Yesterday on my walk around the neighborhood I took some pictures. The mountains were full of gorgeous color, trees in town were turning, bushes were getting berries, and it was a lovely representation of fall. We live in a beautiful place. But I ran out of time to post them before bed.
This morning I woke up to this in my front yard: the season’s first snow. Brrrr.
It’s been raining here for a couple days and yesterday I woke up to find that the mountains right outside my living room window have snow on them. One of the peaks was snow-free for only about 9 weeks this year. It hasn’t gotten quite cold enough at night yet to freeze so my annuals are still hanging on, although some of them are looking tired. A few perennials are still blooming and I have some lovely roses blooming late this year. Hurrah for Liquid Fence! I’m a believer, as the deer have mostly stopped nibbling now that I’m fanatically spraying our property. They pass through but don’t stay to eat. So for the first year ever, I have fall-blooming roses because the dang deer didn’t eat off the buds.
I’ve gotten some reading in and finished another challenge: the goodreads.com 2013 Challenge. I set mine for 104 books and reached it in September. Still three months left!
A friend and I have scheduled some quilting time together so that we can encourage each other and make sure some work gets done, so this week I started the quilt I’m making for our family Festival of Trees space this year. I have until Thanksgiving to get it done, but really before then as I’m having this one machine-quilted for the first time instead of hand-quilting it like I do my others. I’m shooting for finishing the top by Halloween. It’s chocolate and lime with some turquoise and has a fun rectangular repeating block in a scrappy fashion.
Except for the week when I was laid up with a sprained foot, I’ve been walking pretty regularly around the neighborhood and listening to audio books. I really like being out and walking. With the weather turning cooler, I’ve been going later to enjoy the warmth, but this week it hasn’t helped much because it doesn’t warm up. I might need to get one of those ninja masks people wear in the cold for fall walking.
We went to see our niece, Nika Fazulyanov, in “Shrek, the Musical” at the SCERA theatre where she played Young Princess Fiona. She was great and looked cute as a redhead.
Brian’s car was broken into and had the passenger window smashed in. Trust me, that makes an unholy mess inside the car. He was shaken up but not hurt and nothing really valuable was stolen, but I sat for 3 1/2 hours yesterday at the dealer while they replaced the window. Things like that make it easy to get lots of reading done.
That’s about all the news. Hope we have an Indian Summer on the way because I’m not quite ready for winter.
Thursday night Scott and I were able to hear Audra McDonald give a spectacular performance at BYU. She sang a program of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley songs with great emotion and story-telling quality. Her sound was beautiful and it was a totally amazing evening.
Then Friday night Mark and I were lucky enough to score tickets to the O. C. Tanner Gift of Music concert at the Conference Center in Salt Lake City. We got to hear the incomparable James Taylor sing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Utah Symphony. It was glorious and wonderful. He did a couple numbers a cappella with him and the Choir, some with the orchestra, some with all three, and a couple with his combo. It was so great! He did his big songs and it was so awesome. He got huge ovations every time he walked on and off the stage and at the end his ovation was huge and he came on for what he called the encore they practiced to be spontaneous. Then the ovation was so huge he came back on and played an actual spontaneous encore, just him and his guitar. Ohhh, it was wonderful.
So a great double evening worth of marvelous music. Yay!
Scott bought a DSLR camera for our trip and experimented a lot with settings, lenses, apertures. That’s camera talk. Anyway, along the way he took some really nice pictures. So here, for your viewing pleasure, is a gallery of artsy photos taken by the budding photographer. You can click on any photo to enlarge and inspect it further.
Day 18-Idaho
We drove to Malad Gorge State Park which has an overlook to the Malad Gorge, interestingly enough. There is a footbridge crossing the gorge so we got a really good look at the volcanic rock lining the gorge, then walked a trail along the gorge to an overlook that showed the falls. There is a huge spring coming out of the rock downstream from the falls, with vegetation growing in the water.
We followed a cryptic map on the brochure to an area a quarter mile up river to the Malad Way Station, where a bridge had been constructed that was used by early Oregon Trail emigrants. We found the bridge abutments that can still be seen but wandered around looking for the wagon ruts. We think we found them, but as we were traversing areas of the state park, at one point I was in the lead and Scott said he thought we had run out of trail and I was following a deer or buffalo trail, so we retraced our steps. Later we researched more on the internet and found a better map which would have been nice to have when we were out hiking in the blistering sun.
We then drove the Thousand Springs Scenic Byway and saw the springs pouring out of the cliffs, although not as much water as when we had been there in the spring. But it’s still a beautiful area.
We also found Niagara Springs State Park which has a beautiful spring, quite large, coming out of the rock face and winding all over. It was so cool there by the spring and so gorgeous with all the vegetation. There’s also a really nice park there.
Day 19-the last day
We came home from a great trip! We traveled a total of 4010 miles and stayed in two countries and three states. So fun and so awesome to have all that time together!