Pattern Interrupt

Nick left to Chicago today to spend a week with Miles and Ethan at the Paul's home!
He's really been looking forward to this trip and spending time with his cousins.

After he left, I had a very frustrating day 1) cleaning up dog diarrhea and 2) being the assistant to the air conditioning guy who was supposed to just do an annual check. I had to show him where everything was (takes such a long time) and he'd recently broken his leg so couldn't get around great (which took an even longer amount of time and made it impossible to inspect half the units on the roof and in a crawl space). Literally took three hours of my day. I was so frustrated.

Dan and I had planned to hike up Thayne's Canyon in Millcreek in the evening. After my wasted afternoon, I was eager to get out of the house and do SOMETHING. We decided to just hike an hour up for a couple of miles just to check out a route that was new to us. After two miles, we debated going the final mile or not. It was pretty steep. I told Dan he should go ahead and be our scout to see if there was anything cool at the top or not.

I was so tired, I was kind of done. But then I decided since it was so steep, I could count every step as lunges which I wouldn't have to do tomorrow if I did them today. It was amazing how just putting a different spin on it, I had a lot more energy. I didn't want to hike anymore. BUT, I was up for getting my lunges crossed off my list.

This was a great example of a "Pattern Interrupt" -- a concept we learned from the podcast we listened to for Sacrament Meeting. When something gets routine or old or we don't appreciate it anymore, change it up to make it special again. Hiking was old. But lunges were new and I had plenty of energy when I thought of moving in that way.

Pretty soon Dan called out that he was already at the top. It wasn't as far as we'd thought. And flattened off a lot. We love exploring and doing new things, so of course both of us were thinking, "Should we just follow the trail around to the overlook?" We'd been to the overlook a different way and new the trail wrapped around, but had never done it before. So of course we kept going.

We had a great evening. Hiked 6.5 miles in all and didn't get home until 8:30. It was so great to get out, be together, do something hard and see something new. Such a great feeling. Especially since we came home to more dog diarrhea.