elk adventure.

Here are some photos from our little elk adventure to Hardware Ranch with Daniel's family this past month, if you'd like to see!

And now for some elk trivia!

1. Elk, along with moose and caribou, are members of the deer family.
2. An adult make elk is called a bull, an adult female is called a cow, a baby is called a calf, and a yearling bull is called a spike because his antlers are spiky.
3. Only male elk have antlers, but both male and female caribou (a.k.a. reindeer) have antlers!
4. The elk's antlers (along with antlers of all other animals who have them) are made of bone! They fall off and re-grow each year. 
5. Horns are a different story. Horns are never shed, and they are made of the same stuff that our fingernails are made of.
6. New antlers are covered with a fuzzy skin called velvet. It has a lot of blood vessels running through it. Because antlers are made of bone, they need to have blood flow in order to grow! 
7. The elk's canine teeth are made of ivory.
8. Cows, calves, and yearlings live in herds for most of the year while bulls live alone. This means that a cow is usually the leader of the herd! Of course, this changes during the mating season.
9. If an elk feels threatened, they make a barking sound.
10. The elk's coat makes them essentially waterproof. 

And that is the end of my elk facts for the day. If you want to see one of these guys up close, I suggest you visit Hardware Ranch! We had a blast!

lately.

Just a few things we've been up to lately.

1. Wandering around the Salt Lake Arts Festival.

2. Sipping Jamba Juices.

3. Learning to cook artichokes.

4. Playing guitar (or if you are M, getting serenaded by the guitar).

5. Going on little dates to the Bountiful Temple.

6. And perhaps my favorite, attending beautiful weddings!

Thanks to Mel Nash Baucom for letting us be a part of your special day!

What have you been up to lately?

M+D+Cars=Death

We have had the absolute worst month with cars. It's getting kind of ridiculous. D and I are on a first-name basis with half of the mechanics and insurance agents in the Salt Lake Valley. Every single one of these things has happened to us in the last 5 weeks or so. Ready? Here we go.

1. Early in May, I got in a legit car accident in the Corolla. It had to be in the shop for like 2 weeks, so I had a to drive a rental car.

2. The same day that I got into my car accident, D got pulled over and got a ticket for having one of his tail lights out (soooo lame, right?!) Turns out, his tail light was cracked and it had filled up with water, so it wasn't an easy fix. We had to take it to a repair shop and pay to get the entire thing replaced.

3. The day after I got the rental car, I was driving to work and a giant rock hit the windshield and chipped it. Welp, there goes the deposit...

4. When my car finally got out of the repair shop, it started steaming and smoking everywhere while I was driving it home. Overheated. No one could come pick me up, so I had to wait for a guy from the repair shop to come rescue me. Oh, and this all went down on a very sketchy part of State Street, mind you. On the hottest day of May.

5.  Two days ago, D and I were driving his Saturn around on a few errands. We went to park the car and get out, but the keys would NOT come out of the ignition. They wouldn't even turn. We tried for half an hour, and had absolutely no luck. All of the repair shops were closed because it was like 10:00 at night. Finally, D ended up driving the car to his friend's house, and they figured out some way to shut the engine off with the keys still inside. We had to borrow a car from D's parents so that he could drive to work until we can get the car fixed.

6. Cut to today. We finally find some time to take D's Saturn to a repair shop. We got it there just fine, but as we were coming home from the shop in my Corolla, we noticed that the car we borrowed from D's mom had a flat tire. And no, I don't mean just low on air. The tire is legitimately FLAT.

And there you have it, folks. Currently, the Saturn is at the repair shop, D is outside changing a flat tire, and I am blogging about our ridiculously terrible luck with cars. I can't wait to see what happens next.

zoology 101 with M & D

D and I just had an extremely hilarious debate over whether an aardvark and an anteater were the same animal. Honestly, don't ask me how we even get onto these subjects in the first place. But, of course, we had to google it to find out who was right. So in case you needed a little zoology 101 in your life, I will share our newfound knowledge of the animal kingdom.

Let me begin by saying that I totally knew what an anteater looked like:

Aren't they the sketchiest creatures? 

I wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley.

 But anyway. I was thoroughly convinced that an aardvark looked like this:

Turns out, that guy is an armadillo!

And an aardvark is a different animal altogether! Check him out:

Who knew, right?! 

So thanks, Google and Daniel, for teaching me something new and making me laugh tonight. I hope you did too!

popcorn cravers anonymous.

Alright, people. It's confession time.

My name is Mandy, and I have a popcorn problem.

I realize a lot of people like popcorn. Hey, some people might even love it. But I have stepped beyond the average boundaries of popcorn consumption. And it's getting serious. Last night, D and I were over at my parents house watching Robin Hood (the one with Russel Crowe, which is quite a great flick by the way..) and my mom walked down the stairs with two bowls of fabulous homemade popcorn. It didn't matter that I had just eaten a full Sunday dinner. I still got that wide-eyed, about-to-drool look on my face and ended up eating almost an entire bowl by myself.

If that's not enough for you, let's rewind to the time that D and I saw Tangled at the movie theater. D got us one of those extra-super-giant TUBS of popcorn, and let's just say it was entirely gone before the movie was over. D probably had two handfuls, and I probably took two years off of my life.

Now fast forward to this weekend when we were on our way to dinner at Tucanos. It just so happens that you have to walk past the Megaplex 12 movie theater at The Gateway to get to Tucanos. I regret to admit this, but I may or may not have asked Daniel if we could cancel our reservations in favor of having popcorn for dinner.

So there you have it, folks. This is my true-life story of being a popcorn addict. I can eat it anytime, anywhere. I love all flavors from kettle corn to caramel corn. I can also eat it no matter how full I am. It's like my stomach expands exclusively so it can accommodate massive amounts of popcorn. If anyone knows the cure, I'm all ears.