Out with the old...

The last two months have been a whirlwind (warning: awful pun ahead) and now we find ourselves in Hurricane, Utah. Some of you may be wondering how this came to be. Some of you may not care and if that's the case, I don't know why you are reading this blog anyway.

Believe it or not, there was a series of events that closed 2009 for us that started with getting kicked out of prison and ended with the disappearance of sea lions from San Francisco's Pier 39. I know it sounds strange, but if you have few minutes perhaps I can explain...

San Quentin.

I don't pretend to know anything about it. I have yet to write much about it in this blog, because it has been the black cloud in our lives for the past 18 months. We've worn out all the jokes about how Adam has "served his time in San Quentin" or "done his 18 months in prison". I love the daily quips about getting "let out of prison on the weekends" and "work is prison". These all stemmed from the fact that Adam was one of the construction managers working on the new hospital inside the prison. This entire post could be a political rant, but I need to conserve energy for motherhood.

On average he put in 12 hour days for them, but at one point he was leaving at 6:00am and not getting home until 9:00pm and I sometimes wondered if the inmates weren't getting a better deal in their gated seaside community.

Construction on the hospital has ended and the company decided that his career would be ending as well. As he has reflected on the whole experience, he has tried to describe to me his working conditions. I don't think I will ever understand what he had to endure going to that place everyday. The glimpses he has given me in describing certain situations and interactions would have made me come home crying every night. I am in awe of the personal sacrifice. That he would take care of me and Max despite the personal cost, is something that I am eternally grateful for and love.

Of course, the experience wasn't entirely negative. In fact, we both can look back with certainty that our choices led us to the place we needed to be. There were too many coincidences, wonderful people, and beautiful experiences to think that anything was a fluke or mistake.

For instance, if any of you know Adam or have even met him briefly you know that he had a lot of energy. Some of the things I love most about him are his zest for life, sense of humor, and zany antics(although he will claim that I don't laugh at his jokes anymore :))

This past 18 months he was an Office Engineer and full-of-energy Adam, who has worked outside with his hands most of his life, was forced to sit behind a desk, stare at a computer, push papers, and talk on the phone for 12 hours a day. For someone with a slight touch of ADD this was no small task, but he has come out the other side with a whole new skill set and is now applying those skills to the stone masonry business he had before in order to bid million dollar jobs!

I digress. We can't really say that we didn't see this layoff coming. It was in the back of our minds for the last half of the year, but not official until October that we would be finished at the end of November with HenselPhelps. It is the nature of the construction industry. There was no upcoming work(along with other contributing factors to the layoff of which I don't wish to discuss) and Adam was cut loose.

Adam felt relieved.
And anxious.
Hopefully California won't be handing out IOUs instead of unemployment checks.
We still have yet to received an actual payment.

I am happy for Adam. He is returning to his old self.
I didn't realize how stressed-out and tense he had become.
I am reconciling myself to leaving Marin county. It's not the county I'll miss--it's the ward members. And the weather.
I have grown rather fond of them. Leaving here is harder than leaving home when I was 18. I cried myself to sleep many times thinking about it. I can't explain why.

We needed them.
They took care of us.
They needed us.

I love them.
I still cry sometimes when I think of them.

It was a beautiful Christmas celebration with our California family.

We decided to come to Hurricane.
To the house where Adam grew up.
His parents now live in Toquerville a few miles up the highway.

Lindsay came.

We packed. Remember that guy that wouldn't stop talking?
David M. stopped by to say farewell. I love David and I miss him. He enlightened us and I will write more about that later.

We drove. And drove. Max did well.


We arrived. We cleaned. And cleaned.

Went to Vernal for a break.

My mom's a great barber! Tori says the funniest things.

Had some more fun with family up north...

Drove back down.

Cleaned more. Painted. Cleaned. Painted more. Had Christmas here and a little PS3 Rockband with the inlaws...hilarious. Still cleaning. The air is so dry, I have two vaporizors going at night trying to make the transition from the coast.
I'm a wimp.


So many details are lost to me. I did read that the Pier 39 sea lions had disappeared. Adam and I just figured that once we left the bay the sea lions must have thought what's the point!


Stay tuned...