The sun is a mass of incandescent gas

As we're a little behind in our blogging, I'm going to share our Sunday of 2 weeks past. We had some good times this Memorial Day weekend, but that will have to wait.

As you may have heard, there was quite the natural phenomenon in the sky Sunday May 20th. A coworker of mine bought a whole bunch of those eclipse viewing glasses and gave them out to us. I had kind of forgotten about the eclipse, but was very happy to get the glasses. I instantly messaged Lisa, asking her if she wanted to to go down to southern Utah on Sunday the view the eclipse. I wasn't 100% serious, but I wasn't 100% joking either. She told me it was up to me, and after going back and forth some, I decided we should just go for it.

So, Sunday afternoon, right after church, we packed up, and headed down to Kanarraville. It was a fun little (I guess 3 hours isn't little) drive down there. When we got off the freeway, there were some cars parked by the exit. I smiled at the few cars all set up and ready for the eclipse. We then made a turn and there were cars lining both sides of the street. At that point, we decided we better just take the first open spot we could.

We parked facing the west, so we actually had a pretty good view sitting in the car. We let James roam free in the back of the car (with some food of course)

 He did pretty well back there while Lisa and I could enjoy sky-gazing. Of course, giving him that thing of cheese was not without consequence.

Well, Lisa and I wanted to photo-document what we were seeing, but we didn't have any kind of special camera for taking pictures of the sun. Lisa tried taking some pictures holding the glasses up to the lens of the camera. After some messy first attempts, she got the hang of it really well. Here is what we go to see over the course of an hour or so.

It was so awesome seeing that perfect ring of the Sun. Everyone started cheering and honking their horn as soon as the circle was made. It was a lot fun. It was also crazy how the light changed. It was a bright sunny day without a cloud in the sky, and then as the moon covered the sun more and more, it got very dusk-like.

As the moon started to head out the other side, we decided to follow suit and head out of Kanarraville. Part of me want to stay and watch the whole end of it, but we had a long drive home ahead of us.

All in all, it was well worth the drive down. We had a great time. More pictures of the trip can be found on facebook. The chance to see something like this doesn't come around too often. It's time for us to start planning our trip to Idaho for the 2017 total eclipse.

We have a Garden!!!

Our big project for the year was building grow boxes in our backyard and we finally finished! We have even finished planting. :)  My family helped out A LOT with building the grow boxes and setting up the drip system to water them.  My little brother, Daniel, helped out the most, and he finished off the drip system himself.  He's been my handyman since he's waiting around until he leaves on his mission in August.  Dan (my husband) filled them with dirt, almost all by himself...I helped fill about half of a small one. :)  Today, Dan and I finished them off by putting the rock between them....Dan did most of that too. :) Because we had extra dirt, we cleaned out a garden bed by the house and planted some strawberries there too....but apparently they need full sun and they are in the shade...so we'll see if they grow or not.

Also, my parents brought my brothers and sisters over to our house a couple weeks ago on a Monday night to weed our front garden for their FHE service project! :)  That was VERY kind of them, it looked like a field of grass before they weeded it, now we can actually see all the pretty flowers. :)