2010: The Year in Review

The past year was a great one for us. As we've reflected on 2010, we came up with a few highlights:

We took some awesome trips: Mt. Rushmore, the Black Hills, and the Badlands; Alaska; Yellowstone National Park; St. George for Thanksgiving; and Cache Valley for all kinds of family fun.

Our families grew: Justin & Annie got married, and we have two new nephews -- Dean in Albuquerque, NM and Gavin in England.

The wedding
Dean
Gavin

Melissa had lots of opportunities for professional development: ALA Midwinter in Boston, ALA Annual in Washington D.C., Immersion in Vermont, Library Assessment Conference in Baltimore, Wyoming Library Association presentations, two articles (article 1 and article 2) published and another accepted. She is loving the job at UW after a year and a half.

Mike has developed professionally, too: continuing to take Master's of Public Administration (MPA) classes, and getting a great new job in Student Success Services as an advisor for at-risk students.

Other good stuff: we have made great friends, spent time hiking and camping, read lots of good books and watched some good movies, and became addicted to a few TV shows (Buffy, Angel, and Bones).

We have big plans and high hopes for 2011, and we wish all of our readers a very happy New Year!

Christmas 2010

Christmas tree at the Bowles home

We had a wonderful trip to Idaho to visit the Bowles family over Christmas. We had some great quality time with the brothers and sisters-in-law (we love you guys!), and of course with Mom and Dad, too. Mom and Mike and I went snowshoeing on Christmas day, up in Strawberry Canyon, and it was just gorgeous. Of course we also played lots of board games and card games during the week of vacation. The new ones were Bananagrams and Scrabble Slam -- both very fun in my opinion, because I'm good at word games -- and the old ones were Rummikub, Salad, and Outburst. Good times! (Except for when I lost at Salad by about 400 points and had a tizzy fit. New Year's resolution: be a better sport)

We have a tradition in the Bowles family of having our grandparents over on Christmas Eve for dinner and a program of Christmas music. Rob and Sarah sang a beautiful arrangement of "Away in a Manger," Justin and Annie played some piano duets (congratulations to Annie, who taught Justin to play), and Mike and I prepared a Music & the Spoken Word arrangement of "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day." There were other musical performances as well, including the traditional performance of "Sleigh Ride" as a piano duet by Mom and me. Here are a few select photos from the evening:

Grandma Hansen, Grandma & Grandpa Bowles, Dad playing his traditional role of running the video camera

Justin & Anna Lee, "Silent Night"Mike doing the spoken word portion of "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" (Mike really can sing, but it's not really something he's comfortable doing for an audience. Thus the spoken word.)
Dad and Mom serving the cheesecake on Christmas Eve

We also opened a few presents on Christmas eve, which included these awesome aprons made by Mom. In case you can't see, they're all university-themed. Justin and Annie have "Vandals" aprons, Rob and Sarah have "Aggies," and Mike and I have "Cowboys." So cute!

Mom and Dad hosted the big Hansen family party this year on December 27th. The extended family keeps on growing exponentially. There were about 50 people at the party this year, all fed and entertained in the Bowles home. It was quite a feat, and I had a great time seeing all my cousins.

In addition to spending time with family, we went to a gathering of some of my high school friends. I was on the Academic Decathlon team in 1999-2000 and our little team defeated all the other schools in Idaho (some much larger than ours) and we went to the National Academic Decathlon competition in San Antonio, Texas. It was a great experience and an awesome team, and a few of us from the team were able to gather at our coach's home before Christmas to catch up. It was great to see everyone, reminisce about our "glory days," and catch up on what's happened in the last 10 years.

Other fun activities over Christmas break: catching up with old friends at Mom and Dad's church, talking to my brother Nick (a Mormon missionary in Seattle) on Christmas day, seeing True Grit with the whole family (I liked it a lot -- even more than I expected to), going to the Logan temple with some members of the family, lunch at Cafe Sabor (yums!), more snowshoeing near Maple Creek after a big snowstorm.

The snowstorm hit on Wednesday, when we had planned to leave for Laramie. We stayed at
Mom and Dad's that night, and Mike ended up on a tractor moving snow around on the dairy.
We thought we had a window to get back to Laramie on Thursday, but we ended up getting stuck at Little America when I-80 was closed for about 100 miles between Rock Springs and Rawlins. We were glad to get back to Laramie the next day and ring in the New Year with friends.

P.S. I also read all three Hunger Games books during Christmas break (over the course of 4 days). The series was a fascinating look at the nature of televised war, a voyeuristic society, governmental control, and it's a great coming-of-age story to boot. Highly recommended, especially for anyone interested in dystopian YA lit.

58 Books in 2010

I'm a list-maker, and since 2007 I've kept a list of the books I've read. This helps me remember what I've read, what I want to read, and allows me to pull up a title when people ask for book recommendations. Some of my reads were for my book groups, some were free galleys I picked up at library conferences, some are not necessarily great literature (I read the entire Sookie Stackhouse series, for example.) I read 58 books in 2010, and thought I'd share my favorites here. If you have read and want to discuss any of the books below, if you want information on any of them, or if you'd like a personalized recommendation, leave a comment. (These are listed in the order in which I read them.)

1. Steinbeck, John The Grapes of Wrath
2. Shaffer, Mary Ann and Annie Barrows The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
3. Atwood, Margaret Oryx and Crake
4. Strout, Elizabeth Olive Kitteridge
5. Grossman, Lev The Magicians
6. Smith, Dodie I Capture the Castle
7. Walters, Barbara Audition
8. Jackson, Shirley We Have Always Lived in the Castle
9. Barry, Sebastian The Secret Scripture
10. Mantel, Hilary Wolf Hall
11. Stead, Rebecca When You Reach Me
12. French, Tana In the Woods
13. Palfrey, John and Urs Gasser Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives
14. Benjamin, Melanie Alice I Have Been
15. Stockett, Kathryn The Help
16. Udall, Brady The Lonely Polygamist
17. Bender, Amy The Particular Sadness Of Lemon Cake
18. Thackeray, William Makepeace Vanity Fair
19. McCann, Colum Let the Great World Spin
20. Nicholls, David One Day
21. Byatt, A.S. The Children's Book
22. Eliot, George Middlemarch
23. Collins, Suzanne Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay
    
24. Kingsolver, Barbara Lacuna

So there you have it: a mix of old and new, YA lit and regular lit, mostly novels with a few nonfiction books mixed in. I finally read some stuff that I'd been meaning to read for years (Middlemarch, Vanity Fair, and The Grapes of Wrath -- not one of those disappointed), a series that was recommended by everyone from my mom to a friend in Seattle to YA librarians everywhere (The Hunger Games -- WOW!), some highly acclaimed novels (Let the Great World Spin, The Lonely Polygamist) and some critically panned (Lacuna). All in all, it was a very good year for reading.

Happy New Year, and I wish us all good reading in 2011!

Holidays!

Happy holidays! I thought I'd give you an update on our holiday season so far. First, Thanksgiving in St. George: we had a great time hanging out with the Broughs (Mike's mom's family) and enjoying the warm, sunny St. George weather. We also did a little Black Friday shopping -- a first for me! Here are some fun family photos from St. George:

A bunch of Mike's cousins -- cute, huh?
Cousins, again
And some of the "grown-ups."
(We stayed with Kim & Brian, on the left. They were awesome hosts!)

And here we are, getting ready to enjoy the meal.

We're enjoying the Christmas season in Laramie so far, too. The courthouse downtown has a charming light show. The lights on and around the building are synced to Christmas music playing on a radio station. It's magical!

When you use one pound of butter in one weekend, you know it must be Christmas. Last weekend I prepared plates of goodies to take to a few friends and neighbors.

Pumpkin cookies, lime sugar cookies, and pecan fudge. Yum!

Autumn

My parents visited last weekend, and we had such a good time. One of our activities was a trip to the Shambhala Mountain Center in Northern Colorado. It's a Buddhist retreat -- in Colorado. Quite unexpected.

Here's the Buddha statue inside the Great Stupa
Mom with a cast of the Buddha's head
Ceiling of the Great Stupa
Mom and Dad in the hills of Colorado. (Dad's making some kind of weird face.)

Earlier this fall I went to Baltimore for the Association of Research Libraries Assessment Conference. It was a really awesome conference, with librarians from the U.S., U.K, and Australia sharing assessment ideas and results. Baltimore is a pretty nice city. Besides attending the conference I got to go to an art museum, visit Edgar Allen Poe’s grave, eat a lot of fresh seafood, spend some time at the beautiful Inner Harbor, and have dinner with a good friend from library school who lives in Baltimore. Here are some photos:

Inner Harbor

Peabody Institute
At the Walters Art Museum
Faidley's Crab Cake -- BEST CRAB CAKE EVER
Downtown Baltimore -- I love visiting urban places, but I also love coming home to Laramie.

We've enjoyed produce all summer and fall from Grant Family Farms in Northern Colorado. We bought a share from the farm and they deliver to Laramie once a week. Here's one of the more beautiful things I've made with the local vegetables:

Leek quiche with tomatoes

The Return Trip

Part of the fun on our trip to Yellowstone was traveling through parts of Wyoming we hadn't seen yet. We covered big swaths of the state since we live in the southeast corner of Wyoming and Yellowstone is in the northwest corner.

On leaving the park, we went through Cody, Wyoming. We stopped at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center and looked at art and artifacts there. Here are a few sculptures we saw:

Buffalo Bill Cody himself

Sacajewea

Crazy Horse

After spending some time in Cody, we hit the road again and stopped in Meeteetse, Wyoming. Meeteetse, a town of about three hundred people, has one of the best chocolate shops you're likely to find anywhere. The shop is owned and operated a cowboy-chocolatier named Tim Kellogg. Check out the Meeteetse Chocolatier's website for a promo video that show's Tim's skills in the rodeo arena and in the chocolate shop.

We spent that night in Thermopolis, Wyoming, home of one of the world's largest mineral hot springs. We stayed at a really great hotel. The building is historic, and the amenities were great, including a mineral springs hot tub. If you're ever passing through Thermopolis, we highly recommend the Best Western!

Yellowstone National Park

We had an awesome trip to Yellowstone National Park last week. My parents and my brother & sister-in-law (Rob and Sarah) met us there and we all camped together in the Norris campground. We had a fantastic time reminiscing about past family trips to Yellowstone and showing Mike and Sarah the park for the first time.

Here are a few favorite photos:

A glimpse of the Tetons on our way to Yellowstone
At Norris Geyser Basin on our first morning in the park
I love that I caught these two mid-laugh. Aren't they fun?
(Yes, those are my parents, even though they look waaaay too young to have adult children like me.)
This is one of the most beautiful things about Yellowstone -- steam rising amid the dark green pines.
And here's the other most beautiful thing in Yellowstone -- the grand canyon and the falls are stunning.
Mammoth Hot Springs
Dad & Mom cooking breakfast. We ate really well on the camping trip: stuffed French toast, grilled salmon, corn on the cob, homemade ice cream, s'mores. Yummy.
Here's the obligatory Old Faithful photo. It really is stunning, but also so crowded. This year Yellowstone National Park set a new record for attendance: 2.5 million.
And here are the wildlife photos. We saw tons of bison, but just a couple of elk, some deer, and a wolf (though it might have been a coyote).
On our way out of the park, Mike and I saw a grizzly bear with a cub! I have to admit, that was the most exciting wildlife sighting of the trip. And I didn't even get a photo.
On our last night together, it snowed. Pretty hard. Mom & Dad and Rob & Sarah were staying in Mom & Dad's tent trailer, so we all ate dinner there together, played cards, and ate popcorn. It was great fun.
Mike and I felt pretty tough sleeping in our tent after it had snowed for a couple of hours. But we were really warm and cozy, and when we woke up the next morning most of the snow was gone.

The trip to Yellowstone was great. We're planning to make another family trip there in a few years and hopefully everyone can make it then. It's such a beautiful place. Being there with the family brings back great memories.

(I didn't get a photo of the whole group together at the falls. Mom or Sarah, if you have one please send it my way!)