And of course I had to take plenty of pictures of Callie while I was at the wedding.


I had to! ! !










Callie, meet Kali!








...that's close enough!!!!












all wedding-ed out!

Best friends

Although Aaron and I have been friends for ouer entire lives, I only have access to photos from the last 16 or 17 years or so. Who would have thought way back then that we would be where we are now? We've been through a lot. We've had our highs and our lows. We've been near and far, but whenever we get together, it's like no time has passed and we just pick up where we left off. Here are a couple pictures from along our friendship's journey.

(Most of these are photos of photos that have been kept in a shoebox forever)

The first one is the spring of '93maybe? That water was COLD!The second one is right after I got out of the hospital. Aaron's mom took us to Sears and got our pictures taken for our birthdays. Aaron was 16 and I was 17.

The next one is a picture of an old print out of a blown-up picture of a picture taken after an afternoon on the go-karts. Then we have us when we went through the Seattle Temple before our missions.

Fast forward about 12 years to last Saturday when Aaron took Kali and I took Callie for a walk before his sister's wedding.

And some more of getting back to our old shennanigans

Just a picture

This is just a picture of Callie and I all ready for the wedding...

That's all for this Post!

Another event-filled weekend

It has been several years since the entire Smith clan has been all together at the same time under the same roof. This occasion was for Sarah's wedding. I took Friday off from work and went down Thursday night.

It was quite chaotic considering there were nine siblings + their spouses + their kids + 1 foreign exchange student + 1 cousin + his daughter, all trying to get ready at the same time.

Everything turned out well though. The only minor glitch I noticed was that the flower girl (Luke's daughter) refused to throw out the petals from her basket. She cried when Liz picked her up and started spreading the flowers out from the basket for her.

In this picture are Shelli, Emma and you can barely see Sara in the background there



Sara and Uncle Wayne . . .


















The ceremony was performed in Weston's parents' back yard. It was a very nice setting, except it was very hot! We all survived though. The luncheon was excellent. I had to leave before the reception party that night, but everyone was well occupied for the whole afternoon.









The bishop, Sara, Weston, Luke, and... Kyler? I can never remember!!!

The happy family

THE ALLENS

Some more pictures

Emma and Shelli~Mariah~

What a cutie !

And Luke

Sunday driver

There are basically only two times of the year when Cache Valley is truly beautiful. Fortunately, they both come exactly when they are needed the most. The very best time of the year in Logan is after a l-o-o-o-o-o-ng, dreary, frozen, hazy, winter when even the die-hards are about fed up with the snow and ice and the smog that gets trapped under the clouds. The clouds, in turn are trapped here by the mountains surrounding us on all sides, like a layer of dirty gray whipped cream on top of a bowl of jello.

Then, a crocus will pop up almost unnoticed. Then another and another. The tulips and daffodils and other flowers mark the beginning of Spring. At the same time,the tree buds begin to swell and the slightest tinge of green begins to show on the outermost edges of the tree canopies. Finally, the snow begins to retreat and the mountain benches green up. It is that time of year when the earth is fresh, renewed and full of life again.


Sadly this #1 beautiful time of the year seems to get cut short by the onset of the typical Utah summer. The jade green mountainsides turn brown as the grasses dry up in the heat. Bare rock is left exposed as the scorching sun blasts away the snow from the tops of even the highest peaks. In their own way, 'the purple mountains majesty' is beautiful, but still no comparison to the preceding season in my opinion.


This brings us to the second-most beautiful time of year for our big jello bowl. Finally the record-setting temps begin to drop and you have to start wearing a jacket to go out in the evenings. Ever so gradually you notice a hint of pale, yellowish-green in the trees on the mountains. Little patches of stronger yellows and oranges fade in and the reds show up. A close up view reveals light pinks to the darkest purples and every possible shade in between.We're now officially into Fall here in Logan and we're ready for it! I took a drive up in Logan canyon today after church to witness this spectacular transformation. The pictures I got don't even do any justice to the views I saw tonight, but here are a couple anyway. I think a certain 19 month old got her grubby fingerprints on my camera lens somehow, so the clarity just isn't there on these. Oh well.














We also know that this means that ugly gray blanket of clouds will soon be hanging over us before we know it; Blah! Oh well, we might as well enjoy these nice moments while we have them, right?!

Ward Activity

Tonight was our ward activity for September. It was pretty simple, just hotdogs, marshmallows, and hot chocolate at a campsite up in Logan canyon. It's really pretty up there this time of year when the colors are changing. I'll probably take a drive up there tomorrow to get some nice photos.

Talk Like a Pirate Day

No matter how many times I tried, she wouldn't do the same growl on camera as she would when she was off camera! Anyway, here's a clip of her version of a pirate . . .

Don't shop when you're hungry

If I followed that rule, I'd never go grocery shopping. On the other hand, if I never went shopping I'd get more and more hungry, further necessitating the need to go grocery shopping!!

What's a guy to do? Fast food is NOT an option. So I broke down and went to Walmart. (Have I mentioned that they have started building the second SuperWalmart for this valley!? It's less than three miles away from the current one!!! AND we have a Sam's Club in between those two monstrosities, for Pete's sake!!!!) Anyway... I went in there with the intention of just getting a frozen pizza to tide me over and came out over $100 poorer! I will eventually eat it all, I'm just not accustomed to spending so much all at one on food. I also had to fill up my gas tank today which was another good chunk of change.

one good thing that happened today was that I was able to rearrange my ling/bedroom into a much more spacious and function situation thanks to my landlords trading out the queen sized bed for a twin. They had had a queen size in here previous to my tenancy and I've been using that this whole time. with the adition of Callie's crib , it made things quite tight Last night they brought in a twin sized frame with a brand new mattress for me! It really opens up the possiblities for multiple arrangemts of the furnishings. The queen size just didn't allow for very many options in the layout of where it could go. My life must be pretty exciting when I
good night. have to go into detail about the layout of my living area, eh?

I'm falling asleep at my desk, so i better go sleep on my new bed and make sure it works properly.

Busy weekend

Saturday morning, after an adventure at the laundromat, I took Calathea to a park we haven't been to yet. I had seen it before and it looked like a fun place to take a kid. It shouldn't have been a surprise that it was packed with people when we got there! We still had fun, we just had to wait our turn to play on the toys. After a full rotation on the playground equipment, we walked over to the duck pond. It is nice because it doesn't have the big scary geese there that chase you. Just cute little ducks. And it wasn't messy either, a very big plus!

I took Callie to the demolition derby later in the day. She is definitely a Johnson, she loved it! Here's a few pics and videos from the event. After awhile, the loudness and everything got to her so we left early. But was fun while it lasted...

The yellow-green dodge in the middle had a Cummins turbo diesel in it with just a huge pipe coming out of the hood and no muffler! It was a brain rattler! It was actually one of the first to die though : (

Play them all at the same time to get a closer similation of the mayhem was really like! (And pray that your speakers don't blow up!)

And last but not least, She was trying to climb up on my landlords' Harley on her own, so I helped her up there for a minute.

...and another fun video...

new map!

It makes me want to sing that song from Dora the Explorer, but I'll save you the agony of that for now. This new map is bigger, more accurate, and it also will give me a list of the locations that people have visited from. I'll be able to find out where everyone has been checking in on me from. The last part of that sentence doesn't seem like it could be grammatically correct, but that's the only way I can think of saying it at this time. Oh well!

Here's a cute one of Callie from today. She was exhausted today by the time I got there, so she really wasn't interested in being entertained by me. Sarajayne said that she had had a 2 1/2 hour nap this afternoon, but she was still walking around like a zombie half of the time and being fussy and clingy the other half. Enjoy!

The cowgirl boots she has on are being borrowed from a neighbor until she grows out of them, which won't be long at the rate she's going! She loves to walk around on her heels and stomp just to make noise

Our animated choir lady

Stake Conference is in two weeks and I'm in the Preisthood choir that will be singing in the Logan Tabernacle. Our practices are on Sunday nights and it's pretty fun to go just to be around the choir director. She's a little 90 year old lady who stands with her legs far apart and uses her whole body to direct us. Her arms are always flailing around, pointing at everyone to come in here and cutting others off with her other hand. At the same time she's making us raise and lower our volume by raising and lowering her whole body almost. She's pretty feisty and won't hesitate to tell one section, "Oh you're doing it all wrong! 'Earth is not Earrrrth, pronounce it 'UHHHHth!!!!' , 'and you guys over here have to hold this out until I cut you off!!' , etc. It's so entertaining.

I had to work today on Labor Day!! We had a total of four customers from open to close. I got paid time and a half to sit and surf the web all day. I did restock some of the shelves , so I wasn't totally worthless.