The basement room is finished!

This construction room was so full of garbage.  Why did I put this junk in here??  A lot of it should have gone in the garbage a long time ago.  The first step was to clean out the room.

I installed shelves, painted the closet white and installed shelf bars.

I painted the ceiling and the walls.

Installed the baseboards.

Painted the baseboards and finished the wiring.

I thought the power was off to the room.  It wasn't.  My gold wedding ring came in contact with a hot wire and shocked me.  I have a scar under my wedding band now.  I took it to the jeweler and had it fixed good as new for $100.  Ce la vie.

Then the carpet installer came!

I asked Merril to put up the fan because I was exhausted. And the carpet looks great!  All the kids had a sleepover in the room.

The bathroom had a transformation as well! I was mostly storing things in it. 

I found this shower curtain and built the bathroom around it. 

The walls were painted a blue/gray color.  I ordered the vanity from home depot.

Merril and I installed the mirror and I installed the light bar.

The cultured marble for the shower and the sink took the longest.  It came about a month after Emily visited.

Merril installed the shower finish pieces and it work. We had Brother Brinkerhoff, a plumber we know, come and take a look. He said he felt that a piece of solder had become trapped in the T in the wall. He tried to blow torch it out from the shower side but it wasn't happening. He said the best thing would be to cut a hole in the wall. The bedroom wall. The one I had just finished painting. 😩 Whatever. Cut a huge hole in the wall that I just finished and fix the dang shower. It worked!

Then I spent 2 days getting the wall patched, sanded, textured, primed and painted but you can't even tell!

But now that it's finished!  It looks so nice!  I'm really pleased with how everything turned out!

Little Candid Moment...

Peach Days didn't disappoint with yummy navajo tacos and delicious texas twister lemonade.  This is the only picture I took.  They were waiting for Juliet to finish her ride.

Canal Hike: Coolest hike ever!

During Peach Days in Hurricane, guided hikes of our historic Hurricane Canal are given.  I heard about this 2 years ago and have wanted to go ever since.  This was my year!  I walked every day for 3 weeks.  There are 3 levels of hikes, easy, moderate, and strenuous.  I was going for strenuous hike!  I met at 6:00 a.m. and off we went!  We drove over by Jem trailhead and started hiking down into the canyon.  It was the perfect temperature!  The old canal used to take off from the Virgin river by way of a little dam.

The canal went through some settling ponds to get rid of some of the muddy sediment and then started to mosey along the mountainside.  This was the first tunnel, just carved out of the rock.

If you look, you can see the canal line, half way up the canyon wall.

We are walking along the edge of the canal, where "ditch riders" would ride their horses every day to make sure that the canal was running properly.  If large rocks happened to slide down into the canal from the hillside above, they would divert water out to remedy the situation.  They would build a huge fire on the rock to heat it and then pour cold river water on the rock to cause it to split.  Once the rock cracked, they could use wedges to break the rocks into smaller pieces for removal.  

There was this cool pipe we hiked across.

This gate let water out of the canal when they needed to work on it.

This flume carried water across Chinatown wash.

This was one of the last tunnels.  I think we went through about 10 tunnels all together.  This one was shored up with cedar logs.

The canal made it possible for the Hurricane pioneers to farm the valley.  It took over a decade and dedicated volunteers to make this canal possible.  They had to work all winter because they had to tend to the crops in the summer.  Walking along the 5+ miles, I kept thinking these guys had grit!  They created this canal when surveyors said they couldn't.  They had shovels, picks and a level.  It was totally nuts! I was inspired so much that I put 3 books on hold at the library to read more about the history of this canal.  I can't believe those hard-working pioneers.  I want to take the whole family on it!

Bubsy...

This turkey hates getting his hair cut.  It usually takes a bribe in one form or another.  This time he said he wanted a really huge blizzard from dairy queen.  

So I made the deal and he allowed me to cut his hair.  Then we showered him up and headed to Dairy Queen.  I tried to get him to settle for a medium or a small but he only wanted the large.  A deal is a deal!  He got a large blizzard and we took most of it home afterward.  What a turkey.

Mountain Bike Race...

Jack has been practicing with the mountain bike team a few times a week and now we are full into race season!

Merril looks awesome in his team gear!

Jack was so cute and placed 10th in his division! Awesome dude!

Butterfingers....

I'm not a huge fan of cake but this cake is so good. It was shared by Kathy Brown, who moved away. She brought it over when I had Mark. It's vanilla cinnamon sugar pudding cake. I was excited to make it and as I took it out of the oven, I totally dropped it. Cake flopped out all over the floor. I totally picked it up and we ate it. 

First Day of School!

Wahoo! The first day of school is here! Jack and Juliet are both going to the Intermediate School this year. Juliet is in 6th and Jack is in 7th.

They ride the bus together and it comes crazy early! At 6:55 a.m.

Maxine fixed Mikayla's hair for the first day of school. Braids of course. Mikayla is in 1st grade.

They are ready to peace out.

Maxine is ready for 10th grade at the high school.

Mark starts preschool at Coral Canyon. He's a little nervous but I think he'll do okay.

And we finally have our mornings back! Loving it!

Catching squirrels...

I made a new grow box for things that don't fit in the greenhouse. After planting peas, lettuce and arugala, we discovered that the rock squirrels behind our house like to eat those things. So I tried to deter the squirrels and that didn't work either. I got mad and didn't plant anything for a while. I broke down and bought a live squirrel trap. I couldn't kill the squirrels myself but I wanted them far, far away. After some trial and error, I caught a squirrel. Juliet and I drove clear past Virgin and released it next to the river. It's going to need water. I couldn't release it in the desert. It's on the other side of the river so I don't think it will find it's way home.

I ended up catching 4 squirrels total! Now it's way too late for peas so I'm going to plant a pumpkin patch. Hopefully I can get a pumpkin before Halloween.

AND I FINISHED THE FLAGSTONE PATIO! It turned out better than I though it would.  Yay! Yay and yay!

Lagoon!

This is the last hurrah before school starts!  Lagoon!  We haven't been since Jack was a baby.  Mark loved the boats.

I saw on Facebook that the 20th ward had leftover Lagoon meal tickets from youth conference and was trying to give them away.  I snatched them up.  We got 6 free meals!

We rode rides and screamed screams.

I don't have any pictures of Lagoon-A-Beach but we spent part of the day in the water park.  The water was super cold!  The weather was sunny so it was still nice.  Maxine and I played until the park closed and Merril took the rest of the fam to go get Crown Burgers.

Unfinished Business Rally...

Merril and Ryan entered a 3-day motorcycle rally. They road from Hurricane to Hoover Dam, Las Vegas, Primm NV, Williams AZ, Albuquerque NM, Denver CO, the corner of Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, Idaho, and back to Utah. They rode 3,200 miles in 3 days. They had to take pictures with their rally "flag" to earn points and a picture with an officer was one of the bonuses. This cop was not excited about it. He said "this is my happy face." OK.

And there he goes!

Merril and Ryan are posing in front of a sasquatch at a museum near Denver CO. I can't see it so it must be a good sasquatch. 

They found Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota.

Merril and Ryan won 3rd and 4th places! 

Hurricane Flying Tigers...

Hey look at my cute kid! He's on the Hurricane High School mountain bike team called the Flying Tigers. He's only in 7th grade but he can get away with this because Merril is helping with the team. He's holding his own and looks good doing it.