Oh baby, this post is long and totally worth it.

Oh baby, you will not believe what happened while I was in Reno!

We had the fabulous opportunity to go to a Square Foot Gardening presentation with the one and only Mel Bartholomew! Naturally we had to sign up for tickets the week before the event, which gave me plenty of time to tell my parents all about it. We also found out that Mel would be available for book signing after his presentation. This bit of information caused Mother's jaw to drop. Yup, she was that shocked and jealous. The day of my flight my parents handed me a new copy of Mel's book and bid me to get his signature or not bother coming back home.

After the presentation Kylie and I elbowed our way to the front to get in line to meet Mel.

We love standing in line:


And then, the magic moment:


Please note that we are all wearing red. I don't know what it means, but it must mean something.


After I had safely tucked away the autographed book we went into the nursery so the Comfolteys could pick up some stuff to make Mel's mix.

And there's Ky, picking it up.


She's so strong. I think it's all the baby lifting she does every day.

Also, while we were in the nursery, I proceeded to take a picture with every pretty plant:


Seeing how that volume is obviously extensive, I'll only give you one shot of the "Myriah with pretty plants" pictures.

The remainder of that day was spent working in the garden, and an excellent photo montage of the event can be found here.


After what could be described as the best sleep of my life, we went to church where I didn't hate Sunday School. This was obviously going to be a good day. I had expressed interest in seeing Lake Tahoe, so we decided we would go in the afternoon. We asked around and everyone gave us basically the same directions: Go over the summit, and turn left at the Smokey Bear sign. Smokey is huge and telling you the chances of wildfire, you can't miss it.

Sounds easy enough, so we headed up the mountain. Soon we saw this sign:

Sigh.

We didn't have chains in the car, and we certainly didn't have snow tires. The only thing we had was this Pirate's Booty, and we knew that wasn't going to help us.


So what did we do? I put on my lucky lip gloss, baby! And did we have a problem getting over the summit? NO. We even stopped to take a picture:


It was SO COLD. The only jacket I had brought was this fleece, and I almost didn't even bring that. Please notice the wind. I don't think the wind died down even for 5 minutes while I was visiting in Reno. It was crazy windy. I couldn't believe it.

Once we were over the mountain we drove right past the Smokey Bear sign. Everyone had blah blah blahed about how easy it was to find, but they didn't take into consideration that perhaps someone was trying to lead us astray:


We quickly figured out how to get to the lake and it was simply gorgeous. Windy, cold, and gorgeous.

I was going to add more pictures but blogger isn't interested in doing that right now.