Reflexion on the past couple of months

A lot has happened in the past two months. I have started and just about finished my new job at Nike. It has been great to get some new contacts and to get some new work experience. Katie was especially excited about getting some new Nike apparel. It has been a very short tenure for me and we are now preparing to move to Provo, UT for me to pursue a graduate degree. Katie found an apartment for us (thanks Nick and Lindsey for checking them out for us) and I got season tickets for the sporting events, so I think that we are all ready :) We are looking forward to starting a new adventure and being close to other members of both of our families. We will heading out on Aug 29th that way we'll have enough time to catch the first football game and Katie is hoping to get some classes at the gym as soon as she can. She is not looking forward to loosing all of her classes here. Katie and I are especially happy to not have to manage apartments anymore. It has been a blessing and a curse. It amazes us what people think that they can get away with and try to do. Hopefully we will be more responsible as renters. Moving has mixed emotions for us. We have made some really great friends that we will miss a lot, but we are also looking forward to seeing and being close to friends in Utah.

The big news in our family is that Jack went on his first camping trip. We went with the Smith's to Lake Sacajawea just East of the Tri-Cities area. We were mainly worried about him sleeping through the night as he is kind of picky. We borrowed a pack-n-play from some of our friends and were able to get him asleep just fine. We even got into the tent, read our scriptures and prayed without waking him up and we were all fast asleep. Unfortunately, our camp site was close to a railroad. When I say close, I mean the ground rumbled as the train went by. That wasn't too bad, until the train reached the intersection with the road where it had to blow its horn several times, which woke Jack up. The first time, Katie let him cry for a minute or two hoping that he would fall back asleep, but he just continued to cry harder. Since everybody in the entire camp ground could hear him, she took him out of bed and fed him to hopefully put him back to sleep. Humorously, he thought that it was time to play and started grinning and whacking us in the face and back trying to get us to respond. Based on the lighting, we thought that it was early morning, around 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning. Boy were we wrong, we looked at the cell phone to realize that it was merely 1:30 a.m. The trains continued to come by through out the night making it a rough night for us and those camped nearby. Luckily, the proceeding nights were not as bad or we would have come home a little early for our trip.

Another big thing is that Katie attempted a back roll on the wakeboard. She was doing really good landing her wake to wake jumps, throwing in a grab and doing a 180. She was on fire. Unfortunately, she did not land the backroll and she thinks that she hurt her shoulder in the attempt though, but I was very proud of her for trying. I also have attempted to land a backroll and am so close. I was trying one weekend before we were going to go to Lake Sacajawea and I over-rotated and landed on my side and hurt kind of bad, but I didn't think anything of it. The next couple of days, my abs (or so I thought) were really sore and I kept telling myself "Man! I had a killer ab workout the other day." I was trying to do the backroll at Lake Sacajawea and it hurt really bad. Turns out that I broke a rib and I have felt it popping in and out ever since. Having a broken rib is really odd. Some of the smallest things are really painful, such as having the hiccups or laughing too hard. I have a Dr's appointment today and hopefully I didn't damage any internal organs. For any one who is interested, here is what a backroll is supposed to look like (hopefully I get it before Kate :))