Hesitation Stops Here - Living Life, And Recording It

"Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age."

Ernest Hemingway

I've decided it's time to stop hesitating.  Time to start a blog because I've felt I should.  As I observed this summer at work as I taught crafts to people of all ages at a resort, children are always more willing to act freely and according to their own desires as opposed to adults who are often afraid to act for fear of ridicule or doing a "sub-par" job with their craft.  

I want to recapture that piece of imagination and perception of life that I expressed quite a bit easier as a child, which has become more suppressed over the years.  I think that may have been partially situationa and soceitally induced, but it was definitely also my own choice.  I want to flip the ratio that Ernest Hemingway stated since my name is now indeed Risk.  I'm pretty ready to take the kinds of small, personal risks that will help me to stretch beyond my comfort zone a bit more.

On the note of how I plan to take a few more personal "risks:" Before my mission, I was very dedicated to writing in my journal on a regular basis and keeping a relatively thorough record of the important occurances in my life.  I took that good habit into my mission expecting that I would write at least once a week my whole mission.  However, I learned on my church mission to the Philippines that sometimes living life can be distracting and tiring enough that it feels like the greater reward comes from just doing, rather than taking the time to do it and then write it all out.  I know the blessings of keeping a life record however, and I feel a blog will help me pay a little more attention to the finer details of what I'm doing in life, and the "why's" and "how's" behind it all.  

For starters, being an adult now, Paul and I are now off on our own. It has been a singularly exciting and novel experience.  There's a different feel to life now, and I very much like it.  I'm going to do a quick recap of some of the fun things that have happened to us over the past couple of weeks.

THE SHORT LIST OF THE PAST TWO WEEKS:

Paul and I were sealed for time and all eternity in the Washington D.C. temple.  Simultaneously we were married legally. I will talk a little more about my feelings about it all in a future post most likely.  Despite the following list however, I haven't ever had a more perfect day or week in my whole life.

Here's some of the more interesting things that were little bloopers and side notes from that day and into the following weeks : 

~ We only barely had enough time to get my five-piece dress on and hair done before we left to go take pictures before the sealing at the temple.  We showed up late by a bit to pictures.

~ The car with all the flowers in it (except for my bouquet which I was holding) was driven off right as we started taking pictures, so Paul didn't have his boutonniere on for about half of the pictures which were taken around the temple grounds. Good thing he had a snazzy pink pocket square to make up for it.

~We were a little late getting into the temple, and then ended up waiting for a while because we weren't fetched on time so we were about 40 minutes late to the ceremony.

~I didn't want to go through all the rigamarole of taking off my dress (a 30 minute process because of all the layers and pieces to it- it was a rental dress) so Paul and I went to the luncheon at Olive Garden dressed in a tux and wedding dress.  We were sure fancy there for Olive Garden.

~We got to the reception about 5 minutes before it was supposed to start, and then promptly lost each other in the chaos of trying to get stuff ready.  Paul had a tad of a sick stomach, a groomsman brought him Pepto Bismol, and some of it ended up spilling on his rental tux.  That resulted in a heroic (and eventually successful) attempt to remove it with water.

~When we left to go to a small historical inn for the night (the Inn at Dawsonville - super cute, I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a quaint place to stay near Charlottesville), we pulled up and expected to be able to find the key since Paul is friends with the owner.  After an unsuccessful search, we saw that we were truly locked out (it was about 11:30 at night or so) and sat on the front steps waiting for things to get sorted out since the owner was out of town.  After about a half hour of waiting a man (kind of a stand-in inkeeper) unlocked the door and apologized saying he didn't know we were coming.  That was a pretty frustrating/entertaining moment of that day considering how drained we were from the day's festivities, but props to us for not getting mad because of it.  

The Inn at Dawsonville and some shots of the room we stayed in.

~There were two really big wolf spiders lurking in the honeymoon cabin and about 15 other ones over the course of the week.  Paul thankfully dispatched of them and tried to save the ones he could by just putting them outside.  I think that's really why women need to have men around - to have a person who has specifically been designated as a "Spider Removal Specialist."  Our honeymoon at Fairystone State Park was awesome though, and it's definitely a place I'd like to go back to in the future.  We also found fairy stones while we were there, which are a specific mineral found in only a few areas in the world which naturally forms in the shape of tiny crosses.  We found some pretty good ones while we were there, and although I don't have pictures of the ones we found walking around here are some examples of what they look like, as well as pictures of the cabin.

The water was right through the trees there - lake front property.

Our very quaint little cabin, inside and out.  The doors had huge awesome latches on them.  This cabin was built in the 1930's.  Probably those big spiders had been there since then.

This was a moonshine still that we discovered at a small town's museum/geneological society (Bassett, VA) right outside of Fairystone.   They actually had this meme with "Got moonshine?"  on top of one of the still barrels. There were a lot of cool displays there, and about half of them were related to the Civil War.  When we first walked in a man with a confederate flag on his hat asked if we were there to find information about our Confederate ancestors. We replied we were "just exploring."

We went hunting for our own fairy stones!

  

The Legend of the Fairystones:

Hundreds of years before Pocahontas father, Chief Powhatan, reined over the land that is now Virginia, fairies dance and played around springs of water with naiads and wood nymphs.  One day an elfin messenger arrived from a city far away and brought news of the death of Christ. When the fairies heard the story of the crucifixion, they wept and as their tears fell upon the ground, they crystallized to form beautiful crosses.  Historic superstitions held that possessing one of these rare stones would protect its owner from illness, accidents, and even warding off a witch’s curse. 

When we left the cabin, I left behind a Book of Mormon with my testimony in it.

~When Paul and I got back to the house, we ate wedding cake for the following three days before we left to drive to Provo. We. Ate. So. Much. Cake.  Definitely had cake for breakfast at least twice.

The chaos of putting on a wedding is evidenced by the mess, but yes, there are three different types of cake in front of Paul.

~ We packed up all our stuff into the Carolla my parents gave me and drove out West.

 Our first stop was in Missouri, but we ended up getting to that first stopping point at about 12:30 am.  This was even more complicated because we had planned to camp the whole way out instead of spending money on a hotel room.  So there we were, exhausted from our first day of travel, pitching a tent until 1:00 am or so.  We were pretty happy to crawl into that little two-man tent once it was set up and fell asleep easily.  I kind of laughed when I first saw it because I had never seen a tent quite like that one, but it ended up fitting us both quite nicely. At probably about 3 am though, Paul and I both woke up to the sound of a pack of coyotes not too far off.  I definitely got a little closer to Paul when we heard that.  When we woke up in the morning, we realized that we were actually camping right next to the Missouri River.  It is quite an impressive sight.  Our campsite was at Cooper's Landing, a small marina that was right beside the river.  

A pretty small tent, but just the right size for two average sized newlyweds.

 A shot of the marina. They do a lot of folk music concerts there apparently.

 We woke up to this sight of the Missouri River in the morning.  There were several boats there similar to the old paddle boat you can kind of see.  Thankfully we were able to pay for much needed showers in the marina that morning.

While Paul was taking a shower, I found this adorable little Manx cat (she just had a little stub of a tail.)  This cat literally laid on my lap purring and rolling around for 20 minutes while I looked out at the Missouri River.  That was a heavenly moment, especially when Paul came out and sat next to me for a bit.

~ I unfortunately received my first ticket ever on this trip.  I was driving through an intersection on a road that had been 65 for a billion miles and I saw a sign saying it had dropped to 55.  I suppose I never saw the sign that said it had dropped again to 45.  I got pulled over and was pretty upset when an Iowa state trooper gave me a ticket for it.  To Paul's eternal credit though, he wasn't mad or upset with me because of it, although we really didn't have the money to spare (hence the camping out instead of staying in hotels, combined with the fact that we really do enjoy camping.)  

No, I didn't take this.  Just a photo from the internet.

~  Lesson learned about desert-esque climates: That night we got to our campsite at about 2 am in Colorado, set up the tent again, and tucked in to sleep.  Paul chivalrously gave me the better foam sleeping mat and the only sleeping bag while he just had a few lighter blankets on top of him to sleep with.  As I tried to sleep, I noticed that I was feeling rather chilled inside the sleeping bag and had curled up into a little ball inside of it.  Not too long thereafter I felt a couple of nudges on my leg - it was Paul. "Hey... can I get in there with you?  It's freezing out here."  It sure enough was, I had my face down in the bag because the temperature had dropped so much from the hot day.  We somehow managed to fit both of us in one sleeping bag with it zipped up all the way.  I'm pretty glad we're small-ish people sometimes... it was like one of those emergency survival shows, since we both did indeed feel a lot warmer after that if not a lot more squished.

~ After about thirty hours of driving, we eventually ended up in Provo!  Boy were we excited to see that big "Y" on the mountain as we drove into our college town.  We did our best to unload everything when we arrived midday, then went and picked up stuff from by brother and sister-in-law's house which I had been storing there over the summer.  It took two car trips, but we did it.  That night, we slept on our little foam camping slabs because we still had no furniture.  Fortunately, I had gotten into contact with a few people on Craigslist about a table, chairs, and bed set.  Fetching all the furniture was a whole different matter, however.  It took a lot of Paul's Tetris skills and tine to make it work.  So our second night in the apartment, we fortunately had furniture and a bed to sleep on.  We're pretty thrilled with everything we got, especially at such cheap prices.  The table and chairs were $60 and the bedframe, mattress, end table, dresser, and sheets/pillows were $345.  We're still on the lookout for a lamp or two and a small side table for our kitchen.  We're also getting a free couch, so that is pretty awesome as well.

~ The first meal we cooked in our new home was a pizza from scratch.   We invited over my cousin Rachelle and good friend Deb to eat it with us.  We also had our first real Family Home Evening on Monday, and Paul organized a lesson about finances.  Our activity was watching My Little Pony in bed and eating ice cream.  Best FHE ever.

And now life continues - right now Paul and I are both working and we'll be starting school again at Brigham Young University in a week and a half!  We'll see how often I really post on this blog once school starts, but I hope it's at least mildly entertaining for those of you who know us and may be curious about what's going on in our lives.

Sources:

The Inn at Dawsonville:  http://www.theinnatdawsonville.com/

Fairystone crosses: https://www.etsy.com/listing/236192735/australian-raw-natural-staurolite?ref=market

Cooper's Landing Marina:  http://www.cooperslanding.net/

Police shot: modernsurvivalistblog.com

Ponies: play.google.com