so long 2011, hello 2012!

2011 was by far dominated by ups and downs. i started off the new years with andy's family out in northwestern PA, while my parents packed up the home they had lived in for my whole life and moved to texas. andy and i had started looking at houses in late 2010, and we spent all of 2011 continuing to live in our rented 1890s farmhouse. 

we had some adventures:

Texas (San Antonio & Houston)

Promised Land State Park (PA)

lots of kayaking

river safety patrol

Madison, Wisconsin

Siesta Key, Florida

 We reached some milestones:

100,000 miles on the Echo.

and a car with 7 miles on it.

 We had some setbacks:

my poor echo

a basement full of water

We spent some time with family and lost some family.

I took up a new form of exercise (hot yoga!!).


I had some major work projects come together, ones that i put together all on my own and saw them through to completion. [hey, maybe a promotion in 2012?]


and of course, the most exciting news of all- we got engaged!

maybe you can't tell it from my face, but at this point, i'm still in disbelief.

the last two months of 2011 flew past as we set a wedding date, picked a place for the ceremony/reception, booked a band, ceremony musicians, a photographer, and i bought the dress! 


we spent thanksgiving with andy's family, and christmas with my family (almost all of them!)

just the grandkids (mom's side)

dad's side (minus 3)

earthquake, hurricanes, snowstorms in october... all in all, i'd have to say 2012 was good, even with the pretty rough patch in the middle there. hopefully 2012 will be good all around. i have a feeling that august 18, 2012 will be an especially good day! :)

happy new years!

quick holiday recap and rant

i hope everyone had a wonderful holiday! i was able to spend time with andy and my family this year for christmas. we bounced around from place to place over three days, stayed at a hotel with my parents (even though this was just over an hour from where we live, but all the driving back and forth for 3 days would have been a little crazy and exhausting). it was good to be with family, but it was a sad christmas too. this was our first christmas without poppa, but they still wanted to have it at the house, and as somebody pointed out, that's the only place we've all known for christmas morning for our whole lives (aside from the one year we had it elsewhere when grandma was diagnosed with lung cancer). and this would be the last year we would have it there. so it was a bittersweet day. i do have to realize that i'm pretty lucky and that each christmas that i spend with my family, i do (usually) get to see every single one of my aunts and uncles and first cousins. not a lot of people can say that, so its nice that we can usually catch up at least once a year.

andy started with a cold on the eve of christmas eve. i managed to try to avoid him until he gave me an adorable card for christmas and i had to give him just one kiss on the lips. and then of course, the following evening, i started feeling sick. i can't blame it all on him, because my mom was sick too, and then my dad got it, so it was just a matter of time.

our last holiday event was monday, and then when we got home it was really starting to hit me. i woke up and felt awful on tuesday morning and called out of work. i had a meeting on wednesday that was related to probably the most important project of my career so far. i told my boss i would meet him for the meeting and that's probably all i would work on wednesday. i did make the meeting, even though i felt worse on wednesday than i did on tuesday. i've been going to bed at around 8:30pm every night i've been sick, and just spending all day in bed. aside from our appointment to look at two townhouses on tuesday and to take my mom to visit my dress today.

[here's the rant part] but i have to head in to work tomorrow because if i call out sick tomorrow (the last work day before a holiday), i won't get paid for the holiday on monday. regardless of the fact that i've been sick for three days, with an obviously contagious head cold. so, i'll drag my sorry, sneezy butt out of bed tomorrow morning, and potentially contaminate my officemates. sorry, co-workers, but i'm not going to not get paid. i at least only have to work 6 hours because i've pushed off my two hours left of vacation that i have to use this year until tomorrow (i was going to use it this week for some of the other errands, but now i've been sick). ugh, such a stupid rule. i totally understand that people will take advantage and try to extend their long weekend by being "sick" but obviously that's not the case here. so just sucks for me.

anyway, hope you all have a wonderful new year's celebration--i have a feeling that it will be pretty low-key for us sickly folk. hope you all have a wonderful 2012!

family, kayaking, more kayaking...

so, in my last post, i hinted in what i might be up to in the next few weeks. [family, kayaks, tents, pa state parks, friends, more family, and hopefully lots of use of my camera (since it's been hiding for a while...)]

so family: my parents were BOTH up from texas this past weekend, and i got to see my sister, A., and bro-in-law, C. A was playing in a exhibition/surprise softball game that was to commemorate 30 years of coaching by our high school softball coach (he's still going strong!). they had players from across the years, including several that my sister played with, and that i played with (i only played softball in HS for two years, and never made varsity). [my sister's senior year they were the state champs, A. was the pitcher and hit in the winning run.]

C. likes my DSLR. Well, likes is an understatement. Nearly 150 photos later, we got some shots of the game. Here are some photos that I took (C still has some things to learn about using a DSLR...):

surprise!

A. playing 1st base

After the game, A & C were off on some other adventure, so Andy and I had dinner with my parents at Charlie Brown's (a delicious regional steakhouse chain).

on sunday, andy and i attended a meetup. if you haven't heard of meetup, check it out. you find a group of people in your area that do things you like to do, and you do those things. like hiking, or kayaking, or photography, or moms that love to run with their babies in strollers, etc. you get the point. so we attended a kayaking meetup event. the river was high (which didn't make me happy), and there were some really difficult incidents (everyone is okay), and i can definitely say that my rescue instincts kicked in. Andy was able to paddle upstream (in a high flowing river) and reach people that needed help, i was just able to maintain my position while paddling upstream. Aside from being exhausting and draining, we did get to paddle 19 miles on the delaware.

andy in his kayak [i think i was tilting when i took this-also, the river is not this ugly brown normally]

me, in my kayak. [photo credit r. pace]

work monday, then onto the gym for some pilates and bodypump (maybe not a good idea after the day on the river, but oh well). then work on tuesday, which this was my office for the day:

surveying the canal by kayak

anyway, that's the update so far! hope you have a great 4th of july weekend! :)

hey life, can you wait a minute?

things have been super super busy for me over the past few weeks.

i'm finally over my sinus infection (it took over 3 weeks). we had some rain, which means i had some field work for work, which was fun, just exhausting. nice that i didn't have to drive all the way to the office, not nice that i had to collect samples in the rain, but i at least got to wear my knee boots. my field locations for this project are only about a half hour from my house, rather than the hour that my office is. things are picking up for the season work-wise, other field work (in-kayak surveys of the canal), events, etc. work is just crazy. 


in life, we headed up to the river for a weekend of swiftwater rescue a couple of weeks ago. the river was high, but we went out on patrol with a park ranger in a power boat (which i got to drive, which was CRAAAAZY). luckily, we didn't have to rescue anyone, even though it looked a little hairy at times. we stayed at a super sketchy cabin (which was free, i guess why it was sketchy). i consider myself a girl that can rough it. if it hadn't been pouring, i would have rather pitched a tent than stay in the cabin. made me miss the counselor cabins from my summer camp days...


andy just sent me an article that someone drowned this past weekend in our river that we've joined the patrol for (in a section that we would patrol). He wasn't wearing a life jacket. pretty scary to think about it. 95% of the people that have drowned in that section of the river in the past 31 years were not wearing a life jacket. The others? not wearing their life jackets correctly.


anyway, i volunteered for andy at work yesterday, and we've been out fishing a couple times. other than that i feel like i've been in a blogging slump... my life doesn't seem nearly interesting enough to even write about, especially since i feel like my days off are taken over by laundry and cleaning the house. 


hopefully i'll have something interesting for you, and some pictures! soon!

busy busy busy

life has been busy. it's getting to be my busy season at work (field season and event season all coincide...), and luckily it looks like i'll have some days off with andy this year (every sunday in april! yay!), so we'll be doing more and more things together, which cuts into my bloggy time. but i hope you can all understand.

we just got back from a weekend with his family where he was working, i was volunteering. we were responsible for a fish frying station, and so we and our clothes smelled like fish sticks. it was gross (i don't like the smell of fish... bleh!). 

we went for a 6 mile walk with his parents on sunday, and then drove back home yesterday. it was warm and sunny when we got back, so we decided to go on another 6 mile walk at a park by us (i think my legs hate me).  

but now it's back to work, and i've got a lot on my plate, so i hope you don't miss me too much since i won't get to visit the blogosphere as much!

hope all is well with you!

when it rains, it floods.

i work in the water resources field. meaning that when it rains, the first thing i do when i get to work is look at local rain gauge data and stream flow data (how fast the stream is flowing, how high the water is). and while i don't want to digress about work, i want to tell you that i notice things that most people don't think about. 

i think about flooding and what that really means for streams (erosion, carrying pollution, making drinking water a mess), not just what it means for people.


today, i left the office for a meeting, and we couldn't take our normal route because the road was flooded (we had 2.25 inches of rain yesterday). the main river in our area was back-flooding the smaller streams closer to their confluences. 


after the meeting, we took a look around at some of the other spots nearby, and i couldn't resist this photo. it doesn't do the spot justice, because pretty much the whole athletic field is in the river right now.

i sure hope somebody didn't come out yesterday to make the sign read this warning. i'm pretty sure the road to the field being flooded is self-explanatory.

hope you had a good monday!