"Santa Claus is Coming to Clown"

Haven't been on here in a while. Here's a bit of what's happened in the last month or so . . .

It's now official. Josh became a real lawyer.
It was great to have family come to the swearing in ceremony. Ainslie was especially glad to have a few extra people to play with.Halloween came and went. Ainslie seemed to have pretty mixed emotions about Halloween. She liked running around the house in her costume, and she liked carving her pumpkin. She was particularly proud of the cat face (on the left side). But she really, really didn't like some of the decorations in the stores. When the time for trick or treating finally rolled around, Ainslie told us that she didn't want to go. "Too scary." So we stayed home and watched Halloween episodes of Ainslie's favorite shows. Fall came . . .
and went.
This last week we had a great Thanksgiving. We enjoyed getting together with lots of Janae's family for dinner, but we weren't quite sure what to do with the rest of our evening since we didn't go anywhere else that evening. So we decided to take advantage of the time and decorate the tree that Janae may or may not have put up a week or two ago. Fortunately, Ainslie has been very excited for Christmas for a while now, so she was lots of help. We even hung a few lights outside this year. On Friday evening we decided to join everyone else who has ever heard of Temple Square for a chance to see the lights. We didn't know that Friday was THE day to go see the lights, but we enjoyed spending time with Sue, Adam and Angie. This is the first year in a long, long time that we won't any finals this Christmas season, and we couldn't be happier about it. We have a lot to be thankful for, and we're looking forward to the rest of the holidays.

Bob Dylan

This past Thursday we headed out to California for a quick trip. We flew out Thursday afternoon, and we were home Friday afternoon. Why such a quick trip? Well, Josh's mom had some great tickets . . . To a great concert, and she and Michael asked us to come along. How can you say no to this?Before the show, we had fun hanging out in Hollywood with Jody and Michael, checking out several of the tourist-y things to see around those parts and watching for movie stars. Then we headed over to the Palladium for the show. We had some great seats in the VIP section. We all knew the tickets were good, but we were pretty surprised when Johnny Depp and his entourage walked in and sat down just a few tables away from us. We even got to say "hi" to Mr. Depp at the end of the show.

The concert was amazing. Dylan is still going strong, and he and the band put on a great show. After the concert was done we headed out to haggle with a few vendors on the street for some concert shirts before we found ourselves at Denny's eating some midnight breakfast slams. It was quite the night. And to top things off, when we got back to the hotel we sampled some fantastic Amano chocolates that Josh's mom brought along for the trip.

Great concert. Great chocolate. Great night. But mostly great fun with family.

Saturdays . . .

Since Josh has started working we're feeling like real grown-ups. What do real grown-ups do on Saturdays? Chores, projects, stuff like that. So Janae has been working on things to keep us busy. Her first thought was finding a solution for this:

She did some looking on KSL.com and found this:

Then we borrowed a saw from Sue, and Janae talked Josh into cutting the thing in half:
Now it looks like this:

We like having things tucked away a little more. It's nice. With that out of the way, Janae's moved on to the furniture . . .

But our Saturdays haven't been all work. We still managed to squeeze in some celebrating last week for Josh's birthday. We had fun with family coming over to our house, and as usual in this family, the party continues with more family this weekend.
We were also celebrating because we found out that Josh passed the bar exam. For a combined birthday/bar present, Janae got Josh some chocolates from Chocolatier Blue. Fantastic.

Prince Edward Island

Part of the reason that we wanted to go to Maine was the relatively short distance that it is from Prince Edward Island. Janae is a long-time fan of Anne of Green Gables stories, so she has always wanted to visit the places that served as the inspiration to Lucy Maud Montgomery's stories about Anne. Plus we'd never been to Canada before . . .


We crossed the border much later in the day than we thought we would, so it was getting pretty dark. And it was very foggy as we were driving in. We didn't think about potential currency issues until we hit our first toll booth. We fumbled around looking for something to throw in the bucket, and finally Janae ran over to one of the booths with an attendant to get change. The whole ordeal ended up taking a few minutes. Fortunately there was no traffic that late at night, but we did thoroughly frustrate a Canadian man behind us who yelled at Josh as he switched lanes to go around us, "You could have killed me, eh!"


The fog stuck around for one more day, and we were sad that we didn't really get to see much of St. John, New Brunswick.

St. John sits on the Bay of Fundy, which is home to some of the biggest tide changes in the world. The water fluctuates 28 feet between high and low tide. This change causes a unique phenomenon called the reversing falls on the river as it flows into the bay. We weren't able to see the falls at their peak, but we hear it's pretty impressive. We decided we'd had enough of the fog and headed on towards PEI.
Fortunately things did start to clear up when we got closer to the island. We got some great views as we were going across the Confederation Bridge. We were amazed at the bridge. It's very long (about 8 miles) and very tall (almost 200 ft). Pictures can't do it justice. It's also very expensive - $42.50 - but only on the way back to mainland. You can visit from Prince Edward Island for free, you just can't leave. We were also surprised at how big the island is, and how many beautiful things there were to see as we drove to the place where we were staying. We managed to get lost a few times trying to find our B&B, but were very pleased when we finally made it to the Misty Meadows. Janae picked the place partially because of it's convenient location, and the next morning we headed out to Avonlea village to get a taste of what life was like in the world of Anne of Green Gables. We started out at school . . .

Then we played dress up . . .

Yup, ALL of us played dress up . . .
We made crafts with Josie and co. (characters from the stories) . . .
Drank raspberry cordial (but not until Josh made Janae confirm that it was non-alcoholic) and ate chocolate covered potato chips . . .
And met Ms. Of-Green-Gables herself . . .

That afternoon Hurricane Bill threatened to hit the island. The storm ended up as a near-miss, but we got hit with a lot of wind and a lot of rain. So we ended up spending time in the car looking for lighthouses. We found some pretty good ones . . .
While we were at the Avonlea village we met someone who was born in this lighthouse . . . But Josh's favorite was this one. The storm was really blowing when we found it, but he decided to jump out for a picture anyways.

The weather cleared up the next day, so we headed back to Avonlea to go for a spin on the carriage ride and give the pony ride a try. Ainslie loved them both.

After that we headed over to the real Green Gables house that was the inspiration for the stories. We took a little tour of the house . . .

And we even put Ainslie in the "special backpack" for a stroll through the haunted forest and down lover's lane.

Sadly, we had to leave Prince Edward Island and head back home, but we loved the time that we spent there.