Halloween- BOO!

 These were our costumes if you can call Dave's a costume.  We went to a friends party and I got all dressed up and Dave went in what he was wearing that day already, a Captain Obvious t-shirt.  I guess it works.

 I went as a goth because Dave kept making fun of my Bellatrix Lestrange costume I have worn for the past three years (it might even be four), even though it totally rocks. 

This is Matt and Liz.  She was Amelia Earhart and he was a priest (obviously)

My Beach Fix

Liz and I went to Ontario Lake Beach and put our feet in the water.  We pretended it was the ocean. The beach had real sand =)  That made me happy!

 I have never seen geese on a beach but there they were.  Just a reminder that we were not at the ocean but it was till pretty.

 I loved this shirt so I took a picture.  

 The fisherman would often catch these little trash fish.  They would get in trouble if they threw them back in the water so they just threw them on the pier for the sea gulls to eat. . . kinda gross!  Watch where you step.

 We walked on the pier and there were a lot of people fishing for perch.  My experiences with perch involved a cane pole, worms, and a little pond.  These fishermen were using minos for bait and extra line hooked to the main line so there were two hooks per pole. I have never seen that before.  I got the skinny so if anyone wants to go fishing when they come and visit, I know what to do!

Letchworth. Not your grandmother's park

The title might be a little misleading.  It's not your grandmother's park because, chances are it's been around longer than she has.

Anyway, as it turns out, New York State grows waterfalls, and parks that have waterfalls, like idaho grows potatoes.  We went and experienced the so called "Grand Canyon of the East" this past weekend, and it was so pretty we decided to share pictures with you.  Actually, we figure that you all are starved to see our lovely smiling or smirking faces again, so we've included pictures.  Yes, that's right, pictures.  If you haven't had enough by now, sit back and relax, cause more are coming your way.  I've decided that mostly people will want to see the pictures, because there's not much to say about them, so I'll just let you look without interrupting.

I know I said I wouldn't interrupt, but I just had to.  This bird thingy was flying level with us.  How cool is that?

The clouds were being a little ornery during our trip, so some of these pictures might be a little dark.  Like this last one.  We went with another couple from our ward, the Preslars.  They're a lot of fun, and we've had a good time doing a variety of things with them already.

All in all, Letchworth state park is pretty dang impressive.  Well, I guess we really only saw about a fourthish of the park, really, but everything we saw was really pretty.  Except a nearly empty dam.  Not so pretty.  I mean, it didn't even warrant a picture.  But other than that, pretty awesome stuff.  Yep.  And that's all I have to say about that.

Bartoq Comes to Visit

So I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth, minding my own business, when I looked to my left and baboom!  There was a bat.  I guess he knew Halloween was coming and decided to provide some natural decorations. 

It is a day later and he is still hanging out, pardon the pun =)  Hopefully he does not die between the screens because that would be really fun to try and get out.  "I'd give her a ha! and a hi-ya! and a whooooo-ah! And I'd kick her sir"

A Weekend at Bern. . . Rochester

This is my handsome husband.  He did his hair and got all cute for me for when I came home from spending two weeks with Sarah.  Isn't he adorable!

Weekend In Rochester

Well, it turns out that we live in a beautiful city.  We never knew!

We went on a small adventure this past weekend.  It was decided that we were boring, and we needed to get out and see things, so we decided we would go and look at one of the things on our list.

Rochester has what are called the falls.  Yes, they ARE waterfalls.  Surprise!  There are two of them, named the upper and lower falls.  First on our stop was the upper fall, which was closer to us.  The Genesee River is odd in that it flows from south to north, so the upper fall is actually further south.  My mind had some serious issues coping with a north flowing river - I felt like the world was upside down.

When we arrived at downtown Rochester, we were greeted with an eery silence.  Mostly silence.  The buildings are beautiful, many with roman/greek influence, but downtown goes dead during the weekend when it's chilly out.  There were few, quite literally a few, cars that we encountered on our way once we got into the middle of town.  As we walked about we wondered if we had entered a well developed ghost town, or maybe the apocalypse had happened without anyone telling us.  It was almost a relief to see another couple out sightseeing.  One plus of this oddity was that we got free parking!  Unfortunately, we didn't get any fake money with  it.

Here's a couple of my favorite pictures from the Upper Falls area.  They have a museum (closed) and some nice looking doors.  Melissa has a thing for doors, that I still don't quite understand.  Anyway, here's a couple of pictures:

 You probably can't tell from this picture, or any of the others that I'll put on here, that Melissa has lost some weight, but she has!  She's been doing some pretty awesome exercising, working out often twice a day.  She stubbornly refuses to weigh herself, though, so we don't know how much she's lost.

It turns out I've lost a little too, so we're feeling pretty good about ourselves and our health these days.

This door on the left here goes into the museum.  Pretty door, eh?  And the girl in front of it isn't too bad either.

 So, in this picture you can see the upper falls.  It's really pretty, in case you can't tell.  They also use the falls as a hydroelectric dam as well.  Good for them for using stuff and such, though we were a little sad that the area was as developed as it was.

 This is a door to a bar.  I'm showing my true colors!

Even when you're not looking at the falls, the colors here are starting to be pretty impressive.  It's kind of hard to see because we do not have the most awesome cameras in the world, but lots of the trees are turning this really beautiful deep red color.  There's a multitude of bright vibrant oranges and yellows as well, and an occasional lighter red color.  I actually was disappointed until what Melissa tells me was a tree with faded, light red color, but I'm going to call it pink.  I wanted a pink tree, I saw one, so I'm satisfied.  The colors here are gorgeous, though, and I'm pretty sure Lacey would be going out of her mind right now with all of the picture opportunities.

We also went to the so called "Lower Falls."  They are a lot less developed, but Miss and I have agreed that they are also much prettier.  Take a gander,

This is from a bridge that cars travel on that's above the falls.  you can't see it well, but this is a gorge, which means there are not really any easy ways to get next to the falls.  There is some sort of rock mining or soot collecting building next to the falls (a tragedy, we think) that has a road to it, but you're still limited.  To really get close you have to hike down.  We didn't.  Not this time, anyway.

More Lower Falls pictures!

Don't I have a pretty wife?

This last picture here is from down close to the falls looking at the bridge above the fall.  They have some really pretty photo opportunities here.

We also went to a graveyard!  Turns out our neighbors are all really quiet folk.

 

Sorry about the quality of the pictures from here on out.  My camera is still an enigma to me.  You can't really tell from this picture, but this little house of the dead is built into the side of a hill.  They had a lot of those, and a lot of non-hilly houses of the dead in this graveyard.  It was huge.  Really huge.  And some famous people live here.  For example, it turns out that one of our neighbors is Susan B. Anthony.

I'm ashamed to admit we didn't know who she was when we met her here, but we found out later on wikipedia.  Fredrick Douglas is also buried in this same cemetery, but we were worried our Sunday dinner would be burning (graveyard was a Sunday experience) so we left off meeting him for another day.

Here's some more graveyard pictures:  (this is Melissa, the pictures with awesome color were taken with my camera and edited by me, just so you know) ;-)

Which pretty much sums up our weekend.  We're starting to really get into the swing of things here, and really enjoying ourselves.  We're planning on going to a state park this weekend, which is supposed to be "The thing to do" and "the place to go" here in Rochester, so we're pretty excited about that.

Just for fun, here's a picture of where we're living, from the outside.  You can't tell, but we live in a U bend.  And we're in the bottom part of that U.  It actually is really quiet here, as most of the graduate students spend all of their time at school.  Or at least that's what it seems like.

And there's us, for the moment at least.

Pictures of the Abode

Here are some pictures of our lovely apartment.  It's small but we call it home. 

 This is a picture of David just being silly!  He makes a good monk don't you think.

 The kitchen of course.  I was heading out the door to go see Sarah in Michigan when I took these pictures so the house is in a bit of a mess.  That kitchen table was only $10 at a second hand store.

 The living room.  That couch was found on the side of the road for free.  I like that price tag!

And the bathroom.  It is really small but it's not like we are having a dance party in there so it works=)

A New Yellow Abode

Hello All!

The nifty site looking at tracker thing tells me that so far today (and I'm typing this at nine o'clock pm) there has been a total of one page view of my blog.  Cool, huh?  That means that even the internet surfers are giving themselves a break on Sunday.  A great way to go, if you ask me.

I thought I'd write and share a few thoughts I've had since we moved in.  I guess I should first say that class has actually started, but I don't think it really counts until I've actually experienced all of my classes.  I've only gone to two of my classes because of a fortuitous scheduling that makes my Fridays free of classes, so I feel like school hasn't really begun.  More on that later.  But not in this blog.

Anyhooligan,  this post is meant to be more about a few random insights into our living space.  First, everything is hardwood.  Even the ceilings.  Don't ask me how they got it up there.  No, that was an exaggeration.  It is true, however, that excepting the bathroom and kitchen, which have a linoleum like flooring, everything is hardwood.  There are also these odd places that could either be some very serious air vents or places to put muddy boots.  Maybe both, we really don't know.  There appear to be air vents of varying types all around our apartment, so we're not really sure which ones correspond to the actual heating.  Should be fun to find out which are which, especially because we've covered a couple of them for the time being.

Another oddity of our apartment, and probably the most apparent one, is lighting.  There are no light fixtures in the bedroom or the living room.  The kitchen has a normal light, but the bathroom has a light that is just over the mirror.  It has an eery glow about it - it makes me look like I have a lot more wrinkles and some serious sleep deprivation.  It also makes my skin look oily.  I'm thinking of using the mirror and light as my halloween costume-it should be plenty ridiculous.  We did get two plug-in hanging lights put up.  As far as we can tell, either the people who patch the walls after each resident moves out are really good at ceilings or we may be the very first to put holes (and they're big too) in the ceiling.  Hopefully it doesn't give the management a heart attack when they come to patch up the walls and such.

That's not the only home improvement we've done.  Melissa got up some very nice looking curtains for the bedroom and the living room, and I was able to get a shelf set up in the kitchen, specifically for the microwave.

Our apartment really does look nice, though, and very homy feeling.  We've been scouring garage sales, second hand stores, and even some cheap brand new stuff looking for furniture and such to liven the place up, and I think we've done pretty well.  Our set up is pretty standard, and we even have a little study corner that Melissa banishes me to when I'm being bad and need to go to time out.  Our stuff even almost matches.  We had made ourselves a promise that as soon as we were done setting up the apartment we would get coldstone.  Glad to say that we'll be having that adventure tomorrow.

We've had a good time getting to know our ward.  We just had a couple over for dinner (that shows you that we really are pretty much done setting our apartment up) that is just a little less new than we are in the ward, and we had a delightful time with them.  It was fun to make fun of slightly older or more childed couples too.  In any event, I think this ward is going to be a good match for us, and we're excited to get to know more people.

I think that's all we really have to report.  We miss everyone back in Utah, as we're starting to find as things start to calm down into a daily rythm, but we're doing well.  Yep.  Well.