He actually caught one!

Look at those honeydew vines!!!

The corn is getting tall in one section of the garden.

Can you see the green beans?

The beginning of a honeydew!

A tiny cucumber.

This is the shady spot in the garden. It's taken a long time for the watermelon vine to get going.

This is the catfish Garrett caught!!!

The proud fisherman with his catch.

Yesterday around 8 PM, Garrett and I headed over to an urban fishing pond. He took two poles with him. He prepared one pole and cast out his hook (baited with a worm). He put that pole down, and while he was in the middle of preparing the other pole, the first pole moved slightly. He picked it up and...reeled in a catfish! The catfish was about 14 inches long. We stayed and fished for another hour and a half, but the catfish was the only catch of the day. Still, a pretty good catch if you ask me! We're going to have catfish for dinner tonight.

The garden is also coming along. The cucumbers are doing well. What I'm really hoping will do well are the honeydew vines! I love honeydew!

A Beautiful Day in June

The temperature was high for most of the week, but it cooled off and became quite pleasant for this weekend. Our garden plants could tell the difference too, and the soil wasn't bone dry by the afternoon either!

I finally realized I made a horticultural error with the cucumber plants in the planter. When I planted the garden, I thought that for each seed I planted, I would get one cucumber. Not so, not so! For each seed I planted, a large vine began to grow. Each vine had numerous, large leaves that began hogging all the sunlight. Thus, we had a garden full of cucumber plants that were preventing the tomatoes and the bell peppers from growing. I like cucumbers, but not that much! Garrett and I experimented with transplanting some of the plants into a garden space we had left in front of our house. The results were sad, as you can tell by the pictures. I ended up cutting most of then away and putting them in the green box. We'll have to see how the tomatoes and bell peppers do now that they have access to some direct sunlight. Garrett and I have also been amazed at how much difference two or three feet can make in the amount of sunlight an area gets, and how much that affects the growth of the garden. From the pictures, you will be able to tell what plants get the right amount of sun, and which plants need a bit more in order to grow faster.

I also included a couple of pictures of the inside of our apartment so that you can see what it looks like without all the moving boxes everywhere (I should have posted pictures of this sooner-the moving boxes have been gone for a long time).

Family Reunion Fun

Garrett and I went to his hometown last week for his brother Jordan's graduation (congrats Jordan...sorry I didn't get any pictures). From there, we journeyed to a family reunion on Garrett's great uncle's ranch. I'm not sure I will have any luck properly labeling the pictures, but I will try:

The first picture is of Garrett's parents. The second picture is of Garrett's oldest brother and his family. The woman working the kitchen cutting up peppers is Grandma Pitrat. After that is a picture of Garrett and me. Below us is a picture of Uncle Wayne and Aunt Sheri. I didn't get any pictures on my camera of Amber (one of Garrett's older sisters) and her family, nor of Candy and Clint and Darrell and his family. However...I do have some video footage of them on my video camera. The area where the ranch is located is beautiful! The food was delicious-Wayne and Sheri sure know how to feed a crowd! We had bar-b-q chicken and pork, rice, a bell pepper/vegetable medley (grilled), fruit salad, plus roasted green chiles and "cheese crisps" (tortillas filled with cheese, grilled, so that the cheese melts). Aunt Candy brought chili too! The drive to and from the reunion was also fun. We drove on Route 66 and stopped for ice-cream on the way, plus we saw the town where Garrett's mom lived from age 7 to the time she left for college. Reunions are a my favorite way to collect family history!

The Graduation!

Yesterday was my brother Jared's high school graduation. He looked so handsome! The evening was a little long...we arrived at the venue around 3:30 PM, and we didn't leave until almost 10 PM. Though his graduating class was small, the graduation was combined with the end of year awards ceremony for Grade 12. Here are a few pictures.

Greetings from Canada

I am visiting my home town of Calgary, Alberta for a few days. The official reason for the visit is for me to attend my brother's graduation this week. In the meantime, I've been keeping busy spending time with family and visiting friends. Here are a few of the highlights:

We (my mom, grandma, and I) visited my "Oma" the other day. That's a picture of her waving to us from her balcony. She has known our family for years, so even though she's not technically a blood relation, she'e still a member of the family.

The ground-breaking ceremony for the Calgary, Alberta temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was held on May 15, 2010. Though we didn't get to go to the temple grounds on the day of the ceremony (parking was limited), my parent's ward had a Ward Family Home Evening on the future temple site this evening. Our Bishop borrowed one of the official groundbreaking shovels, and so our family headed up to the temple grounds and a got a picture. There is actually a small picture of the temple engraved onto the shovel.

My grandma and I were excited to see that since my arrival a few days ago, two of the flower bushes in her backyard started to bloom! We got a picture in front of the bushes.

That's it for now. Unfortunately, Garrett was not able to come to Canada with me this time. He's in charge of the garden in Arizona, and has done a lot of work setting up a drip system for it. I can hardly wait to see it when I get back!

Melons and Peppers and Pumpkins, OH MY!

I finally got our garden re-planted. Having never tried to keep a garden alive in the intense Arizona summer heat, I'm not sure how it will do. I plan to water it a lot. I planted some honeydew, watermelon, pumpkin, corn, bell peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and green onions. A friend at church gave me some bean and squash starts to plant. We'll see how it all goes! Now, perhaps you may be wondering how all of those plants could fit in our box garden. They can't! I am utilizing a narrow space of garden between the apartment and the sidewalk for increased garden space. It was growing a lot of weeds, so I figured I could get rid of the weeds and try to grow something useful in the space. A few sprouts have come up in the box garden (I planted that about a week and a half ago), but no sprouts yet in the other garden (as I just planted it the other day). There are before and after pictures of both the box garden and the garden space alongside the apartment. Unfortunately, they are showing up in the wrong order in the post-the after pictures appear first, while the before pictures appear after. Sigh. Someday I will figure out how to put the pictures in the right order.

Events & Nature Around the Apartment

The event that is going on near our apartment right now is "Jesus the Christ", the Mesa Arizona Easter Pageant that is sponsored, organized, and presented by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. We can hear it every night from our apartment. Tonight, we are going to go an be audience members! I'm excited about that. It's an hour long (from 8 PM to just a little after 9 PM). It tells the story of the Savior's mortal life, including His death and resurrection. I have two pictures of the stage (which they build every year and then take down after the performance). The stage is quite large. I took these pictures just before 5 PM yesterday, and you can see that some people were already camped out saving seats. There are chairs set up in the large grass area in front of the temple visitor's center. One of the pictures is of the visitor center with the temple behind it.

The other pictures are of our garden...which I REALLY need to completely harvest (except for the celery) and replant, because...have you ever seen broccoli plants flower, and lettuce begin to bud??? Well, now you have, because I took some pictures of just that! I also included a picture of the little orange and yellow flowers that grow just outside our door. They're the kind of flowers that when you water them, they look like they're being tickled because they wiggle back and forth as though they really enjoy being watered.