Carving Pumpkins

Tonight, Jodie and I carved some Jack-o-lanterns. We invited our friends, John and Joy, from the ward and had a pumpkin carving contest. I don't have too many pictures from the actual carving process- goopy, pumpkin hands aren't good for taking pictures. However, here are the pictures we took...

Jodie doing her favorite part... cleaning the pumpkin guts. Kind of weird to me, but it works out great.

So, here is the finished products. John and Joy's is in the front, ours is in the back. They made a witch out of theirs (even with a carrot nose). We made a ghost out of ours.

Here's a test run of John and Joy's pumpkin. I really liked the eye brows. They shaved part of the pumpkin off to make the eye brows, so they kind of glow.

John and Joy with their pumpkin

Me with our pumpkin

And the final result of the pumpkins...

I thought they both turned out very nicely. It was a lot of fun carving pumpkins with John and Joy.

Lastly, here is two cool pictures that I took this morning of the sunrise- it was very cool looking.

This is from our balcony

And from our office window

An Amazing Superstar

Well, this past weekend we had a fun trip to go see Jenna swim at the Regional Championships. It was a lot of fun to finally get to see Jenna swim (we have been waiting years for our schedules to allow us to go see her). So, finally it worked out at the end of the season this year. For those who aren't familiar with high school swimming, the Regional Championships is the final meet for most swimmers. If you swim fast enough in regionals, you can qualify to swim at the State Championships. But anyway, here are some of the pictures we took...

Jenna first swam in the medley relay, but we missed that race. We didn't bring enough cash to get in because we thought they would take checks- but they don't apparently. So, we had to run to an ATM and get some more cash. So, we missed that race, but her team got 1st place.

Next, Jenna swam the 100 yard butterfly...



Really, she has a great stoke and performed very well. You can tell with her smile below that she had a good race...

And here she is at the awards platform with 1st place- not bad for a sophomore. Her time was 1:07.48, which is cruising right along.

I also had to grad this picture of my mom, who just happened to officiate the meet.
Next, Jenna swam the 100 yard backstroke...

Again, she had an amazing race and got second place overall.

Lastly, she had a 400 yard relay- every girl swam 100 yards. I thought this picture was really cool because I caught Jenna in the air.
And in the end... they won again.

So, the final count is 3 first place medals and 1 second place. We are very proud of Jenna and her accomplishments. Because of her performance, she is going to state in all four events. For her individual races, she is ranked 6th in the 100 yd fly and 8th in the 100 yd backstroke for the entire state- very impressive, especially being a sophomore.

And lastly, here is a picture of Jodie and I with our Thunderbird regalia in support of Jenna.


We are very proud of you sis and love you very much. We wish you the best at State this weekend!

Mt. Lemmon Trip

Well, Jodie and I decided to take a trip up to Mt. Lemmon on Friday to get out of the heat and explore a little.

So, we started out at Tucson, at an elevation around 3000 feet and lots of cactus.


Gradually the cacti began to disappear and small green trees began to dominate the landscape.

Then a few pine trees began to dot the landscape.

On our drive up, we saw tons of people biking up the road. Definitely very impressive because they went all the way to the top, which was climbing over 6000 feet in 27 miles. Here is one of the unreal bikers.
We stopped off at a view point along our drive. It was very cool because of the neat rock formations - like the pillars just to the side of the road.



As we were about to leave, a family joined us at the stop and we asked them to take a picture of us.

We then continued on our journey and the trees began to change even more... showing signs of fall.
This was near the top of Mt. Lemmon at the entrance of the... ski resort. Kind of crazy huh? I never knew that Tucson had a ski resort, but they do. Apparently it is the furthest South ski resort in the United States.
Before we stopped at the ski resort, we decided to continue all the way to the top to the observatory. Here's the parking lot with lots of Aspen trees in fall colors.

To get to the top, you had to go on a little walk past the gate for the observatory. But here is a picture at the top.
Jodie really liked this lone pine tree among the aspen.

On our drive back down to the ski resort, we ran into some more fall colors.

Here's the proof of Tucson's ski resort. It's not very big by any means, but its still pretty impressive I think.

There's a picture of one of the two ski lifts.


We found some more fall colors.
A view from the bottom of the ski resort looking North.

Outside of one of the restaurants at the ski resort.

After spending some time exploring the ski resort and the city of Summerhaven (right next to the ski resort), we decided to head back down to Tucson. On our way down, we stopped off at another view point and had lunch on some of the rocks. After eating lunch, I took this picture of Jodie enjoying the sunshine. Also, the rock pillar behind her, there was a group climbing up the backside of the column; it was pretty cool.

Here's part of the view from the lookout - I thought the rocks were really cool.

A view of southern Tucson. Actually, mostly everything that you can see in the picture is the airforce base.
Jodie grabbed a picture of me.
The view towards central-nothern Tucson. Our house would be on the right side of the picture, at the base of the mountains.

In all, it was a fun little trip to get away, cool off, and explore a little.