San Francisco

So just a quick update before I blog about San Francisco... Reed and I are back from our summer adventures.  We spent half the summer in Palo Alto (Silicon Valley) and half the summer in Dallas.  We were just way too busy to blog so I will be catching up for quite awhile.  Just FYI, I got offers from both the law firm in Palo Alto and the firm in Dallas.  We LOVED both the firms but we have to make a decision so we will keep you all updated on the decisionmaking process.  Anyways...while Reed and I were in Palo Alto we were able to see a lot of cool places. One fun day trip was to San Francisco with my mom, dad and sister. Our first stop was to see the Painted Ladies (row of houses in San Fran that has shown up on various different shows like Full House).

Next up we have the Crookedest Street in the world (though it's not really...) and Reed's favorite attraction: Himself! :-)

We spent some time on Fisherman's Warf but it was a little chilly! While we were there I told Reed that he needed to get better at taking candid shots so that not all the pictures I am in are of me standing & smiling at the camera. He insisted, however, that he is way better at taking candid shots than I am. To prove it he made awful faces every time he thought I might be taking a picture of him haha. In the end he did get somewhat of a candid shot of me laughing because he was making the most awful faces every time I even looked at him.

We were bummed when we drove across the Golden Gate Bridge cause it was SUPER foggy. There was only one moment (very brief) when we caught a good glance of the bridge but other than that, we could hardly see anything. It was a little eerie.

Disneyland!!

Reed and I love Disneyland. Well I LOVE Disneyland...in capitals. Reed just lowercase loves Disneyland. But I think he also enjoys how excited I get about it. I sang Zippity Doo-Dah to Reed on the phone every day for about 2 weeks before we went :-). There is just something so magical about Disneyland. It was really a bummer that I was sick the whole time we were there but it was still great. Well the pictures will tell our story better than me (except the part of our story spent on Tower of Terror, one of our favorite rides, because we never took any pictures on it!) so here you go:

ToonTown

By the way, you can probably tell from these pictures that Toontown is just about my favorite place in Disneyland to take pictures.

Big Kid Rides

        I should apologize before I continue that most of our pictures are taken by Reed holding the camera out himself and taking the picture. But truthfully the pictures would have been just as close if someone else had taken them since they are mostly taken while in line or on a ride. BTW, I love the picture below that is evidence that Reed wore a poncho with me on the water ride.

Other Activities
We definitely couldn't miss out on getting a turkey leg and eating it like savages...it's officially a tradition now.

World of COLOR

The World of Color at California Adventure was absolutely breathtaking. It was this tremendous water show with tons of fountains in different colors and then some of the best Disney clips and songs projected onto a mist of water amongst the fountains. It's impossible to describe how incredible the experience is but I highly highly recommend it. Here is a video we took during the Aladdin section of the show. The video obviously does not at all do justice to the real show but it gives you a little bit of a taste.

Viva Mexico!

BYU doesn't have a spring break but I got to go to Mexico for ten days! For my senior project I went with a group of 15 other students and did some water analysis for the city of Guanajuato. I'll explain the project I worked on later.

So I left on Friday March 9th. Yeah, it was Natali's birthday. I hated leaving her on her birthday but left her some notes and presents to wish her a happy birthday and then she went out with some friends that night. We arrived in Mexico that evening and went to Guanajuato and stayed in the Hotel San Diego. Guanajuato is a really cool city up in the mountains and our hotel was right in the center.

Here is the view of the city from the nearby mountain. The big yellow building is a big cathedral and right behind it is the University of Guanajuato established in 1732. Yeah, older than the US!

At the top of the mountain was this statue of Pípila that was pretty sweet.
On Saturday we went to San Miguel de Allende to check out the shops. A few of the guys bought some Mexican fighting masks and were showing them off.

Monday we got started on our projects. I was on a team with two other students from BYU, 3 students from Guanajuato, and a student ftom Zacatecas.
From left to right: Eduardo (Zacatecas), Karsten, Darren, Edith (Guanajuato), Anna (Guanajuato), Daniel (Guanajuato), and me.

The project I was able to work on was a flood analysis. Guanajuato is a mining town that is up in the mountains. There were hundreds of mining tunnels below the city and a lot of these tunnels have been turned into roads. Flooding is a major problem in these tunnels because Guanajuato sits in a valley with lots of mountains surrounding the city.

At the entrance of each tunnel there are flood warning signs with colors on the bottom. Our project was to check these risk level colors at the bottom of the signs to see if the signs were in the right place on the road and to check the heights of the risk levels.

In order to do the analysis we built a model to represent the tunnels from GPS survey points. Below are two videos. The first is the real tunnel, and the second is the model. If you could somehow hit play on both of them at the same time that will give you the best effect so that you can see how the model compares to the real tunnel.

We finished the project on Friday and then headed to Teotihuacan which is just outside of Mexico City. The best way to describe it is a bunch of rock pyramids that were built hundreds of years ago. It was really cool. We then went to Mexico City for the night. Two of my buddies and I went to go get something to eat. We were sitting outside eating our food when we heard a loud crash. A car had driven by and its tire fell off. Sparks were flying everywhere and I saw the tire bouncing down the road. Luckily it didn't hit anything (or us).

We also went to a cool museum and saw some really old stuff from the Mayans and Aztecs and other indigenous people in the Americas. The coolest thing we saw was the Sun Stone. I guess it was used as a place where they would have people fight on top of it. Pretty crazy.
Then we came home and now I am back to school. I am graduating in a couple of weeks so I am ready for summer to come. I'm not really celebrating graduation because I will be back at school in September to begin my Master's Degree at BYU.

The Holidays

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is not really much of a holiday for me because it comes right before finals so I need to study the whole break. But we went to the Crosby's home in Eager for the break and Reed had a great time with his family while I studied up in my room. Mostly he just watched football but he also played some football and basketball and went shooting with his brothers. I did surface momentarily for Thanksgiving dinner though so we managed to capture one picture of that.

We also snapped a couple pictures of our niece London and nephew Kingston in their cute snow hats. Here is one of the best ones:

 Oh and here are these two waiting for Thanksgiving dinner:
 

















Christmas 
Christmas was much more of a celebration for me than Thanksgiving because school was over! Yay! I still have almost a week of freedom before we start up again and I am sure enjoying it. Before leaving Provo Reed and I did a couple fun Christmas activities such as going to the Festival of Trees and the David Archuleta concert. We were actually at the concert when he announced his decision to serve a full-time mission, it was really neat. He is an incredible guy and a great role model, nobody deserves the success he has had more than him. We didn't take any pictures at the concert but here are a few from the festival of trees:




Then we went to my parents home in St. George to spend the rest of the holidays. We didn't really take pictures actually because I wanted to get my hair done before taking pictures (my highlights were like halfway down my head) but then nobody would do my hair until after Christmas so it took us a while. But we did finally get my hair done and convince my little sister Tracie to photograph us...We really like a lot of them....Here are some of our favorites:

It's also important to note here that Reed gave me this entire outfit for Christmas (including the jewelry) and I did not help him pick it out at all. Isn't he great at picking out clothes?! The goofy photo down on the left is Reed's favorite. He always likes the silly photos the best.

As far as Christmas presents go...as you can see I got some nice clothes and jewelry from Reed (as well as others that are not in this picture). In keeping with tradition, Reed/Santa gave me some new supplies for my popcorn machine and Reed also gave me a cute jewelry holder, a new curling iron and some perfume. I gave Reed some cologne, a couple new church shirts and ties, some regular shirts and a football. My parents and younger siblings gave us some great kitchen supplies (we always love new things for the kitchen) and new clothes, Jaimee gave Reed a pocket knife that looks like a rifle when opened up and gave me some lovely scents from Victoria's Secret. Dana and Jason gave us gift cards to a really nice steak house. Reed's parents gave us some honey for food storage and some Christmas decorations. Our favorite present to give was to Randi and Shane. We joined with Dana and Jason and gave them a 16 x 24 canvas picture that I had taken and edited for them. I think they really liked it and we were super excited about how it turned out. Oh and we gave Smoochie a bird pinata :-).