Wandering Browns

Thinking back on 2011, I think it was a pretty ho-hum year. For the 2 years Austin and I have been married, we have pretty much kept to a hectic, student schedule. We registered for classes , paid tuition, looked at eachother's schedules and realized we would never see each other. This year, I left home at 5:30 am most mornings to make it to my 7:00 am classes, then stayed up in Salt Lake most of the day to go to work from 4-7. Austin added teaching Italian to his already crazy homework load, and spent at least 5-9 hours/night doing homework while I took care of everything else (I didn't have that much homework). Austin took summer off to regroup for his final year of school, and I completed an awesome internship. All in all, it was just another year in school, getting us closer to our goals, but not necessarily an exciting year of change. Contrast that to 2012! I just finished my last academic semester. On January 2nd, I will start my first of 2 8-week internships leading ...

Sorry if I confused anyone with taking down my prior post about changes happening in our family. I wrote the post, and posted it, and then Austin asked me to take it down because it was not a for sure thing yet. So... without further adieu.... AUSTIN GOT A JOB! I am SO excited for him. It is for UOP, a division of Honeywell and he starts in mid-June. They are based in Des Plaines, IL which is a suburb of Chicago just north of the airport. He will eventually be helping groups around the world start oil refineries by taking them through the planning process, building process, and finally handing the working refinery off to the crew who will be permanently working there. First, though, we are moving to Chicago, where Austin will undergo 2 years of training in order to do this job. After that, we will put all of our belongings (except a few suitcases) in storage, and the company pays for our family to travel to random places all over the world. Assignments are anywhere from a couple week...

I thought my weed stick (at right) looked like a decoration one might spray paint silver. Austin thought it was lame.  Austin has this really annoying, but slightly adorable habit of rhyming words all the time, thus the post title. I have enjoyed my fall hiking this year. Austin and I went to Deer Creek over Labor Day and had a great time walking around the lake, which compared to Timp, was not really a hike at all, but merely a stroll. We each adopted a weed stick that we used to hit each other with. Austin's was like 7 ft tall until I accidentally broke it. It was a beautiful day. On literally the last weekend before Timp was again covered in snow for the year, my little brother Gregory and I, along with a group of his friends, attempted to hike Mt. Timpanogos. We started from the Aspen Grove trailhead at around midnight. Unfortunately, we made a wrong turn and ended up 2.5 miles off the trail. We realized this when we stumbled into a parking lot at around 2:00. We were ...

Many things have happened since my last post... We hiked 2 mountains over 14,000 ft. in Colorado in less than 7 hours. Before... the trailhead was at approx. 11,000 ft.  The mountains we were about to climb. We climbed Gray's on the L, hiked down the saddle and back up to Torrey's on the R We had a fabulous time, although Austin was disappointed I wanted to just get to the top of the mountain and go back down. I was very cold at the top and didn't want to spend a ton of time up there. On the way back to Denver, we came across a hitchhiker who got stuck in a mudhole with his family while camping and needed help. He was from the Czech Republic and had gone on SOOO many outdoor adventures with his wife. It was determined we would not be able to help him with our little Jeep, but we gave him a ride to his house so that he could get a truck to get him unstuck. At the top of Grays My internship ended August 9th. I was so thankful to be able to have suc...

Yesterday we decided to get out of the house and go to the Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster, CO. It is an invertebrate zoo, so along with butterflies there were other cool bugs and spiders! I think we were one of about 3 couples we saw the whole time that weren't there with their little children. First, we went into a room with lots of little cages with different bugs. They had like 20 different kinds of tarantulas! Most of them are from Brasil. I held Rosie the Tarantula and got a sticker afterwards to prove it. My favorite, however, were the camouflage bugs because it took a long time of staring at the cage to figure out where they were. There was a bug that looked like a half dying leaf. That one was the trickiest. Next we went into the actual butterfly pavilion, which looked like a mini tropical rainforest. It was very hot and humid in there because most of the butterflies live in humid climates. There were butterflies flying around ALL OVER THE PLACE. It was like a litt...

Aquathlon= 1 mile swim, 5k run. This was the qualifier for the Aquathlon World Championships in Beijing, China. I am not going because we are poor and the visa alone costs several hundred dollars. Maybe another year when it's a country that is easier to get into. Before anyone thinks I'm bragging, this is what I really think about winning the Aquathlon National Championship in the age group 19-24. For one thing, I KNOW there are AT LEAST 200 collegiate swimmers that could have beaten me  in the race this weekend. The problem is, no one knew about it. If I hadn't been looking for an aquathlon to do in Colorado for summer 2011, I would not have been in this race. But, I found it and signed up, and so did 4 others girls in my age group. Luckily for me, none of them were swimmers, and only 1 was a runner. Go figure. Here is what went down this weekend: Friday, May 20th, 5:30 pm. We learn that the original aquathlon plan has been scrapped. The reservoir where the swim was g...

On May 7th, Austin and I moved most of our stuff into a storage unit, and took some of our clothes and our computers with us to Arvada, CO to live with Austin's parents for the summer. You could say that we just moved home for the free rent, but I thought it would be nice for Austin's parents to have him around since I have been stealing him away for several years now and they haven't really gotten to spend much time with him since his mission which began in May of 2007.  I have an internship with Alpha Rehab in Broomfield, CO for physical therapy, but Austin does not have anything yet, although there are some job opportunities that look promising for him.  The original caption for this picture was "Arvada is an ideal Colorado community" We have spent the past few weeks "working" for Austin's grandparents. It took Austin 2 weeks to paint their textured wood fence, due to power washing, health problems,  inclement weather, and finally grandpa mak...