We're about to start a new adventure

Bill and I had a meeting on Sunday with one of the stake presidency from a BYU singles stake which concluded with Bill being called as the 2nd counselor in the bishopric of one of the wards in that stake. What a surprise for us! Well, it wasn't a surprise on Sunday, but it was quite the surprise 2 weeks ago when we got the initial phone call scheduling the interview. There was very little question in our minds what that interview would be about. Except that we're out of town this Sunday, we would have started right away, but instead, he'll start on the 30th. What an exciting, scary, slightly crazy opportunity this will be! The calling is for one year only, and I will be attending the ward with him. We'll still do home and visiting teaching in our married ward, but that's about it.

I have pretty mixed feelings about all this. I will really miss the friends I've made in our current ward. Bill and I are still going to try and go to activities and that kind of thing, but I'm guessing that lots of our time will be taken up with this new calling and supporting the activities in that ward. It will be weird to come back in a year to our ward and not know a good chunk of the people there anymore.

I'm sad to be released from my calling as choir pianist. I just got called a few weeks ago, and I've really been enjoying it. Oh well, I bet they'll grab me up again when I come back.

I am excited to for the new opportunity. It's going to be an awesome experience for Bill, and it will be so great to interact with the bishopric and their wives. The bishop and 1st counselor are from a normal family stake, so they'll be quite a bit older than us. That will be really fun to get to know them.

I'm overwhelmed by the role model that I am going to become for the girls in the ward. I've been in several singles wards with young couples in the bishoprics, and I always loved the couples and totally looked up to them. I'm feeling a little unprepared to suddenly be in that position in this new ward.

All in all though, I'm excited for the opportunity to grow and develop. I was really comfortable in the place we had created for ourselves since we got married, so this will be a great opportunity to grow. C'est la vie!

Cute New Living Room Arrangement

Bill and I decided last week that we wanted to replace the rather ugly entertainment center the complex we live in provided us when we moved in. We have a projector, not a TV, so it looked really weird to have that huge spot just filled with games and stuff like that. Plus, it was made out of really ugly brown particle board junk and just looked terrible. We looked around for some bookcases and settled on getting some from IKEA. They were out of our price range at the moment though, so I figured we'd just save up for them. Well, Wednesday a bunch of ads came in the mail and I decided to glance through the Shopko one. I was so excited to find a couple of bookshelves on sale for a third of the price of the IKEA ones! We splurged and went and picked them up that night and assembled them. Turns out our office won't take out the old entertainment center unless someone else needs it, so we disassembled it yesterday and put it under our bed and now our living room looks awesome! We still have one wall that's completely blank, but we have our eye on some art that will fit it perfectly. Anway, here's a couple of pictures of how the room turned out. I love the dark wood color! It's so much better than the ugly brown!

Also, we have a computer desk in the same ugly brown fake wood junk. It used to have a hutch on top of it that made that corner of our room look super cluttered. Last week I took that apart and stored it under the bed too, and I think that part of the room looks so much better too! Bill has some pretty fun artwork down in Henderson that we're going to bring back to fill the space above it now that it's not so crowded, so it should look pretty sweet when we get that up.
I'm pretty excited about all our little upgrades. I've found that I really like decorating! It's so fun to decorate a room and when it's all finished really love the end result. I wish we had a bit more money to spend on it, but oh well. Me going back to grad school kind of tightens up the finances. It's all good, though.

Bill's turning into Paparazzi

For Bill's birthday I got him a Nikon D60 digital SLR camera. It's the sweetest camera! It takes such great pictures. Bill is loving it. We went to my nephew's hockey game the other night and he took 200 pictures in less than an hour. One of these days I'll get my hands on it to try it out for myself, but for the moment, Bill is in heaven and that makes me happy.