summer!

Alright so summer break thus far!

My hours at work have been sucking because kids have been gone here and there.  Look forward to when school is back in and they won't be able to travel, heh.  It blows because I can't take on clients now that I'm going to have to drop once school starts in 3 weeks so I have to suffer low hours plus MIA clients.  *sigh*

Jed has been chilling like a villain except for this weekend he's working about 45 hours in 3 days for his old employer because they needed someone to work the Madison Fair booth Thursday through Saturday.  Not ideal work but it's cash in the pocket and that's nice!

Our garden has been kicking butt.  Our lettuce is huge and delicious and we have more zucchinis than we know what to do with.  Still watching the cucumber, corn, and tomatoes grow and not sure if anything else will be producing.  We are already planning our garden for next year and are very excited to get more legit.

We are trying to find recipes to try and use our zuchs up.  Here's a few of our creations:

zuch bread, of course

zucchini pizza (it's shredded under the cheese) with spinach from our garden too

frittata - doesn't look fantastic but it was pretty dang tasty

Jed and I have been on a roll going to the gym for 45 min most nights and working on the elliptical machines. When we started Jed wanted to loose about 30 lbs and I wanted to loose about 15 lbs so we could get to our ideal weights.  Jed lost really fast and has cut 10 lbs so far.  I was loosing but now I think I'm gaining muscle while loosing fat so I'm not dropping too quickly.  

We're also using an app called My Fitness Pal that helps us track calories and nutrients really easily.  You can scan the bar code of your foods and even plug in recipes.  It's been a really great tool to help us eat smaller portions as well as less of the bad stuff and more of the good stuff.  When you have to budget your calories for the day you tend to opt for things that are going to keep you satisfied hunger-wise instead of sweet-tooth-etc-wise.  

We're been having lots of fun with our besties Daniel and Maddy, especially since this is their last summer here.  Darn them for graduating and moving on with their lives.  We are seriously gonna miss them.  We were going to roadtrip with them to western WA to visit our families but we are so seriously poor right now, we had to bail.  It's the first summer I haven't been home other than my mission.  It's a bummer but what can you do other than carry on?

D&M took us out to Sammy's :D

As well as going to the gym and on walks around the neighborhood together, Jed and I have been rekindling our love of World of Warcraft and playing our dranei characters together.  The next expansion for the game comes out this fall so we'll be able to play some new areas and have some new virtual adventures, lol.  

We also finished the currently available 30 Rock seasons and are working on How I Met Your Mother.  I also finished the last season of House, which was very anticlimactic.  Ah well.  

We were also able to see Brave in the dollar theatre.  Good animation, beautiful scenery (does anyone want to send us to Ireland please?), but choppy story with very shallow character development.  Tell you what though, I seriously can't wait to get back to a place where I can get back into the SCA.  Jed and I both really miss archery and I miss the pseudo-period culture and arts. 

We have also been trying to get out hiking as much as possible.  After our backpack/camp at Palisades Creek and our day hike at Big Elk Creek we did a day hike at Bear Creek with Daniel and Maddy, a day hike at Rainey Creek (that was going to be a camp but the trails were terribly marked so we lugged our backpacking selves out again en lieu of getting lost), and another camp at Palisades (all of these hikes were in the Palisades area of the Caribou-Targhee Forest).  

This time at Palisades, though, we got there early, built a fire from driftwood, were able to bathe in the lake since no one else was there, and generally were able to relax instead of rushing in and rushing out the next morning.  Also, Jed got the "pleasure" of making eye contact with a young grizzly standing 6' from him in the bushes as we hiked down.  We do carry bear mace and no we didn't have to use it.  I think he was as freaked as Jed was!  

trailhead for Bear Creek

one of many fordings

Jed hiking shoe-less since he had to keep taking off his boots

Chaco buddies!

Jed's new Five Fingers on the Rainey Creek Trail (now he's good for stream fording!)

Upper Palisades Lake

our tent looks like a mantra ray

breakfast in my hiking skirt

our camp buddy who tried desperately to get some food/trash from our camp

2 of 5 moose we saw

Well, I think that's all for now!  We have 3 more weeks til school starts for both of us (mine on Sept 7 and Jed's on Sept 10) and we are planning more camping while we still can (darn the short season here).  More updates later!