This One's For Charina!

This past week was a joyous one, and I want to dedicate the description and the events thereof to our dear east coast sister, Char! This is a rather wordy and self centered blog, so if you could care less (which is likely and just fine) read no longer.

But. Char, you must.

On Tuesday I got all the way from Colorado Springs to Provo, barely making the SLC flight and traveling on the bus by myself! I was a lone traveling woman with all I owned in the bag on my back! I just imagined myself having to wait at this little rundown ghetto corner of downtown Salt Lake crowded with a bunch of foreign people and when i got to my first transfer stop it was just that! Regardless, I made it to Provo and campus is a glorious place!

There I met Elise!!!!!!! A joyous, joyous reunion indeed. We went to Ripple's the next day, which is the drive-in place in The Phone Call. This picture is the posts where Scott lays the board he breaks to warn his adversary, "Don't press your luck, Joe!" Cool, eh?

Then it was the Sports Camp Counselor Retreat! Char, so many people recognized me as your sister on their own free will and intuition and it surprised me! I was honored of course, and they were all happy to hear you are thriving (you are thriving, right?) and that I was the very flesh and blood of sisterhood related to you. I also had the honor of occasionally being identified as Sarah's best friend ("you're from Colorado Springs? Do you know Sarah then?" "Ha, do I know Sarah!? I am more bonded to Sarah than you are to your own mother!")(Just kidding, I didn't really say that) (sometimes)

There was a talent show, in which i performed my poem, thinking, "Oh, these people will appreciate the clever humor and true statements about BYU dating weaved within this ballad" but, no, they more appreciated the memorization factor. Alas, appreciation nonetheless.

In any case, here's a glimpse of friendship for you, Char, as well as a shout out to my newfound kindred spirit Josh Bolding, as I do believe he may check this blog every now and then.

After a glorious retreat full of an hour total of training, bonding beyond any before, and more people discovering my bellybutton trick than should have, Jamie and a surprise-CJ!- picked me up by providence in Provo!

Both of them even changed their son's diapers in Elise's yard which was hilarious becuase a) Elise comes from an all girl family b) there were strangers viewing her house at that time and c) the mom next door was mowing her lawn with her child strapped to her in a baby carrier thing. ha!

We bonded all the way down to Monroe, where our nieces and nephews were just abundant and big and where we visited two Monrovian spots, the quaint library and La Casita del Osi! It was way good and way hectic with Carters and Lindes coming out of our ears!
It was WONDERFUL to be with them all, though, and CJ and I stayed up late LAUGHING OUR HEADS OFF (see her blog) and discovering that we are actually NINE years apart, where we both thought it was only 8. I mean, i knew we had to be so far apart because the world couldn't handle both of us at the same time, but really? Nine!? We had no idea.

Jame and I then took off across the country with the kids in the back and snacks in the front (and all over Ally's carseat) at which point we proceeded to LAUGH OUR HEADS OFF for NINE hours straight! Some conclusions we came to after all this laughter: a) Dad is funny b) Mom is funny c) CJ is funny d) Char is funny e) Bum is funny! Hahhaa we have a funny family, and we told stories of each of you as the miles flew by! Definitely one of the top three road trips of my life! Thanks, Jame!

I spent a day in LA with Jamie and LaDon. LaDon and I ran the most beastly stairs ever ever ever, LaDon beasted up them and it was rough but joyous!

Sorry if this picture is inappropriate, but it is also the best one demonstrating the fatness of Daniel, which is fatness beyond your wildest imagination!

PHEW! SO..... What is the point of all this nonsense gabbering about my own life? CHARINA! You live so far away! I want to bond with you and Jimmy, for I have bonded with all the sistas but you this week and such yearning is in my soul!

Can I come see you on Thursday?

Boredom Conquered!

Karalee and I woke up today and realized 4 things: a) neither of us had showered for the past forever b) we both had no future plans to entertain us c) We were basically in a state of unproductive patheticism, but d) you can always find joy if you just go looking even if you are unshowered and broke so....

Today we had an adventure! The first of many over the next month we decided, but anyway, Karalee, Taylor (he also was in our same state of miserable peonism) and I set off to rid our miserable selves of boredom! And I just wanted so desperately to go the Carriage Museum, (because, what? It's like the Funeral museum--who even knew there was such a thing, and who has even been to one?) but we of course got lost. However, it afforded us many other great adventures. Such as

Helen Hunt Falls! We asked this precious old lady named Nanetta (who was a twin. Instant endearment) for directions and ended up having a billion minute conversation with her just because she was so charitable! But she inspired us to visit the falls. So we did.

We didn't take the full hike, but here's Karalee and I in our true form. I'm looking at her like she's weird, she has her red purse, she's wearing my shirt, and she's quite happy about it all!
We went far enough to see the wall Taylor built for his eagle project. Nice, eh? Yes, he is holding my grandma 90 lil white purse, which by the way, got many good pictures today.


After driving through the glorious netherlands of Colorado, we finally found the Carriage Museum and it was so wondrous! We had the whole thing to ourselves and we made good friends with the curator (3rd generation native, you know) so he let us actually get in some of the carriages!!!!! It was complete BLISS!!

I felt so quaint and happy and I wanted to buy a carriage and ride it around town!
But Karalee's faithful car was fine, and she was a pretty good chauffeur. When her eyes were open, unlike in this once again very characteristic shot. hahaa

We also stopped at the Bookman bookstore by the place where they used to pick us up for work and yeah. That cat was still there. It was a quiet enviroment. But i quite liked its romantical nature.

We also finished off the day with free fish tacos from Wahoos. They were surprisingly delicious!

It was SUCH a beautiful day and I must have taken at least 21 pictures of the Peak. It just was so endearing! So good adventure. Lessons learned: a) Go to the carriage museum b) accompany us on any of our future adventures c) Colorado is the most BEAUTIFUL PLACE in the world! d) Boredom can be conquered at no cost to anyone in the near vicinity!

Ode to Facebook

There's about a billion and one things I could say to make fun of facebook, but today's focus will be on people's statuses. As far as I can figure, there's probably 6 different types of statuses people put up, and because facebook is not a place for creativity, there is just no more than that and not a lot of fudge room within each type.

First you have your Lyrics + Quotes people. These are usually girls in whimsical moods:
Marcia Jones the spaces between my fingers are right where yours fit perfectly
Betty Smith Dance like no one is watching :)

If you're like me, you don't know a lot of lyrics, so you think these people are all artsy and romantical for thinking up such clever lines. These statuses are usually posted to denote carefree feelings of love and bliss.

Then you got your Profound Statements About Life People. And I mean Profound.
Hannah Johnson Life is full of trials. We just got to keep moving on though!
Anne Nobles I see nothing but the sun which makes a dust and the grass which is green. The future lies ahead.

These people are serious thinkers, and they are kind enough to share their wisdom with the world.

After them comes the Inside Joke People. These, of course, are funny only to those on the inside and are usually followed with an appreciative comment towards those involved
Ben Thompson Nothing beats hats and poker chips
Mary Simmons FORKS!!!! love ya Julie!

This group also includes the Group Appreciation People
Dan Brown Great ward activity. Go 94th ward!
Kaylee Redding Playing frisbee in the park was so fun!
Everyone involved "likes" these statuses instantly

Besides those you have Emotion People. But don't think for a second you actually get to know why these people are experiencing the emotions they are. Emotion statuses are vague proclamations meant as bait for getting comments
Kara Yates happy :)
or better and even less vague!
Sarah Sampson :)

Next group includes the Practical Use of Facebook Status People
Christine Lopez Hey everyone, don't forget about the CES fireside tonight at 7!
Graham Gilligan Playing soccer in the park at noon today. Anyone up for it?

One of the most popular status updates is just that: Update People
Jake Wilcox Just aced my history exam! Now off to the gym for some weight lifting
Hillary Jackson It's 78 degrees outside! Think I'll go to the pool....
Ashley Dixon Just took my 3,864th breath for the day! Oh, and there's my 1,743rd blink!
Updated via facebook iPhone 2 seconds ago

These are generally also the people that makes sentences out of themselves
Derek Cakehead is watching Goonies. Love Chunk
Melissa Sanders woke up feeling sore.

Don't get me wrong, facebook is a wonderful institution. I check it religiously after reading my scriptures and brushing my teeth like any healthy person. And I hate it with a passion too.
Krista Roy Can't you seeee you belong with meee
Krista Roy Sometimes oxygen circulates around in the atmosphere. Just a profound thought
Krista Roy 5 minute mile in you vans. hahaha Coach Schwartz!
Krista Roy neutral feeling :|
Krista Roy Dinner in the kitchen in an hour! be there!
Krista Roy is finished blogging. Think I'll go check my facebook.....

Well, shoot!

I've been working on a slideshow for Dad to show at the World Cup next week and it is joyous and great. Also, I have absolutely no problem searching through the extremely large variety of shooting pictures from previous world cups and compiling an exceedingly diverse collection of images. There are simply just so many different shots of shooters you can shoot!

Just kidding, but really, I suppose if someone made a slideshow of running, it would be the same pose over and over again, and it would be entertaining to runners, so i can't really say a lot against pictures of shooters and just hope they are entertained by looking at themselves in the same pose over and over again.

I try, at least, to get a good mix of the happy winners...

...and the ecstatic ones!




Haha! And besides the humor of all those shooting pictures, I have also been adding pictures of the USA- just to fuel nationalistic pride, I guess- and in case you forgot or didn't know,
Our country is beautiful and diverse! (Even if the shooters within it are not!)

Today I remembered what i hate even more than ice: the dentist

When I was in 3rd grade we did a musical called "Someone You Can Count On" and it was about how dentists and doctors are our friends and we should like them and it was all a psychological trick to get little kids to warm up to those sorts of things at an early age by putting encouraging words to clever tunes and having us all dance around like happy little hooligans. It was tight casting, because they put me as the kid who hates the dentist and with excellent emotion and true sincerity, i opened the play with a line that went something like this: "YOU GUYS! I just saw a monster and he had tubes coming out of his face and he was wearing a mask and he was holding all sorts of weapons ANNNND...." And then the next kid interrupted me by saying something stupid like "Oh, that was just the dentist, you paranoid child! Dentists are our friends! You should have run up and hugged that big friendly monster!"

That play was a lie.

There is no charity in the walls of a dentist hell.

The pleasant conversation is a deceitful guise. Your hands are in my mouth anyway!

The innocent Billy Joel playing in the background is a weak attempt to make me at ease.

I hate looking at ceiling tiles. I don't want the toothbrush at the end of the visit. I'm usually an amiable person, but no. Not at the dentist. It is just an evil place. They even leaned me back so far in my chair I couldn't see Pikes Peak out the window. blllllahhhhhhhhh and now my mouth is numb for the next 4 hours.

I would have even been a little happier if they had at least, instead of those evil tool things, used ice to numb me up.

In my Inbox!

St. George Marathon Good News‏

From:	St. George Marathon (marathondonotreply@sgcity.org)
	You may not know this sender.Mark as safe|Mark as junk
Sent:	Fri 5/07/10 5:21 PM
To:	kristaroy@msn.com

CONGRATULATIONS!!!
We would like to personally congratulate you on being selected for the 2010
St George Marathon.  This year you were 1 of the 7400 lucky runners to be chosen out
of a record-breaking 11,000 registrants. We will be hosting runners from 50 states
and 17 countries. We would like to thank you for your interest in our event and we
look forward to seeing each of you cross the finish line in October!

PIKES PEAK!

The best part about being home is seeing Pikes Peak everyday! A friend once made a comment about my relationship/slight obsession with this wonderful mountain, and I will now confirm its truthfulness in this list,

The Top 20 Reasons Why if Pikes Peak were a Man, I Would Indeed be Kissing It Right Now:
(aka: Top 20 Reasons Why I Love Pikes Peak!)

1. You can see it from ANYWHERE! It is easily the most prominent purple mountain majesty for miles around!
2. It is named after someone named Zeb who, admittedly, never made it to the top, but really, Zeb? That's a pretty outrageous name.

3. It has grown over the years. The older signs and merchandise still say 14,110 feet, but now it's actually 14,115 ft. in elevation.

4. There are 4 ways to get to the top: the highway (a 26ish mile, 10$ drive), the cog railway (a guided 30$ adventure, jokes included), the Crags (a weeny trail up the back side), and Barr Trail (a free, gloriously wonderful 13 mile hike). We even used to tell our customers we would get catapulted or take a jet pack to the top. These, obviously, are lies. We would always just run.

5. There is a donut shop on top! What other fourteener do you know that sells the world's greatest donuts at the summit!?

6. Pikes Peak is marked on every world map I have yet encountered! That is so cool! There is a little corner of heaven that I'm so endeared to and it is marked on world maps!! When was the last time your childhood was marked on a world map!?

7. At the base, there is an old train track, now converted into a type of hiking trail, that goes STRAIGHT up the first mile of the mountain, lovingly called the Incline, and it is a BEAST, but you are also a beast if you hike up it. The picture below shows the summit peeking on the left, and the line you can see going up the right side of this picture is the Incline.

8. Pikes Peak employs the most wonderful people in the world! You know if you can a) drive many times up and down the same road with b) spend many hours in the same place with c) hide in cupboards with d) endure lightning and snow storms with and e) clean inches of grease from the grill with someone, you can surely be their dear friend! You only wish you knew Kim Webb whose passion is charity and Angie Jack who can sing like a larken!

9. Every year Pikes Peak has a race up the highway and tons of foreign people come and race up it in race cars. The usual hour and half drive for the relatively brave tourist takes these crazy people only 10 minutes!

10. The summit house on top treats its nauseous and oxygen lacking customers with the greatest care and to the most quality food. Want some water? There's dixie cups on top of that rusty water fountain over there! Want some food? You can pay way elevated prices (ha. pun.) for these wonderful hot dogs that have likely been sitting in the "boiling" water over there all day. (Note to customer; water takes a long time to boil at 14000 ft. Thus, hot dogs are usually not cooked, let alone hot). But, don't worry, the saltine crackers are free.

10. You can see EVERYTHING from Pikes Peak! It is so so so beautiful and the inspiration for a 2 second introduction to myself- "My name's Krista and i love mountain vistas!"

11.There are such wondrous places as Bob's Creek, No Name Creek, A-Frame, treeline, and the Cirque on the Peak. That is wonderful.

12. When you are on the Peak and there is a rainbow, you are really somewhere over the rainbow, because you are so high, you are looking over the top of it!

13. I played footsie with Death for an hour once on the Peak!!!!! That, even if you've heard it before, is a great story. I may soon make a blog of it. What a day.

14. Pikes Peak served as the inspiration for America the Beautiful, which is included in the hymn book. Tell me that doesn't make it pretty joyous.

15. The view of the city coming down from the mountain at night is enough to make some feel like they want to get engaged or fall in love.

16. Sometimes the wind blows so hard on top that you can see the snow swirling around the summit like a magical aura all the way from the city. And then sometimes it is so serene that it almost looks like a cardboard cutout.

17. Pikes Peak is photogenic. I have more pictures of Pikes Peak than most anything else, and in every single picture, it always looks beautiful!

18. Half way up the mountain at Barr Camp there is a quaint little cabin where the same lady has lived for as long as I've known. When she dies, I will live there. And I will also make pancakes for breakfast so when hikers come by, I can offer them some whole wheat health.

19. Every year there is a running race up Barr trail. The race going just up is the Ascent, and then up and down, run the next day, is the Marathon. This race has defined much of what I am and can do now because I bonded with my mom when I registered for it, spent a whole summer getting advice from veterans who would come to the summit house, slept every night dreaming about it, ran every day to train for it, and finally RAN it, which was glorious and hard and triumphant and wonderful and simply ebullient and I want to do it again and again like all the other crazy old people who run it!

20. Pikes Peak is part of my soul! Who doesn't feel endeared to their own soul!?

Here are some photographs of all things Pikes Peak. Every time I hike it, I take a picture like the one at the bottom left at that same place on the trail. The rest are just joyous pictures. Don't you feel 10% happier because of those 20 things!!? Maybe you don't, but I hope you enjoyed this!

Who Knew?

When I left for BYU, CJ told me to keep a blog so that she and you other family people could keep up on my life. This, hopefully, ended up providing many joyous moments for all of you, reading of my precious roommates, my crazy college happenings, and my initiation into independence. Now, however, I am quite roommateless, quite collegeless, and quite dependent on the wonderful food that little mom house elf just pops in front of me!

This has left me to wonder, "Why even keep the blog for the next six weeks?" After poking around other people's blogs and having hours to sit and think Krista thoughts, I've realized blogging, for most the world, is like a journal type sort of let-me-tell-you-about-what-i've-been-thinking-lately thing and not just the keep-the-family-updated illusion I'd been entertaining all this time.

Thus we see, I will now blog like a true blogger. But I don't ever really do anything like other people, so hopefully it will be more entertaining than your average blog for you to read.

If any of you are even reading this. You, like me, could be planning on thinking I died from the blogger world for a little bit. If this is true, you will have many surprises come July when you see all the blogs I'm going to post in the near future!

Until Then!