Tulip Festival Utah Style

Grandma McKenney treated Ellie and I to a girls get-a-way this weekend. We met up on Friday for some shopping of course we hit two malls and found Mom a great dress that looked lovely on her for baby Tamia’s blessing day. I picked up a few goodies from the Body Shop and some new bath towels. So excited to have nice new fluffy bath towels. Anyway after the shopping extravaganza we headed to Thanks Giving Point where Mom had booked us a room at the Marriot close by. Once Ellie got settled in and asleep we pampered ourselves with foot soaks and facials. Ahhh just what I needed. Oh and we had some dessert to indulge from our lunch at the Cheesecake Factory. Yummy.

The next morning we ventured over to the Thanksgiving Point Tulip Festival. Unfortunately due to the cold weather around these parts the Tulips and such had not peaked yet, but there were a few brave flowers making a showing and it was a beautiful day. Perfect for a stroll around the gardens and a nice lunch on the patio. Ellie received many compliments on her cute yellow sweater. I must say she did look adorable like our own little baby chic. She seemed very content strolling around looking at the flower and buds ready to make their Spring time showing. I think we may have to make a trip back in a week or two so we can see the gardens in their full glory.

Now to see what it’s like to experience a real Tulip Festival go to my sister’s Blog where she has posted about their travels last weekend to Amsterdam.

Sledneckertons

Gary here. I wanted to share a clip from last night on the snowmobile. It’s not me riding, it’s WasatchSpeedGoat Scott Mason…a good friend of ours up here in TL. I never thought I would own a snowmobile, but I’m glad I had one up here for this epic winter. If I didn’t own the sled, it would be like living on the beach with good surf and not owning a surf board.

Since we’re so far away from Alta now we don’t get over too often these days. A guy I know came up to me a few weeks ago and said, “Dude, where have you been all winter? It’s been sick!” I paused for a second, then responded “I’ve been 15 miles up in the Uintas in 15 feet of untracked POWDER, where have you been!?” Was the perfect comeback. So I did get my powder this winter one way or another 🙂 And there’s definitely something to be said about throwing around a 500lb machine, in deep snow, at 10,000′ above sea level. Oh and in my case, digging out the thing every 20 minutes! ..so I actually stayed in pretty good shape.

Last Night Uinta National Forest – April 9th and BOTTOMLESS POW

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=3UYKqKvd5go[/youtube]

Getting Off the Fence

Ok, I have an emotional grip now I think. Gary and I have decided to mix things up a bit and relocate ourselves in the Ithaca, NY area for a while. We made the decision way back in January when we were on the long drive home from our visit over the holidays. Believe me it was discussed thoroughly as we had hours to spend on the topic while watching the yellow stripes pass by. I felt good about it for a while but I will admit that once I got home I found myself getting back up on the fence and avoiding the topic. I was finding that for every good reason to go to NY there was and equally good and opposite reason to stay. Family and friends being the best example of this. My heart aches when I approach the subject with my Mom or when our friends say how much they will miss us. Then I hear the excitement in Gary’s parents voices when we talk about the real estate we have been looking at and I get goose bumps over the prospects of being close to his family and discovering a new place. (emotional grip is lost as I have a big lump in my throat now) So we had another long talk the other night and we realized that we should do this. We are in a unique situation with Gary’s job (he works from home) and we should be taking advantage of the freedom it allows us to choose where we want to be and we should be doing it while Ellie is young. So who knows maybe in another three years I will be writing about our next big move to the coast of Oregon or the mountains of Montana or the beaches of the Great Lakes. The future is wide open…

THPPPT…

…a conversation with Ellie.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t74aU2L3nzM[/youtube]

Spring Clean

Oh yes, it’s that time of year again. Time to clean and I mean CLEAN. Months of dust and grime have accumulated in the Marcoccia home and with a fresh change in season comes a fresh home. Granted our snow is still here and apparently isn’t leaving anytime soon, but we are doing what we can to encourage things to come back to life. A few other motivators for this cleaning festival that I should mention as well are that we listed our Timberlakes home for sale this week with a realtor. I will write more about this when I have a better emotional grip on it, but for now we are scrambling to get this place “show ready”. Another motivator is to SIMPLIFY yes! I love to simplify and I was inspired to do so last night by this blog I discovered here good stuff.

So here are some highlights from our Saturday cleaning festival. First we discovered that our bathroom light fixtures are kind of cute they are frosted on the tips. Huh we had assumed the whole glass thingy was frosted the entire two years we’ve been here! This is bad I’m totally revealing what a bad housekeeper I am and how lazy I am. That light fixture has been screaming to be cleaned and polished from the very first time I saw it. Procrastination is a terrible thing.

Gary volunteered to watch Ellie as I attacked the bathroom. It was a little quiet after a while so I stepped out to see how they were doing and this is the scene I found…

Daddy’s little helper. She was content in the backpack for over an hour! I think we have discovered a new way to clean the house without interruption. Not sure who was more proud Daddy or Ellie.

Human Thing

Here is an inspirational song/video from The Be Good Tanyas that I found on one of my favorite blogs. I really like the animation, the quilts on the line, and the couple dancing with the mountain scene in the background. Those are my favorite highlights…oh and the song isn’t so bad, either. 🙂 Don’t be afraid to check out “The Littlest Birds” as well.

Enjoy.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd1Ie370rHk[/youtube]

Keeping Gary on his Toes

So, last night after I put Ellie down for bed I began my nightly routine of scurrying about the house in an effort to straighten things up. Gary usually insists that I take a break and sit down, but it’s my chance to get the house in order and complete a task and if I don’t do it who will 😉 besides when I do sit down at the end of the day for that break I like to do it in an orderly space.

Anyway, I was washing the dishes and telling Gary how easy it is to put the slip cover back on the chair when a coffee mug slipped from my hands. I reacted and tried to grab it and in the process cut my hand, blood immediately filled the bottom of the sink and I said “Oh, Gary I cut my finger” then I saw that it was kind of deep and said “um, its bad”. Gary came rushing over and wrapped a towel around my hand, made me hold my arm up over my head, and walked me over to the sofa. It was obvious I needed stitches so we started talking about if we should wake up Ellie or what to do. I began to feel my head tingle and the room was getting dim and I said to Gary I might pass out… Well I did and when I came to Gary was on the phone with the 911 operator and Chip was across the room in the corner looking at me with huge eyes.

I don’t know, apparently I was hyperventilating and passing out at the same time. Didn’t know that was possible but he said my eyes rolled back and I started breathing funny. It scared Gary and he made a mad dash for the phone. Needless to say we woke up the neighborhood. Timberlakes volunteer EMTs were dispatched as well as an ambulance from Heber. TL has a wonderful group of fine citizens who volunteer as first responders which is so critical to the community because it takes 20 minutes at the least to get an ambulance up here from Heber and a lot can happen in 20 minutes. We were able to turn the ambulance away although they got as far as the gate.

Once things calmed down we got Ellie up and took the trip down to the hospital. When all was said and done I got 4 whole stitches on my right ring finger. Poor Ellie went from sleeping peacefully to a house full of strangers and then whisked away to a harshly lite room at the hospital to watch her Mom get worked on by more strangers. Poor Gary thought that his weirdo wife was having a seizure. I didn’t think I was a fainter although it runs in the family. Leslie and I now have matching stories I know she has scared Mark and Bailey a couple of times. My Mom fainted once when she was young. The story goes that my Grandma’s first reaction was to say to my Aunt Meriam “You did it! You killed her!” or something like that. So, I haven’t escaped the female dramatics from my side of the family.

Gary wanted me to show off my battle wounds with the dishes. I thought I’d spare those of you who would rather not be exposed to a nasty photo of stitches. So if your interested you can check it out here.

Spring Equinox

From Wikipedia: “An equinox in astronomy is that moment in time (not a whole day) when the centre of the Sun can be observed to be directly above the Earth’s equator, occurring around March 20 and September 23 each year…”

This is what Spring looks like on the outside today…

and this is what spring looks like on the inside…

HAPPY SPRING!

Here is a little ditty for your listening pleasure… Might as Well be Spring

**UPDATE**

I posted too soon, turns out its a beautiful, surprisingly warm, blue sky, sunny day…