Yellow Jackets in December

I love Christmas. The hot chocolate, the lights, decorations, presents, cookies, gaining ten pounds, the tree! Oh wait we don't have a tree.
After we got married for our first Christmas together we decided to go to Home Depot and buy our first artificial christmas tree (since we had a gift card there) If was only like $70 it was a really pretty tree too! During the move I noticed that the box for the Christmas tree had gotten wet. I was hoping that the damage was not too bad, but when we opened it up, man it smelled. It had gotten moldy on some of the branches. We were deciding whether to just throw it out or try and clean it when we noticed a small yellow jacket. It looked dead but the longer it was in the warmth it started to move and clean itself. That was when we figured out that some lovely yellow jackets had built a nest in the box and were hibernating. Man we got that box outside so fast! STUPID yellow jackets! Now we don't have a tree for Christmas. All of the decent trees we looked at are so expensive! They ranged anywhere from $160-$300. That is a lot of money! So our plan is to go shopping the day after Christmas for one when hopefully they will be like 75% off. (I hope)

Moab

Over the Thanksgiving holiday Mike and I went with my family to Moab. We had a blast! For our Thanksgiving dinner we went out to eat. On Friday we went Hiking in Arches. Mike had never been there so it was fun to show him all of the neat sites. Saturday we biked on the slickrock trail. My mom looked up on the internet the difficulty, etc. They said it was for all skill levels and it wasn't that hard and you could take your kids. My butt is wasn't hard. That was the hardest bike ride I have ever been on in my life. There is no way I would take anyone under the age of 14. There were multiple times you would be a foot away from a cliff and the hills were way steep. Unfortunately I found out that I was the worst biker out of the group. I biffed it pretty hard at least 3 times. (the most out of anyone) Mike hurt his leg pretty bad. He was going down a steep hill and started going over the handlebars. I screamed, I though he was going to die. Luckily he stayed on but he has a pretty cool war wound on his thigh.

Gross huh!! Luckily we all made it out alive. It only took us 6 hours to go 11 miles. That shows how hard it was. Then on Sunday we went climbing in the Fiery Furnace in Arches. That was fun, you had to get a permit to even go in and watch an instructional video. You can go anywhere you want in there, except on the cryptobiotic soil. There were all of these small crevices you had to climb up or down to get where you wanted to go. I get a little claustrophobic so some of these places were hard.

All in all though we had a ton of fun. (even if we are incredible sore and bruised!)