Last Few of Summer

Ok, Ok, so I have just a few more pictures and things to post from the summer. So hear we go!

Our last 3M ( Monday Middle school Madness) we went swimming at one of the girls houses. It was a lot of fun, and a fun last night to spend with the middle school kids.

This is one of my favorite pictures from the night. 

OK, so next pictures. Brad, Bag, Andrew, Will, and I, climbed the Colorado National Monument. The Monument is a 500 foot tall monolith in the middle of canyons. Beautiful to look at, but scary once you get climbing! It is 5 different pitches of lead climbing, and most of the time there are pretty basic moves to climb up, but every once in a while, especially when your short like me, it gets a little harder. But here are some pictures!

This is the monument in all its glory!

Brad starting the lead climb of the last pitch.

Me almost to the top of the monument.

ok, to be honest I did not make it to the top, I was about 10 feet from it. I just could not reach the overhang move that pulled you to the top. 

The high school girls had an idea for a girls night, 'Chocolate Wasted' it came from the movie Grown Ups. So Teri and I decided to put it into action. So here are two of the pictures we took from the night. We had everything from chocolate milk, oreos, cookie dough, strawberries and bananas to dip in chocolate, chocolate ice cream, chocolate bars, brownies, I mean the list goes on and on!

Our chocolate mustaches!

Lastly, we took all the kids boating on afternoon after church. It was soo much fun!! The tubing was great, and the kids loved it! Bag and I got to go as well, (no pictures from that unfortunately) but the ones I have from the kids are priceless. 

of course there was plenty of throwing people in the lake!

All in all the last bits of my summer were great! I had so much fun with all the kids in Colorado. These pictures don't even do it justice. But hopefully you can get just a glance of what my summer looked like. I would love to tell you more about it, just ask!

Mt. Garfield Hike

So Bag and I decided to check some things off our Colorado list on one of our days off. One of them was to climb Mt. Garfield. This thing......

Well one great thing about Mt. Garfield is that it is only a two mile hike up. But you gain 2,000 feet on that hike and 1,000 of it is in the first mile. Woof! 

Here is Bag on the first leg of the hike. 

We just climbed up that.... yes.... it was nuts!

There were so many boulders I wish I could have climbed. But most of them had a cliff on each side of it. 

The Mesa looked beautiful with the clouds behind it. 

 I love this picture because you can see the Mesa, town, and part of Mt. Garfield that you just climbed all in one. And I love the color differences- the dirt, the green farms, and the blue sky. 

Im only about 1/2 a mile into it, and about 1,000 feet up. I quit here... My heart wasn't liking the altitude too much, I felt like my heart was working way to much, and I figured Bag did not want to carry me back down. 

I signed the sheet at the beginning of the trail head on our way out, and in the comments I wrote "holy fart knocker batman!"

It was a crazy hike, and I'm mad I did not make it all the way to the top. But I figured my heart thanked me for it later. Now this will just be a good thing to come back to Colorado for and finish it again!

San Francisco

Yes, it has been a long time since I last posted on here. Time has FLOWN by!! So I will begin where I left off... We went to San Francisco for a week to work at a bunch of different places and do a whole bunch of different things. So I have picked out pictures hopefully from a few different things we did, and I will try to explain all of them---

some of the kids working at Alemany Farms. A community garden where people can come and work and then take home some of the food that is there. 

still working at Alemany Farms

a group shot from Alemany Farms.

We went to a Giants baseball game. And because I bought us group tickets, we got to put something on the score board. Well, we thought it was going to be one name at a time.... and Brad, Bag and I were really excited for what we decided to put on the score board. And it was really tiny... But this is what it said--- 

MY NAME WAS ON THE SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS SCORE BOARD!!!!

We also worked at the San Francisco Food Bank. We bagged pasta one day, and beans another day. It was amazing how much we packaged that day. 

We also spent an afternoon on the beach swimming, and of course rock climbing. 

One morning we went to Mount Davidson to work with the Parks and Recreation Department . 

We had to cut down black berry bushes which were nasty little things. They had huge thorns on them!! We cut them down then raked and carried them into a trail to close the trail so that no one could use it any more. I was so proud of my girls working. Most of them had shorts on, and got right up in those bushes cutting them down and moving them to the trail we were blocking. At the end of the afternoon, our legs were so cut up, it looked like we were mauled by a bear or something. I was so proud of them for getting right into it all, and working their butts off. 

I talked to one of the Parks and Rec guys after and he said that we were one of the best teams he has ever had come and work for them. We got right down and dirty, and did the work we were asked to do. He was so amazed that we were not doing this for community service, or anything like that. We were just doing it to be good people. 

We found out that at the top of Mount davidson there was a huge, and I mean huge cross! It was really cool to hike up there and see it. Then after we were done working, we went up there and had a Bible Study. 

You can kinda tell how big this is. Those are some of the kids standing at the bottom of the cross.

Some of the girls after a long day of working in the blackberry bushes. 

Brad and two of the boys. 

Now this, well this place was interesting to say the least. We went to a soup kitchen called Food Not Bombs to help them cook dinner than pass it out to people who were needed a meal for the night. 

We got right to work, cutting potatoes, shucking corn, everything. While what was going on around us was very different. We actually ended up at an Anarchist house and soup kitchen, and on top of that was plenty more red flags that I just wont get into. (I would be more than happy to share the story, just ask me and I will let you know of this great experience)

All in all with that experience, I was so proud of all the kids putting their heads down and getting right to work. They did not ask questions, or stop and stare, they just put their heads down and went straight to work. They all held their shit together through it all. I was so amazed with all of them!

We actually stayed in San Anselmo across the Golden Gate Bridge, so it was cool, other than the $6 to get into the city, to drive over the bridge every day. 

Another thing we did that I did not get any pictures of was we split up into smaller groups of about 4 or 5 and went around to 'meet a need'. Mostly that meant that we took someone to lunch. But other times they did not want any food, but wanted socks. So we went and got them socks. And another time we met a lady named Mama K, and she needed mats to sleep on. They would always sleep on cardboard, but the city kept throwing it away. So we went out and bought them some yoga mats to sleep on. It was amazing to see the kids really step out of their comfort zone, and talk to people who they would normally not talk to. But again they amazed me over and over each day we did this, and they always would talk to them as if they were their friend. 

All in all this was a great trip. Everyone had a great time, and we learned a lot. I really leaned what it meant to 'love your neighbor as yourself'. All the kids did an amazing job with working, and really did more than we thought they would do. It was amazing how well they held their shit together. I was so proud of them day after day.