Summer Rain, Etc.

Most of you have probably been experiencing right along with us an excessive amount of rain this year. I don't think we've gone even a week without a torrential rainstorm. The last time we saw a rain like the ones we've been having was when we lived in Atlanta!

We took a few pictures to show how it was today.

Those small pieces of white that you can see are pea-sized hail!

There is so much rain it's overflowing the gutters and look how much is rushing out the bottom!

A couple of intersections near our house just full of water!

At places along this road, near the church, the water was 28-30" high!!
(Ty said the pickup tires were nearly covered and they are 31")

We drove down to the falls and passed a bunch of people packing up from a massive rained-out wedding, with balloons, streamers and limo! Oh, how awful!!

The water is the highest I've seen since we moved here!

In other news...

We've been spending more time at home this summer to try to save some money and get more done on the house and yard. So here's a few fun pictures of what we've been up to lately.

Our neighbors have some beautiful, but very invasive roses that are taking over our garden. One night when I was pulling weeds in the garden I got fed up and cut off a couple of big branches. Instead of throwing them away I arranged them on the table. Here's a little sample of my handiwork.

All the little ones are in glasses a.k.a. mini-vases around the base of the larger vase. :)


The weekend before the Fourth we headed up in the south hills for some overnight camping. We didn't get many pictures, but here's a couple to take a gander at...

This is us too lazy to make a fire, and eating Smores anyway over the cookstove. :)




And although we've been home a lot that doesn't mean we haven't been busy. I just got a new calling as Beehive Advisor and Ty is spending his days home working on big projects around the house, so we're running all over recently. And needless to say there have been lots of leftovers in the fridge. I try to go through the fridge once a week and use up any leftovers, but this one must have gotten lost somewhere. It had been in there for a month.


Moldy Marshmallow Fruit Salad anyone??


Long ago the dogs kind of adopted the bed as their own during the day while we are gone. So recently we've working on keeping the house cleaner, which includes making and keeping the bed made. We've been trying to keep the dogs off the bed by closing the bedroom door. Well we occasionally forget and this is what ends up happening!

Time to remake the bed!! (If only we could teach the dogs how to remake it themselves...)


For the Fourth of July I ended up working, but only for a few hours in the morning. It was a beautiful day, so after lunch Ty and I went down to swim at Dierkes Lake, a local swimming hole. It was packed, as the city pool was closed as well. But we had a good time cliff jumping, diving, swimming and dock lounging.

That night we grill some excellent steaks and sliced up some watermelon. At the local College, CSI, they have a great fireworks show, so we packed up some extra watermelon, some chocolate milk cartons, a blanket and our camping chairs on the back of our bikes and headed to the campus a couple of hours early. We played and read our books and ate watermelon as we waited for the show to start. It was great, but the best part was making it home in ~10 minutes and flying past all the cars waiting for the traffic to clear. We had strawberry shortcake for dessert and watched a few of the neighbors fireworks before we headed off to bed.

A wonderful Fourth of July!!