hiking again

Because frolicking around on red rocks is what we do in St. George.

And part of that includes squeezing ourselves through ridiculously narrow slot canyons.

And then the camera battery died.  So I have no pictures of the rest of our hiking antics... for that day anyway.

I went home for Christmas!

It was pretty amazing to experience the wonders of the mainland.  Like friends and family. And hiking and rock climbing and snowboarding and Disneylanding.  Of course, being me, I forgot to take pictures of half of what I did, but here are a few of the first couple days. 

I had a great time catching up with Amy and Amy and Amberly.

And hiking with the family.

Everett and Simon had a blast playing with Josh.

 

And Ruth and I found a rock teeter totter!

dudes, Jesus is the answer

To the age-old question of "what should we put on a billboard to make Vegas seem less like Sin City?"

It's totally working too.

simon's spider

sunrise

Aunu'u is awesome

Aunu'u is a tiny island off the tip of our tiny island.  A group of us headed over because sometimes you just need to get off your usual tiny island and visit another (even smaller) one.  Aunu'u is about 1/2 of a square mile and pretty easy to hike around in a day.  It's also ridiculously beautiful.

Although I think the most important thing to remember about Aunu'u is that when you come to the quicksand lake, you need to step in it.  You should remember to have your children step in it too.  It's the responsible adult thing to do.

Everett cut his foot gallivanting around in the quicksand lake so Keala carried him for a bit.  Simon realized that being carried was a legitimate option so he got in on that too.  Poor Keala had a kid on his shoulders for most of the day.

Again, ridiculously beautiful:

perhaps I need to get out more

Because, yes, I'm blogging about the arrival of an airplane.  I know it's absurd.  But I remembered to take pictures!  And I don't know what to do with them.  A blog post seems like the best answer.

So the biggest airplane in the world came to American Samoa to deliver generators.  There was a lot of airplane talk around ASPA just before its arrival.  Everywhere I went I seemed to hear "I heard it was built to carry a space shuttle!" or "Did you know that it burns X lbs of rubber every time it lands?!"

Naturally, I was curious to see something so big land on our tiny runway.  So I hung out at the end of the runway in order to be directly underneath the beast when it landed.  It was pretty incredible.

tsunami pictures: 2 days after

So the day after the day after the tsunami, people were burning all the piles of trash that had accumulated.  It was a cloudy day anyway, but the smoke coming from the harbor area definitely added a gloomy feel to it all.

This is Josie and her office. The ceiling kind of slid down the wall, which is why it looks like it's about 5 feet high in there.  Her windows were all blown out and most of the furniture that used to be in her office was swept outside or into the main office area.

Most of my files ended up like this: wrapped around trees and bushes outside.  So much for confidentiality.

The front desk was swept outside too, complete with telephone and computer in a tangled mess underneath it.  I just love that David decided to make the most of its new location.

  

About 6 cars, a couple portable generators, and our security guard shack were all pushed behind the building by the force of the wave.  Several of these cars had people in them at the time.  Luckily everyone was fine.