I will always love flying around Northwest Arkansas with my grandpa. There's something so fascinating about seeing the world you grew up in from an entirely different perspective. It seems.... big.

 

July 9th: Big

Wow... I don't think the photo needs to be this big... Oh well. This is usually where I get lunch. Leftovers are delicious and free.

In other news...

I'm not a reporter, what am I saying? 

Anyway, I leave good ol' Arkansas Saturday morning. I'm pretty excited to get back to Utah, I'm not going to lie. But I will miss being here, like I always do.

This one is pretty straight forward, I would say...

July 7th: Garden

I love hydrangeas. I would use them in my wedding bouqet....

This one took me a while to figure out what to do. Chair.... It seems so simple, but I didn't want some picture of a chair that I would post in my photo challenge, and then forget about it for the rest of forever. And then I remembered a very special "chair"...

July 6th:

I'll admit, I had no idea what to do with this one. Until I was walking around with my camera and noticed Schatzi in her customary spot under the coffee table in the hearth room.

Yes, we call all the rooms in our house fancy things like "hearth rooms". Just kidding. We absolutely do not.

July 5th: On the Floor

Schatzi became a part of the Stoker family right around my mom's birthday in 2001. Eleven years old! But she doesn't seem a day past four or five. She can still give Sophie a run for her money, and Sophie actually is five years old.

Even though she does get a tad... ok really jealous, she is deserving of her namesake. Having just moved home from Germany, we thought the German word for sweetheart would be a cute name for our new dog. So sweetheart is what she was named, and that's just what she is.

My mom knows how to throw a party. That is a fact.

Growing up we always had a party for every holiday, so of course this included the Fourth of July. My mom started the tradition many years ago of having my grandpa, who is a retired pilot with United Airlines, fly over our house in his plane and drop streamer-wrapped candy from the plane window to the waiting children below.

Sort of like a pinata... but way cooler...

So essentially I'm fairly confident no one knows how to have fun like my family does...

I think a lot of people would agree with me on this one:

The best part of the day is when you finally get to turn off the lights and snuggle down in your covers at the end of the day.

Schatzi usually protects me from Samara... eh hem... sleeps with me...

For my mom's birthday several years ago, my dad put in what we call "the courtyard". There's a fountain and a place to sit and eat breakfast. My mom planted ivy next to the fountain and it has been growing ever since. It is now a regular site to see mom and dad outside pulling the ivy off the windows. The ivy keeps us quite busy with it's growing, I would say.

I wrote on here a couple weeks ago that I was doing another Photo-a-Day Challenge for July. I finally finished going through them all, so I wanted to start sharing them on here. And maybe give more of a description than I gave on facebook.

July 1st: Self Portrait

Can I preface this description with an "I hate taking photos of myself. And I'm not too fond of pictures being taken of me." I think the only person I really ever let take pictures of me is my mom... and probably only because she insists. So to have "Self Portrait" be not only in May's photo challenge, but also in this one, I was thinking to myself "What the heck?!" So I sort of cheated. This was originally one of my senior photos that the very talented Anna Jones (my photography inspiration, by the way) took several years ago. You know... when I was a senior. In high school. (How the heck am I already a senior in COLLEGE?! Let alone a super senior....)

In my IB Art class my senior year one of the assignments was a self portrait. So I picked this one and drew it in charcoal.

Then I sort of cheated and took a photo of the drawing of the photo for the photo challenge...

So that's the story!

This girl and I go way back. I remember the first time I ever met her, I thought she must have thought she was the coolest thing around because she had a leather Harley Davidson backpack. Thank heavens first impressions are almost always wrong.

I think her reaction when I told her was a little something like this: "I hated that backpack! My dad made me use it!"

But Kendal is probably one of the most talented people I know. And super creative (I mean, who else would invent LGFPDAHFPR with me?!). She knows how to dance, do her hair in awesome 'dos and has a killer voice.  Just to name a few...

So Kendal, I just wanted you to know, I will always be your fellow LGFP. Always. :)