Happy Holidays and our Year in a Nut-Shell

December 11, 2010 | Author: Jerel Harwood

Happy Holidays to you all and Merry Christmas.  This has been quite an eventful year for us.  Faythe has turned 10, Inez and the kids celebrated with a trip to Lagoon.  He got to take a trip to California with his Grandpa this past Summer and enjoyed his time there.  Faythe started the 5th grade this past Fall and is doing good in school.  Esperanza turned 8 and was baptized.  She is in the 2nd grade and also is doing good.  She makes it a goal to be in the homework club each month.  Jerel graduated with his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Utah Valley University this past Summer.  His last class was spent in Italy doing an Art History study abroad.  It was an amazing trip, 2 weeks in Rome, 2 weeks in Florence, and 1 week in Venice.  He made many good friends while there and was able to see many great works of art.  Pictures from the trip can be seen at Jerel and Inez’s Art BLOG Grey Forest Studio.  On the way home Jerel was able to stop in London and visit with his longtime friend Clara Wessinger, her Husband Eric and their 2 children.  They graciously opened their home to him for a week while they showed him the sights and helped him to navigate the metro system in London.  It was great to see them and spend time with their wonderful family.  Jerel came back excited to see the family and to get working on his art.  This past Fall he began attending classes at BYU and is completing his application for their Masters of Fine Arts in Studio Arts program, to start Fall 2011.  Inez is working very hard in school and is doing great.  She applied and was accepted for the Art and Visual Communications department trip to New York in the Spring.  They will be there for a week attending Museums and visiting Artist’s Studios.  It is a wonderful opportunity for her.  She was awarded a work study grant this past semester and has been working in the Financial Aid call center.  It has been wonderful to see the growth in our Family throughout this past year.  We have been to amazing places and seen wonderful things.  It has been a great blessing to be in school.  We would like to say thank you to all of our family and friends who have been such a great support to us in our endeavors over this past year.  We could not make it without your loving support!  We hope you have a wonderful Christmas.

We love you all,

– Jerel, Inez and the Kids

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High Altitude Camping

August 16, 2010 | Author: Jerel Harwood

A couple of weekends ago we took the kids up to one of our favorite places to camp in the Manti-La Sal National Forest. Just off of Cleveland Reservoir is a small section of primitive camp sites that we like to stay in. We spent two nights there. Saturday we took a walk around the lake. It was beautiful around the back side of the lake, we explored the tail water and I wished I had brought my Fly Rod to do a little fishing. as we were walking around the lake the clouds started rolling in. We attempted to hurry ourselves but had to walk carefully through some extremely muddy areas where the inlets to the lake are. At one point I had to stop and pry Esperanza’s shoe out of the mud where it had gotten stuck after she jumped a small creek. As we turned to go around the north point of the reservoir the clouds opened up and the rain came showering down on us, the lightning strikes moved closer and closer to us. Inez and I found a grove of aspen trees where we hid from the lightning dancing off the surrounding peaks and huddled together to stay warm as we tried to wait out the storm. The weather in this area changes frequently, only for us it went from wet to worse as the hail started coming down. At that point we decided to make a break for it and hurried as fast as we could back to camp. Gratefully the tent was dry and our sleeping bags were warm as we spent the rest of the afternoon napping and enjoying the sounds of the storm going on outside.
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Ghetto Paint Job

July 15, 2010 | Author: Jerel Harwood

Inez’s words are, “Awful!!!  It looks hideous.”

I say it looks better than it did.  The long story is that I spent the last couple of weeks working on my Toyota Pickup, redoing the front Axel and Knuckle seals along with the bearings; wheel and trunnion.  It needed them bad, before my study abroad session I had taken the truck in to get an alignment done on it and the shop wouldn’t do it, explaining that the bearings were worn and any changes they made would only last a couple of miles.  So I went about preparing for a fix of the truck.  I had some old parts hanging around the garage, a transmission, transfer case, drive line, and rear 3rd member.  I contacted my favorite shop Dave’z Off Road Performance in Placerville, CA and set up a trade for the parts I needed.  Mark (my Father in Law) was headed out to California so I hitched a ride with him and drug all of my old parts out to Dave’z.  Dave was generous enough to do a straight trade for the parts I needed!  His shop is awesome and I recommend it to anyone who needs Toyota Truck parts.  Fast forward to this July after I got home from Italy, I was able to fix up the front end of the truck and boy did it need it, the seals were all worn out, the grease in the knuckles looked like soup with all of the gear lube in them.  After I had the truck fixed we took it for it’s maiden voyage up American Fork Canyon here in Utah.  Our plan was to have a picnic at Silver Flats Lake and then drive the mountain roads over to Midway, Utah.  We spent the majority of the day out in the mountains, where Inez took picture for her photo class, and I shot some with the digital camera.  We had gotten into the mountains pretty far when we were forced to turn around because some person had decided to try and tow their pop-up camping trailer where it didn’t bel0ng and had gotten stuck.  We turned around and came back through the Alpine loop where we we got to drive through a beautiful aspen forest to Provo Canyon by Sundance.

The driver’s side door has been hanging up on the quarter panel for some time now, and it chose that day to catch the quarter panel and bend it all to heck.  I ended up having to remove the quarter panel and fix the hinges on the door so it would close properly and stop catching the quarter panel.  I also had to bang the dent out of the quarter panel and repaint that section of it to protect it from the elements.  It’s not the best job I have ever done, though in my defense I don’t have any body tools for working on cars, so I had to make do with what I had.  I like it, even if it does look like a bleeding fish ;)

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