Past Couple of Months

I am not very good at keeping up on the blog! But I will promise to try to get better! Casey and I are settled in to our nice home here in Star Valley! It is a beautiful home and it has an incredible view! When I find our camera I will take pictures and post them! In the mean time, you will just have to take my word for it!

The past couple of months have been busy for me and Casey. I have still been traveling between here and Evanston because my dad was sick for a little while. However, he is finally doing much better, and I think I will be staying in Star Valley a lot more now. I actually have a job interview tomorrow for a part time position! I am hopeful that this will go well and I will have a new job soon! I am also looking forward to finding different ways to volunteer within the community, giving me both hours to fulfill my CFLE requirements, and a chance to serve those in the community!

This last week I was able to go to Evanston and see my brother, Brady, his wife Alayna and their little boy Cael over the weekend! He is up in North Dakota going to PT school, so this was a very quick trip for them, but it was great seeing them!

This week Casey and I are looking forward to a trip up to Kaycee, WY to go on our annual white tail hunting trip! I am especially excited this year because my parents bought me a new gun! When I was younger, I never thought I could be this excited about a gun, however, I am very excited! And, to top it off, this week is suppose to be around 65 and clear skies!! It will be a GREAT hunting trip!

I have to apologize that my blogs are so boring and pictureless, but I will post some pictures of happenings as of late when I get my hands on our camera! For now take care!

Not Much

I feel guilty that I haven't posted much of anything on my blog lately except for a few lame updates. But, unfortunately, I really don't have much to update on! Our traveling adventures are over for now (but there will be more to come next year!) and we are going to sink our roots in Afton, Wy for a time. We are currently looking for places to rent, and I am looking for a job. I am hoping to find something that can attribute to my becoming a Certified Family Life Educator, however I am quickly learning that to be picky in Afton is not really an option! However there are a couple of job openings I am applying for and I will hope for the best!

I have been really hesitant towards living in Afton for any length of time, but I am slowly starting to enjoy the little quirks to this town that I have previously disliked. It's also great knowing that I have a friend from college living here as well as a high school friend living close by! Plus I have a lot of great family in the Valley too, which makes a WORLD of difference. I am definitely happy to be in this next stage of our lives, though it is proving to be a little more difficult than the college stage for me, due to the lack of routine and work and plans just not working out at all!! But I have really enjoyed myself! Hope everyone is enjoying the cold, but staying warm! Bring on Fall!

Checkin' In

Things are starting to slow down for us a bit. I am probably on my last stretch of traveling to Evanston, as I am anxious to stay in Star Valley with Casey and possibly find a job. Currently we are looking for places to rent here, but nothing has been impressive yet, but I am hoping to find something by mid September, if not sooner. I am extremely thankful to my brother-in-law and his wife, though, for letting us bunk with them for the last little while. I know it's not terribly easy having other people live in your house for an extended period of time, but I am extremely thankful to them for letting us. Though I have my reserves about Star Valley, I can definitely think of many an uglier places to live! I still have a lot of warming up to do, but I am grateful it is here in SV that we are currently, rather than a million other places that I can think of. It has almost everything I have been wanting in a place to live! I am definitely sad at the thought of those great friends back in Laramie that we left, but I am confident that we will find many more friends here as well! SV isn't lacking in young couples surprisingly enough! I do have to say that I am in need of some structure in my life again and I will hopefully be getting that very soon! But, life has been great to both of us! I can't complain! I miss you all, and hope to see you sometime in the near future! Bye for now!

Moving On

Just a quick update,

Casey and I sold our house on Aug. 13th! We are very happy to have it sold to a great family! And for now it looks like we will be in Star Valley for a time! But many adventures are sure to come!

Monday Blues

Here is a quick update before I go back to doing some work. Casey and I got into Laramie on the night of the 10th. Did some work on the house and met with a Realtor on Friday to talk about listing our house for sale. Saturday we decided we wanted to put it on the market asap since it was pretty much ready to go. Sunday we continued to do some last minute work before the Realtor came by Monday to take pictures. Monday, I did some last minute cleaning, the Realtor came by, took pictures and said that the house would be listed that day. Now, get ready for this super exciting and super ironic part of my story: the river a couple blocks away was rising pretty fast, and had been for the past couple of days, as was the ground water here at our house. While the realtor was taking pictures Casey decided that it was probably time to start moving Bj and Tersa's stuff out of the basement, just in case we had to tear up carpet due to flooding, as we could see the ground water seeping out of our french drain. So a bunch of people came over to help us move their stuff out of the basement, and then we just watched and waited for a little while, hoping that we wouldn't have to tear out all the carpet, padding and baseboard. However, as luck would have it, the ground water kept rising higher and faster, so we eventually had to pull it all out. About 30 minutes later the water started seeping through the cracks on the floor, and then it started seeping in from the side of the walls, and needless to say it's been a very, very long week, and so far and it doesn't look like we'll be selling our house for a little while. The most ironic part, there haven't been water levels this high since the late 1950's. This house has been sitting here for 20 years with no water damage in the basement that we know of, until the DAY we go to put it on the market.

To try to look on the bright side, it hasn't rained since Sunday, and hopefully it doesn't for a while. And, nothing of Bj and Tersa's was ruined, and we were able to save our carpet. The water has stopped seeping into the basement (thank goodness!), and Casey and I were able to rig up a sweet irrigation system, with a water pump and gutters yesterday to prevent further water coming in from our drain. So far, we have had to cut out a couple of inches of drywall were the water had soaked in, but fortunately that's the extent of the damage at the moment, we'll see what else pops up in the next little while. There were some other awesome things that went wrong Monday, but it's really not worth my time to list them, we are just super grateful to the people that helped us move stuff out of the basement, as well as the GREAT friends that stayed until close to midnight trying to help us keep the water in the basement to a minimum, so with this, Casey and I say thank you to all that helped us. Here's some pictures for thought:

BEFORE

DURING AND AFTER

Our pump and irrigation system

Luckily we had our sump pump to push water into, as well as our water heater drain to keep water levels down fairly low during the night.

Goodbye Texas

Casey and I are wrapping up our time here in Texas. It has been a great time though! I am going to miss being down here though. However, we picked a great time to go for many reasons. It's starting to get ENTIRELY too hot for me, working in 90 + heat sure isn't my idea of fun! So we will miss the really really hot summer, not too sad about that. And, we stayed just long enough to see Candice's new baby! She had her on Tuesday morning (Which was when we were originally thinking about leaving). So after we have a little more time with Casey's sister and niece and finish up a few jobs here, we will be taking off and head to Laramie and then Afton! Take care and see you all in Laramie soon!

Texas

I thought I had better write a quick update on how we are doing. First of all, we are still alive and doing well. We are at the end of our time here in Texas, which is a bitter-sweet feeling, though I can't say I am sad that we will miss the really hot heat but I have really enjoyed it here!. We will leave around the first of June and head back to Wyoming and spend the summer doing jobs in Afton.

We have definitely accomplished a lot in the time we have been here though! Casey has done alot of work and I have learned a lot of carpentry skills that have helped me be a more useful employee!! There are still a couple of projects left to do however so I had better get back to doing them. I will add pictures later when I get the desire! Hope everyone is good!

Adventures of the Frome's!

Hi all! So we are not in Hawaii anymore (much to my disappointment at this current time due to cold weather and, yes, snow!) However we did have a great time.  Overall we spent two weeks on the Big beautiful Island and then a week in Oahu, with my cousin and her wonderful family!! We had a blast, but knew that Hawaii wasn't going to be our home, just a great vacation place! Though we will definitely be going back some day! We came back to the mainland the end of February and have been spending most of our time since in Evanston helping my parents finish up on projects in their business and home. We had the chance to spend a week in Star Valley putting up a green house for Kim.  Though, I do have to note that, that week it started snowing the day we got there and didn't really let up all that much until we were done and leaving Star Valley! So as ironic as it was, we had fun putting up the greenhouse in the middle of an amazing snow storm!  We are now starting to pack up (again!) and we are headed, first, to Oklahoma City, to do some jobs for Casey's brother-in-laws dad, and then we will continue down to Texas to help his sister with some projects and, hopefully, get some other projects down there from some other people! Casey is also hoping that some opportunities will open up down there, if so then we may stay down there for a while!  As of now we are planning on staying there until June! We have had a lot fun and work in this area, but it's time to move on I suppose! Hope everyone is enjoying the cold and snow in spring!! 

More fun in Hawaii!

More updates from the Big Island! The fun of camping has ended for now, to Casey's dismay (I'm sure) and my....well pleasure! (I really, really like showers and a soft bed!). We have found a room to rent in a house in the Kailua Kona area on the Big Island, so we will be her for at least a month! During this time Casey and I will look at the possibilities of employment and see how practical it would be for us to live here! For now her are a couple of room pictures....it's dark right now so I don't have any house pictures...

No I wasn't trying to capture the tv in our room, this is our personal entrance into our room! Yep, pretty exciting!

So here is the last camping spot before we moved into our humble abode! Here is a picture of the sunset on Spencer Beach, which is just north of where we are....this was our last campout meal! It was a beautiful sunset...and yes, I took A LOT of pictures!


Today we went to some garage sales early....apparently people take it pretty serious around here! I filled out the worlds longest application for a job and then we went to the beach! It was a beautiful day here in Kona! We did some snorkeling and Casey did some of this:
Casey's castle did survive the waves up until we left!

We hoe all is super swell back home! We love you all and we would love to hear how everyone back home is!

Oh Yeah, this is on the road to Spencer Beach, nothing like parting a vehicle on the highway...if only we needed something!

The first days

We flew into the Kona, HI airport on Wednesday evening. Warm winds welcomed us as we stepped off the plane onto the airstrip (and yes, we did actually step off the plane onto the airstrip, not into terminals, and no, we were not greeted by flowers.) We slept in a 5 star hotel the first night called a KIA Optima. Look it up, it's a great hotel, it offers first class beds with a console in the middle! And to top it off, our 5 star hotel is portable, we only had to move it once due to.....unusual, curious, maybe even suspicious events around us. Here is a picture of our second hotel location of the night and pictures of flying into HI.


Thursday, our first full day in Hawaii we woke up to do some exercises on the beach, yes, it was all that it's cracked up to be! It was warm and we had the ocean right next to us! It was beautiful! We then headed over to the Hilo side to pick up our tent and sleeping bags that we bought. After obtaining those we took off to tour that side of the Island as well as to find another 5 star location to sleep! While exploring this side of the Island we went over to where some older lava flow areas and not only was the sights pretty neat (it had wiped out the entire road and a town about 20 years ago) we also found a lot, and I mean a lot, of squatters hangin out in the lava fields as well as some people that decided this was prime Real Estate and built houses here, not my idea of a great investment in some of the areas, but hey, whatever works for them!


That night, we cooked some delicious food of chicken fried hamburgers and really watered down pork and beans (not quite as good as I had imagined!). Then we went to sleep with the sounds of frogs....croaking, I guess would be the term, but it was more of a chirp, and the ocean in the background! We woke up to the ocean and some beautiful sounding birds chirping! We then did some exercises on the edge of cliff that overlooked the ocean, and we were able to catch the sunrise as well!

Friday, after packing our stuff we headed to the Volcano National Park to catch a glimpse of the volcano and some lava....we didn't exactly get to see any lava because two weeks before we got here the flow had went to a different vent that we couldn't access. But the volcano was pretty neat, it doesn't look anything like Dante's peak, but I was expecting something like that to happen at any moment! The volcano is kicking out a lot of steam right now, it's quite the event, and if you look around the land, there are steam vents everywhere! After marveling at the steam blowing volcano we decided to do some hiking. We found a hike to a lava tube that is absolutely amazing! It's huge, but the best part is that the park left a good chunk of the tunnel untouched, but they let you go down and explore the rest of the tunnel if you want! Flashlights are definitely needed, but it is neat! It goes back for a long ways too! So after some hiking it was getting decently late so we headed to a camp ground near the volcano and set up for the night.

Saturday we took some more hikes and explored the volcano area a little more in depth! We did a 4 mile crater hike that was really neat. It started in the rain forest, then we hiked down the side of the mountain to the bottom where the lava is and where one of the craters is, then we hiked back up the other side of the mountain through the rain forest to get out. It was great, but definitely not a hike I would want to do in the middle of the day because the bottom can get pretty toasty! We also did a drive down the coast through some more volcanic paths. We also took a short hike to a historical sight where there are petroglyphs from native Hawai'ians.



Saturday night we stayed at a really pretty botanical garden type of campground in Hilo, it was so pretty, they had several different camp spots plus a little lodging house too.

This is me trying to stay calm and take a picture when there are tons of spiders and spider webs around this area of the garden we stayed at! Other than the spiders, beautiful spot!

Sunday we went to a church ward in Hilo, we met some great people there! We met a guy that was going to let us tag along with him when he took the zone of missionaries to a really pretty valley (Can't spell it or I would name it!) Monday, but unfortunately that didn't work out, but when they do go he is going to give us a call and see if we are around! So Sunday night we headed to the North East tip of the Island and camped out by the ocean, going to sleep with the CRASH of the waves to keep us company all night long! This place used to be a town, but the tsunami of;46 completely wiped out the town. It is now a beautiful park with a monument to the town and the people who lost their lives. Since the tsunami, the town has been moved up the hill more out of harms way.

Monday we headed across the tip of the Island, explored some caves, did some whale watching, hiked to some waterfalls and camped at a nice camp spot, but it had no water due to an earthquake in 2006...but it was beautiful and the whale spotting was plentiful!

We may, or may not have spent a LOT of time in a dark cave trying out different things to get these types of shots! I have a lot more pictures like this, only funnier! If you need some blackmail on Casey, just talk to me! This picture sure is cool though, there are four poses in this one!
This one is kind of creepy right? By this time, we didn't have to spend as much time figuring out how to do things to get this cool shot, we had already been taking pictures like these two for about half and hour!

I think we may have taken more pictures in the cave then out of the cave!

Today we spent time coming down the west side of the Island, we stopped at a national park to learn a little more about a temple the first king of Hawai'i built. We also stopped at a more secluded black sand beach! We had to go through a gated community to get to it, but it sure is a pretty area! Tonight we hunted for a camp spot, but the pickings are slim where we are now. We are on the south west area of the Island and there are about two camping sites, the first was EXTREMELY busy, and the second was a VERY uninviting spot, we had to drive 5 miles down a VERY winding, steep road, and we drove through something that resembled a community, but it is, what our guidebook would call a "local beach". According to the author it was not too taboo to go to during the week, but it was best to leave it alone during the weekend, I would say just leave it alone period! I kept having the feeling that we might get mugged! Luckily, we didn't, but needless to say I put my foot down and we are now staying in a very nice hostel in Captain Cook. We hope all is well back home, we also hope, dearly, that everyone is enjoying their COLD weather, and we will sleep easy tonight knowing that we are about 70 degrees warmer than all of you! We love you all and good night!
Here are a couple of more pictures from our trip so far!

I saved this picture for last because it is the best picture EVER! After seeing the whales for the past two days we had the perfect opportunity to sit and watch tons of them in a bay area, this is the best shot out of MANY shots that Casey took, we were on shore when they were frolicking around, but Casey got zoomed in just enough to get a great picture.