BOOTY CALL!

Tad sent home some pictures as an update. We scanned and posted them here for your viewing pleasure. We included his original comments for each picture.

Elder and sister Walker Quorum of the 70.

I just can't stop eating. Wait, who's that fat guy? Oh it's me. I'll get it down.

The ripping of the pants! First day in the new area (Barton Creek/Lake Travis) Booty Call!!!!

Conquering the Mountain. Surprisingly no injuries either.

My family in San Antonio. Greg, Jouline, Me, Justin, Steve Thurgood!

Crossing the Flooded road. good times. this road could be flooded 4 times more than it is now on a good rain.

Look at that intense sewing. The concentration!!! I didn't ruin them either.

Top of Utah

I am officially a marathon finisher!!!! And as my teacher, who has run many marathons says, "Once you have run a marathon, you can do anything." Ok, down to the details. The first 18 miles went really well and were quite fun. The canyon was beautiful because the trees had started changing colors and there was a little river. Then the last 5 miles helped me realize why this marathon is a once in a lifetime deal. I thought that my body may fall apart about mile 23. And then heaven smiled down on me and a lady was standing there handing out Swedish fish. I almost cried when I saw them and wanted to take the entire bowl with me. Upon nearing the 26 mile marker, I remembered the .2 miles that I had left. Why couldn't it just have been 26 miles. Anyway, the top picture is of me sprinting to the finish-yeah, I don't look like I am sprinting, but Carl Lewis would have been left in my dust. I finished and promptly drank tons of Gatorade and water and ate an ice cream sandwich. Two girls from my program came up and they are Annah and Megan. They cheered me in, which was really nice. And, just for the record, that isn't sweat, it's water. I kept dousing myself to keep myself moving. I ended up running the whole thing and kept about 10 minute miles. My official time was 4hours 32 min. And I was only 1hour 40 min. behind the leader-Maybe I will try to beat her next year-Maybe not!! In the Filly(fatty marathon runner category) I finished 27th out of 109 people! I wish that I could up load the picture of my medal, which I know you all are waiting to see, but I don't have a computer cable, so I will do it later-Promise!!

Summer Lovin Had Me a Blast

Well, this summer was filled with lots of good times. Here's just a few highlights. Connie brought me down to Manti for my first Manti Pageant experience. We drove down and had a little picnic before enjoying the show.

We did lots of fun stuff with friends and family. One night we went on this huge scavenger hunt with 11 other couples. The girls put their names in a hat to be drawn by the guys to determine who would go with who. Connie's name was obviously left out of the drawing. So we went with Con's sister Corinne and her date. Here's a picture of us in Maceys holding our favorite candybar. The four of us thought we were going so fast, and starting talking about how bad we'd feel for the team that comes in last. Well, as it turns out, we were dead last by a long shot.


Then of course there was that magical day on July 2nd. Connie made my favorite cake/pie (whopper baby)! This was at the end of a marvelous day which started with us getting engaged. Here is one of the few pictures we have together where Connie's wearing her ring. Since she forgot it for our engagement pictures, we really don't have that many together with it.

Lori and Mother can back me up when I say that Con's Ma is a little crazy, though I'm sure they have no idea just how crazy fun she can be.
So she had the idea to set up this huge slip n slide. How cool is that. So we all had a blast flying down the hill. Her mom was probably the next best, behind me of course. Connie started to get the hang of it after a while, and as you can see was having a blast.
As most of you know I took the job at the golf course for the summer. Though I wasn't able to go until my test was over, we definitely took advantage of the free golf after that. As you can see I had the hottest caddie on the course, and after a while she even started recommending clubs. Con's favorite part was driving the cart, but would play the par 3's with me.
For my last day of work I woke up and walked outside to find this written on my sidewalk. Just a little example of the cute little reminders she'd give me throughout the summer. That sidewalk chalk ended up staying there for weeks to follow.

And of course what would a summer be without our yearly hike up to Stewart Falls. This year we went with her mother, cousin, sister, and friend. We did a lot of biking, hiking, park playing, and what not with her fam. Though it seemed to breeze by more quickly than ever, it's now so nice to know that a few months from now we'll be together forever.

We also got to go wakeboarding one afternoon. Con didn't try it, but took some cool video of me wipe'n out. Check it out if you haven't.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HabwLB7DJK0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0bRzHXQ-KM

Getting our GOLF on!

Last week for date night, we randomly decided to play putt putt. I found a relatively cheap course nearby, so we drove out. Well, we found out why it was so cheap...the course was a joke! The greens were all curling up at the edges and there was no castle or waterfall or bridge or anything! It was big fat lame. BUT, instead of calling it quits, we decided to buy a bucket of balls and hit the driving range...that's when things got interesting....
I had never actually hit a golf ball for real before and it had been several years since Preston had gone, so we were both lookin like pros, as you can imagine. First we chose a spot, under a wooden porch type thing, because we wanted to be away from the other golfers (so as not to show them up, of course). But this spot proved to be a little dangerous...after a couple balls ricocheted off the beams and back at our heads, we decided to move out into the open. Preston had some great hits and I basically made a fool of myself - A successful date night!

It's official!

We were in the meat section of Meijer, when Preston got the crazy idea to try making a pot roast. I had never made one before so I called my parents for advice on what other items needed to be purchased. After my dad started mentioning meat thermometers and how to cook it in the oven and how we shouldn't add
anything to a rib eye roast and how what we really wanted was an english roast; and after I had asked two different meijer workers where to find an english roast, we finally just decided to get potatos, carrots, and onions and hope for the best! WE got a nice rib eye roast on sale for 40% off because it was "to be used" by the next day. I found a recipe online for potroast in the crockpot and the rest is history folks.
Midway through the meal Preston says, "Wow, our first pot roast in a crockpot. We're officially married!" We overcooked it a little, but it was delicious Tuesday night, as well as last night, and I'm sure it'll be just as good tonight! Gotta love meals that last 3 days! ***I'm not trying to overshadow lori's post, but I just posted this on our blog and though ya'll might enjoy knowing what kind of crazy stuff is going on in Warren!

Guyana, Barbados, Puerto Rico and yes I'm crazy!

Ok, I love to see pictures more than read stuff, so this is gonna be tons of pics. This is me with the last group of youth that I helped trained to be HIV/AIDS peer educators. It was a very diverse group.

This is me and Matthias in Lethem. He helped by biking me to different houses to that I could administer a survey to the youth in this hinterland region. This region has Amerindins-indiginous people- and they are so kind! Lethem is right on the boarder of Brazil and so I crossed into Brazil for an afternoon to eat some beef on a stick and drink some Guarana.

These are some of my soccer boys. I would play soccer with neighborhood kids most nights after work, that is, if the field wasn't flooded from all the rain. They were always happy to see me cause I brought the ball-yes, I brought a soccer ball to Guayana. Once a PE teacher, always a PE teacher.

These last two fotos in Guyana are my favorites! Every Saturday they would have baptisms at the chapel. It was a little crazy at first to see them get baptized in chocolate brown water(which is how all the water in Guyana is), but very special and powerful!

This is a photo with a few of the kids in the primary which I taught for 3 weeks because the primary president had gone inactive. I had 17 kids, ranging from ages 2-12, for 2 hours. To make this more of an adventure, 3 were recently baptized and 12 were there because their parents were investigating the church. It was crazy town, but behaved pretty well because I promised them each two cookies. Oh, the power of a cookie!

I met my friend Megan in Barbados and just did it up for 3 days. We went on a Catameran cruise to swim with the sea turtles and fish. Then we went all over the island, at flying fish, Marlin, King Fish and Tuna. All were amazing!

One the way home, I had an 8 hour lay over in Puerto Rico. We all know me, and I couldn't stay in the airport. So, I went to see San Juan-the capital city. It was fun to run past the old fort, cathedral and then hit the beach before I was back to the airport. Now I am back in Provo and enjoying alittle golf with Taki.

Looks like we made it!

(a little barry for any of you who caught it...)

Well, we are now in the great city of Warren Michigan! We've had some struggles and ups and downs, but alas, we are here! Mom was a HUGE help in the process. She came out to help us clean (she basically cleaned the entire house-literally). While preston studied like mad for the boards. He looked a little crazy before he left and even sillier when he was finished. The good news is, it's over! We still haven't gotten the scores yet, we'll keep you posted on how he did.

Then, we took our Fabulous trip to Santa Fe NM courtesy of Bob Barker! It really was just what we needed, a nice relaxing get away. We basically did nothing the whole time. We were stuck at the resort, miles from civilization without a car - but it was actually perfect because we just wanted to be lazy! The trip there was a little crazy. We were on this DINKY plane, not only was it a rocky ride, but it also didn't have a bathroom (which nobody told me!). So it was an interesting flight, but we made it there. Our homey Casita was really nice, with a fireplace and everything (not that we ever used it, because it was blazin hot the whole time). We mostly just chilled in our room, layed by the pool, and read books. We did rent a car one day, from this shack of a place, to get food and explore the city. We went to the main plaza area, which was nothing but restaurants and stores and street venders. It was really neat. We bought some delicious grilled corn and I found a purse made out of candy wrappers, like the gum chains lori and I use to make, and it was selling for 180 bucks!

We looked for a cheap mexican place on the way home and stumbled upon Los Potrillos!
(check out the big barrels of juice in the background, they were just laddeling out cups from these suckers. It was pretty ghetto). We tried a cactus dish and enjoyed some delicious fajitas.

The highlight for me was eating at the onsight restaurant the "Blue Heron" for our one paid for meal on Bob. It was really delicious and REALLY expensive. But they paid for everything. We got an apetizer of delicious chicken spring rolls. Our waiter also kept bringing us out delicious mint, ginger, lime drinks. There was also a delightful live jazz group playing (which you may or may not be able to see in this picutre). The portions were small (you should have seen Preston's steak! It was no bigger than my fist). But everything was delicious, including our deserts! Yes that's plural, we EACH got one! We joked because our 20 dollar tip was more than we would normally pay for an entire meal. It was a fun night.

We also went on a short hike to watch the sunset over Santa Fe. We sat on these big water tower thingys, which kind of made me feel like a delinquent, but the view was much better.

We arrived home and were thrown back into the chaos of the move. Within the first 3 hours of our trip we stopped to get gas and I noticed that there were barely shreds of a tire on our trailer. One had completely blown. We called to get roadside service, which took about 3 hours to get to us. The guy was able to fix it real fast, but it put us way behind schedule. Preston was a little tense at first, especially chugging through the rockies at night I wasn't sure that we'd make it up this incline); but once he was comfortable, he was rockin out to the music and we had ourselves a good ol' roadtrip across the country.

We were welcomed into michigan by this glorious sign and some of the fam! It was so great to have the help moving and to see everyone! WIth all the chaos of moving in and trying to find a place to lock up the trailer, we forgot to pick up a shower curtain, so sunday morning we had to use a little creativity!