Rain! Panic! Head for the Hills!

So today it rained in Salt Lake City. And not just the normal, drizzly, spotty rain...but a real live thunderstorm. I'll admit that this is one of the things I miss the most about Kansas...a good old storm cloud rolling in once a week or so with thunder and lightning to boot!

As I've mentioned before, I can pretty much see the entire salt lake valley from my office window. Perfect locale for viewing storms when they occasionally come through. So today it was stormy out, and you could see there's some pretty intense rain and a little bit of lightning coming our way.

And here's where the craziness begins. I get a text message from the University of Utah saying the following: "Emergency alert from U Admin. Severe storm expected. U will not close. Take necessary precautions and find shelter."
(Sidenote: after the Virginia Tech shootings, the University of Utah, like most universities developed an extensive emergency alert system to communicate emergency instructions to students and faculty quickly when warranted).

OK, fine. A little overzealous, I think, for your standard severe thunderstorm, but we don't get these much around here so...OK. Then, the buzz around my office is that since it's a severe thunderstorm that means there's a tornado somewhere. Wow, I decide that someone logical definitely has to step in here. I put on my midwestern know-it-all hat and eduate them about the meterological warning system and how there's clearly not a tornado involved in this situation. Jeez.

Then, in the next 10 minutes I also get an e-mail, two voicemails and a message at my house about said severe thunderstorm from university administration. Lord. Calm down people.

The storm passes, we get a few wind gusts and it rains hard for maybe 10 minutes. No hail, very little lightning. Definitely no tornado.

Do you think they could save these emergency alerts for maybe, I don't know, A REAL EMERGENCY? Like an earthquake, a shooting, a campus wide gas leak....yeah, something like that. For god's sake it could snow 5 feet in two hours with traffic deadlocked all around the city and they wouldn't say a peep!

Regional differences. Gotta love them.

-Emily :)

I know, the suspense is killing you...

Sorry for the cryptic post last week, but I had a secret to keep. Ash & I decided about three weeks ago to take advantage of some decent airfare prices to fly to Wichita for Labor Day weekend to see my family.

Since it was fairly last minute, I decided to try to surprise everyone (minus my mom, my dad and my brother for various reasons). We had planned to mainly surprise my sister, who had mentioned she was upset that she wasn't going to see us until Christmas awhile ago. So my mom set up a breakfast date with her at 'the grill' on Saturday morning. My sister, ever the cooperative one, calls last minute to say she had had a little too much fun the night before and wasn't up to going to breakfast. OK, so the original surprise plan wasn't going to work. So after my dad and her husband Justin made her mad berating her to go to breakfast, we decided just to ambush her at her house.

We walked up on the porch and she looked out the window and was totally shocked. Her face was hilarious! She was so excited...so was Ellie. Later she told me, "That was so cool...I don't think I've ever been surprised in my whole life." Yay! Mission accomplished!

We also successfully surprised both sets of my grandparents and my Aunt Jodie and her family who were visiting from New Mexico.

We had a great time hanging out with everyone. Also got to see Aimee and Micah, and Michelle and Andy on Saturday night. Thanks for coming to Burrton to hang out with us, guys...all the great laughs were so therapeutic.

-Emily :)

My Walmart Sells.....

I'm not sure if these are really available at my Walmart,
but it wouldn't at all surprise me.  I'll look the next time
I'm there.  Some people take modesty WAY too seriously.  I
think it's more obscene to wear this than a normal swimsuit.

(Thanks for the tip, LA!)

Hope everyone has a great long weekend.  I'd tell you what
we're doing, but it's top secret.  Yep, we're that cool.

-Emily :)

Broadway Here We Come...

I think possibly the cutest thing Helena's done ever is start to sing. Completely adorable. She's got the basics in her repertoire - Wheels on the Bus, If You're Happy and You Know It, the Wonder Pets theme song - but here you see her morphing a couple of other basics together. She gets off to a rough start, but it ends up pretty priceless.



After Ash watched this he said "I never really realized those two songs were the same tune."

-Emily :)

Alcoholic Tirade

I think I might start writing a series of "Seriously, Utah is Weird" posts... there's so much fodder.

Here's my pick of the week:

Utah restaurant liquor licenses going, going . . .

I have a hard time swallowing why Utah has this quota system for liquor licenses based on population. You'd think they would welcome any new investment in the community in these difficult economic times...even if they want to serve...GASP!...alcohol. Why in the world would you let the state and not the market decide how many liquor licenses to issue in a given year? And there's only 1 full permit left for this fiscal year, and they expect 80 requests statewide. They only adjust the licenses based on the population growth once a year (the last official count was in June), so that's 79 potential business owners that aren't able to execute their business plan for their establishment as they would like to, and if they do open then their business may well suffer until they're able to get their liquor license.

Ugh...I could go on. But I won't. And I thought Kansas liquor laws were weird! Nope, Utah takes the gold medal on that one. Wonder what they would all think if they knew Ash & I shipped three cases of wine back from Napa this summer and didn't pay taxes on it. Oops! Hope the DABC isn't monitoring my computer.

-Emily :)

Six Years Ago...

This month, Ash & I celebrated our sixth anniversary. I know, how have we been married SIX YEARS?!? I think that means we're getting old.

Anyway, my wonderful co-worker Gina agreed to babysit for us and we headed up to the mountains to go on a more strenuous hike than we usually can with Helena in tow. Sounds romantic, huh? We packed up a picnic, some wine, and headed up to Dog Lake.

We definitely achieved our goal of challenging ourselves on the hike. At one point I wasn't sure if we were both going to make it up or not. (Sidenote: as our anniversary present to each other, we got a membership at a gym by our house, and Ash had just worked out really hard earlier that day.)

I kept cheering Ashford on, at one point saying, "Just think, this hike is a great metaphor for marriage. You keep trudging along, and sometimes it's not fun, but in the end it's so worth it." Ash replied, "You mean it's hard, it sucks, and then you die?!?" Good to know he still has a sense of humor when he's about to pass out. That 0.6 miles at a pretty steep incline wasn't very pleasant. We got to the lake, and scarfed down our well-deserved food while watching several people's dogs frolick in the water. One continuously swam after a group of ducks the entire time we were sitting there. It was very entertaining.

The way down was much easier terrain (as with most hikes) and we also spotted our first Utah moose!

Happy Anniversay, honey. I love you six times more than when we got married! ;)

-Emily :)

The Gies' Have Landed...

A couple of weekends ago, my Aunt MariAnn and her family (Uncle Bill & cousin Conner) came to visit us. We were really glad to have them (we love visitors, obviously!) and tried to show them all the sights while they were in town. My favorite outing was the hike we did in Big Cottonwood canyon to Lake Solitude. The wildflowers were in full bloom and it was just gorgeous.

Helena loved my aunt and seemed to be a bit confused that she looks a little like my mom. She called her "MeeMaw" for most of the visit. We hit up the local brew pub downtown, too. Uncle Bill was very enthusiastic about his beer sampler.

We also took them on the obligatory jaunt to the Great Salt Lake. Ashford decided to try to get us a better view of the scenery and ended up taking us out in the middle of nowhere (we saw a guy test shooting his MACHINE GUN!). But we also saw the Morton Salt plant which was kind of cool.

I decided after this bout with visitors that one thing I really like about not living close to everyone is that when people do visit us, we get to spend more quality time with them. I can't remember the last time (if ever) I got to spend 3 days with my aunt and uncle-- and it was really great. We had conversations we don't usually have time to have, Ashford and Conner bonded over bowling, and my uncle had the chance to chide me for cussing too much on my blog (I was just glad that he was reading it! And, I think it was only once and it was pivotal to the story I was telling). :)

Thanks for choosing to spend your summer vacation visiting us!!

-Emily :)

P.S. - Aunt MariAnn, send me your pics from Arches!!! I want to see them!