. Darker at night: When I got home I tried to sleep Sunday night and realized that the city lights of LA make it rather hard to go to sleep after experiencing the wonderful pitch black nights in the forest. Plus when it's that dark you can see millions of stars.

Sunset in the mountains

5. Beautiful scenery: The breath-taking scenery from the top of Moro Rock was enough to make the trip worth it. The trees, river, and snow-covered mountains were much more beautiful than the congestion, parallel parking, and schoolwork of LA.

Our first glimpse of wildlife.
View from the top of Moro Rock

Top 5 reasons why an apartment is better than camping:

1. Hot water: Try doing dishes in freezing cold water at midnight. Hot showers, hot dish water, laundry, etc. Modern life conveniences surprisingly make life more convenient.

2. Light: Somehow we didn't bring a lantern with us on the camping trip. This may have been slightly easier had we not put up our camp in the dark. Being able to turn on a light switch and instantly have light certainly is easier than wearing a goofy head lamp for two days.

3. No bear boxes: Due to the black bear traffic in the park we had to put all of our food, toiletries, baby wipes, etc. in the bear box each night. Good thing we didn't encounter any bears because someone left the bear box open Friday night. How thankful I am to have a refrigerator full (well sometimes it's full) of food that I only have to share with Sara, no bears.

Bear Boxes and "the boys next door" tent

4. Insulated walls: Tent walls are rather thin and when your neighbors "the boys next door" and "The Andersons" are loud at night you can't help but hear everything they say and their snoring. Sadly the walls in my apartment are not much thicker than the walls of a tent as I went to bed on Sunday night and could still hear Jessica, Sara, and Josh quite well on the other side of the wall.

The circus tent and The Anderson's tent

5. Soft mattresses: Now my mattress is not exactly a sleep number bed, in fact it doesn't even have a real box spring (thanks Jessica for your old mattress which acts as my box spring). But when I got in bed on Sunday night, I felt like I was sleeping in the best bed ever. Sleeping on hard ground with a half-an-inch thick pad below you is not exactly comfortable. In fact I think I may have several bruises from unwanted rocks under our tent.

Somehow Josh managed to get a picture of us while we were sleeping. Guess which one I am?

So after weighing the pros and cons I would say that as far as a permanent residence goes I'll have to stick to an apartment, but camping needs to be a more frequent undertaking in my life.

John, Kristen and Josh exploring the soft bark of the Sequoias

John, Kristen and Josh spanning the tree

General Sherman--the largest tree in the world (so they say)

Rick, Sylvia, Jeff and Bethany on our snow hike

You know you go to school in the ghetto when...

Wednesdays are my super long days at school already. I start class at 9:00am and don't get done until 10:00pm. I still can't really figure out why I did that to myself. Today was especially hard because I feel like I'm getting a cold and it took all I had to just get up and go to school today. As I was just about to finish my ergonomics class today my classmate leaned over to me and asked me if I got a text from the Trojan alert system. I hadn't checked my phone in a while so I looked at what hers said

Trojans Alert: Shots fired @ Budlong & Adams. 1 suspect & weapon in custody. 3 suspects @ large. LAPD perimeter north of UPC. Stay inside until further notice.

Well I had just finished a 13 hour day and there was no way I was going to stay at school any longer. I didn't mention that where the shots were fired was a couple of blocks away from my building. So we all decided that we would just walk in groups and brave it through the night. I walked with my friend to her car and then she dropped me off at my car which was only about a half a block away. I hate that I have to get a ride to my car half a block away. As I drove to the freeway the cops had Adams blocked off and there were helicopters circling, trying to catch the suspects still at large. As I got in my car I turned on the radio and what did I hear, no nothing about the shooting by USC, but another high speed chase on the freeway that ended just after I got in the car.

Somehow I made it home without any other criminal activity. Sometimes I really wonder why I ended up here. Thank goodness for spring break!

Unwelcomed guest

Always looking much younger than my age may soon be ending. Today as I was straightening my hair (yes it was a weekend, about the only time I actually do my hair) I was trying to look at the back to make sure it was sufficiently straight and I saw a hair that did not match the others. After further inspection I discovered that this hair was much lighter, much whiter than the rest of my hair. So I did what all girls do when they find a silver hair, pull it out. Let that be a lesson to others who want to take up residence on my head. They will be plucked out. Sadly this hair didn't know what it was getting its self into. When I pulled it out one end (the older end) was a lovely reddish, brownish color (I'm never quite sure what color to call my hair), but the other was a not so lovely shade of silver/white. I guess 25 is just going to be too old for my hair.

Sara's Birthday

Happy Birthday Sara! For Sara's Birthday we went to Mulholland Grill for dinner. Jessica, Danielle, Josh, Jeff, Danny, Sara and I all went. Danny had to cut out shortly after we got there, but the rest of us had a wonderful dinner. The food was really good, but the service was sub-par. Maybe they knew that we didn't have as much money as the rest of the people there! After the dinner we came back to our place and had root beer floats which Sara had been craving for weeks. Others joined in for the birthday festivities and Danny returned for his classic gloomy birthday song. Yay for birthdays and a reason to eat and party.

Jeff, Sara, and Josh at Mulholland Grill staring at Sara's wonderful cake concoction.

Jessica, me, and Danielle enjoying dessert
Josh "helping" Sara get the chocolate out of the bottom of the glass.
Ahhh how cute!
Josh had a little dessert malfunction which Sara was fixing with the Tide pen
The delicious dessert.

Roommate pictures with Sara sportin' the police badge. Happy birthday to her.

Exploring Los Angeles

Late in 2008 Kristen, Bethany and I decided after going to the Griffith Observatory that we needed to explore our home town a little bit more. There are so many places that we've never been to so our group New Years resolution was to explore LA once a month together.

So for January we happened to find out way to the Fair Oaks Pharmacy. Sara, Danielle and I had pretty much just eaten an entire batch of chocolate chip cookies on this particular Saturday. We had made plans to attend a Glendale singles ward activity along with Kristen and were just about to leave when Josh and Jeff showed up at our house. We managed to convince them that they should come with us. As we made our way out the door Jeff somehow came up with the idea of going to the Fair Oaks Pharmacy for milkshakes before going to the activity. I had the black cherry milkshake and it was wonderful. Adding more sugar to the already sugar filled girls was just what was needed for the best night ever.

By the time we made it out of the pharmacy it was time for the singles ward activity to be over. We showed up right after the closing prayer and took our time mingling before deciding we'd had enough of meeting new people (even the Harry Potter look-alike couldn't keep our attention). We had two cars which both managed to get lost before we made it back to Josh and Jeff's house for movie watching. The combination of sugar, not enough other food, and getting lost produced gales of laughter from all the girls, especially Sara, Kristen and I. I must have burned off all the calories I ate that day just from laughter. What a wonderful way to work out.

So for a good time and lots of laughs I would recommend the Fair Oaks Pharmacy. Stay tuned for Februarys version of exploring LA...

Weather

While checking the local newspaper for what's going on in the world today I came across the weather. I think this is my favorite forecast so far. Monday ??? we don't know what's going to happen. Weatherman-the only job you can have where you can consistently be wrong (or ambiguous in this case) and people will still keep paying you.

Century Minus a Decade

Grandpa's Birthday Cake

Grandpa and Grandma at Yen Ching

My grandpa will be turning 90 in a couple of weeks so over Christmas break while everyone was off of school we decided to celebrate his birthday. We got together on the 2nd and had a wonderful party for him. Everyone was there except for the three cousins who are on missions. We started out with the task of taking family pictures. It wasn't as bad as it could have been. Laurel took the pictures of everyone and then used the timer to get all of us together. After the pictures we went to Yen Ching, the best Chinese place ever, for a great dinner. All the older cousins sat at a table together which was tons of fun.
Geoff getting the perks of being an MC

Geoff was put in charge of the program so we planned all sorts of fun/embarrassing things for our parents to do since they pawned it all off on us. I think the restaurant was glad when the 30 of us left and went to the church for the next part of our night. We had decorated the Relief Society room with birthday decorations and even brought the couches in so that Grandma and Grandpa would be comfortable. The program started off with Carolyn singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Aaron and Reese did "Chem 111" which involved using household chemicals to make experiments. Grandpa was a Chem major, so this went over well. Susan played Can You Feel the Love Tonight. Thomas played a song on the piano by Rachmaninov. Melanie sang Stormy Weather. The little cousins sang I am a Child of God. Mike and Timothy played the trumpet and the funnel to Popcorn Popping. Then we got to the even more fun part. We had Barbara juggle sugar packets from the restaurant. She did ok with the first one, but could use some juggling lessons. Dad played Home Home on the Range with the spoons. And Bob did the classic Heart where he takes his heart out and then swallows it again.
But the best part of the night was hearing each of the children talk about Grandpa and his wonderful life. What an amazing man he is. I love learning more and more about him all the time. It was so much fun to see all the family and just spend quality time together.