And she runs rampant.

Did you know we got a dog? No fooling! Here she is:



Meet Ollie Bird the leaf diver. We adopted this funny thing from the local Humane Society. She's a black lab/border collie mix which equals lots of love and tons of energy, much to our amusement.

[Zach interlude: Ollie has strangely taken on one of Liz'z habits -- whenever we walk by a sewer-cover Ollie will either walk around it or jump over it. Super weird for a dog, eh?!! Maybe she was surprised by a Ninja Turtle popping out of one once. That's the only viable explanation I can conjure up. End of interlude by Zach.]

So, there you have it! The newest addition to the Zach Carr family: Ollie Bird.

Anyone remember the others? Here's a reminder...

H.R. Featherbottom




and Baby Corn Longfellow

Blogtober

If you are planning on reading this entire post I would suggest packing a lunch and taking your potty break right now. I will try my best to keep you entertained whilst I wrap a winsome web of Wyoming wonder ‘round your hearts and hearths, supposing you have a hearth to hunker ‘round and a heart to hearken to a tale told from a lonesome land… a land far-flung from familiarity, fermenting in fortuitous forecasts…

AND BUGS WHO TRY TO EAT YOUR SPOUSE!It’s true. Well, I don’t know if it was going to eat Liz, but why risk it? I smote his ruin upon the graveled banks of a shallow lake, nevermore to rise in a frenzy of flesh feasting. I’ve found that, to the folks of the female persuasion, squishing bugs is quite a chivalrous action worthy of praise and adoration (I am praised quite frequently for this).

With that out of the way, it is time to go back in time a few months (you know, when Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” was a big hit). We begin our adventure saying goodbye to many folks we love.
Grandpa Clark and I share an affinity for maps. We can just stare at them for hours. Some people say that’s weird. Well, you’re weird. Ha! Take that.
Grandma Clark makes good sound effects while telling stories. And she keeps the cookie jar full. Not only that, she is one of the oldest living Daughters of Utah Pioneers.

Speaking of pioneers, there is a pioneer cemetery a stone’s throw from my elementary classroom (well, probably two throws; one to break through my classroom window, then the second throw would get to the cemetery for sure). Once you get over the fear that a rattlesnake might bite you at any second it is humbling to walk around it and look at the headstones. The majority of them were children who died before reaching their first year. One family lost three infants in three consecutive years. It makes some sense now that old man winter has decided to set in early here. To get to Basin you drive through a place called South Pass (pictured below).
It is through this passage that many of the pioneers made their trek during winter. Liz and I drove through a blizzard over South Pass in April and I could not wait to get hundreds of miles from that place (though quite a view come summer time). It gave me a heightened appreciation for what the early pioneers went through.

Anyways, back to saying goodbyes. One of my hardest goodbyes was a silent one to the city of Logan. Say what you will, naysayers. Sure, it can be cold, but that’s really the only argument I’ve ever heard against it. I’d love to end up there someday. We had a nice going-away bbq with friends, complete with a brief, profane, threatening interruption from a drunken neighbor. There are more people we would have liked to rub elbows with before making the big move but some elbows just couldn’t make it. If we did not get to say goodbye to you in person consider your elbow rubbed.

The move was memorable. Thanks be to my family and Lindsay for helping us haul stuff to Wyoming, especially my dad for his, dare I say, wizardry in puzzle-piecing all our stuff into the U-haul. It was amazing. Likewise was Liz’s uncanny driving of the U-haul truck, towing our Jeep Cherokee as well, through a crowded day in Yellowstone (a place we shall talk about soon enough, dear reader, soon enough).

While my family and Lindsay were here we partook of some local festivities, namely the rodeo. The county rodeo grounds are just two blocks away (like most places here) from our house. One of the events that waxed back my moustache was the wild horse-riding contest. Several teams competed to catch, calm down, saddle, and ride totally wild horses. Whoa! Wild Stallions Rule!!! (Bill & Ted, anybody?). Fact: wild horses are WILD. Fact: watching cowboys getting flung all over an arena by angry horses is beyond entertaining.

We also ventured to a nearby point of interest called Devil’s Garden and explored some crags and cliff sides. Didn’t see no devil, though. Guess he went down t’ Georgia, lookin’ for a soul t’ steal.

We then spent a day in Yellowstone National Park. We want all of you to plan a trip to Yellowstone sometime so we can meet up and hang out. It is well worth the trip to see the splendor of the park (not to mention Grand Teton National Park on the way). Welllllllllll worth it, my friends. We have yet to see everything there. We were lucky enough to spot some wolves through the telescope of a goodhearted feller parked on the side of the rode. That was a first for me. Here are some pics from our visit to the park.


Here are some more pictures of our town, specifically the street we live on and the town park.
It is quaint. Though surrounded by “Mars”, as has been observed by some, the town is green and inviting. But yes, the land immediately surrounding us is Mars-like and word on the streets, or should I say rumor has it, is that a brief video clip of a Transformer shadow creeping into view of the camera before mysteriously losing transmission was recently found in the Town Hall Archives. Sheesh. I don’t want pretend we are in some rugged, beautiful, isolated location. It is very desert-like for several miles surrounding us. And though there have been instances of bears, mountain lions, elk, and moose being in town, it is not common. We do have a lot of deer and rabbits wondering through town with absolutely no fear and plenty of antelope prancing around the outskirts of town but nothing crazy. My favorite creature sightings occurred during a canoe trip down the Big Horn River with the 7th graders. We saw a mink (which I hear is very rare in these parts) and a couple of owls.

So, yeah, we are in a basin (as the name of the town applies), but there are some mighty mountains to the east and west of us. The terrain leading up to the mountains is reminiscent of the Washington Fields in Southern Utah and then turns into terrain similar to driving on Cedar Mountain or near Kolob Reservoir. The high points are barren, exposed, ice/glacier carved peaks.

A few weekends ago Liz and I went up to a lake in the Big Horn Mountain range and I paddled for a few hours while Liz relaxed and read on the shore (this is when the crazy bug tried to kill her).The water was calm and clear with big boulders in it (my favorite for kayaking).
This mooseling was on the shore snacking on some saltiable selections when I happened upon her. I love seeing moose in the wild. SO HUGE!

There were some waterfalls a short hike from the lake that nearly made me yell out, “Jumpstart me heart!” in an Uncle Scrooge McDuck sort of way.

There are plenty of amazing mountain ranges within a short road trips distance:

The mountains between Yellowstone and Cody.......also home of Howl’s Moving Castle

The Wind River Mountain Range east of Lander… but the photo does not want to work right now. Too majestic, I suppose.

And last the best of all the gang…
You all need to travel the Beartooth Highway before you die. This was the coolest drive I have ever been on. Right through a beautiful mountain range. And by “through” I mean literally through, up and over, on top of, between, around, and down a wild mountain range speckled with pristine, blue lakes. If you come next summer, we will take you there for sure.
One of my favorite sights was Pilot Peak. I couldn’t stop taking pictures of it.
The drive took us into a small quirky town called Cooke City.
This area was full of warning signs about being Grizzly Bear Country. A game warden came to the Middle School to teach us bear and mountain lion safety and he said a grizzly bear could beat a horse in a hundred meter dash. Ah! Fact: you shouldn’t run away from a grizzly bear. You should just let it eat you. Just kidding. That stuff is scary to think about and I have had a few grizzly nightmares since we’ve lived here. You don’t really hear about it, but people do get mauled around here every once in a while. Anyways, enough of this tangent, you just have to use precautions when going into the wild. I was really hoping to see a grizzly on this drive ‘cause I know there are tons in that mountain range but we saw neither hide nor hair of the beast.

Here are some photos from the top of the mountain. The road is open only a few months out of the year.

I think this may be my new all-time favorite picture.

Before school started, we drove up to Billings to go to the temple. It is the nearest temple and Billings is the place to go for all your big shopping needs. It takes a little over two hours to get up there. As you can see, I still have my beard. I was pretty happy to hear that I could keep it as a teacher. Fact: it is hard to find a phonebook in Billings, Montana.

School for Zach… whew. A totally new experience. A lot of challenges. A lot of fun moments. For those who don’t know exactly what I’m doing, I am teaching music at an elementary school and a middle school, grades K – 8. The elementary music is a blast and the kids are wild and eat it up. I am exhausted coming out of there. The middle school music program was in shambles when I arrived. I teach band, choir, music appreciation, and general music classes there. My band has 3 flutes, 2 saxes, and a clarinet. My choir consists of two boys and a girl. I don’t know if I can complain about small class sizes when I think of Utah teachers having to deal with 5,003 students in each class period. My other classes range from 9 to 23 students and one class of 28 (that is huge for around here). The entire Big Horn County School District #4 consists of about 329 students. I like it. There are still definitely discipline issues that come up in small class sizes but the small class sizes allow me to get to know my students pretty well. We see students all the time when we go shopping or to football games. Even when we go on bike rides students will run out of their houses and yell at us. It’s fun.

There have never been any moments when we’ve detested living here. We aren’t biting at the bits to leave this place in the future. There are definitely many charms to living in a small town. We have made some good friends here. People aren’t weird and backwards here. For the most part, if I may totally stereotype the people of the town we’ve lived in for only two months, the people really understand the concepts of hard work and making contributions. They are very generous and helpful. Sometimes it takes a little time for things to happen since being easy-going is another common trait here but people are pretty reliable. If I were to describe this town and the people in one word I think I would probably say something like “calm”. It’s a good place for us to be at this time in our lives.

I could go on but don’t want to overload you. I don’t know how often I will be able to post since I started teaching but my super cool wife has started posting super cool posts on this blog so keep checking it out.

I will finish with some practical advice… if you hear a very loud strange cracking sound in the middle of the night that sounds like a burglar trying to break into your house, don’t be alarmed. It’s probably not a burglar so don’t get out your billy club and flashlight and slowly walk into the kitchen like Liz and I did. Just go to the freezer and take out the Nalgene bottle that completely exploded when it froze solid. Yes, they can break. Case closed.

Until next time, friends.

The Late (but great!) Cowboy State Update

We’ve moved. You can now find us in the tiny town of Basin, Wyoming (by-the-way, this is Liz posting). Clink on the link below to see it!

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en-GB&q=basin,+wy&ie=UTF8&gl=us&ei=bFzJSoKPC4mCswPYq-ChBQ&hq=&hnear=Basin,+Wyoming&ll=44.380251,-108.03616&spn=0.013741,0.038409&t=k&z=15

That’s the whole town. Yup. Notice the large, lazy river to the right? That’s the Big Horn River that flows in a northerly direction. One day Zach will kayak the river in his zayak. But you can count me out. The visibility is only half an inch and that means anything could be in the water. Possibly some really large catfish that will nibble on your toes (thanks Auntie Jill and Auntie Julie for putting that thought into my head as a child), or, even worse, a shark that’s journeyed its way this far inland (thanks 'Jaws' for that crazy thought)! Yikes! I admit it: I’m a ridiculous wuss.

Basin, as you can see, is fairly consolidated. That means… BIKE RIDES!
HA HA!!! (that’s me expressing my joy of having such a cool husband that built me such a cool bike that will one day be such a cool color)

Mine is the one with the brown seat if you can tell




Best -and only- eats in town
I l-o-v-e our US Post Office!

Did you know Basin is the Big Horn County Seat? Uh-huh.
When you think of lawn decorations for a library, you think canon, right?


We were really lucky to have gotten our house. It is the coveted “teacherage” in the area. A teacherage, for those of you less educated in teacher terms, is a house that the school district owns and then rents to their teachers at a very reasonable price. I don’t know why they use that word and I actually think that it’s a pretty unique situation so they can call it whatever they want. I don’t care.

The house is large enough to have a room for all of the musical instruments, including a newly acquired organ that I inherited from my grandparents, a digital piano I’m hanging onto for my sister, a ukulele, a mandolin, and quite a few guitars and their accessories.

There is also a room for me to use for sewing and girly stuff like that. However, the previous tenant had pets, at least one dog and one cat and a tribe of wombats with really small bladders. The result? One “pee” room. It was awful! My poor mother and sisters-in-law slept in there the first two nights. They were really courageous to put up with that smell. We have since pulled the carpet out, scrubbed the walls, scrubbed the floors, and painted the floors to seal out the smell. When I say “we” I mean “me” since Zach is teaching these days and I’m left at home to do as I please. Needless to say, I am pleased to rid our house of pee stench. We now have nice, new smelling carpet, compliments of the school district.

Here's the Pee room before I worked on it:
and the Pee room after:(just use your eagle eyes to see that more than just the floor changed)

The school district has also complimented us with new linoleum, a newly refurbished garage and coming soon to the Zach Carr residence is a nice new deck! We are the luckiest of ducks!

BONUS PICTURES! Hurrah for High School football games! Hurrah!
!sneeze attack!


Er, that’s all for now! Zach will fill you in on the more awesome side of our lives. And his wonderful life as a K-8 music teacher.

Patience

We have been settling in slowly here in Wyoming (that's the way of life here, you know) and we are on the brink of getting the internet at our home. When that time comes, there will be a post that Liz has all ready to go with some pics. Soon after I shall have a megapost with more pictures than you would dare shake your puny fist at. That's right, I called your fist puny. Be patient. We really do want everyone to know how we are doing. And no, Lige, nobody has been gored by an elk. Just stared down by a moose.

Super(nintendo)Post

Note: if the old adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" is true, the pictures contained in this post will add up to a combined total of 25,000 words.

Sidenote: Liz and I stopped in Moab the other day and bought our second Handmade Mexican stuffed animal -- a giraffe we named Babycorn Longfellow. Our first was an owl we named H.R. Featherbottom.

We have gone on several adventures since we last spoke (aside from the post 2 days ago dealing with Jocco's death -- read it and weep). The first said adventure was a drive up to one of our favorite spots. Tony Grove Lake. Still surrounded by snow and riddled with floating slush. This water was cold to stand in. We scraim (alternate version of "screamed").

On the way back from Tony Grove we stopped at a natural spring called Rick's Spring. Just a few months ago we stopped there and it was frozen over. The picture below is the spring in its full force. That rascal bubbled out and created its own river. Just like that.

Next adventure, New Mexico. We wanted to visit Liz'z family once more before the move so we drove down last weekend for a few days. There are some expansive badlands near her hometown that we checked out. You know, just to be bad. Anyways, fate dished out an extra large supreme pizza in the form of a lizard sighting that waxed my moustache. The following photo is a collared lizard. I have never seen one besides on post cards and stuff so I was super stoked. They are pretty rare to see. I snuck up on it slowly and got close enough to get some great shots of it. So close that it did a push-up pose for me.

Here is a lookout point at the bad-to-the-bone-lands.

And Liz doing an explorer pose on some sqwibbly rock formations.

This is Angel Peak. The main reason we ventured into the badlands.

Yep. Five fives. The odometer in Liz'z car while we were driving into...

THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS!!!

Boy howdy, I tell you somethin', I was one happy kid as we drove up through Durango to a little town called Silverton. The drive was nonstop big rock mountain candy (not to be confused with the Big Rock Candy Mountain) for my eyes. I went nuts with my camera and took an unnecessary amount of pictures of every single peak we came across. Here are a few of them. Sorry if I bore you.

We found a cool lake nestled 'neath some peaks and did some exploring. This is Liz with her two sisters, Lindsay and Andrea, perched on a rock lakeside.And this is me in the water wanting Liz to hurry and take the shot so I would not get attacked by the army of leeches patrolling the shallows. The first one I saw I found when I lifted a rock looking for a salamander and I called it a mountain eel or something insanely ignorant. But clearly, they were leeches. They sucked.
There were oodles of dandelions all around the hills and I made Liz pose for this shot. She was a good sport and I think it turned out pretty cool.

Another shot of Liz through some purpley bush at a hot spring we goofed around on (as much as you can goof around on a hot spring).Me "goofing around" hot spring style.

This is downtown Silverton. I think this is now one of my favorite places on planet earth. It is completely surrounded by mountains and has lots of old-timey buildings and cool shops to check out (although I did not think chocolate-covered crickets for sale was that cool)


This is a waterfallish stream coming off one of the Silverton Mountains. Water was cold. I scraim.

And now for one of the top reasons to go to Silverton...Yep. It's true. I was into that place like a chicken on a junebug. The last Bigfoot sighting in the Silverton area was May 19 of this year. By a BLM Ranger nonetheless! There was so much Sasquatch nicknack in that place. And so many smiles.

For you naysayers, is this proof enough?

How about now?!!

You need to read this sign all the way through to find out if it is serious.

It was a fun visit to the Clark residence and it was nice to see family. Alas, we had to return to Logan to get back to work. On the way back through Price Canyon we stopped at a waterfall by the side of the road. This fall freezes over in the winter and people ice climb it. Anyone done this one?

And now we are home resting after a taxing morning serving in the nursery.

And now I am typing the last sentence of this post.

When a Monkey Dies

So I read in the paper this morning that Jocco died in his sleep.

Oh, you don't know Jocco, you say?



I'm pretty sure you do.



Ever been to Hogle Zoo?

Ever walked into the monkey house? (No, you RUN to the monkey house!)

Ever thrown a glance in the capuchin monkey habitat?

Ever noticed the one leathery-skinned, molting, decrepit, boney, hazey-eyed monkey you thought might be a zombie monkey?

That, my friends, was Jocco.
Fell victim to jaw cancer at age 45.
Some say he was the oldest existing capuchin.
Some say he was a ghost that was cursed to roam the land of the living.
Some say he was actually a giant, diseased sewer rat that got mixed up in the wrong zoo display.
But I...
I say that Jocco was a reminder that not all memories deal with perfection and beauty.

Rest in peace, dude.


In other news, I have some good adventures and pictures to blog when I get the time. Stay tuned.

Cozy Creatures

Lesson number one learned this past week: cutting someone's hair does not mean cut your own knuckles with scissors lest you are prepared for the ensuing blood bath.

Lesson two: if you find a good root beer, be willing to drive out of state to get it. It is well worth the frothy mug, says I.

I am pleased with our mailbox. Hear me out. Despite it occasionally housing wasps, it keeps our mail safe and dry. And now, thanks to some custom decal work, it is the talk of the block (I pretend it is) and it is a happy reminder that I am now happily married to a sweet little gal and we have a happy little home together. Our mail being sent to the very same receptacle is one symbol of how our lives are now one.

Our yard has presented some peculiar pollen-producers proving particularly pleasing to the peepers. Liz arranged a fewofem for our viewing pleasure (this is a thing she does well). Alas, they have gone the way of all the earth by now. C'est la vie.

The other day we had a hankering for an adventure. Sometimes adventures have a lot to do with thrift stores. This one did. But that's not all. Remember the out of state root beer? We happened upon a gas station in Preston, Idaho where we found the coveted (by me) "Old Fashioned" (that's the brand) root beer. There is also a place to get some saltiable (that means tasty, to me) potato wedges. Mission complete.
Later that night we were enthralled to do some puppy-sitting for a friend of a friend. The creature was a delightful little black lab with a penchant for pouncing on pesky parading porch ants. We put our wedding gift dutch oven to use (thanks Hayes and Terrie) and made some peach cobbler (a.k.a. "Sweet Majesty" or "Peachler"). For first timers it turned out divine (thanks to a recipe from Dax Mangus).This picture sums up the evening of bliss. We are so excited to get a dog when we move. So y'all keep your ears to the ground (or just one ear, since it is physically impossible to touch the ground with both of your ears (perhaps I should've said "keep your collective ear to the ground"? (or just erased that first questionable sentence and corrected it, rather than further polluting this post with a plethora of parentheses))) for any info on cool pups.

And just to add some depth to this post, here's a quotation I like: "We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane". –Kurt Vonnegut


p.s. if you don't remember, Bebop is the warthog, Rocksteady is the rhino.

I've spent long enough thinking about what the first line on this post would be and I've decided that this very sentence will be it.

Now that that's out of the way... Our story begins one pleasant evening in the SLC valley. The air is warm, the stadium lights are warm, and my temper is warm as Liz and I wait in the slowest moving line ever assembled by creatures other than the sloth, snail, chameleon, and turtle (and I guess starfish, too) to get our tickets for the match between Real Salt Lake and the LA Galaxy. To make a long line story short (mostly 'cause I don't want to remind myself about it) we finally got our tickets in time to see the second half of the game. It was my first time in the new Rio Tinto Stadium and Liz's first RSL game. We were joined by friends Clint and Cassie. It was a real slobberknocker of a game with 3 goals scored in the last 5 minutes. RSL games are pretty fun. If you have never been to one I would suggest experiencing it at least once. I think it is pretty unique that we have our own MLS team in Utah with their own stadium. So go support it, eh.

Speaking of turtles, a tortoise is a similar creature. And a creature I enjoy finding in the wild. Liz and I took a trip to St. George last week to hang out with my family before we move to Wyoming. You bet your bottom dollar we went out into the desert for a tortoise hunt (I would've called it a gila hunt if we would've found one but of course we didn't since gila's don't exist). We got to see three timid torts traipsing tepidly through tumbleweeds.Like always, we made sure to leave 'em be as to avoid the $10,000 fine for tampering with them. They did pose for some close-ups, though.

One night we joined my family and went to Sand Cove for picnickin' and kayaking. The sunset was superb and the rolls soaked in honey-butter.I really dig this picture of my dad out kayaking below the setting sun.

Our last day in Southern Utah was spent in Zion National Park. That morning I wanted to take Liz up to Kolob and show her the view and the condors. Though we saw but one condor from a distance the view was still there in all its sweet majesty. Feast your eyes on this landscape (although the photo does it nary a droplet of justice).This is Liz standing on the edge of the cliff where the condors often perch.

And this is me on the hike to the Upper Emerald Pool in Zion.And here we find Liz on the same hike, never suspecting that within the next 20 minutes a squirrel would watch her unwrap a granola bar and then begin a mad attack dash towards her to get a bite (it gave up at the last minute as soon as Liz squealed and jumped (much like a squirrel herself)).

And lastly, but not leastly, is the Richmond Black and White Days Parade (the black and white being a reference to the colors of a cow, NOT a reference to skin color, television sets, or a Michael Jackson hit single). It was the first of a long line of parades that will take place in Cache County this upcoming summer. We hope to attend as many as possible and stash away a hearty supply of Bit-O-Honey's for the harsh winter to come.We got a perfect spot right on one of the turns. It was just us and a family with 3 small children who were easily pushed out of the way so I could get my pick of the candy. Being one of the bigger kids has its advantages.

Until next time, true believers.

Catsup

For those of you who are still alive out there, yes, I am alive, also.
How alive?
Very alive. Alive and wed.
Or is it wedded? Weddever.

Life has been busy.
How busy?

[insert 30 minute break]

So busy that I just left to eat lunch after typing that last question.
But maybe that means more hungry than busy.

[insert 2 minute break for putting laundry into dryer]

Since we last spoke: a lot of preparations for the wedding. More preparations for a wedding. Final preparations for a wedding. A wedding. A teacher job fair. A honeymoon. An Open House. An awful lot of applications and researching school districts. A phone call offering me a job. A drive into Wyoming. An arrival in a charming small town. A plan to move to said small town the end of this summer.

Now for details (if I can concentrate over our downstairs neighbor yelling at her cat (a habit she has which happens at 2 in the morning sometimes, followed by banging pots and pans, then a maniacal cackle, followed by a rush of wind and a dark shape flying off into the night sky on a broomstick)). Okay, not totally true and not nice. But that darned cat…

So the wedding was nice. Thank you for coming if you came. If you did not come, that is okay since Logan is a rather distant location for many of you. We understand. It was good to see so much family and so many friends. I hope that we can spend more time with all of you so you can all get to know Liz better. I will post some wedding photos as soon as we get some back. I must say Liz was super cute in her dress and cool yellow shoes.

We did not get to go straight off to a honeymoon destination because I had to stick around for a Utah Teacher Fair at the University of Utah. While we hung around Logan until the teacher fair we went on some adventures. Firstly, we ate at my favorite burger place in the universe. LD’s. I got a pastrami burger (which I am only allowed to get 3 per year so I won’t have a myocardial infarction). Heaven on a plate. The we went up to Bear Lake. Liz loves to throw things into water. And I love that.
On to the teacher fair... Tons of people trying to act like adults (some failing and some were probably born adults, sadly); tons of resumes; several interviews; sore feet; a rumbly tummy; getting sick of asking and answering the same questions; people being impressed by the same things that bored someone else. But I decided then and there that Wyoming was the place where I should try to find a job. We’ll get back to that soon enough.

After the teacher fair we shot down to Moab. We did a bunch of shopping and eating there (these were two of the main themes of our honeymoonin’). The weather was as nice as Mr. Rogers so we wanted to make the most of it. We went into Arches National Park for an afternoon of hiking.

It is fun to see other hikers from all over the world – and to see Liz take a picture for some Hungarians and make them say “cheese” and make me think of how much I hate saying “cheese” and how that was either funny, or mean, or interesting (I can’t decide) that Hungarians come to America expecting to have to say “cheese” when an American takes their photo. Funny how that is the one thing that I go into detail about when there are so many more noteworthy things to write about our time in Moab. Like pizza with HONEY for sauce! I think I’d make a good Winnie the Pooh ‘cause that pizza was lip-and-finger-smacking good.

From Moab we drove down to Durango, Colorado. As we drove, we tried to come up with a name for the Mexican handmade stuffed owl we bought in Moab. We agreed upon H.R. Featherbottom (H.R. = Higgaby Rigby).

I had never really been in Colorado before so my little eyes were taking in the scenery like mad. Durango is a pretty cool place. Not quite as friendly or navigatable as Moab. One thing that stuck out was how dog-friendly the town was. Every other shop had a dog roaming around in it. Sometimes it was a three-legged dog and sometimes it was a dog with booties on its feet. Also intriguing to me was the amount of vintage cruiser bicycles around town.We took a drive several miles out of town to a lake called Lake Vallecito where Liz threw a snowball at my gut. We hung out there for a while and Liz threw rocks through the ice.

After Durango we drove to New Mexico to hang out with Liz’z family and have an Open House. Some people from the ward of Liz’z family graciously offered their home for the occaision. It was wonderfully simple and simply wonderful (as are most moments with Liz at my side). We all drove up to Durango one night to have a Cajun broil at a restaurant there. Crab legs, shrimp, snausages, potatoes, corn on the cobbity… all dumped out right onto the table for the pickin’. I’ll try not to talk about food anymore on this blog.

We returned home and to our jobs (which is never fun after having so much fun free time off) and I got crackin’ on applying for different teaching jobs (which is never fun, period). After a few days of insane stress I got a phone call to set up an interview over the phone with a district in Wyoming.

Two things I hate: interviews and phones.

I was dreading it and I was never expecting that the 7 people sitting around that speaker phone in Wyoming would ask me to sing the National Anthem for them over the phone. But they did. What was I to do? It was one of the top ten most awkward moments in the history of Zach but I got through it and was not at all nervous about anything else they asked after that (how could they top making me sing?) So that interview went weird. BUT… they called back a few days later and offered me the job. WHAT and WHOA?!! I told the lady we wanted to see the location in person before we made a decision. So, just like that, we were on the road to Wyoming that very afternoon.
Wyoming can be really windy and boring. And it was for much of the ride. And there was a storm covering the state and we couldn’t get to where we needed to go so we had to get a hotel for the night. It wasn’t bad besides the Pepsi machine that stole my dollar after I took too long to find that extra 25 cents that it wanted. Stupid Pepsi machine. So I went to the Coke machine. Take that. Yeah, most of the driving was more of a chore than an enjoyment. But then we started getting closer to our destination and the clouds opened up and the wind died down and the antelope frolicked in the fields.We drove through some awesome places. My favorite was the wind river canyon.

We stopped in a place called Thermopolis (sounds like a place from a Superman comic, eh?). Thermopolis is the home of the world’s largest mineral hot spring. We explored it a bit and found a suspension bridge going over the Wind River. Suspension bridges are scary when shaken. But a fun scary.Also, Liz tried to climb this plastic mastadon (I call it a plasticdon) thing at the park.

The place we went to is called Basin. Population: 1,238. I don’t know what to compare it to. It is very small. But not spread out. It has the feel of being in a normal neighborhood – houses all near each other. There are larger, but still not large, towns nearby. It is about an hour east of Cody. There are big mountains to the east chalk-a-block full of lakes and creatures and adventures and there is a big river running by the town. We got there after dark so we had to get a hotel there. Surprisingly they DID have a hotel and it was super cheap so we didn’t even stop to think about what the rooms would be like and whether or not the rooms would have ancient monsters for heaters that would make un-heater-like sounds all night long and make me think there was a full-grown crocodile groaning under bed.The culprit.


The next morning we were shown the town and the schools I would be working at (Elementary and Middle). The student population of the entire district is 329. This place is really small, remember. Liz came along with me. To make a long story short, we really were taken with the place and felt really good about it. I feel like I have to sale it to make it sound appealing (because it does seem like a crazy move to a small town in the middle of nowhere). The bottom line is that we have a good feeling about it and it is in a pretty cool location. There are fun places all around it that we can go to. We don’t plan on staying there forever. It would be hard to be away from family and friends for a long time.
Here are some pictures of the places we could explore in the Big Horn Mountains.




We are way excited to explore the mountains up there and we will be somewhat close to Yellowstone so we hope people will want to come up and have some adventures with us (but we don't expet any of you to since it is even further away than Logan). We want to hang out a bunch this summer with everyone before we move so let's get some fun stuff planned.

I can't lie, I am really tired of sitting in front of my computer catching up my blog. I want to be finished with this post.

So I will be.

Respite

Can I brag about Liz for a moment?
Well, after our New Mexico trip I started looking around Logan for a job to last me a few months until I can get a teaching position. I was getting turned down left and right for jobs that a trained ape could do. I have not been so frustrated with anything for as long as I can remember. I was feeling hopeless and so stressed out since our marriage is coming up (March 14 in Logan if you did not know) and I ought to be employed and earning/saving money. I was a complete wreck. One afternoon Liz suddenly took my hand and told me to get ready. I had absolutely nothing else to do so I got ready and she started driving me somehwere. Further and further north we went. Into Idaho and out of my blues. She knew I needed to get my mind away from all the stresses of being unemployed.
One thing I love about Liz is that she knows about lots of cool hidden spots. A peculiar ice cave was one of the stops we made on our drive alive into the superunknown (Soundgarden reference, anybody...anybody?). We didn't have a flashlight to explore the vast cavern of doom doubtless caked with graffiti and booze cans. Does anybody know about the Ukranians who lived underground in hiding for months and months during WWII? Does anybody remember Jed Rudd's naked mole rat t-shirt in high school? Just some questions I thought of while daydreaming about living in a cave. Our destination was Soda Springs, Idaho. If you haven't heard of Soda Springs, then the government is doing a good job. In Soda Springs is a natural geyser that spews a gush of steamy mineral-rich water nigh unto 70 feet in the air. The power of the geyser has been harnessed and engineered to go off every hour on-the-hour. Oh, the government comment... the fountain was stealing thunder (and by thunder I mean tourists) from faithful ol' Old Faithful so the government (and I am using the word quite ambiguously, I mean to say some governmental agency of sorts) quelled, by way of quashing, the hype of Soda Springs by purporting that it sprayed out raw sewage and brussel sprouts and it has since become a lesser spot on the map.
So some of that was a lie and a lot of it was skewed in my fickle memory. I shouldn't have said anything at all. Just that we went there and it was super cool. And I love Lizbeth for kidnapping me from Old Man Trouble and taking me there.You know what else is super cool? Some of you may remember my attempt to document 11-11, 11:11:11 on my digital watch but my camera wouldn't focus. Well, here's the next best thing (if you're into this kind of thing (which you probably aren't)). But I consider it a historic event of sorts. The photo below could have been taken at only two different times that day meaning that just 1 in every 15,768,000 seconds out of each year will provide this unique occurrence. Think of this, the National Society of Photography Studies reported in the year 2007 alone 1,104 out of 1 billion pictures taken were of alleged UFOs. So statistically speaking, if you were to point your camera into the night sky and take a photograph every second for 15,768,000 seconds, you would capture 17.4 UFO sightings. So you are 17.4 times more likely to photograph a UFO then you are to capture what I have captured below.
You are welcome, humanity.

Yes, I lied again. But you can do the math. I think I at least got that right. But maybe I’m lying again. Or am I? Just stop it, Zach.

Oh, and my birthday was on MLK Day so the Government (there I go using that word again) cancelled school so everyone could come to my party. Yes, of course we ate pizza. And Liz got me an awesome surprise gift. This is further proof of how cool she is. If any of you have seen the movie ‘RAD’ you know how much you’ve wanted a red “Rad Racing” shirt ever since you saw them being sold at Helltrack. Well, my friends, I am now the proud owner of a “Rad Racing” t-shirt. So Liz’s donation will help fund Cru Jones and his independent BMX Team (now featuring Bart Taylor) to trump the corporate racing competition. Hooray for my shirt!

And lastly, I recently found a job at a treatment center called Catalyst in Brigham City. I am a mentor and guitar teacher. I’ve loved it so far.