first of all...

...i want to apologize for the radio silence over here.  i swear i'm really alive.

but, in the words of my home dog, martin lawrence:



"shit just got real."

you see, life sometimes has a way of walking up to you, slapping the shit out of you and waking you the eff up.

i mean, i'm just being honest here.

and while i'm being honest and open here, you should know that this has been an incredibly hard year for me.  i know i'm not really into sharing my feelings here on the ol' bloggy blog, because, well, i'm not really into sharing my feelings in real life.  i'm kind of like a dude in that way.  i like to internalize things and just pretend they will go away eventually.  which, obviously, when you are an adult, that's so far from the truth, it's laughable.

so, i'm going to get down and dirty and share a little with you all because...well...i don't know, because

in june, kyle lost his great-grandfather, who was about 6 months older than my grandfather.  this was a sad time for kyle and his family and i didn't really know how to react, as i had never lost a grandparent before.  all of my great-grandparents were gone before i was born (except one that passed when i was still a baby) and my dad's father passed away before he even met my mom.  while sitting in the middle of the service, i came to the realization that my grandparents weren't going to be around forever.  and that hit me.  hard.  why it took me until the age of 26 to realize that, i'm not sure.  perhaps because i've been blessed to have never lost a grandparent i knew before.

and then, at the beginning of september, just 25 days before our wedding, i lost my maternal grandmother.  she had been sick for quite sometime with some form of dementia or alzheimer's.  i can't even tell you the last time that she recognized me, but it was always a comfort to me that someone was there to keep my grandfather company.  they lived in a home for sometime and have outlived the majority of their friends.

and, because i love pictures...here are a few of my favorite family photos with grandma in them.

 my grandparents on their wedding day.

 beautiful.

 grandma and myself circa 1984.

silly me, my grandfather, the incorrigible flirt, has plenty of friends in the assisted living facility where he lives.  he is more than able to take care of himself and i expect will be around for quite sometime.  i'm sure he misses grandma, but he has a lot to live for.  my grandfather is the best, he is truly my hero, he has always been my hero.  he's 96, still very independent and spunky, loves getting on the computer to email people and has even asked one of my cousins to set him up a facebook account (eek!  he's not on there...yet...)

some more gratuitous family photos...

 so handsome!

hahaha, i just realized how unhappy i look in this photo!  me and gramps circa 1984.

and then, the real kick in the pants was a couple of weeks ago, was when my dad called me and told me his mom was sick and they had taken her to the hospital and placed her on a respirator.  it was a saturday.  he and my mom were going up to see her the following day, which happened to be when we were forecasted to get a huge snowstorm here in kansas.  i told him i wanted to come and see her, but would wait until i heard from them and would come up if they thought she wasn't going to make it.

to make a very long story short, the doctors thought she was doing much better that night, i spoke with my parents that day and they agreed it wasn't a smart move for me to drive to kc with the weather forecast and i stayed put.  they and my brother and one of my cousin's went to see her and she seemed to be doing much better.  i dropped kyle off at the airport for an international flight (only a week long trip) and felt much better about not being able to make the trip.

she passed away the following tuesday.  i have to be honest, that really tore me up inside.  i didn't help that i was left alone here at home (remember, kyle was overseas) and left to my own crazy thoughts.  i beat myself up for days and days about not going up to see her.  would she have recognized me if i had gone?  probably not.  but, i would have felt a million times better than i do now.  the funeral was last wednesday, ironically, the morning after yet another famous kansas snowstorm that dumped 12 inches of snow in wichita.  but, kyle and i trudged through the snow and made it to the funeral.  because there was no way i wasn't going to be there.  not this time.

and a picture of my gorgeous grandmother carpenter on my parents wedding day (omg, my dad is so going to kill me when he sees i put this picture of him on the internet.)  :)

sorry to be such a downer on such a lovely day, but i felt everyone deserved to hear why i have been silent for so long.

i do hope everyone had a great valentine's day!  we kept it low key and enjoyed this:

okay, we didn't watch just frank...but we did watch the jayhawks get their butts handed to them by the one and only wildcats!

happy 150th birthday, kansas!

happy kansas day, everyone!!

to celebrate, i'm showing off a few of my favorite kansan things....

the state flower: sunflower

the state animal: buffalo

source

the state tree: cottonwood

source (in fall, of course!)

the best college: kansas state university

 

and this kansan: kyle

photo by jackie cooper photo

sorry...had to throw that one in there.  i know, i'm so sweet it makes you want to throw up a little.  :)

HAPPY KANSAS DAY, YA'LL*!

 

*no i don't ever say ya'll, but it fits the sentence.  deal with it. 

honeymoon road trip: day 6

day 6 of our road trip was (if i'm totally honest) my most favorite and my least favorite day of the trip.

we woke up early in anticipation of running a few errands and heading up to the grand canyon for hiking.  i had big dreams of hiking down to the bottom and back up in one day.  which, we probably could have done.  it would have been a long trip, but we had been working out prior to the wedding, doing a program here in wichita called "shocker fitness" a group of runners led by the wichita state university track coach.  so we knew we were in good shape.

nature, on the other hand, had other plans in store for us.

on october 6th, 2010 flagstaff, arizona was hit by a series of tornadoes and hail storms at 5:30 in the morning.  FIVE THIRTY IN THE MORNING, PEOPLE!!  what the crap?  arizona, you must be confused, when it storms in kansas, it's always at a decent time when people are awake and doing normal things.  like eating dinner.  duh.  get your stuff together, arizona.

but i digress.

true story: arizona usually gets about four tornadoes a year.  and they got 8 in a day.  and flagstaff isn't really up-to-speed when it comes to tornadoes.  and nothing there is built withstand that sort of wind and weather activity.  at least in this commercial-interior-designer-architectural-nerd-who-happens-to-be-from-kansas girl's humble opinion.  i mean, crap, the week before our wedding, kansas had record breaking hail.  an 8" hail stone fell in wichita that week.  it punched holes in people's roofs.

by the way, i am not making fun of arizona...i'm merely stating that i they aren't prepared for these sorts of things.  for good reason...they don't usually have them.

for example:

source

this amount of damage was done by an EF-2 (some say EF-3) tornado.

so, needless to say, kyle and i were pretty much the only people out and about in flagstaff that morning.  we were all, "ppshhh, just a little bit of rain!" 

we went to the grocery store across the street from the hotel to pick up some lunch.  completely empty.  the manager of the store checked us out.

we went to walmart to pick up some hiking boots for me.  i had brought hiking shoes, but with that much rain we had the forethought to think that JUST MAYBE it might be a little muddy at the canyon.  thank god for that forethought.  i also picked up a waterproof jacket while i was there.  again, thank god for that.

walmart was almost completely empty.

so then i'm all, "hell yes, the canyon is going to be way empty!"

yeah, right.

we drove through lots and lots of tree damaged national forest barely seeing anyone along the way...and pull into the south rim parking lot to see it completely full of people.  and hail that looked like snow.

a very blurry picture of downed trees...sorry.

yup, that's hail.

and the canyon was clouded over.

i'm not exaggerating, you couldn't even see the canyon.

okay, you could kind of see it.....and i admit, it was gorgeous.

we walked around the (brand new) visitor's center and along a few of the rim trails while it rained/sleeted on us and finally just decided to go for it.

we walked about a quarter of a mile down the south kaibab trail and TADA!

we were beneath the clouds!  and you could see for miles and miles!

here's a map from the NPS website i reference above of the trail we hiked:

we went about 2.5 miles down into the canyon and since we had a late start, decided we wouldn't be able to make it down to the river and back before night fall, so we turned around and headed back up.  on the way down we stopped at Ooh Aah Point, to um, oooh and aaah i suppose.  we got a few great shots of both of us there...

oooh

aaahhh...

ooohhh!

and then we stopped again at Cedar Ridge for the ever important potty break and lunch.

 it was raining.  again.

this little guy decided to join us.

 

 

during our lunch (which was rudely interrupted by two of the most annoying children i've ever been around and their equally annoying parents) a park ranger blew past us on her way to camp down in the canyon.  she said she was going to stay down there for a couple of days and then hike back up to the north rim from there.  (the south kaibab trail has a north kaibab trail that goes to the north rim's visitor's center.)  i was in awe.  even though i hate camping, i think i might camp down in the grand canyon, just because that seems pretty bad ass to me.  don't you think?

and now, for the picture heavy portion part of the post...

this was our turn around point.

we were about a half a mile in when we stopped to take this one.  it shows the trail going down the side of the cliff.  it's a switchback trail...can you see the people?!?

definitely one of the best days of the entire trip.

have you ever hiked the grand canyon?  did you love it as much as i did?  how weird do you think we are that we enjoy hiking?  because people ask me if i'm crazy a lot, but i LOVE to hike!

honeymoon road trip: day 5

so after you read my super long rework of day 3 and then day 4, i'm sure you are super excited to read about day 5.  (did i warn you this was an 11 day trip?  i didn't?  worry.)

i'll keep day 5 pretty short for ya...mmmmkkkay?

when wondering around the square on day 4 we saw a bus tour that left from the square and went around the city.  it sounded like a good time to us, so we decided to catch it the next day if we could.

we arrived and asked about the tour, which was apparently completely full.  but not everyone had shown up, so the trolley guy told us to hang around and see if there were some people that didn't make it.

we lucked out and boarded the ABQ trolley with these fun people (and a few more, obviously, that weren't in the picture):

why, yes, we did happen to be the youngest two passengers by about OHHHH, 25 years.  what can you do?

in case you are in the ABQ sometime, take this tour, i promise it is a really great time.

i promised i'd keep it short, so here's a few of my favorite pictures/buildings of the tour:

did you know albuquerque is where a ton of movies are filmed?  i didn't either.  apparently this is tim allen's house in the movie wild hogs.  haven't seen it.  everyone else on the bus had.  does that tell you something about the movie?  :)

i can't find the picture of this that i really loved, but albuquerque is the only place in the whole USA where route 66 crosses route 66.  evidently, a long time ago, one of the mayors tried to reroute route 66 through downtown albuquerque and now there is the "old 66" and the "new 66" and they intersect.

this used to be the high school for the city, but is currently sitting empty.  they guys giving the tour went there to school.  they were probably about 35 or so.  jealous, i would have loved to go to a school that didn't look like a prison in the middle of a wheat field....

i'm not kidding, you wanna see where i went to school?

 

sorry, i'm far too lazy to crop this out right now.  can you see it?  yeah, that's where i went to school....

ps - why are there no images on the internet of my school?  i had to go to street view in google docs to get this.  boring.

and here is the lovely view of across the street.  guess what that is?  yeah, it's a wheat field.

you thought i was kidding, didn't you?

moving on...

this is architect Bart Prince's house.

that. is. awesome.

he bought the lot next to him and this is his studio.

this. is. also. awesome.

alright, enough boring you with pictures from the bus tour...after the tour we had a late lunch and set off on our longest drive of the trip to scotsdale, from albuquerque, new mexico to flagstaff, arizona.

ohmygawd it was a long ass drive.

but i did realize a life long dream of mine when kyle pulled off in winslow, arizona so i could stand on a corner!

what a great husband he is!

and then we drove on and on (and on and on) to flagstaff.  got in SUUUUUUPER late and i slept like a rock.

it was cold.  and raining.  (in case you wondered.)

(did you catch that foreshadowing?  or should i say forecasting?!?)

i crack myself up.