All good things must come to an end

My funemployment has come to an end. I am back in a cubicle. I am the newest senior staff accountant at PBGH LLP, a small CPA firm in Fairfax, VA. While I am happy to have income, I can't say I am thrilled to have rejoined the work force. I have been working for just over 3 weeks and after being FUNEMPLOYED for 6 months, it has been quite an adjustment. Luckily, my new job is pretty great. Nice people who believe in work/life balance and leave the office at reasonable hours. Really, the latest I have been at the office is 5:45! Love that. And yes, I will be working more when tax season comes, but they do something called compensatory time which means all the overtime I work goes into a pool and I get to take those hours at a later date of my choice. As far as accounting jobs go, it's a good setup. Not my dream job but it will do for now.

Now for a few updates on my last months of freedom and how I enjoyed them to the FULLEST! I won't write a lot, but just know that my six month break was one of the best decisions I've ever made. Loved it all and highly recommend it to anyone who has the chance.

First of all, to wrap up my time in Guatemala, I finished working at the orphanage and spent the last little bit traveling with friends. I went up to northern Guatemala, Flores and Tikal and then over to Belize and then Rio Dulce. SO GREAT!!! Beautiful lakes, rivers, ruins, beaches, sailing, friends, food, tree houses, boats, volcanoes...loved it all.

We hiked Pacaya, a live volcano. And we roasted marshmallows on the lava. Not joking.


This is the "tree house" I stayed in on the Rio Dulce. Totally reminded me of Swiss Family Robinson.

Riding up Rio Dulce on a speed boat was magical. It was actually my 3rd of 4 boat trips that day after traveling down Belize back to Guatemala on 2 different boats and then the tree house was only accessible by boat, so I took a boat to dinner. Amazing.
Our favorite eating establishment in Placencia. We ate every meal there, looking out onto one of the most beautiful beaches I've ever been to.

I just love this sign. Read it with an accent.
Our first stop in Belize was Caye (pronounced "key") Caulker. A small island off the coast of Belize City. And life really did slow down here.

Our little beach cabins where we stayed.
Our all day sailing/snorkeling crew. We all became best friends. They were all wonderful but I think the bottomless rum punch may have helped.
Captain Steve.
Who doesn't want to swing from a vine when you're in the jungle?
One of the famous temples of Tikal. These ruins are amazing.
I like spiders.

After stopping in DC for a day to exchange my Guatemala stuff for normal stuff, my first stop was Mesa where I visited my old roomie Lisa and her cute family.
I was there along with my entire family to pay tribute to one of my heroes. My grandmother Laurel Petersen Ellsworth passed away while I was gone and I was lucky to make it back in time for her funeral. She was an incredible lady.
Driving back from AZ. This is one of our favorite spots to take family photos. I'm not sure how many pictures we've taken here, but there have been a lot.
I spent the next month in Cedar City enjoying my family. Going to high school football games, homecoming assemblies, and being very domestic.
At a ward party with my fam. My dad loves his crazy clothes.
Made a trip up to Provo to have a reunion with all the Mozambique crew except for Mags who was in Michigan. I love these people. Love, love, love!!
Bree and I had so much fun helping my mom with Caige who is one of the foster kids living with my parents right now.
Can you even believe how big and tough Bryson is? What a heart throb!
Making salsa and crying our eyes out!!

Saryn was on homecoming royalty and she looked beautiful!!
Bree and I took advantage of our funemployment and headed down to our favorite place in Mexico. Puerto Penasco. Our lovely cousins were kind enough to let us hang out at their condo for a few days and it was heavenly.

Next domestic project was making a dress from some old patterns from the 1950s that I bought online. My mom is a genius. I helped, but I never would have been able to do it without her.

We also made a t-shirt quilt for Bree while we were there. This shirt did not make the cut though pretty incredible she can still fit into it! Since this is what she looked like when she first wore it :)

I LOVE this temple. Love it. And love that I got to go with my mom.
So blessed to attend several sessions of conference at the conference center (thank you Isom family) and got together with one of my favorite visiting teachers of all time.
Spent time with my MTC companion and her cute family. She makes faces just like her mom.
And finally made it back to DC where since I was still funemployed, I took over several home improvement projects to keep myself busy. This is one of the only ones documented but this is Christina in front of the couch that came with a chair and ottoman that I found on Craigslist for FREE. Thanks to Shannon for letting us use her truck for the day after she had only known me for 3 days. We moved this and also purchased a new coffee table and dining room table from our favorite thrift store, Unique. I need to write a whole blog post about that later. The dining room table needed a lot of work, it was only $6 and it looked like it came from a school or something. It was the yellow wood and it had markings on it and gum on the bottom...ya pretty gross. I wish I would have taken a before picture. But I sanded it down and painted it red, and then black and then distressed it and it now looks quite lovely if I do say so myself. It was a great project. I also painted my room and the kitchen and started getting decor for my room.
Jen and I really wanted to go on a picnic, unfortunately we chose to go the day it turned cold. It was still fun though!

I LOVE So you think you can dance. And I attended the concert tour for the 2nd year in a row and am fully planning to attend this next one as well. It all started back in Season 2 when I was an intern in DC and I have loved it ever since.

Christina and I took a road trip up to PA where they had just opened a branch of my favorite store!! HOBBY LOBBY!! And we spent 5 hours there. And we ate lunch in the aisle at one of the display tables, we came prepared with a packed lunch. They really need a cafe in there or something for those of us who take our decor and craft shopping very seriously. If you want to know more about my obsession with this place, just ask. And if you want to come with me on the next trip, it will be happening soon after the new year.

There was some AMAZING fall foliage on our trip back down to VA.
We stopped in Gettysburg on the way home.
My cute cousin Anna left her husband and boys behind to come spend some time with me. We had a great time shopping, taking photos and visiting family up in MD.



I love karaoke!!

You may recognize Clark from all of my Guatemala photos. He is now in Philly going to law school and he came down to visit. It was a lovely weekend.

I took advantage of my last week of funemployment to head south for Thanksgiving. I stopped in NC to see my old roommate Ani and then headed to SC to visit with the Houghtalings and then to Atlanta to stay with Ryan and Amber. This is at the children's museum there. Curt and Lindsey were down as well and then we all headed to Carl and Court's in Alabama for Thanksgiving day. It was such a fun road trip. I loved seeing all of them.

Am and I may have been doing some "leaping" reminiscent of Sunday night aerobics (you girls know what I'm talking about).
Oh the annual ugly sweater party.
And finally this last weekend was just about as much fun as a girl can handle. One of the reasons I chose to move to DC was because of the lack of this white powdery stuff. But occasionally it still comes and this time was a doozy. It started on Friday evening and did not stop until late Saturday night. Linds and I stayed cuddled up warm in our house all day Saturday and finally resurfaced on Sunday to find the entire area shut down. All church meetings canceled and only a few brave souls on the roads. We walked to visit our closest friends down the street and then came back to spend the next 4 hours digging out our own cars and several others in the parking lot. It was a great way to meet all of our neighbors!!

Well that was the longest post ever and now I'm pretty much updated. I leave today for Cedar City and can't wait to see my family. I wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!

One of the best things about being in a third world country...

...is that they let you do things that you would never be allowed to do in the US of A. From the first weekend I got to Antigua I had been hearing about this place called Semuc Champey and how I needed to do one of the weekend trips there. We finally found a weekend when we could all go so Clark, Drew, Julie and I all booked with our favorite little underground travel agency to do a Friday through Sunday expedition. Julie, if I haven't told about her yet, moved into the house where I was staying after Simon and Zoe left to go back to England. She is also from England and just absolutely adorable. We were friends within the first 5 minutes of meeting. So all 4 of us planned to go together. Clark and Drew arrived from Patzicia late as usual. But we met a new friend while we were waiting. Her name is Lizzie and she made up the 5th member of our weekend party of 5.

The drive to Lanquin, where we would be spending the night, took about 8 hours. It was not the funnest drive of my life, but we bonded with the other people in our group. There were two vans full of people. Our driver's name was Jose who I had become friends with from booking other trips and shuttles. His little friend Chris was also riding with us and we had a good time becoming friends with him. He was quite the ladies man. He told us one of the girls in our van was his girlfriend which was funny because she was at least 10 years older than his 12 years :) And every time I saw him around Antigua after that he usually had his arm around at least one girl. Anyway, the point is that our guides were really great. They were all originally from that area so they had grown up in the places they were taking us.

Saturday morning started early with a delicious breakfast and then we all loaded into the back of pickup trucks to drive the 45 minutes on a slightly bumpy dirt road down to the river/falls/caves. This was very reminiscent of a drive we took at a family reunion many years ago in the back of a cattle truck. We were on our way to Pacheco where my grandfather was born, but instead of 45 minutes it was 3 or 4 hours. Now that was an adventure. We were all sore for the rest of the family reunion.

When we arrived at the river our first stop was actually on the bridge that crossed the river. Jose stopped the truck, got out and told us this was our chance to jump. And so we all got out and most of the group jumped off the 30' bridge into the beautiful blue-green water. This was just the beginning of our adventures that day. After we all got back into the trucks we rode a little further to the trailhead of the lookout point for Semuc Champey which is a chain of natural pools that reminded me a lot of Havasupai. When we hiked down to the pools, our whole group followed our guides like little lemmings as they told us where to walk and when to jump off the waterfalls. We worked our way down the right side of the falls jumping, swimming and falling on the slippery rocks and finally arrived at the big waterfall where our guides tied a rope to this stake and then we all climbed down the waterfall. No we did not have harnesses, nor any sort of safety gear, yes there was water rushing down over my head preventing me from seeing anything, no we did not have any idea where we were going so when the guide told me to go down I was a little nervous about where I was going to come out. Turns out that there was a cave underneath the pools where the underground river comes out. So great!! After hanging out there for a bit, we jumped off the next little section of the waterfall, swam across the river which had quite a bit of a current (no they did not ask us beforehand about our level of swimming skills) and then climbed up the other side of the waterfall using another rope, no safety gear, with water pouring down over our heads. WONDERFUL!!!

We didn't have as much time to swim in the pools as we would have liked, but it was because we had to get on our way to our next adventure. And sadly I don't have any photos of this because we had to leave our cameras at the bottom. After walking back to the trailhead we walked back across the river and over to what is called Lanquin Caves. Here we left all of our stuff and then we hiked up a little trail to where a stream/river was coming out of a cave. As we entered the cave, our guide lit our candles that each of us had been given before hiking up. We walked into the cave and at first we were just walking through water, but then we came to a part where we had to climb up a ladder. And then we came to a part where we had to swim, well dog paddle while trying to keep our hand with our candle above the water. But the two best parts were where we arrived at a rushing waterfall and there was a ladder on one side and a rope on the other. I just assumed that even though our guide climbed up the rope that he was going to make us climb up the ladder, but he gave us the choice! And when you're given a choice between climbing a ladder or a rope up a waterfall, inside a cave, by candlelight in Guatemala, there is really only one option...the rope!!! It was exhilirating. We didn't actually hold our candles while we were climbing. We handed it to the guide before we went up, and we got it again once we got up. There were several times when everyone's candles went out and we had to get them relit. Just before we turned around to head back out, we got to a point in the caves where we could climb up on a ledge and jump down into a pool. At first when we stopped, we had no idea what we were doing and the guide was just kind of pointing and motioning with his flashlight. Then after the first guy did it, we understood what we were doing. And once again, cliff jumping inside a cave, by candlelight is not something you can say no to. It was hilarious because the guide would just point with his flashlight to the spot in the water where he wanted us to jump. AMAZING!! Once again, this whole description doesn't really do this experience justice. We all kept looking at eachother the whole time as if to ask, "Is this real? Are we really hiking/climbing/swimming/jumping in a cave by candlelight?". It was very much a combination of Pirates of the Caribbean/Goonies/Indiana Jones.

When we returned to daylight, the last adventure of the day was tubing down the river to where the truck would pick us up. And after all the exercise we'd had that day, I was more than happy to plop down in a tube in a beautiful blue-green river, surrounded by jungle and just relax for a little while. Sigh. It was magical.

The rest of the trip was just full of bonding with the others in the group, eating good food and spending more time in the van on the ride back. There were once again SO many great people in this group. We would run into them all the time for the rest of my time in Guatemala. Mary Claire from Scotland, Suzy from Canada, Lizzie from England and the list goes on.

It was one of the best weekends EVER!

I'm home and ready to update

Updating is obviously something I'm struggling with. That is partly because the computers in Guatemala were pretty slow with blogs and partly because I was having so much fun that I didn't want to spend time blogging about the fun things I was doing. So my goal for the next week is to update with at least most of my adventures that I had while in Guatemala. I'm going to start where I left off which was really just the first week I was there. The second week I was there I actually got really sick. The kids at the orphanage all had the flu and kindly passed it on to us volunteers. I now understand why so many elementary teachers keep large bottles of hand sanitizer on their desks. I called my mom during this weekend and she thought I was going to die from the sound of my cough. I felt like I was going to die. And I realized that even though being sick at home is not fun, it is a far cry better than being sick in a third world country without the comforts of home. After a few days of sitting in my red cement walled room for several days straight I left to attend church partly because I wanted to find the Elders to ask them to give me a blessing and partly because I was so sick of being in my bed. It's amazing how much better it is being sick when you have television and movies to pass the time. Needless to say, I didn't go anywhere fun that week.

By the next weekend I was finally recovered enough to venture out. There were some volunteers from the orphanage who were heading to Honduras to visit the Copan ruins, so I decided to go with them. The actual distance is not that far, however, the journey was less than exciting. We left at 4am on Saturday and there were 12 of us packed into a small shuttle van. The roads are windy and the van got hot. I was in the back seat and the only way I kept from getting sick was putting my headphones in with some calming music and telling myself over and over that I was not going to be sick. My friend Tom who was sitting in the back with me did not have a system like this and we ended up having to pull over to let him out. After that he switched places with someone and sat in the front for the rest of the journey.

We finally arrived in Copan Ruinas, which is the quaint little town next to the ruins, around 10am and quickly found a really cheap but lovely place to stay and went in search of some breakfast. The ever faithful Lonely Planet had some suggestions and we took one of them, ending up at the most delicious little restaurant called. The breakfast was delicious and it was accompanied by a fresh mango smoothie that was even better. They have fresh fruit smoothies called liquados in almost every restaurant and because they're so cheap, having one with my meal became a tradition while I was down there. After breakfast we headed to the ruins. Copan is part of the Mayan civilization and it is famous for its well preserved carvings. As you can see in these pictures, many of the columns and temples have carvings on them that are very clear. We had a great tour guide and had some fun taking photos. It was so much hotter and more humid down there than in Antigua. We were all gross and sweaty by the time we were done looking at the ruins. But it was beautiful. It is so incredible to think how many hundreds of people lived in those civilizations over the years. They built them all without machines or even wheels. I don't know how they did it. We took it easy that night as we were all so exhausted from our early morning. Phoung and I were sharing a room and we actually watched Gossip Girls in Spanish for awhile. That was pretty entertaining. Because of the long journey home, we had to leave at noon the next day, but luckily our shuttle was much less crowded on the way home. In fact I had my own seat and was able to sleep most of the way home.

It was a quick trip but I'm so glad that I went. I loved getting to know Phoung, Tom and Simon better. We also ended up meeting some other new friends while we were down there who went around the ruins with us. Meeting new people was one of my favorite things about my time down in Guatemala. Everywhere I went there were fun new people who were just waiting to share their stories and make new friends. It was delightful. I love people!