Let's play Candyland!

Yeah, that was one of the first things my brother said to me when he came to visit this past week. And I can't complain! Somehow, my family (though the youngest of us is almost 14) has come to love that game more and more with age. Don't ask. It's the same with the game Sorry. Man alive if you want to see my family competitive, get us all together for a game of Sorry.

I absolutely love my family. I am so glad that my baby brother and daddy could come out to Utah to visit last week. I had so much fun with them. We talked and laughed. A LOT. I got to show my brother around campus and convince him even more that he wants to come to school here at BYU. We saw the new Spiderman movie (which was pretty good) went out to eat a few times, and daddy even bought our groceries for the week! Hooray!

We also got to spend some time with my cousins! Which I don't do very often, unfortunately. My cousins are AWESOME! They are just like the rest of us who live on the East Coast. We have the same sense of humor and even the same mannerisms. I'm so sad we didn't grow up closer together. Anyway, we spent July 4th and 8th with them and had a TON of fun. We played 2 games of whiffleball which was a blast! Except for when Keith hit the ball into my 10-year old cousin's face... Actually, that was hilarious. We all just laughed, it looked so dang funny. Hit her square in the forehead, and then that ball flew straight up like ten feet in the air. She laughed too haha. When you grow up the youngest of 5 brutal siblings, you get used to it. At least it wasn't a real baseball. :)

I'm not much of a picture taker, so I don't have any proof of the fun I had with them, but believe me when I say I absolutely LOVE my family. I wouldn't trade any of them for the world. I can't wait to go back home and visit everyone (minus Josh) next month for my older brother's wedding. YAY!

Random thoughts

So, it's been a while since I've posted here. Julie is a bit better at it than I am.  Actually, there have been quite a few times that I've had something to say but never ended up posting. It's usually just because I'm too tired or too lazy. I'm sure that all of you already know that I transferred to a different department at Vivint a little over a month ago. I now work in the retention department, and I got a $2/hour raise, which was really nice! My schedule is now from 7-3:30 Monday-Friday. I'll work a Saturday every once in a while, but it isn't something that happens on a regular basis. As much as I love getting home so early, it really kind of stinks when my alarm goes off at 6 in the morning. I've never been very good about getting to bed on time, which doesn't help things. For the first few weeks after transferring over, I was feeling completely overwhelmed with all of the work that we had to do, but things are looking up now.

We had the opportunity to pick Joseph up from the airport last week and take him to the MTC. That was such a great experience! It was so much fun to spend some time with him! And when I think about it, we aren't going to be all that far. I just realized that when we go down to Garry and Sheri's for the baby blessing at the end of the month, Joseph will already be in the field. We'll be driving right through his mission on the way down. Random. Anyway. We were supposed to pick Joseph up from the airport at 11:45. Being the really intelligent person that I am, I didn't even think to check his flight status before we left for the airport. When Julie and I got there, we checked the flight board and saw that his flight had been delayed until after 2:00. We had enough time that we could have easily gone home and come back to the airport later. Instead of wasting that much gas though, we decided to just head over to the City Creek Center to waste some time. While we were at Macy's looking at clothes, we got a call from Joesph. The reason his flight was delayed was because of storms from where the flight originated. Once the plane actually got to Texas, Joseph boarded and sat for a while. But at some point, a bird flew into the engine. Yeah, that's really helpful. They said they were going to check it out but that they should be ok. However, after sitting on the plane for about an hour, they had to get off the plane. Apparently it wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. Luckily, Joseph ran into some other missionaries. Some were going home, and there was one who was also headed to the MTC. They finally found a plane and Joesph ended up getting into Salt Lake at about 6, only 6 hours after he was supposed to. We took him and the other stranded Elder (the shuttle he had arranged to pick him up was long gone) out to dinner and got them into the MTC a little after 8.

Um... I went to change our laundry, and my train of thought got derailed...  I hope you enjoyed my disjointed thoughts. :-D

Carpet Cleaning

We got our carpets cleaned today. I absolutely HATE getting our carpets cleaned, and here are my reasons why...

1) Is it really necessary to clean the carpet three times a year?! They're just stealing our money. We HAVE to have them cleaned when the complex schedules the cleanings, and they automatically add the charge to our monthly rent bill. Yuck. More needlessly spent money. I keep a clean house... and I KNOW I didn't dirty my carpet that much over the last semester...

2) Those guys are in and out of here within 10 minutes. How is that a bad thing you might ask? Not gonna lie, it's not like I want people tramping around my house for hours and hours, but heck, if you're going to claim to "clean the carpets," you had better CLEAN THE CARPETS! And honestly, I doubt you can legitimately clean an entire apartment's worth of carpet in 10 minutes, even though our apartment is small and the carpet wasn't all that dirty to begin with.

3) WET SOCKS! UGH! I hate having wet socks! Or wet feet! Or wet shoes even! The ventilation in our place isn't all that great, and that stuff they spray doesn't dry too quickly. They came in for 10 minutes, but we'll have uncomfortably wet floors for the next day and a half. Fantastic...

I have to admit though, there is one (and only one) good thing about getting your carpets cleaned. Your floors have to be clear, and vacuumed. I ALWAYS keep my house neat and clean. In fact, my friends get ticked off if they hear me call my place a mess. However, when we get our carpets cleaned, my house is extra, EXTRA squeaky clean. And I love me some clean house. :)

Graduation!

So I am officially a graduate of Brigham Young University. Most people would be excited to graduate, stop going to school, doing busy work, jumping through hoops, etc. I, on the other hand, wouldn't mind freezing time and staying at this school forever. By FAR, these past four years have been the best of my life, and I wouldn't change a thing even if I could.

So now in order to keep myself from getting all mushy... I'll talk about my MOM!!! She came out for my graduation, and I had a blast with her! She got here late Monday night the 16th, and she left the next Monday. We were exhausted all week, we did so much running around and visiting and partying. After I actually walked early Friday morning, she, Keith, and I headed up to Idaho for the weekend. I have a lot of family that lives up there, mostly second cousins. And I don't know any of them haha. It was great going up there and actually getting to know these family members I had previously only heard the names of.

One of my favorite parts of the weekend was that I went shooting!!! It can't be a proper Idaho experience if you don't mess around with some guns right?? So the husband of one of my cousins took Keith and I out to the middle of nowhere (which isn't hard to find in Idaho) and we got out some clay pigeons. First he taught us how to throw them. That was absolutely hysterical; my first few tries were horrendous, and I almost collapsed from how hard I was laughing... multiple times. Trying to pull that thing left handed was the best. So then my cousin takes out 3 shotguns and all these ammo boxes... but they were all empty! What the?! He didn't have any ammo for the shotguns he brought with him. So instead he gave me his handgun, and I got to shoot that. We just propped up some clays so I had something to aim at. It was still so fun. I've never shot a gun before, and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Maybe it was that I was doing something new, or something dangerous, but I really enjoyed it! Which doesn't make any sense because I'm truly terrified of guns? Maybe not as much as I thought. :)

Anywho, I loved spending time with my hilarious mother and seeing once again how insanely similar we are. And I'm glad that Keith got to meet more of my extended family as well. We had a great time.

These are my elementary education girls! We made it through two years together!

This is me and one of my besties M. We've been through a lot haha.

 

Of course Keith and I had to take a picture together...

 which was reminiscent of this one taken last year, still one of my favorites :)

This is my mom's cousin... the one who owns all the guns.
This is his gun safe... bigger than a refrigerator, currently holding at least 30 guns.

Hoppy Easter!!! heh heh...

One of the best things about the first year of marriage is starting new traditions. I have always enjoyed Easter. And no, it's not just because of all the candy.  Easter is a great time of year. Spring has started and everything is coming back to life. Coincidence that the holiday celebrating the Resurrection of our Savior falls at this time? I think not.

Anyway, as of yet, we don't really have a ton of traditions, but we did do a few things for Easter today. First of all, we actually had TIME to do some fun things, considering it was the first Sunday in a while that Julie didn't have to spend the entire evening planning lessons for the upcoming week. The first thing we did was color eggs. We boiled a dozen and got the dye ready, but by the time everything was set up, it was time to go to church.  When we got home, we decorated our 6 eggs each. The egg-dying kit we got had a magic crayon that you could use to make designs and whatnot.  I'll tell you what, it's rather difficult to draw something without it looking ridiculous or just plain creepy when you're (1) using a clear crayon, (2) drawing on an egg, and (3) can't really draw in the first place.  We'll just say that the Easter bunny I attempted looked more like a Halloween bunny...  Most of the eggs actually turned out pretty well though!  See!

All of the eggs:

Julie's eggs:

My eggs:

After we colored the eggs, we made a bunny cake!

Julie's family would make a bunny cake every Easter. We thought it was a good idea as well. I mean really, any excuse to make a cake is a good idea. We basically made two round cakes and cut the ears out of one to make the bow tie (don't judge if it looks more like a shirt than bow tie). We shared the cake with Julie's old roommate and her husband. It was a lot of fun to spend some time with them.

Also, Julie likes to make sure that my posts are worthy to go on the blog. She makes sure to edit them and take out any random rambling that I may do. Which in some cases means she almost rewrites the entire post. I love you babe!

A Car!

We got a car!  Yes indeed.  We bought a car.  We found a 2007 Suzuki Forenza for $5400.  It has about 68,000 miles on it and a little bit of damage to the fender, but it's still in pretty good shape. We feel like it was a really great deal. Man alive. Can't tell you how exciting it is to actually say that we own a car now. Can't wait to put it to use!

General Conference

I love conference, and I mean LOVE it.

And every six months I am blown away, once again, at how much I love it. Which is honestly a weird thought. Not gonna lie, it's hard for me to watch conference. If you know me, you know I have a TERRIBLE time sitting through hours of television or watching movies. I usually fall asleep. And if that isn't the case, it's always the opposite. I go crazy if confined for too long! What makes it even better is that I have the privilege of watching it alone... I HATE being alone. Curse Keith's work schedule...

At any rate, in the midst of my intermittent napping, the drifting of my easily distracted mind, and my inability to sit in the same position for more than a few minutes at a time, I find myself in tears by the end of a session. Though I usually have to reread all of the talks at a later date to get anything out of them, one thing has always been consistently clear. The men and women that speak to us are prophets and apostles of God. Their messages are inspired and crucial to our happiness. I know that if we want to feel honest joy in this life, it is my responsibility to take heed to their council.

Rarely do I feel as humble, gracious, charitable, and grateful as I do at conference time. It is then that my eyes are opened once again to the many blessings I have received in the beautiful life that I live. I have a testimony that those blessings come because of the choices I make and the people I spend my time with. I love the Lord and everything He does for me. I know that even though He has billions of things to worry about, I am still one of His first priorities, and He truly concerns Himself with my happiness and welfare.

For some reason, these confirmations of my faith cause me to be a bit emotional. (Me?! emotional?!) Conference weekend and I have a love/hate relationship like that. I've been sporadically crying for like, the last five hours... In any case, I would rather be filled with these overwhelming feelings of gratitude, peace, and joy than not. The first two sessions of this, the 182nd General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, have been uplifting, enlightening, and profound. I encourage everyone to listen to these inspired saints.

Here is the link to happiness, peace, and love. Enjoy. :)