Our Ultimate Life: Field Trip and Catch Up

Well family and friends, lots has been going on! I'll try to briefly give a summary of what's going on.

This weekend I had a field trip my mineralogy class. We took six vans full of students. We combined our class with an applied math class and went to Ririe Reservoir, Swan Valley, the Teton Dam, Driggs, and Mesa Falls. It was ridiculously cold! I wore enough clothes to go snowboarding and I was still shivering. Now that it's over I look back and some things were fun, but for the most part I'm over field trips- especially in the cold! From now on I'll be the one leading field trips when I'm a teacher! So exciting.

The waterfall is undercutting the Mesa Falls tuff, slowly migrating the falls upriver

Precambrian igneous rock

Plagioclase dike interrupting gneiss

2.5 billion year old rock -- orthoclase

Teton Range -- too bad the clouds are covering their magnificence!

Teton Dam; it was build to curate as it filled over two or three years but heavy snow caused it to fill in a matter of months. It was an earth dam which isn't a bad thing, but they used loess for material. These were the main reasons the dam failed.

lithified tuff

pelagic basalt

Justin and I got a new car off Craigslist on Thursday. It's a 2004 Grand Prix with chrome paint. It's a lot like Mom and Dad's blue Grand Prix, but it has more miles and I don't think they're the same year but...it is so nice having a car that has bright lights, automatic transmission, decent tires, etc.

Justin had his first ultimate game on Friday night and won 14-11. It was a close game and it made me happy I'm not playing this semester. It was freezing cold, and I get way too emotionally involved. I was a good cheerleader though! Justin is a really great coach.

Justin's team; he's the one holding the disc

Justin is starting a new business called "Dates to Go." He's created pre-packaged dates that people can order through facebook (for now) and we deliver. It's a really neat idea and for all the places for it to succeed, Rexburg is the place! He's hoping to get things up and running this week so people can start ordering. We're going to advertise a little...we'll see what happens! He's been doing all this on the side as well as his two jobs in Rigby.

Pie in a jar

Build a snowman date

Glow in the dark jar

Prepackaged dates!

Both of us really enjoyed conference. We watched everything on our ipad at home. We made "after Conference goals" the next Monday for FHE. I don't think there was one talk I didn't like. I really liked Elder Ballard's talk with the member missionary challenge. A girl in my ward gave a talk today about her conversion and said the missionaries didn't do any of the word -- her activity days teacher did! Sure the missionaries did the baptizing, but ward members do the activity and reactivation work. We pray for missionary opportunities so we'll see what happens!

Other than that we've had the same things going on -- school and work. I took my second mineralogy test and I'm pretty sure I have to retake it. If you don't pass with 90% or higher you have to retake the test, and for every time you have to retake it, our teacher docks 10%. So for example, if it took me three times to get 100%, I would end up with a 70%.

For one of my classes I've been teaching in the Jr. High. I teach a class with five 7th graders. Our teacher grades our teaching performance and either gives us a 0, 5, or 10. On my first time my teacher gave me a 10! After reviewing my teaching video with him he said I'm leading the class as far as teaching goes, so I'm very motivated by that. He said after I'm done teaching in that classroom, he'll talk to the earth science teacher in the Jr. High and see if he'll let me come in and teach his class a few times before the end of the semester! That would be awesome! I'm really happy that I'm doing so well and that I enjoy teaching. It's very encouraging.

Other than that here are some pictures to catch up a few things that have happened in the past few weeks. I must do better with staying on top of updates!

For my SPED 360 class I had to spend half a day in a wheel chair. This was so hard on our campus since the whole thing is a hill! Going downhill was just as hard as going uphill.