Summer Summary

Ok I know we are way into fall, but I still want to post my summer recap. It was a great summer and I wished it would never have ended! Here's an illustrated list of my going-ons:

Summer Highlights:

Sailing at Little Dell Reservoir

Doing field botany

Foraging for mushrooms

Losing weight

Summer Firsts:

Learning to sail

Ice blocking

Driving the back way from Strawberry Reservoir to Springville on treacherous roads in a mini van

Growing lots and lots of zucchini

Going to Capitol Reef National Park and Fantasy Canyon

Summer Activities:

House shopping with Megan

Moving to a new house

Taking hundreds of pictures of plants and the wild

Visiting with Stacey in town from Korea

Riding my Cruiser bike

Composting

Swedish Festival

Art City Days

Collecting thousands of seeds

Getting to know Vernal

Seeing Seven Brides for Seven Brothers on stage

Making wheat bread from wheat flour I ground myself! (um, didn't rise very well)

Good News

Hello all two of my readers! ;) I have good news-as of late I have lost 30 lbs! It's been a great experience and easier to do than I thought it would be. I just had to make up my mind to really do it and come up with a good plan that I could stick to. Now I wish I would have decided to do this years ago! So far it's taken 4 months to get to this point and I am still going. Hopefully I can lose another 30 lbs by the end of the year (although it may be hard due to the feeding frenzy which begins with Halloween candy and ends with Christmas treats)! But I'm pretty determined. If you so desire you can check out my new blog: Losing It (http://www.losingitthesensibleway.blogspot.com/). Basically I just post about my weight loss strategies, etc. It may be helpful to someone out there, so pass it along if you feel the desire.

I Can't Believe It's Not Apple!

Lately I've had an excess of zucchini lying around so I've been looking for every recipe I can that uses the stuff. This one I tried today was great. It pretty much tastes like apple crisp, but there's not a single apple in it! I'm going to give it two thumbs up. (ps I put in a little extra sugar and halfed the recipe)

ZUCCHINI CRISP

from Allrecipes.com

Ingredients:

8 cups cubed peeled zucchini
3/4 cup lemon juice
1/2 cup sugar
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
Topping:
1 1/3 cups packed brown sugar
1 cup old-fashioned oats
1 cup all-purpose flour
2/3 cup cold butter or margarine

Directions:
In a bowl, combine the zucchini, lemon juice, sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg; mix well. Pour into a greased 13-in. x 9-in. x 2-in. baking dish.
For topping, combine brown sugar, oats and flour in a bowl; cut in butter until crumbly. Sprinkle over the zucchini mixture. Bake at 375 degrees F for 45-50 minutes or until bubbly and the zucchini is tender.

I Knew It!

Check this article out, it makes me happy: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914857,00.html

Cruisin' and Compostin'

I enjoy the simple things in life and few things in life are simpler than compost and cruising on a bike through your neighborhood, especially in summer. Take a look at the pictures below and feel my joy.

A Murray Cruiser bike, circa 1992. I thought it was the most hideous thing back then. But now it's cool, go figure.

Compost of my own making. I started it almost two years ago, but since the addition of a box and a pitchfork to the process it has really started to get brown and beautiful-can't wait to put it out in my garden.

Dinosaurland

Hello All. I'm still doing the botanical gig every week in Vernal and then coming home on the weekends. Vernal is an interesting place. It's a small town with one main road, but the population of residents is probably matched by the number of tourists in town and people coming in for work-especially those working for the oil and gas industrial complex. There are many hotels and motels in town and they can all charge high rates, because the demand is high. We are staying a fairly nice motel for which we pay $130.00 a night before taxes! Vernal is known as Dinorsaurland because of all the dinosaur bones and fossil fuels that are found in the area and you will not fail to notice this fact while you're in town because of all the dinosaurs everywhere. One of my favorites is the one found above. This brontosaurus lights up and moves its arms up and down beckoning people to stay and swim at the local motel. There is also a huge pink dinosaur on one side of town welcoming people and there is another huge dinosaur sculpture in the middle of town that has changing accessories depending on the time of year. During high school graduation it was wearing a large graduation cap and holding a diploma. Now that it is fishing season it is holding a fishing rod with a fish on the end and wearing a fishing hat. It's unreal. Take a look below.Things are going well with the plants too. We have been surveying areas looking for our penstemon plants. We've been going down a lot of dirt roads, getting soaked by many rain storms, running from lightening and seeing some awesome views. Here I am at the top of a mountain ridge (don't laugh at my field clothes).

Wandering in the Desert

I've been out working in the field twice this month and it's great. Take a look at some of the places and things I'm seeing. The Uinta Basin is more beautiful than I ever imagined. I love the desert.
One of our research sites

This is the Penstemon plant we are studying, looks like it's sticking it tongue out us, doesn't it?

"Willa crick" (Willow creek)

An evening primrose and our Jeep Rubicon that gets us down all the dirt roads we follow

Me in the field, glamorous, no?

A Job, A Job

Ha ha, and just when you thought you'd seen the last of me-I'm back! So anyway, I found a job or should I say I got a job, I found jobs that didn't want me, but finally someone did! My days of searching are over, well at least for a little while. It just for the summer, but I think it will be amazing. I will be working for the Botanical gardens near me in their conservation department as a Field Botanist. Doesn't being a field anything sound great? So I will be travel around the state surveying plant populations, collecting seed, revegetating areas and whatever else a field botanist does. I'm not sure yet because I don't start for a week, but huzzah! I will keep you updated and you'll surely get lots of pictures.

Sharing the Wealth

If you noticed that my background changed lately it's all due a great source for cute blog layouts. Check out my friend Cristi's FREE blog layots. She's awesome! http://cristiscreations.blogspot.com/

Jobs Schmobs

Ok so two things for today. First, the job search isn't going too hot. I know leave it to me to pick the best time to look for a job, but it's too late to go back. I was talking to a guy last night that is also looking for a job nowadays and he described the process as "soul crushing." I would have to agree, that is precisely the way it feels. If anyone would give me the chance I promise I am a very hard, smart worker, really! So if anyone knows of any good or even not so good jobs out there, let me know.
Actually I'll work for a lot less than this, I'm a bargain!

Second, on a lighter note, I found this funny blog http://www.sexypeople-blog.com/ . Don't worry it's nothing dirty, just very funny portraits of people from the 1960's to 1990's, like this:
Haha, these kids crack me up.

Haunting myself

Hah! I just got a message from my past self from one year ago. So amusing. If you go to the site, www.futureme.org, you can write an email to yourself to be delivered at some point in the future. I had kind of forgotten that I had done this, so it was a fun suprise to get my email to me. Try it.

Books on my mind

So at the moment I'm looking for a fulltime job and since I can't spend all my time job hunting (or I'd go crazy), I'm also looking for some good reads. I want to read something enjoyable, it can be poignant, just not depressing and it has to end well. Currently I'm reading John Adams by David McCullough, which I'm thoroughly enjoying but I want a few more books in my queue. Does anyone out there have any suggestions? (Oh and any leads on jobs will be accepted as well :)).

Cool Nerdy Things...

Hello blog buddies,
I know I haven't post in like 5,000 blogging years, but I think I lost my direction in how I wanted the blog to go. I didn't have any cool posting ideas so I just kind of stopped, but now I have renewed my determination to blog. I think my direction will go less to the things that I'm up to-(mostly boring!) and more to the things I'm interested in, including links and ideas, etc. But mostly it will be a random hodgepodge of stuff. So everytime you tune in it will be a suprise. Ok onto the topic at hand...

I was all alone at work today and didn't really feel like listening to music, but I thought it would be cool to listen to a book on tape. So I went online to look for free books on "tape" and found a really cool site, www.librivox.org. People volunteer to record themselves reading chapters of uncopyrighted books and then you can listen to or download them for free! So cool, I started listening to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide. It was read by a man with an interesting British accent. Actually the first site I found was one that had free audiobooks, but they were read by a computer and it was strange and discombobulated. Anyway, maybe you had already heard of this site and it's nothing new to you, but I'm excited to have found it. Now I'm going to volunteer to read some chapters, which I've always wanted to do as job.

Another cool thing, I found out at work (I work at a library) we have these Polk City Directories and you can look up by street and house number the name of the the people that lived in the house. So I looked up my house at found that it was most likely built in 1929. The first residents were the Hickoks, then the Croceks, then the Waterfields. I kind of like knowing a little bit the history of my house.