Three days ago a friend came to see us. Her name is Lisa and she is very nice. Yesterday we went to the Church of the Holy Cross and we saw a bird. It was a quail.
Today we went to Cathedral Rock it is AWESOME.
🙂 But today Lisa had to go. 🙂
We had a visitor the past three days; her name is Lisa. She has been friends with my mom since high school. She is super friendly and nice (she bribed me to write about her with ice cream). The family and I went on a cool hike Lisa showed us called Cathedral trail.
The trail had beautiful views. Then after she bought Joe and me milkshakes and ice cream. We went out to dinner at a place called the Javelina Cantina. It is a Mexican restaurant with good cheese burgers. (I was in withdrawal). It was really fun (mostly because we were off school).
The last couple of weeks have been an absolute blur of work, as grant applications came due, the ACR Conference work seriously ramped up in the final days of preparing the program book, and I tried to make progress on various research manuscripts. After a lot of long days, I took a lovely break for the last few days as my high school buddy Lisa Wells came to visit us in Sedona.
We had a great time! While we did a couple of challenging hikes, we also had one or two margaritas along the way, and several wonderful dinners, both at home (thanks Dan) and in fantastic local restaurants (thanks Lisa).
Lisa and I travelled Europe together more than 25 years ago, and also had a funny low budget trip to Margarita Island, Venezuela together before we both met our wonderful husbands. Although we don’t see each other nearly enough, we immediately fall into the same comfortable friendship we’ve always had.
Here’s to the best of friends!
On the weekend I watched a movie called Gangster Squad. It was an amazing movie. It had great actors like Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Josh Brolin, and Sean Penn, and phenomenal supporting characters. It was a great movie with a exciting ending. Also, viewers should never expect everyone to live. The movie is more interesting in the beginning because the producers say it is based off a true story. Overall, the great actors and good story make it (in my opinion) the best gangster movie out there. On a complete other topic, I like cheeseburgers. Do you?
Howl’s Moving Castle                                                               Â
Yesterday I watched Howl’s Moving Castle. It is a Walt Disney animated movie about a demon that has an amazing home that can move. A war breaks out with weird creatures that can somehow have masks that stay on in the air. Weird? It is a very funny movie.
🙂 I think you would like it too 🙂
Library
At the Sedona library there are a lot of movies, books, computers, a kids’ section, a teen section, and sometimes
A GAME DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
At game day you can play Xbox, Wii, board games and card games. But game day is not until next week, 🙂 and I cannot wait! 🙂
At a store down the street that sells ice cream treats there is a stray cat that is so very cute. I like him a lot.
The weeks we have been here have been pretty much unplanned. The only thing we have kept coming back to is the library. It is gargantuan; it is part of a 75 library system with a huge section just for tweens. It has a massive amount of new movies. Some of the ones they have are on pay-per-view. I am really getting into a series called Hazardous Tales. It is an array of books in graphic novel form about history. It has funny narrators describing disgusting things like the Donner party, World War One, the Revolutionary War, and the naval raids and battles of the Union forces in the Civil War. I am getting into comic books in large volume forms like the Walking Dead series. The library here has an extensive collection of books, from non-fiction history books of cowboys to fictional romance novels, like The Fault in our Stars (which I have on hold). The library is much bigger than the one back home. It is starting to feel like home there.
Today we went hiking on Broken Arrow Trail to Chicken Point. On the hike we saw lizards, barrel cactus, big rocks, pink jeeps, and a yellow rock.
The other day we hiked to Devils Bridge. This is my favorite hike so far. How breath taking is this?
Yesterday we went to my favorite trail so far. It is called Devils Bridge. It is one of the toughest hikes my family and I have done. I found it enjoyable because I love climbing.
Also, on a lesser note, I claimed a Golem hole for Jacktopia. It was so fun on the bridge. The “bridge” is where the two connecters of the mount meet. You can go under and to your right (if you are under the bridge) you can sit in a nice shady spot (that is where I found the Golem hole). The view is just breathtaking up there.
It was really astonishing, the one bad part was I kept thinking zip line almost as much as I was thinking spaceship during The Lego Movie. Over all, the hiking here is really gratifying.
We have settled into an interesting work/life pattern here. For the last two weeks I’ve been back at work, fine-tuning the ACR academic conference program (while marvelling at my co-chair Stacy Wood’s ability to party-plan), planning my field labs for next term’s Semester at Sea courses (Consumer Behavior and International Marketing) as well as working on the special issue of the Journal of Business Research I am co-editing with the ever patient Catherine Prentice. (I mean really, who takes a vacation just as the deadline for the issue comes around? Well, I did, actually). Still on my sabbatical list: revisions of a couple of papers, finalizing working papers for publication, and getting started on a book! Some many interesting projects, so little time… Well, actually, still finding time to hike! This was taken on the Hogwash trail not far from our house; this one had a lot of technically difficult sections, and we were really impressed with Joe and Jack’s emerging skills and endurance.
We are working the boys up to longer hikes, and managed a hot 5 mile one yesterday that concluded with a serious climb up to the “Devil’s Bridge.” Joe was trying out new hiking shoes, and he was tired, but he was really happy that he did it!
The routine so far is a little unorthodox. I work while Dan home schools the boys. We try and hike every couple of days, early morning before it gets too hot. Then home and school/work. Some days it is all school/work, and a late afternoon swim. The oddest thing is that we are working weekends, so when we do take a day off places we go and visit won’t be as crowded midweek. Sort of a three days on, one day off, sort of model. it’s interesting. Very productive for me, but the combination of Arizona time zone, my later start times in the day, and some weekdays “off” must be driving my Eastern time zone colleagues a little crazy! We also have some really interesting visitors. So far, two tarantulas and one scorpion have appeared. I am also quite certain I had javelinas rooting around outside during the night. But the highlight so far was the visitor we saw munching the bushes in the yard one morning.
June, Dan, and Joe go travelling 