I'm Allergic to Kansas

I spent all last week visiting Kansas. I haven't really spent a lot of time in Kansas the last few years which was enough to make me forget that my allergies get really bad EVERY time I spend more than a day there. I don't know what it is that floats around in the air in Kansas, but my body hates it. I went to Kansas for my fall break because I needed to get away from everything work and school-related for a bit. It's all been pretty over-whelming.

So I flew in on Saturday, the 10th and by Sunday morning I felt like crap on toast. I pretty much felt crappy the whole week. I couldn't breathe through my nose at all, I was totally congested, my eyes watered like crazy, and one morning my eyes were literally glued shut. It was gross. Friday night my arms completely broke out in hives, so that made my flight back to Utah Saturday an itchy, uncomfortable ride. I drugged up on allergy meds and benedryl to try to get rid of the hives. It worked, but I was too drugged to go to work Saturday night. So yeah, kind of a crappy week. It's almost got me convinced to go get an allergy test done to figure out what all I'm actually allergic to. I say almost, cause that would mean I would have to find a doctor in Utah and I hate finding new doctors.

Only kind of though. I did get to spend some quality time with two of my best friends, Miranda and Serina. I also got to spend an afternoon with my oldest brother which was cool. I probably get to see him the least of all my siblings. I wish he lived closer. I hung out a couple of days with Miranda and her almost 4 year old twins. They both told me I was their best friend at different points and I watched the Care Bear movie with them, so it that was fun too.

So as I've mentioned before, I have pretty much the cutest godson ever. In June his family moved to Kansas so that his 5 half-siblings could be closer to their dad. I can't hold that against them, cause I think it's great that they get to see their dad more, but I sure miss them all a lot. I used to go hang out with them at least every other weekend when they lived here in Utah. So David (the really cute godson) turns one today and I wanted to be there for his first birthday party, so they held it a week early while I was visiting. It was pretty cool. I just wish I had felt better. Here's a few pictures from his party.It was probably one of the largest parties for a first birthday I've ever been to, but it also probably had the best food, so I definitely enjoyed it.

He wasn't real fond of the birthday hat, but I was able to snap a picture before he tried to rip it off.He really liked his chocolate cupcake too.

This was one of the things that I gave David for his birthday. It's a Lightning McQueen ride on toy. He LOVES it. I also got him a Utah Utes hoodie (the one he's wearing in the picture at the top of this post) and some other cute little clothes that he wasn't real interested in.

Fall Frenzy

So I realize it's been a while since I last blogged, and I don't really have a good excuse except that I've been really busy with really mundane boring stuff. So even if I had time to blog, it would have been boring. So here's a fun little recap of my last month...

A while ago I decided to go back to school and get a bachelor's degree since nobody gives a crap about Associate degrees. So on August 24th, I started working on my degree in Exercise Science at the University of Utah, where I happen to get a 50% discount on tuition because I am an employee. Cool huh? That part is, but everything else about going to school again sucks. I'm taking Biology 1210, Intermediate Writing and History of Film which adds up to 11 credit hours. I pretty much don't like any of the classes and they all involve a ridiculous amount of writing assignments, which takes up way too much of my time outside of class. NOT COOL.

So at the same time that I'm taking all these classes, I'm still working 50-60 hours a week between my job as the Po-Po and my job working security at the zoo. Since school started, I have volunteered to take a lot of ER shifts so I can sit and do homework when it's slow in the ER (which is rare, but still).

I also took on the job of being one of my department's 3 system administrators for the reporting system that we use at work. Last week the department sent me to a conference put on by the software company puts on. It was boring and because I'd only been an administrator for like 2 weeks at this point, they kept using all kinds of jargon I am not yet familiar with. So that sucked, but at least they fed us well.

On September 16th, I moved out of the folk's house and into my own place in West Jordan. I got a discount because I have a take-home police car, so I ended up getting a 2 bedroom/2 bathroom apartment so I can get a roommate later if I want, but for now I think I'm going to enjoy having lots of space all to myself! I'm still in the process of getting things unpacked and arranged the way I want them, but when I finish, I'll post pictures.

I would probably have most of my stuff unpacked by now except for the last week I was house-sitting/dog-sitting for my coworker again while she and her husband took their two bloodhounds to a Police K9 tracking school in Colorado. So it was just me and their retired K9 German Shepherd Oskar for the week. He's probably the only dog I know of that actually watches the TV, and he likes to bark at it when he sees animals or people running. It was kinda funny at first, but it got old real fast.

So anyway, that's pretty much all that's new with me. I'll try to get those pictures of my new place posted soon, but who knows when I'll have time!

Bad Night...

I'm not having a very good night. I worked some kind of snowboard movie showing thing tonight as an overtime gig and it did not go well. There were a few hundred little skater kids in this auditorium, and they had issues with the sound, so while they were trying to fix it, these kids kept yelling obscenities and wouldn't shut up long enough for the guys in charge of the event to tell if the sound was fixed so it took forever for them to start the movie. I think it was supposed to start at 8pm and it was 8:55pm when it finally started. Then they were throwing snowboarding gear out into the audience after the showing, so there were people climbing over seats and throwing trash... It was giving me a headache, then when it was finally over, I went outside to help usher them all off the property so it could all be locked up for the night. Then I get a message from the dispatcher that security drove by where another officer and I had parked our patrol cars and said that someone had put stickers all over them. Sure enough, when I got to my car, there were about 8 stickers covering the windshield and a couple on my hood/headlights. I started peeling them off before I thought to take pictures.

I was a little more than pissed considering if there had been an emergency call where I needed to be able to leave fast I wouldn't be able to do it because I wouldn't have been able to see out of the windshield without spending all that time peeling stupid stickers off first. So here's a couple pictures of my car after pulling a few of the stickers off, but before I finished. I still have sticker goo all over my windshield and it's been too dark to tell if the stickers that were on the hood did any damage to the paint. Of course there were probably a ton of witnesses, but none of the little dirtbags was going to come forward and rat out their stupid little skater friends. Oh well, I'll be sending some hate-mail to the person in the scheduling office about this group and hopefully we won't be hosting any more of their snowboarding films after tonight.

Braces... again...

Let this be a lesson to all of you who may have braces now or may have them in the future... when your orthodontist tells you to wear your retainer all the time... DO IT! I didn't, and now I have had to get braces for the second time. It's not fun and I look like I'm 14 years old again... :(

Holy Haircut

So about a week ago I got my hair cut. It's probably the shortest I've had my hair since I was 2 feet tall. It's quite a change for me. What do you think?

Work work work, all day long...

I've been working a lot and haven't really felt like I had any one thing to blog about since my last post, but it's been long enough I think I've got enough for a recap...

This actually happened before my Buckskin Gulch trip, but I didn't get pictures from it till just a week or two ago. My department had official departmental pictures taken back at the end of June. Then the photographer's car was stolen and his camera and laptop were in it, so we lost all the pictures he took. Luckily several of the other officers took cameras and took a bunch of pictures themselves, so I was able to get copies, but they probably aren't as good as the ones the photographer took. Anyway, here's a few pictures from that...As you may remember, I played on a summer softball team with a team at work. I missed a few weeks with the broken hand, but as soon as I got out of the big splint, I started playing again. It was a little difficult because I couldn't bend my thumb, so I couldn't really grip the ball. As a result, I couldn't throw it as far and when I threw it, I had to catapult it. We ended the regular season with a record of 4-6. Then we started the playoffs and made it to the fourth round before we got out. I really had fun. Here's some pictures from the last half of the season.

August 5th was my 25th birthday, so we had a little family party with really good chocolate cake and homemade cherry pie. It was yummy, and my brothers really made me laugh a lot.

Last Friday I got my take home police car. It's a 2008 Chevy Impala. It's going to save me a lot of money in gas and it's going to be so nice not to have to clean up after other officers in the shared cars anymore. Here's a picture of it in front of my house.

Sunday night I drove down to St. George, Utah for the Southern Utah Gang Conference. It consisted of 3 days of training about gangs, their codes and symbols, patron saints, and internet gang investigations. My favorite class was the Patron Saints of the Mexican Drug Underworld class. It was taught by a retired El Paso, TX officer who has gone to Mexico and researched the drug cartels and the saints they pray to for assistance in their drug trafficking. It was so interesting and I bought the DVD he has put together with all his research. Anyway, while I was in St. George I got to see my best friend from high school, Crystal and her family. Her husband took these pictures of us on his cell phone, so the quality is not the best.

Anyway, I think that's pretty much what I've been up to. Sorry my life is kinda boring...

The most fun awesome adventure I never want to do again...

...at least not until my blisters go away and every muscle in my body stops being sore.

For 4th of July weekend, I got invited to go with my cousin Nicki and some of her friends on a backpacking trip to Buckskin Gulch down in southern Utah, almost to Arizona. It's the longest, and maybe deepest (?) slot canyon in the world. There were 7 of us (6 women and 1 man) backpacking 22 miles in two days. It was challenging but a blast. Let me relive the weekend for you...

On Thursday, July 2nd, 5 of us (Nicki, Megan, Kelsey, Julie and me) met at Nicki's duplex in Provo with all of our backpacks and equipment ready to go at 5pm. We loaded all of said backpacks and equipment into Nicki's truck and my car and were on the road by 6ish. It was a more eventful drive than I was expecting. What should have been a 5-6 hour drive turned into like 8-9 because we missed a turn and drove over 100 miles more than we should have. We ended up off-roading for a couple miles which was fun, but it got us to the White House trailhead after 2am instead of around 11:30 like we thought. The two from Arizona (John and Erin) were supposed to get there after us, but beat us there. We pitched a tent and tried to get as much sleep as possible before starting our hike into the canyons in the morning.

We woke up a few hours later, ate some granola bars and oranges, broke down the tent, and took one last potty break in the latrines at the trailhead. John and I left our vehicles at the trailhead and everyone piled in the back of Nicki's truck with our backpacks (I'm guessing most of the packs weighed around 60 pounds). We stopped at the ranger station to pick up our overnight permits and our "human waste" bags (Yeah, you read that right, we had to pack out our poo and TP), then headed to the Wire Pass trailhead to start our adventure.

I was feeling pretty good at the start of the hike and it was probably because I had definitely underestimated how challenging some parts of this trip were going to be. I was in complete awe at how amazing the slot canyons were and how beautiful it all was. The first few drops in the canyon where we had to take off our packs and lower them down before climbing down ourselves was about as difficult as I really expected the hike to be. I was wrong, very wrong. I had done some research, but probably not enough. I was expecting there to be some areas that I might have to walk through water pools, but I underestimated how many and how deep they would be.

John, Julie and I tried to save our socks from getting muddy and wet for the first few pools by taking them off and wading through them barefoot, then putting them back on after we crossed them. We soon fell behind the other 4 and got separated from them for several miles. While walking barefoot across some rocks between pools, I got attacked by a bear! Ok, not really. I slipped and did a face-plant onto the rocks and amazingly only scraped up my leg. That's when I decided to give up on the no-shoes idea, and decided just to get my shoes nasty muddy (I thought I'd try the shoes without socks, which also didn't last long cause I got some nickel-sized blisters on the bottom of my feet). John and Julie lasted a little longer before they too gave up and just wore their shoes and socks through the pools.

The other four eventually started wondering where we were and stopped to wait for us to catch up. We weren't moving too fast because we were starting to get tired, John's shoes were cutting into his ankles and I was limping from falling on the rocks and the blistered feet. I guess they waited for about 45 minutes before we caught up.

We had thought that we would be hiking about 10-12 miles on day one, but it was a lot longer. About 13 or 14 miles into day one, we reached an area in the canyons called the "rock falls" which was a 20-25 ft. drop down the side of this huge boulder that you have to climb down with a rope. That was probably my least favorite thing to do on the whole hike because it's hard to grab onto a rope without your thumb. I was relieved that when I went to the hand surgeon on Wednesday to follow up about my broken thumb, that they took the big splint off and gave me a much smaller thumb splint. So at least I was able to use my wrist again. That 20-25 foot drop would have been impossible for me to do without being able to use my wrist.

Anyway, after about 15 miles, we finally reached the "Confluence" which is where we were camping for the night. It's the area where the canyons we had been hiking through meets up with the Paria River. It's important to camp on high ground in this area because about 12 times a year they get flash floods and there's no warning. When we got there, there was a really creepy group of Asians already camping there. One of them was this guy with a big beer belly who wasn't wearing a shirt and kept taking pictures of us. So we decided instead of camping in that same area, we were going to go a little further up the river and try to find another elevated area to camp. We found one just a few bends down the river that had a big enough area for us to pitch our three little tents and set up camp for the night.

About 1:30 in the morning, we woke up to the sound of water. We all jumped up out of our tents and discovered that the river that was practically 2 inches deep and about 4 feet wide when we went to sleep was now at least 25 feet wide and now looked like a raging river. Luckily our camp ground was elevated enough we were safe from the flooding, but it had us pretty worried for a little while until we could see that it was slowly going back down. I probably got 4 or so hours of sleep total cause it was so hot.

We got a late start Saturday morning because we wanted to give the river as much time as possible to go back down before we started. It was still pretty deep, but we were feeling like we needed to get out of the canyons that day cause there had been weather forecasts predicting more rain that night and we weren't comfortable with the idea of maybe having to camp there another night. So we packed up camp and were headed up river at about 11:30 or 12. The first couple miles were EXTREMELY slow because we were having to zig zag back and forth through the river from one riverbank to the other. Some areas where we crossed were between ankle and knee deep, but a lot of the areas were almost waist deep.

I seemed to have some sort of super-power for finding the holes between the rocks on the river bottom or the rocks that would move the second I put my feet on them, so I fell a lot. My shins and knees definitely took a beating on the rocks and I ended up with mud up to my chest. It was pretty miserable, especially cause I was already limping on my nickel-sized blisters. After a couple of really slow miles, we finally got to some longer stretches of dry land in between river-crossings and the water got shallower, so we were able to pick up the pace. It was so hot I started looking forward to the times that I got to cross the river again just cause the water up to my knees felt good even though it was the muddiest, most disgusting water ever.About 7 miles later, we saw the most wonderful thing. That was when we caught sight of those beautiful, wonderful latrines at the White House trailhead. We were soooo excited that we had completed our mission. We were all so tired, sore and sleep deprived that we were overjoyed to finally reach the end.

We loaded packs and people into the bed of John's truck and I laid out a towel on my car seat, then we drove down to the ranger station to catch the rangers before they closed at 4:15pm. We got there with like 2 minutes to spare. The ranger had told us the day before he'd like to hear how the trip went if we got done before they closed, so we shared the details of our trip and disposed of our "human waste" bags in the dumpsters there. I'm pretty sure there was only one person who didn't have to carry around her "human waste" because she never went. It was pretty disgusting, but at least the bags had deodorizers in them and really good seals so I never had to smell it. Just knowing I was carrying it in my pack was kind of gross though.

Anyway, luckily we had a room at the Treasure Trail Motel in Kanab, Utah reserved for the night, so we headed there to shower up and ditch our packs. Once we cleaned up and changed into non-stinky, mud-free clothes, we headed to Mexican Fiesta for dinner. It was soooo good. As we finished dinner, we started hearing fireworks. So we headed out to the parking lot where we could see the firework show that the city of Kanab put on. We watched for a few minutes (cause it only lasted about that long) and headed back to the motel.

I got more sleep that night than either of the two nights before, but I still didn't get very much. Erin and John left at like 4:30am this morning to try to get back to Mesa before their church started and so most of us woke up to say goodbye and wish them a safe drive home. I had a hard time getting back to sleep after that. We woke up around 8 and got our stuff packed up. We hobbled like 80 year old women a block down the street to catch the first hour of church, hobbled back, finished packing everything back up and got on the road around 11am. We didn't take any detours on the drive home so it took 5 hours to get home instead of 8.

So I'm proud of all of us for finishing such a challenging adventure with no major injuries or accidents. I made 5 new friends that I hope I can keep in touch with and got to know my cousin Nicki a lot better. I got to see amazingly beautiful canyons and got to carry around poop in a bag. What more could I ask for?