12 miler

I volunteered to go with the 6th grade today on their 12 mile hike. We started at the school and walked 6 miles up the Hobble Creek Canyon to a park there. Then we had lunch, and then got ready for the 6 miles back. Luke and my feet are hurting, but we did it! (I actually had to trade shoes with Luke part of the way down because his feet were hurting so bad. .. but he made it, actually in the first group on the way up and the second group on the way down) What a beautiful time of year to go for a hike up the canyon!Luke of the way up. It actually started to rain for a little bit at this point, but no one complained. It didn't rain enought to get any one really wet. Just cool us off a bit.

Some of the boys played a little football at the park. On the walk back, they may have been wishing they used the time to rest their feet instead!Luke actually posed for a picture with his mom! I am wearing a school shirt from last year that I designed and our company made. Isn't it cute?Luke stopped to take this picture on the way back. Photo doesn't do it justice.

Lime Pie

Last night in my ward, we had our annual "Bake Off" for Relief Society. You can bring an appetizer, bread, main dish, salad, or desert to share/be judged. The bishopric gets to judge everything and give the award for best in each category. OK, I have to start by saying that cooking is not my favorite hobby. It's not that I can't cook, I just don't. I keep saying that I should meal plan and get organized that way. .. but almost every night the question comes up. .. What is for dinner? So I scramble to put something delish together, which is half the time followed by complaints of "I don't like this". .. and I wonder why I don't enjoy cooking/mean planning. I do enjoy good food, however. There was a lot of good food last night. Not having much time, I decided to make this lime pie. I got the recipe from my good friend Barbara Paskett several years ago. I think this is what she makes for Keith on his birthday instead of cake. It is really good. Of course mine tastes fine, But last night it was left out on the table during judging/eating for two hours and melted at the church. Needless to say, mine wasn't even close to being voted as best desert.. .. but I bet if Barbara made it, it would have won. She has that touch on things. But after that long introduction, here is the recipe. Yummmy. Easy. Enjoy

LIME PIE

4 eggs

1 cup sugar

**beat until fluffy

2 cups cream

2/3 c lime juice

green food coloring

**Add to above mix

**Prepare graham cracker crust:

1 1/4 c graham cracker crumbs

1/4 c sugar

6 T butter

(Here is where my laziness comes in. .. I usually just buy a couple prepared crusts. .. 3-4 for this recipe)

**Top crust with vanilla ice cream

**Finish with Lime mixture from above

Keep in freezer

That's it. Nice and easy.

Simplify

As most of you know, when we bought and moved into our house five years ago (by the way, I can't believe it has been five years! We moved in Conference weekend 2003. . . ) one of the things that I thought was wonderful at the time was how beautiful the yard was. Well, I soon realized that the previous owners LIVED in the yard. Seriously, they would spend hours out there making everything beautiful and perfect. I have succeeded to ruin the yard since we have been here. I don't have the time, or the green thumb (mine seems to be closer to black) to keep it how it used to be. Beautiful flowers, shrubs, borders, and large areas of plants were groomed to perfection with the previous owners. I have decided that simplicity is much closer to my style. Putting in a sprinkler system two years ago was a HUGE help. How in the world did they keep the yard up having to haul a hose around to water everything? Another thing I have slowly been doing is taking out beds that are full of weeds (thanks to my gardening expertise) and replacing them with grass. This was my project the past couple days I spent several hours getting rid of the weeds (weeds are out of control) and moving the rocks back to make the bed much closer to the fence line, and less weeding area in the future. I went and got the sod yestereday and laid it down. OK, so my yard has a VERY long way to go, but one little area at a time will make a difference. Or at least that is what I keep telling myself. I will be so happy next spring when I can get the lawn mower out and mow this little patch and know I do not have to weed it. Now, what to do with the rest of the yard. .. .

100 Books

My friend Heidi did this on her blog, so I decided to as well.

*** Here is a list put forth by the National Endowment for the Arts in the US. It lists the top 100 books, and asks how many you’ve actually read.The Big Read [which is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to restore reading to the center of American culture] reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.

Edit**See below for more information regarding this list

I have colored the ones I have read. .. .

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Thanks for reading!P.S. The list is random, not in order of importance -

So I have read 33 of them, if I counted right. Not bad, I guess.

Some of the books seem to repeat a bit, like 14 says the complete works of Shakespere (who has read the complete works?), and 98 is Hamlet. Also with the Chronicles of Narnia. But still interesting.

Tell me how many you have read, and also give me a recommendation of some to read that I have not yet read. I am not interested in all these books, but I'm always looking for another good read!

Tag. .. if you wish. . . Do this on your blog and let us all see what you have read.

***EDIT: I found a little more info regarding this list of books: The list I posted is the result of a poll/survey conducted online last year by World Book Day. "The 2,000 people who took part in the poll online at worldbookday.com nominated their top 10 titles that they could not live without." - wrote The Guardian in an article published on March 1st. And then they take us to the list - in HERE . So this list is just for fun, as far as I'm concerned.

Check this girl out!

Twinkle, Twinkle. . .

I think one of the purposes of a blog is to document events and other things that you don't want to forget. I want to appreciate little things, and not forget them. So this is kind of for me. . . . Mia REALLY likes to sing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Every morning when I read scriptures, sing a song, and say a prayer with the kids before sending them off to school, she HAS to sing this song. I managed to get her to sing it for me this morning in front of the camera (she loves to dance and sing, but does NOT like to perform. .. she is shy). Not as good as she does with out a camera, but still good enough for me to remember down the road when I forget how she always sang this song, and how cute she is when she does it. . . . .

Saturday

Fall is always a busy time. I know it is the same for most of you as well. Now that we have three kids playing soccer, it makes for interesting Saturday mornings. The day stared off with team pictures for Luke and Kenendy, and then David went to their games. Luckily they were playing at the same location and the same time. So he was able to watch two games at once. Elizabeth then had pictures as well, and then a game. I went to her game and them picked up David, Luke, and Kennedy afterward.

Kennedy was happy to report that her team won their game. She is a pretty good team player. .. but we would like to see her use some of her speed that we saw the last couple years.

Luke had a pretty bad loss. He didn't seem too down about it, though. He is a really smart player, and understands the game well. He just needs to put a little more heart into it at times. He does enjoy playing.

Elizabeth was the star of the day. Granted, it is only cub soccer, and they don't play with goalies, but she scored 5 goals at her game! No that is not the team total, that is Elizabeth's personal total! She is quite the little player. I actually had a man come up to me after the game and ask if she wanted to play on his softball team. I have never had one of my children recruited before! But she sure is entertaining to watch. She is agressive and quick, and coordinated as well. Quite a star.

Then in the afternoon, Elizabeth had her birthday party. We rented out a local gymnastics facility and the kids had a great time. They had an hour of various gymnastics activities and then we had a half hour to use the "party room" for cake and presents. I think all the kids were pretty warn out. They were running, and hopping, and jumping, the whole time. I love that I just had to bring the cake and didn't have to plan a thing. That is my type of party!

In the afternoon was the BYU-UCLA football game. I am sure you all know that BYU won 59-0! David was so overcome with emotion that he actually got teary eyed.

I was able to get a whole bunch of Brigham City peaches from Aunt Sherry and Uncle Jeff. I spent some time pealing and freezing some, and today I made some homemade jam. They are soooo good!