Random and Camping

Alright so there's like 70 photos in this post. Mostly for my parents :]

And a lot of them are nature pictures from our camping trip. I know that I personally kind of just breeze over pictures that don't have people in them on other people's blogs so I will not be offended in the least if no one looks at all of these pictures haha.

To start off, a few weeks ago Dan bought me a lovely bouquet of roses! I was trimming the stems and brilliantly chopped my finger with the scissors too. There's something about deep wounds that makes me whoozy. I started blacking out a little and had to lay down. Dan thought I was being a drama queen but I can't control my reaction!! Two years ago when I cut my knee open on metal/cement stairs, I actually passed out! I'm fine with seeing blood but when I see a really deep wound (on myself) that's when I get sick. I also tend to black out and/or pass out if I hit my elbows or knees really hard for some reason. Once my friend Matt and I were at Lacey's house and I hit my elbow super hard on the banister on her stairs. I passed out from that but Matt and Lacey thought I was faking it so they started tickling me. Hah. ANYWAYS.

I also painted my nails all cool-like.

Alright, so this last weekend Dan and I went camping in the peninsula. It was a place called Sol Duc in the Olympic National Park. It was amazing. It was also a rain forest....so cool! Some pictures on our way.

Yes, we were almost to Forks. No, I'm not a huge Twilight fan. I liked the first three books but the fourth book killed it so now I slightly despise the series, although I still do want to visit Forks because it sounds so cool. It's also really close to LaPush, so Dan and I are going to drive out there sometime this summer. (It's also by a beach called Beach Four [hah], which I heard has a ton of wading pools with bright starfish and anemone.)

A few miles before we reached our campsite, we drove past Crescent Lake which was SO pretty! So we stopped to take a few photos.

Finally reached our destination!

I tried to get a picture that really showed how tall the trees were. This doesn't even do it justice...

Everything was so GREEN! (Duh Lisa it's a rain forest...)

Moss that covered almost every tree:

Some plants/mushrooms/moss growing on logs:

Me in all of my awkward glory

When we got there Friday night, it wasn't raining. This was lucky, as we were setting up our tent in the dark, and rain would have just made it harder. But it started raining in the middle of the night, and barely stopped until we left Sunday morning. I was actually really grateful for this, as the rain meant all of the Daddy Long Legs that kept crawling on me Friday night were hiding and no longer creeping about. Here's Dan trying to salvage some wood we accidentally left out in the rain. We had the hardest time keeping the fire going. Dan thinks the wood we bought must have gotten caught in the rain before it reached the store because it would not light!!! A lot of times we had to take turns fanning the fire so it wouldn't go out. Luckily we weren't relying on it for warmth though...it was chilly but not too cold, even with all the rain!

The cool little jungle-esque walkway to the bathrooms (yes it was wuss camping)

Saturday we went on a hike to Sol Duc Falls. We also went to the hot springs but I don't have any pictures of that because it was basically four swimming pools that had the water from the hot springs channeled to them, so there were tons of people in swim suits. I felt taking pictures would have been awkward to say the least (let me just say that was the ultimate place to people watch....so many unique people..).

Anyways, here's the pictures from our little hike. It was raining the whole time so by the time we got to the falls we were already wet. There was a TON of mist shooting up from the falls so we got even more soaking! We decided to climb out onto a rock in the middle of the river and while doing so, Dan slipped and his foot landed in the river. Not that it made much difference to his soaked factor though...

Tiny mushrooms!! With my hand to give some perspective:

The falls:

Okay my face is weird in all of these pictures. But that's because it was so rainy/misty that it was basically like smiling underwater.

Dan doing some exploring

I almost jumped. Just kidding.

Hahah love this one.

It was hard to see my camera at the time because everything was so wet, so I'm kind of sad that a lot of these pictures turned out blurry. But, what can you expect when it's raining/misting and your camera is on its death bed, right?

This is a cool picture because it really shows how much water was in the air.

This forest seriously had the weirdest shrooms...but so cool.

Back to our campsite. Dan cooking some turkey burgers for us on a little gas stove we rented.

Drying off my feet, haha.

Hot chocolate time!

And this is probably one of the best pictures from the whole trip, bahaha:

Dan thought this looked like a tiki man, which it kind of does if you turn your head to the left.

Sad to be going home! We had such a fun time and want to go back again. If only camping wasn't so pricey, who knew.

A few other not quite as exciting things worth mentioning:

I got a job selling Cutco knives. Yes kids, stay in school, if you get your bachelor's degree you'll be lucky enough to be a knife salesperson. Can you tell I'm not so proud? Haha. Anyways, I really didn't like that job because I was doing phone/virtual appointments (thanks again so much to those of you who were nice enough to listen to me for an hour!!) since I didn't know many people in the area. I was ending up spending more money on gas to get to work every day and then doing a car switch with Dan in the middle of the day (as we only have one car up here) than I was making from the job. I also tended to be really moody every time I had to go in for a workshop or team meeting. Not fun for me or for Dan. Everyone there was super nice, but I was really depressed so I quit last week. And I feel so liberated!!! I'm probably going to do a bit of babysitting and like I mentioned before, try to set up an online shop. I still may be looking for other jobs as well. I'm a lot happier without Cutco in my life.....actually I would love to own a set of those knives, just not sell them.

The ward here is SO nice! We love it. We have determined that family wards are infinitely better than married student wards. The bishop is so funny (one of his favorite things to say when you're telling him something interesting/exciting/funny is "Shut up!!"). The Relief Society is SO friendly and the RS president kind of reminds me of my mom--she's so good at befriending everyone and making everybody feel welcome. Everyone keeps telling me they've been praying for someone who plays the piano to move in so you guessed it, I've been doing a whole lot of piano playing. Which I do like. But Dan and I just got called into the primary so I probably won't be doing a whole lot of playing anymore.

Dan is still loving his internship and really likes Boeing. He's working in their planning department, and works from 6:30-3:30.

Dan and I joined a gym and are doing their Biggest Loser challenge. Right now I'm feeling really discouraged about it because I've been exercising almost every day and eating a whole heck of a lot healthier than I was before, and have only lost 2 pounds since the challenge started. I've lost more than that total but still not a lot so I've kind of been letting chocolate become a part of my diet again....I need to get back on track. Dan's doing better than I am, both in the healthy eating and the weight loss departments. So that is exciting at least!

So now I'm all up to date and I can stop feeling stressed about not blogging. Silly, huh?