More Birthday Fun

Since my birthday was in the middle of the week, Bill planned a surprise date for us Saturday night to celebrate. We went to Tucanos in the afternoon with my free meal postcard they sent, and then he took me up to Sandy to see Avatar on the IMAX 3D screen. I might have slightly ruined the movie by throwing up in the middle of it....3D and Tucanos just don't seem to agree with me, but it was a great night. :) Seriously though, somebody needs to have a talk with my stomach and tell it that it's all right to go see action movies on big screens. It's currently not listening to that reasoning.

Two Blogs I Just Discovered and Love

Knock Off Wood

Make It and Love It

I have always liked creating things, but lately I've been itching more to make things. These are two blogs I've discovered recently and I love reading them. I'm so excited to do some of the projects I've found on them. They have lots of ways to make beautiful things without paying an arm and a leg. I hope some of you out there that read my blog like them as much as I do.

Best Year of My Life

Bill and I celebrated our 1st wedding anniversary yesterday, and I've got to say, it's been the best year of my life, however cheesy that sounds. I love you babe!

Here's a few pictures of eating our wedding cake and our evening activity. The cake actually tasted pretty good, much to our surprise, at least after we scraped off all the fondant.
Bill and I pulled out our Lord of the Rings Risk game that has been sitting on our games shelf for a year. This is Bill trying to remember how to play. I think I finally took my first turn like an hour and a half after we started setting up. It was awesome. :)

Natasha and Kelly's Wedding

This weekend Natasha and Kelly got married. It was awesome! Some, though sadly not all, of the family was able to come, and it was just a great weekend. I got to help Natasha out with tons of the preparations, particularly this last week, and the day turned out just perfect. Here's a few pictures of the happy wedding party:
Best moment of the day? From my cousin Rachel's mouth. "Went to my cousin Natasha's wedding yesterday. She looked absolutely beautiful. The best part of the whole day was watching my Uncle David with the most serene, yet joyful, smile on his face as he watched Natasha and Kelly dance." I agree completely.

Crafty Ornaments

I've been off school all week for a career week. Apparently I'm supposed to be using the time to find an internship, but instead I've mostly been doing crafty things and my homework for next week. Bill and I did decide we want to go to Henderson this summer for internships, so I've at least narrowed my field, but that's pretty much the extent of my internship search.

I did, however, enjoy making these adorable Christmas ornaments that my MIL gave me a kit to make. Thanks Suzanne!!! They turned out fantastic and I had so much fun learning how to embroider to make them. I want to get new Christmas ornaments each year, but we were pretty much out of funds after Christmas, so these became the ornaments for Christmas '09. I'm really happy with them. I'm trying to catch up with my sister Tori's crafty abilities. I don't know if I ever will, but here's my start. :)

First Kitchen Disaster

I've made a goal to eat better this semester, and also to go through all the recipes in the recipe box my mom gave me when I was a senior in high school. I've been adding to it for years, but haven't used many of the recipes since I put them in. Tonight i decided to make a spaghetti casserole that turned out fantastic. Well, that is, until I pulled it out of the oven and set it on a burner that was still on. I didn't realize it until the entire glass dish shattered and sprayed glass all over the stove and countertop. This is the result:



You might be wondering if we had to throw what used to be a beautiful casserole away. Thanks to Bill's amazing salvaging skills, we were able to salvage a good portion of it and enjoyed it for dinner with only a few pieces of glass found. lol. I don't know if we'll be able to eat what we saved later, but we did get some of it for dinner. We ate very carefully and scrutinized every bite, but what we did eat was really good.

It took a LONG time to clean the kitchen all up and I'm hoping I got all the tiny pieces of glass. Miracle of miracles, I only got one tiny cut on the tip of my pinky while cleaning up. It happened at the very end after I had taken care of everything and was washing out all the rags. I call that pretty good luck.

Squaw Peak, take 2

Bill and I have been wanting to finish our Squaw Peak hike for weeks now, so we finally did it last night. Bill had tons of homework and I had a bridals session with Natasha in the morning and a baby shower for a friend, so we didn't get out the door until about 3:45 PM. That was fine though. We both have good headlamps and I have done this hike twice before. The weather was great this time, so we headed out with no worries.
The hike was indeed fantastic. We're in much better shape than a few weeks ago after having done lots of pilates and lots of walking back and forth to school. We made it to the valley we stopped in last time in much less time, due to the snow being hard-packed and our stronger lungs and legs. It got dark about then, so we pulled out our headlamps and kept going to the top. In the summertime there are switchbacks from the valley up to the top, but in the winter, people have just plowed straight up. It was absolutely beautiful when we got to the summit. All of Utah County was spread out below us and lit up so nicely.

It took longer to get back down than it might have at another time because with the snow so packed, we slipped and slid all the way down. It was hilarious as both of us wiped out a few times when we stepped on patches of ice. No injuries, just a few sore muscles. Good times! We have a goal to summit a minimum of 13 mountains this year, so there's the first one. Woot!

On a side note from my last post, I haven't heard anything about my coaching classes, but I'm just going to take the three I'm most interested in this semester and see if I can take any more in the future.

All I want to do is Coach

So I've had this dream for years that I want to coach high school sports--tennis, running, or volleyball, or even all three. I was so excited to be coming back to BYU for my masters program because BYU has an accredited coaching minor program and I really want to take the classes so that when I coach I'll be much more skilled than I otherwise would be. I discovered the program in my last semester of my undergrad degree, so I couldn't do it then, but I planned everything so I could do it now as a masters student.

Just last semester they dissolved my old college and moved all the majors and minors to other schools at BYU. The coaching one went to the School of Education and so I headed up there today to get a form to declare the minor. Little did I know that everything was very shortly going to fall apart. I get there and they tell me the only way I can declare the minor is to meet with a counselor. I say I already have and that comment leads to the discovery that they are no longer allowing non-education majors to add this minor. I can't believe it! There are so many people that want to coach that aren't going to be teachers. What the heck?!?!

Well I wasn't terribly happy and had quite the little interchange with a guy there who was completely convinced that was how it should be and I just let him know I thought it was a ridiculous policy. Oops....Anyway, I head down to one of the coaching classes I'm enrolled in, which I'm so excited about, and just determine that if I can't actually declare the minor I'll just take the classes. But wait! Right after the class, I go to talk to one of the professors about the program and she tells me that actually I can't even take any of the classes unless I've declared the minor, which they won't let me do, so according to her I'm completely shut out of the program. It's not her fault at all; in fact, she was incredibly nice and gave me lots of things to try to see how to get trained and such, and also how to petition, but what junky news!

I pretty much feel like my world has fallen apart. More than anything else I'm doing right now, this coaching program is what excites me the most. I want to coach more than I want to do most anything else, and I want to be a good coach, so I want to take the excellent classes BYU offers in the subject while I'm here and have the chance. I want the minor that gets me accredited to coach, but if that's impossible, I at least want to get instructed. I've been looking online and I'm not sure that the people I talked to today gave me all the right info, so I'm going to call tomorrow and get the answers about this, but for the moment I really do feel like this dream I've had for years just got shattered.

Second Christmas

We've had some struggles getting Christmas gifts from Bill's parents. The address got mixed up a bit and apparently the post office is still unable to figure it out, as our package has still not arrived 2 1/2 weeks after it was sent. The address on the package had the north and east switched, which just happens to be only half a block from our apartment with the same post man, so you'd think it would have gotten here, but I think the USPS computer system has it lost somewhere. Hopefully it will come. Anyway, Bill's sister drove up this weekend and brought a few gifts for us. We opened them last night and it was fun to have a second Christmas.

We're pretty excited about this new teakettle :)

First Day of School

Today's the first day of school and I'm excited to be back! I really like my program and I'm just excited to be in it moving forward. I have tons of finance and numbers classes this semester: budgeting, government finance, statistics, accounting. Should be interesting. I like these types of classes, so I think I'll like it, though they are some seriously nerdy classes. :)

Last week was tons of fun. My sister had a bridal shower that was a sleepover. There were probably 10 ladies there, but there were just four of us that spent the night, all married. I've got to say, it was hilarious. I haven't had a sleepover for years and years, and it was so entertaining to have a bunch of married girls together talking about random things until 2:30 AM. The random conversations are rather different nowadays than when I was
in high school, but just as fun. I'm so excited for my sister's wedding! Her reception is on the 16th and it's going to be great. A few pictures from the shower:
Oh man, these cupcakes were SO good!

The Betty Draper Evening Gala Gown GROSGRAIN GIVEAWAY!!!!

The Betty Draper Evening Gala Gown GROSGRAIN GIVEAWAY!!!!

Oh my gosh, this is a beautiful dress and I really love it. Anyone that likes patterns and cute dresses and things like that should definitely go to the Grosgrain blog.

Good times!