A Fond Farewell to Fall (at least until tomorrow)

It was one wild and crazy weekend around here, weather-wise, anyway. I mentioned that snow was in the forecast, but I thought it would just be a little flurry like we had early last year (except it was on Sept 29!!!! WTH? Since when does it snow below 8000 ft in Sept?!?!). I definitely underestimated Mother Nature.

Luckily I was able to take advantage of the little bit of okay weather that we had. I talked the Hubs into going on a hike with me. He got a flu shot Friday afternoon, so he wasn't feeling the perkiest, but I figure it would be good for him to get out. So we bundled up and braved the cold. We drove to one of the trails nearby, and started up the hill. Here are a couple of pics showing the view. It was around 40 degrees, and pretty windy.
I can't believe there isn't more "fall color" on the trees. Except for the coat, you'd almost think this picture was taken in August.
This picture is just above my neighborhood (that's how close the trails are). The street below is 2 streets up from me- I love being so close to the mountains.

We ended up hiking across instead of up the mountain, and came down the trail into our neighborhood. So the Hubs just drove me over to pick up my car (I probably could have walked since it was a little over a mile, but my knee wasn't doing the greatest, and it was freezing!).

I'm glad that we didn't have a (home) football game this past weekend, because it would have sucked. It got nastier as the day went on, and it eventually started raining (it had rained the night before and in the morning) which finally turned to snow. This is what I saw before I went to bed:
Not a lot of snow, but still, it's snow in October! I was a little shocked Sunday morning, thinking maybe I had slept for a couple of months. This is what I woke up to: As you can see, since most of the leaves are still on the tree, the snow was very heavy and pulled the branches down to the ground. I'm surprised the power didn't go out in my area. Luckily they trimmed the branches when we had the big storm on Labor Day, or else we probably would have been in trouble. It all goes back to "everything happens for a reason"- I was so pissed when I saw all those branches on the ground in Sept, and that they had butchered the tree, but now I am very happy that it was done then, instead of now, when it's much colder.

Here are a couple of pictures showing the front yard. It was so cloudy, you can't even see the mountains in the first picture. Yes, there's about 5 inches on my car. The reason why we don't have much snow on our driveway is because we have two huge trees that are covering it (since very few leaves have fallen). The second picture is across the street, looking up the hill.

Due to the freezing temperatures overnight, the Hubs wasn't able to pour the cement Saturday morning as planned. Sometimes I feel like it's never going to get done, what with all these little hiccups. But hey- now we have our very own ice skating rink:
Here in Utah, we say that you can experience all 4 seasons in one week- and we're not kidding. To put this in perspective, it was 88 degrees on Oct 1!!! The first 3 days of October were in the 80's. Then a week after that, BAM! But at least winter isn't here to stay (at least not yet). Here is the forecast for the rest of the week. I wish I had grabbed the picture when it still showed today's high of 48 (although I think it only got up to 45), but you get the idea. Snow and freezing temps one weekend, sunny and 70 the next. Which is perfect, since we have a football game this Saturday.
Speaking of football, how 'bout them Utes?! We're 7-0, baby!! We beat Wyoming 40-7, but that's the same team that I watched BYU beat up on 44-0. Neither Utah nor BYU moved up in the rankings this week, so we're still at 14 and BYU at 9 (which isn't too shabby and I'm quite proud of my team).

And I couldn't resist the lure of the scale, but at least it was good news. I won't update here yet; I'll wait until I send my official weight for Viv's Challenge next Sunday. If I can just stay where I was at on Saturday, I would be very happy, but I still have the opportunity to lose even more this week. How cool would that be? I just hope I can get back to running soon. Although my knee and leg have been feeling mostly better lately, I've been having weird pain in my hip, so I'm going to take it easy a bit longer. I think tomorrow I'll try an elliptical workout, along with my usual Biggest Loser upper body workout.

I hope you are all grateful that you didn't have snow like this over the weekend (even my Minnesota peeps didn't have to deal with snow yet), and if you did, well I feel your pain.

On a final note, here is a photo that I found on the web site for our local news station, and I thought it was quite appropriate. The original caption said, "10 inches of snow in Roy, and a Vikings win. What a day!!" (submitted by Frank Castle). You can view other pictures by going here, then clicking on the Photo Gallery to the right.