A Picture's Worth 1,000 Words.

First of all, I have to apologize for all of these pictures being out of order and crazily mixed up but that's always been a struggle for me in the blogging world:) At least I've finally had the time to do all of this.

This is a not so great picture of us on our 1 year anniversary, of course we just had to take it, and it's of course, in our yard where we got married.

For our anniversary we decided to get our firearm concealed carry permits so we can be safe when we're hiking deep in the backcountry. Of course most people think of the bears and cougars and other large predatory animals as dangerous, but there are also some very strange and sometimes scary people that you run into more frequently than you would think when you're out that far away from civilization.

This is kind of a funny one to me because I painted this for Ben for Christmas, but of course it was a very long, time-consuming painting so it wasn't actually finished until this spring... I've never been the very best when it comes to timing anyway. Oops!

My parents have a new place in Mesquite that they are very excited about and they have been working on decorating it so my mom asked me to paint this for her to hang on the walls down there. It turned out really well and I think it's now my new favorite painting.

A post by me just wouldn't be complete without a picture of the Hound. She's doing really well, her hips are starting to give her a hard time but only if she overexerts herself... which of course is most of the time.

On our 1 year anniversary, we had a crazy windstorm. Of course my parents (our landlords) were out of town and randomly our blue spruce that grows just outside our basement door blew over. For those of you that don't remember, that was the background for our entire wedding and reception. I was so sad when we had to saw it into pieces and pull out the root ball. I was seriously considering trying to right it again and save the tree. The best part was when my parents came home and my husband was home alone. My dad came downstairs and said to Ben: "son, come here, I need to talk to you for a minute." Ben of course was speechless and nervous, frantically thinking about what in the world he could have done to upset my dad. My dad brought him outside and pointed to the down tree and said: "I leave you in charge for one weekend and you let this happen?!" Then Ben realized that he was joking of course, in my dad's uber serious way of joking. It was so great!

The last three pictures were from our way back home from Sun Valley with Ben's family. We stopped in a small town in Idaho where just off the highway there is this amazing hot spring. It was so awesome, full of little tiny fish and it had a spring bubbling up on one end with a tiny creek running out the other end. We had a good time and it was a nice break from the drive home, but I was sad to see the way other people would treat such a beautiful gift like this one. Apparently some people had decided to throw a party there recently. There was trash everywhere and random socks and broken glass. I seriously can't believe how selfish and lazy people can be to not even consider how their actions and negligence can effect the earth and the other people that come by to enjoy it later. We really wanted to help clean it up like we usually do when we hike but there was too much trash to carry and a lot of it I wouldn't have touched without rubber utility gloves and a long pole.

We also spent St. Patrick's day and the whole week around it in Milwaukee, WI with Ben's sister, her husband, and their new baby Wesley. He's huge but such a cutie I really do love that little man!

We went to the Miller Stadium to see have some appetizers and walk around and bask in it's enormity. I was amazed with how huge it was. I bet those games are a blast... even though I'm not really a big baseball fan.

We went on a tour of the Miller brewery along with a few other breweries that were so cool. It was neat to see the process the the different breweries use and how different Miller was from the tiny microbreweries we went to. Some of them even made amazing hand-crafted sodas that we could try after the tour!

We went to the very best Chicago Stuffed pizza place, Oh my goodness! Now that's what I call a pizza pie!

We went on many what we called "custard crawls" because there were many frozen custard places around where they live and they all had different flavors of the day. This particular flavor was my favorite: birthday cake! It was cake batter custard with yellow cake pieces and frosting mixed throughout.