News

Well everyone, it's time for the official announcement. No, Ada is not expecting a new sibling (unlike my brother Nate - good luck chump!) No, we have not been offered permanent jobs with the BLM after ten years of seasonal B.S., and no, Stacy and Ada are not leaving me for someone gainfully employed (whatever that means).

Rather, we are seizing our scabrous destiny and moving! We will all be heading down to Flagstaff, AZ this August for graduate school. I will be attending Northern Arizona University and working towards a Masters in Applied Geospatial Sciences. It really a fancy-pants name for computer-based mapping and geographic databases.

It is a good department and a good program. A lot of the program aspects relate to the work I have been involved with over the past ten years with public lands management and there is a lot of potential for projects and work with the people and places we are already familiar with. The details of it all will come together this fall.

We have been to Flagstaff twice this winter for visits to campus and to see what the feel of the community is. So far, so good. If we can just find reasonable housing everything will be set. Ada loves the place so far, and we haven't even taken her to the aquaplex.

Here she is keeping entertained in the motel room. She enjoyed hanging around campus and visiting places around town. One side note: having college flashbacks eight years after undergrad while pushing a stroller around a campus is weird.

Speaking of weird, we drove to Sedona one day to explore. The drive through Oak Creek canyon was great. The town, or a least the touristy part we visited was a bit anti-climactic. All the stories we had heard about the new-age wackos in the area are true, but we didn't anticipate the shameless vortex of commercialization. Whatever.

We did get some tasty Korean food in Sedona (while being guarded over).

And Ada felt very welcome around town.

Overall, Arizona has been welcoming and we're excited, even though their state government is a bunch of morons. But we'll be used to that from Utah. It has been satisfying to have one of our self-improvement schemes actually go forward and we'll keep you all updated.