LAKE OF THE OZARKS: I Never Dreamed Missouri Would Be This Beautiful

Are ponchos still in style? If not, I'm in big trouble!

On Easter Sunday Sam surprised me with a weekend get-away to Lake of the Ozarks, which is in central Missouri. We took our little vacation last weekend. We had heard it was beautiful down there, but I never dreamed it would be this beautiful.

One of my favorite parts of the weekend was going to Ha Ha Tonka Stake Park and hiking to the castle ruins. Who would have thought Missouri would have castle ruins? I seriously felt like we were in Scotland or something. In the picture above you can kind of see the top of the castle above the trees.

The bluffs surrounding the castle were too steep to hike on, so the state park built these stairs to traverse the park. Its a little different than hiking in Utah and Idaho, but I definitely liked it!

Its kinda hard to tell in this picture, but this is a natural bridge that we hiked to.

Look at how pretty this is! I never would have thought I would see this kind of scenery in the Midwest.

Below are some pictures of our tour of the Ozark Caverns. (I think that is what they were called.)

We spent one afternoon on our mountain bikes. I am by no means a brave person, especially on a bike, so this trail we did was a bit of a stretch for me. Sam was very proud of me. Heck, I was very proud of myself!

This little dip was a lot steeper and scarier in real life than it shows in these pictures.

This was my attempt to cross a decent sized stream. What the picture doesn't show is that half-way across I got nervous, stopped pedaling, lost balance, and got my feet very wet.

We were both a little dirty when it was all said and done.

I know you're supposed to save the best for last, but this is probably the least exciting of our pics. My mom wanted to see a picture of where we stayed - so this one is for you Mom! We love you!

The latest Scott family ***gossip***

I know that there has been a rumor floating around out there that I was pregnant, so I wanted to confirm the rumor. Its true... I was. Unfortunately this must not quite be our time because I miscarried at 6 weeks. As physically and emotionally painful as it was, the good news is that the miscarriage was fairly routine and we should be able to have a healthy pregnancy sometime in the near future. So in the mean time... Stay tuned...

999 Days Ago...

Anyone who knows me well knows that I have a strange fetish with numbers and dates. I also like to find silly ways "anniversaries" to celebrate. So I figured out when our 999 day anniversary of when we met, and I surprised my husband with the following. There was a note on the garage door that said "999 days ago..."


There were some rosepetals leading from the garage door to the door to the basement stairs. On that door was a sign that said, "...My life changed forever and for the better..."



And in the stair well was a final note that said...

So we celebrated with a "romantic" dinner of Arby's on our lawn furniture in the basement.

Sam and I went to Logan on the night we met. I took him up to the famous True Aggie A. We did not kiss that first night, but I made a little "A" for us to stand on and kiss for our 999 day anniversary. It was as close as I could come to the real thing.

I am a PUBLISHED jewelry designer!!!

It’s true! I’ve been designing (or maybe I should just say making) A LOT of jewelry lately. A friend in my ward pushed me to submit my designs to a couple of magazines to see if they could get published. I submitted 6 pieces, and ALL 6 got picked up for publication! Yay!

[I should probably clarify that these magazines are not catalogs to order jewelry from, they are magazines that aspiring jewelry makers (like myself) subscribe to in order to get ideas of jewelry to make. These pictures are the pictures I sent in to the magazines. Once the magazines let me know they wanted to publish the jewelry, I had to mail in my jewelry and the magazines took their own pictures.]

These pieces are published in the March/April 2008 issue of Bead Trends.

Title: Naughty Knotty

Title: Who Said A Clasp Must Be Worn in the Front?

Title: Crystals for Chloe

Title: Golden Tassels

Title: Petals and Chains

Title: Shell - Casually Elegant

This last set will be published in the Under $25 edition of BeadStyle Magazine in May.

GO BEARS!!!!!!!!

Sam is a HUGE Chicago Bears fan. I tell him I’m a Pittsburgh Steelers fan just to oppose him, but really, I don’t care too much about football unless it is BSU. (Go Broncos!) This night I humored him and wore some of his Bears garb for the game. He said he’d never seen me look sexier.

My Little Tae Kwon Do Champ

Sam decided that one of his goals for 2008 was to learn Tae Kwon Do. Doesn’t he look so cute in his karate outfit? (Are we allowed to call men’s uniform’s outfits??? :-) ??? Maybe calling it an outfit makes it sound a bit less “tough”).

Memphis, Tennessee

In October I had a 2 week training for work in Memphis, TN. 2 weeks was just too long for me to be away from my Sammy (especially since he had recently spent 2 weeks away at his own training in Utah), so I had him fly out for the weekend in between. This is what we did:

We went to Elvis Presley’s house, more commonly known as Graceland.



We also visited the hotel where Martin Luther King was shot. It has since been turned into the National Civil Rights Museum.

Perhaps the highlight was when we visited the Peabody Hotel which is famous for having these ducks that swim in a fountain in the hotel’s lobby. At 5:00 every night a special tune is played and these ducks march in a single file line out of the fountain, down a red carpet, and onto an elevator which leads them up to the roof where they spend the night in an outdoor cage. Kinda wierd if you ask me.

You can kinda see the red carpet in the top of the picture below.

Notice the sign for the "Duck Palace."

This is the Duck Palace. Some palace, huh?