Adrian's Wedding

Right after we got back from the rafting trip we came home, unpacked, re-packed and left again all within about ten hours or so. We headed down to Salt Lake to see my good friend Adrian, from college get married. It was a beautiful day and the bride looked gorgeous. It was fun to see her and I was also really excited to see my friend Rachel who I hadn't seen in a year! It was so good to see her and spend the day just chatting and laughing like the old college days (:


I was very proud of my bargain shopping for our hotel. It was a Hampton Inn that I got for way cheap, but I wanted to still get a nice one. This one looked really nice online and got good reviews, but you still never know. I was very pleasantly surprised when we got there. It was really big and everything looked brand new and way good for the deal I got. Just had to share my proud little moment on this trip.


The night before the wedding, my cousin Stephanie invited us over to her new apartment for dinner. She made a delicious meal and it was so fun to see all my cousins who live in Utah. This is Cole, Amy(my cousin Jordan's wife) and Garrett.


Here are Rachel and I outside the temple. It was SO good to finally see her.


Cameron and I outside the temple


Not sure what we were laughing about here, but I thought it was a cute picture.


The beautiful bride. She looked so happy, and I am so happy for her. Congrats Adrian!


After the wedding and before the luncheon Rachel, Elissa, Cameron and I decided to go take a tour of the conference center. This is on the roof.




The girls

Skelton Family Rafting Trip 2009

This year my family decided to do a white water rafting trip. We went to Riggins, Idaho which is the same place that my dad has been taking the young men rafting for over ten years. Cole and Cameron and my dad had been before, but it was the first time for any of the girls. We had a few minor(ok, pretty major) setbacks to start off the trip with, but in the end we were able to get in two days of rating.

The whole family... So much fun!


Dad, AKA Captain


It rained and was cold the whole first day so we were all stylin' in our ponchos


Cameron and Cole leading the way




My dad devouring a huge burger at our favorite place to eat in Riggins


The owner saw us taking pictures and thought it was so great, so the next day when we came we saw she had put this up on the reader board: Looks so good, tastes so good, Take a picture of it! It was pretty hilarious.


Cameron saw the photographer on the bridge and decided it would be funny to wave.


We also had fun just hanging out in the hotel. It was a really nice hotel that looked out right over the river. It was also kinda nice because there were not many people there so we had a lot of it to ourselves.





Overall it was such a great family trip and even though there were plenty of car problems, I don't think it could have gone much better. I think we are all hoping it will become an annual Skelton vacation.


The family


The real us (:

Lovinger Family Camping Trip 2009

It is a long standing tradition in the Lovinger family to go camping at Glacier National Park each summer. I have now been twice as a new Lovinger and it is tons of fun each time. This year we went about a week after school was out at the end of July. It is a great time to just hang out with the family and get together when we are all living in different states the rest of the year.


The trip got off to a rough start when the suburban broke down about 45 minutes away from camp. Cameron, Sean, Scott and I all went ahead in our car to hurry and set up the tents before it started raining. We were just in time because right as we were finishing it started pouring. Cameron went and picked up his parents and Nicole and Tyler from the car and by the time they came back Sean, Scott and I were all huddled in one tent trying to stay dry. We quickly threw everything in the tents and set up our things to go to bed. Cameron and I walked into our tent to find huge puddles of water everywhere. We thought we could just go to sleep and be fine, but there were drops of water dripping through the top of the tent and onto us. We decided that we would just sleep in our car that night and hopefully the rain would stop soon and we could go back to our tent. The rain didn't stop all night which meant we spent the first night of our trip crammed in the back seat of our car. Here is our nice bed.


We spent lots of time down by the water and skipping rocks was a favorite pastime.




Sorry this is a little blurry, but it had the most people in it. We played lots of games that were way fun as well.


Making homemade ice cream was VERY entertaining


Reading was a big part of this trip as well. Everyone had a book or two they were reading throughout our time there.


The girls making dinner... Very soon there will be another girl to add to the family.


Cameron and I in front of the gorgeous scenery.


The boys tubing


Cameron and his dad after tubing


The soon-to-be grandma and grandpa Lovinger

Cameron's 5-Day Yard Makeover

Hey everyone! This is Cameron. This is my first attempt at all this blog what-not. Hillary thought it was appropriate for me to write about this one since she wasn't even there.

So, on the last day of school as soon as my last final was over I hobbled to the car on my crutches (see last post) and headed to the Greyhound bus station to catch a ride home to Spokane. Hillary still had to work so she stayed home in Rexburg, but because all my jobs are on campus I don't work when school is out. What is normally only a 7 hour drive becomes 11+ hour bus ride when you have to stop for smoke breaks every 1-2 hours. It is worse than having to stop for toddler potty breaks. I think I was one of 5 people out of the almost 100 passengers that would stay on the bus during these little smoking siestas. But thankfully no bus breakdowns so I made it home and Mom and Scottie came to get me at 1 am.

Ok, I will actually get to the yard work now. So when I was home the summer of 2007 I told my parents I wanted to build a waterfall in the backyard. They said fine, but we want you to build these few little walls first. I thought the walls would take me like a week to finish, but I was very wrong. The Great Wall of Lovinger took me that entire summer to finish but I found a new love/hobby in landscaping.

So this summer I was dedicated to build that waterfall, even though I only had a few days. The only other project I had left before it was the fire pit area. Before I got there, while my Mom was gone one weekend the boys did some demolition and tore down the nasty lava rock fire place. We thought it would be a good, kinda sentimental idea to build the fire pit out of that same rock. We decided to make a little bench out of the stone hearth as well. So Tyler headed up putting together the actual pit, I built the wall, and Sean and Scott carried endless wheel barrows of bricks and gravel. After all of hard work, I think it turned out pretty good. We had a fire almost every night for the next week down there. It was perfect!

I think the cherry tree will be a nice addition.


Here is a close up of the lave rock fire pit and the hearth-bench.

We tried to build a little stone love seat in to the wall near the fire pit.

We even built stairs into the wall for more easy access the fire pit area.

Here is a side view.

Now time for the waterfall. I have been taking pictures and taking notes in my mind for how I wanted my waterfall to look for years now. I don't know why, but I have always had a fascination with waterfalls. My mom didn't want an actual pond, so we decided to go for the water feature at the top and waterfall in the middle. The water feature part is concrete cast, which we quickly found out is extremely heavy. The smallest piece I would guess to be around 200 lbs so Sean and I could get it fairly easily. The middle piece was probably near 500 lbs, and Sean and I were able to wheel barrow it over with only skirting death a few times. Now the largest piece was a whole different story. I would bet that monster is near 1000 lbs. Now that might be a slight exaggeration, but it is not far off. Sean and I couldn't even budge it only the two of us. We got Scottie and my Dad to help and we could still barely move it. We had to have all four of us roll it up the hill. It was a bit treacherous.

Once we got the concrete up on top, the only thing left to to was run the electrical wiring. Now did I mention I had never done anything like that before? That was the worst disaster of all. Jon Spear and I played around with it until nearly 1 am that night and it only barely worked. We just happened to have an electrician come by the house the next morning. When he got there he looked at me, at the spliced amateur wiring, back at me and then just shook his head in shame and disgust. He was really nice did give me a few pointers how to fix it.

All in all it turned out awesome. We even got Montana river rock to line the bottom because it reminded us of being at Glacier National Park in Montana. Sadly, I finished it all about noon that day and we had to leave an hour later to go camping at Glacier. I am happy to finally have my waterfall!

Bad timing for an injury

This past week Cameron was playing in his last men's softball game with our ward. He slid into second base on the second to last play of the game to avoid being nailed in the face with the ball that was coming directly at him and this is what happened...



These pictures were taken this morning(4 days after the incident), so it's not hardly swollen at all anymore. You can see he is starting to bruise pretty bad all around his toes and around his ankle. It looks really gross in person.










It happened at about 11pm on Tuesday. Cameron was sure that he could just ice it and take lots of medicine and he would at least be able to walk on it in the morning. He said he was fairly sure it wasn't broken, but that it was the worst sprain he had ever had. Well, the next morning, he could not even get out of bed and couldn't put any weight on it at all. It was SO swollen and looked pretty bad. We decided to both skip our first class and take him to the health center to get it looked at. They did an x-ray and it wasn't broken(luckily), but the doctor said "wow, that is one whopper of a sprain"(awesome). They gave him an air cast and crutches and sent him off to class. I felt bad watching him hobble along to his class, but I had to get to my classes so I couldn't really help him at all. It is starting to feel a little better and he can more and more weight on it each day, but still relies pretty heavily on his crutches for now.

It seemed like horrible timing, happening right as finals are starting and going to Glacier to go camping in a little over a week, AND Cameron and his dad and brothers are all running a half marathon in Mesa Falls in less than a month. I'm not sure if he will be able to run it, but even if he can it is putting quite a damper in his training... oh well, he said people on campus are extra nice to him when they see him on the crutches and total strangers will come ask him if he needs help carrying things or getting the door and stuff. Thanks everyone!

"Fun" Fourth of July Weekend

This past weekend Cameron and I were excited to get a few days off school and work and just go do a few fun things for the holiday. As you can tell by the title of this post, things didn't exactly work out as well as we had planned.
DAY ONE:
We had planned on going canoeing with our friends Collin and Joy on Friday the 3rd. Well, we went canoeing.... it was supposed to be about a two-three hour trip down the river, but ended up being much quicker than that. We got there and sprayed ourselves down with bug spray because the area we were in had TONS of mosquitoes. So after we had been sprayed, we loaded the canoes into the water and got going.

Things went fairly well for the first little bit(minus the fact that I had completely forgotten how to steer and we were going from one side of the river to the other the entire time). As we got going there were more and more mosquitoes and it was getting cloudier and cloudier.

There were two different spots along the way that we had to get out and carry the canoes across the land and put them back into the water. Well, this is obviously easier said than done. We got out of the water fine and the boys hauled the canoes up a big hill, then we got to the other side and needed to put them back in the water. Collin and Joy made a graceful entry into the water, but then we thought we found a less steep place to put our canoe in... long story short(er), I got dumped out of the canoe and straight into the swampy,freezing cold and disgusting water. I was soaked and freezing.

About ten minutes later it started to thunder and lightening so we decided we better get out. We thought "no problem, we will just get out and eat lunch and wait it out". Well when we got out it started to downpour and we were all soaked. We tried to get under cover but everywhere we went had TONS of bugs and I was getting bitten like CRAZY. Well, we quickly jumped back in the canoes and head back to our cars. We were all soaked and I was shivering because I was so cold, but we got back to our apartment safe and sound. It was still a fun mini-trip and we laughed A TON about how it ended up. Thanks guys!

The boys before getting into the water


Collin and Joy enjoying the beginning of the trip


Collin pushing the canoes up the steep hill we had to cross


Cameron pulling the canoes over the hill just before my infamous swim in the river


Joy spraying collin with bug spray while we were trying to wait out the storm


DAY TWO:
Saturday Cameron and I decided we were going to head to Idaho Falls for the day and watch the big fireworks show they have there. It is right over the river and was supposed to be awesome. Well, we heard you had to go WAY early to get a good view of the fireworks. We got there at about 1pm and laid out our blanket. We didn't even get a good spot at first cuz there were so many people that marked off spot with string!!! How lame is that? so we laid out on our blanket and then were like "ok, only NINE more hours to sit here for a 30 minute show, no big deal". Well, we were dumb and didn't bring ANYTHING with us to do. We brought snacks and that's about it.Luckily, there were a bunch of drunk guys that were pretty entertaining(minus the fact that they smoked the ENTIRE day and we could hardly breathe). We were bored out of our minds the entire day and it was SO hot. I totally felt me getting burnt UNTIL... it randomly started pouring down RAIN on us. Seriously, our luck... Anyway, Cameron ran to the car and grabbed our umbrella and we both crouched under that and tried (unsuccessfully) to not get our blanket soaked. It only rained for a little while and then we were back to trying to think up things to do. We resorted to playing car games like I Spy and 20 questions... lame, I know. Well, we somehow sat there and saved our seat for the WHOLE day and then about a half hour before the show they shut down the street right behind us and people just walked up right then and sat right behind us with the SAME view that we thought we had to reserve ALL day. That was a bit frustrating for sure. we found out that Kory and Melanie were doing fireworks at their house and Kory texted Cameron seeing if we wanted to come, but at that point we didn't want to leave since we had been there waiting for that show so long. Anyway, it was a good show in the end and was beautiful right over the water, but Cameron and I agree that the best part was the drunk guys that sat next to us all day. They made the funniest comments during the show, it was hilarious. I think by the end of the day we kinda wished we had gone over to Kory and Mel's(especially when we heard about all the happenings over there). It took over an hour to get home, which I guess isn't too horrible, but by the end of the already long day it seemed very long.

Getting rained on

Our view for the whole day... not too bad


Fireworks

Us


DAY THREE:
Sunday Cameron had to teach in Elder's quorum so he got up at like 4:30 to finalize his lesson plans. I had a HORRIBLE nights sleep because I had over 90 mosquito bites from the canoeing on Friday. My legs and especially my back was COVERED. Everyone else only had one or two bites... I think mine was so much worse because I fell in the swampy water. Anyway, I scratched my back so much it was bleeding and I was miserable at church. As soon as we left church we went straight to Walgreens and asked the pharmacist what we should do. He was like "wow! you really did get bit huh?" uh... yeah. So he told us to get some anti-itch cream and spray and see what worked better. Thus, the rest of the day was spent in agony while Cameron sprayed me and put the cream on the bites. It itched so bad every time he put anything on them.

Sorry, these are kinda gross, but this is my back on Sunday. And no, those lines are not stretch marks, they are SCRATCH marks. Cameron kept telling me not to scratch them, but obviously I didn't listen.