here comes summer

Summer officially started on last Thursday at about 3:50pm for me. At 12:45 earlier that day, all my students RAN out the door (it didn't make me sad though...) and I had to finish cleaning up my classroom. So I guess I survived my first year of teaching. The thing that keeps me going is what every other teacher says: "You'll never have another first year". All I can say is Hallelujah!!! I had a rough year, but I can honestly look back and see times that I really did love teaching. Did I love it all the time? Absolutely not. But...I believe each day will get even better.

One of our first summer activities was going to Kennecott Copper Mines. They are just west of Sandy. I saw them all the time when I was at school. This is something that Darrin and I had wanted to do for a while, so we went on Saturday. After we drove up there, we came back through Sandy and stopped at Frogurt, a frozen yogurt place with lots of flavors and toppings. It's pretty expensive but one of my students got me a gift card so it was perfect! Darrin was really funny because he got a lot more frozen yogurt than he had planned on (he claimed he didn't know how to slow it down) and so his was really heavy. He got really giggly because of all the sugar. It was just him and me and one worker in the pretty huge place. It was a lot of fun, we haven't laughed that hard in a while.

This is what Kennecott looks like when you are driving up toward it. I'm sure most of you have seen it if you look west after you go north of the point of the mountain.

Here's Darrin looking at the pamphlet they gave us.

You can see how windy it was when we got up there. My hair was going crazy!

This is the mining pit from the visitor's center at the top. It is one of the biggest mining pits in the world. The little dots everywhere are giant trucks hauling the rock up and down the pit.

And this is a tire from one of those GIANT trucks!