the neighbors are mountains

My mom will be here in three hours! hooray!

Just a little update. Nothing all too exciting has been happening. Not that much else I've written about has been exciting...

Monday was spent doing little things around the house. Ingrid and I took a stroll around the neighborhood. I took a few pictures of all the trees and flowers in bloom. They were simply beautiful. However, every time I compare images to reality, the images fell so short. That is especially true when you take pictures of the mountains.

Alta, Utah. The end of little cottonwood canyon. it's still winter up there.
(the last row you see is clouds not mountains)

I wish pictures could really show the beauty of creation a little better but then we may never get out to see it. Monday after dinner, Davis and I were doing the "whatcha wanna do? I dunno, whatcha you wanna do?" (Buzzards from  Disney's Jungle Book anyone?) We decided to do a little exploring. We grabbed some coffee from Salt Lake Roasting company, a new favorite of ours. They have renewed our love of the plain old cup of coffee. It's really quite good. Then we picked a canyon to drive up in the Wasatch Mountains. Little Cottonwood canyon is about a 20 minute drive from our house and two ski resorts are at the very end: Alta, ski only, and Snowbird. While these places aren't as big and sprawling as the Colorado ski towns we've experienced, they are so stinking close! Plus, for being the end of April, they were still buried under several feet of snow.

Anyways, the drive was lovely in the light of the setting sun.  We spotted several trails coming off the road and plenty of avalanche warnings signs. Thrilled by the fact all of this was so very close to home, we made a mental note to come back this summer to hike. We did the whole drive in a little over an hour with a coffee stop and one U-turn.


Tuesday, I told myself not to antsy over getting all the paperwork done for Utah stuff. But then I sat down to see what I needed to do for my RN license and five hours later, I was back home after a day of doing grown up stuff... oops. I applied to have my multi-state RN license switched to Utah as my primary. I made a trip to their office down town and got finger printed again. Then I spent about two hours at the drivers license office. Truly, that is one of the layers of hell in Dante's Inferno. It actually went mostly smoothly minus getting my name wrong initially and it still took two hours. They make out of state people take another written test. Thankfully it was open book or I would have failed. It wasn't just the usual "what sign is this?...a stop sign"  I only knew about 6 of 25 questions without looking them up. But I got a 100% thanks to the manual. Plus this place was located in the parking lot of the state fair grounds. It was a tad confusing to find. I was about to yell at Googlemaps for taking me to the fair and not the DMV, although the fair would be more fun. My last stop of the day was to get my car emissions tested and VIN officially read by someone "qualified" to read it so I can apply for a license plate in Utah. Adult stuff. booooo

I made French Onion soup for dinner last night. Usually, I avoid chopping multiple onions because my eyes water so bad it's no longer safe to use a knife due to tear induced blindness. One of moving boxes in the kitchen had Davis' ski goggles in it. Ahhhhh! I successfully chopped all the onions and cooked them without one single tear.

Multi-purpose goggles. winter activities and onion chopping.

Today I will make the quick trip to the airport, twenty minutes compared to the hour plus trip one way to Denver. My mom is coming for about a week. We are planning on using this time to explore and maybe paint that red room blue. Also, starting the garden, hopefully. This weekend is supposed to be absolutely lovely, low 70s and sunny. I am so glad to have some company. After my job interview tomorrow, it will be fun times!

I am sending Davis as our ambassador to a community group tonight. We need to get plugged in somewhere to meet people. Or keep working on convincing friends to move here as well...muahh hahah muahh ahaha  ahahaha muah muaahhahahahhaha (that is my best conniving laugh... I just looked up conniving and it is not quite the right word)

adios!