I have a canyon bucket list, you might not be surprised to hear. It's divided into technical canyons (that is, needing rappelling gear) and non-technical. The top three canyons on the non-technical list are Buckskin Gulch, Little Wild Horse Canyon, and the Peekaboo-Spooky Gulch loop. We checked Little Wild Horse off earlier this year , and we're planning a trip to Peekaboo and Spooky later this month. That means 2017 is going be a banner year for slot canyons. My #1 canyon, though, for a long, LONG time, has been Buckskin Gulch. The problem is the logistics. It's a 22-mile trip, so backpacking seemed like the way to do it. The problem with THAT is, you have to apply for a permit three months ahead, and you have no control over what the weather and conditions will be like when your permit date rolls around. A couple years ago, me and Michelle tried for a Labor Day trip with a couple friends, and that was a bust because the canyon was full of water (West Rim Trail in Zio...

Back story: Flights to Georgia were cheaper out of Vegas than Salt Lake. Like, a lot cheaper. So we decided to combine a trip to visit my family and Michelle's into one epic vacation. And looking at the map and the calendar, I couldn't help but notice that between us and St. George was a lot of southern Utah just begging to be explored, so I added and added to our agenda. Here's what the full itinerary looks like: Friday, 6/26: Drive to Bryce, hike, stay in Cannonville. Saturday, 6/27: Hike Willis Creek in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, drive to St. George via Zion and the Pine Creek swimming hole. Sunday, 6/28: Hang out with Grandma and Grandpa, aunts, uncles, and cousin Elaina. Monday, 6/29: Drive to Las Vegas, visit great-grandma and great-grandpa, and stay at the Silver Sevens hotel and casino. Tuesday, 6/30: Catch flight at 8:15am to Detroit, lay over for 4 hours, and arrive in Atlanta at 9:07 pm. Pray for us. Wednesday, 7/1-...

As of Saturday afternoon, our family is officially old and established. That's right - we have two cars! The combination of Nate's school and work schedule and my Young Women calling (plus the drudgery of being stranded at home with the kids on 17-hour winter days) convinced us that it was time. After a long and exceedingly grumpifying day of car shopping, we found the one and brought it home. So here it is - our '02 Buick Rendezvous. We went with a crossover because of the good gas mileage and because we're way too young to be driving a minivan around. It's got 7 seats total with the option to fold the two in back down for extra trunk space. It's also a lot roomier than our little Civic. Combine that with the fact that the previous owners forgot to take out their "Christmas Classics" cd, and it was a pretty easy sell.

We might as well start at the beginning our customer service woes - last June and Ogden's Carpets. We have mostly wood floors in our house, but decided that it'd be nice to have some cozy carpeting for our family room, so we picked out our fave and eagerly awaited the installation date. It came, two guys showed up, I gave the one who was in charge the instructions (leave a square of wood uncarpeted around the door so we can still open it). He failed to relay them to his english-speaking-challenged coworker, and we end up with a strip of carpet tacking and a ripped out baseboard where the wood was supposed to be. He pulled out the carpet tacking and left. Lame. So Add and I went in to the store and asked the "customer service" man to fix it. He tossed me a tube of putty, insisted there had only been one worker at our house that day, and sent me out the door. So my mean hubby called him (after talking to his tearful wifey), and he studdered his way through an apology an...

We left to come home from our long, luxurious Thanksgiving break in St. George on Sunday afternoon and didn't quite get there until Monday evening. The holiday traffic was pretty busy the whole way, and at about Santaquin , it slowed down a lot really fast. Nate slammed on the brakes and just barely managed to miss rear-ending the car in front of us, but there was a big pickup truck pulling a trailer behind us and it just couldn't stop in time, so it made a sandwich out of our poor little Civic. Luckily we're all okay, just sore and scraped and bruised, but pretty shaken up. It's really scary when your baby's in the backseat. To make a long story short, Nate took care of business while Beck and I cried, shook a lot, and took Addison first into the backseat of a police car to stay warm and then into an ambulance so they could check us all. Shauna and Doug and Doug's brother Jake came to the rescue and took us and all our stuff back to their house in Provo where N...

This little story is called "Listen to Your Wife." Once upon a time a family of three was traveling down to St. George for Memorial Day weekend. Their car had been experiencing troubles, despite their having forked over the better part of a thousand dollars to fix it just a week earlier. The problem was that one of spark plug boots (the rubber-like silicone thingy that covers the spark plugs) kept popping out, thereby reducing the little Honda Civic from a V4 to like a V0.3. From Salt Lake to Provo, the thing popped out three times, forcing Nate to mutter mild expletives, pull over, and cram the boot back down in its hole. The family finally made it to Provo, and on their way to pick up a friend, Michelle said gently, "Hey, that Sinclair station has an auto shop and it looks pretty empty," to which Nate only grunted menacingly. She continued, "Maybe we should stop and have them check it out." At this point, Nate was thinking, "I am NOT going to pay a ...

Last August while we were living in Boston, we realized that our license plate tags had expired the May before. We then had to jump through an insane number of hoops to get our registration renewed in Utah when the car was in Massachusetts, praying, all the while, that we didn't get a million dollar ticket in the meantime. This year we've kept an eye on things and are aware that the tags expire this month. So we have already taken the car in for inspection and are sending in the paperwork tomorrow. We figured we might as well get some basic maintenance done while it was getting inspected, which included lube oil and filter, new windshield, and new drive and timing belts. Kind of painful to the pocketbook. BUT, thanks to good old Uncle Sam and his fabulous economic stimulus plan, we didn't feel it a bit. In fact, we had a little left over. So with high spirits and a shiny new windshield I drove to my final knitting class that night. Almost to my knitting class, that is. On t...