TOM’S BLOG

These are a few pictures from Phoenix, and Havasupai (Jill took care of our visit to Kennewick on her blog so this is all that was left…)

We celebrated my dad’s 55th birthday with cupcakes from Sprinkles Cupcakes. If your read their website you would think wow, these are going to change my life and how I think about cupcakes forever. Well, they won’t, at least in my opinion. I have been to places like Cake Love in D.C. and I know that something as common as cake can taste a million times better if done right. Sprinkles seems to me to be on the same lame bandwagon as Pinkberry, just some over-hyped L.A. crap packaged really pretty and frequented by lame reality stars. Okay, I just read about Pinkberry on Wikipedia, although I take some of what I said back, it still sounds over-hyped.

Jill and I spent some time by the pool in Phoenix. It was already close to 100 in Phoenix so the water felt good and we got some good sun. I got out on the golf course once with my Dad and Kevin down in the beautiful oasis of Casa Grande. I shot an 84 and had a few birdies and a lot of pars, and we had the course essentially to ourselves.

Jill left on Saturday morning since she had to be back to start school on Monday and I stayed behind to go hiking at Havasupai with Joey, Spencer, Travis, and Sean. We met at the Havasupai parking lot at 3am, dodging some stray Supai horses on the way in. We were followed the whole way in by some dogs and turned out two of them Dog Dog and Short Dog followed us all the way to camp. They slept there, followed us on all our hikes, and tried to kill lizards and squirrels during the day. They even waited for us back at camp when we went down Mooney Falls (you have to hike down ladders), needless to say dogs are very interesting. They then followed us all the way out of the canyon (10 miles in hot weather) and down to our cars. At this point it seemed that they found a new group to follow and they were gone. The trip was cool, we went to Navajo Falls above, which was really cool, took the river down to the rope swing, and swam around in Mooney and Havasu falls. I still have some pretty nice reminders of the hike from my blisters to the huge bruises I have from a hand stand that was never to be. Good times

After a few days of recovery at my parents in Phoenix, and after eating at Haji Baba’s and Ted’s I was on my way back to Chapel Hill.

Since then Jill and I have been renting movies, riding our bikes to get LocoPops and return movies (and save money not driving). Jill has done this all with me while balancing her duties as a Masters of Accounting student, while I have to balance it with my sleeping and reading time, which is tough.