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!

Vacation Recap

So here's a little update on a few of the things that we've done the last couple weeks. First off, Friday night of finals we headed up to Salt Lake to drop off my mac to get it fixed. It was gone for an entire week! For those of you that have seen me recently, you know that my macbook hasn't strayed from my side pretty much ever this last semester. It was strangely liberating to be unable to access all the things I look at every day. I liked it, though I was very happy to get it back. We spent the night at our friend David's house so we could go play in the mountains Saturday. We woke up to this:
Freezing fog. We were worried about the state of the snow in the mountains, but we should have been more worried about our parking. We were halfway up the mountain we were climbing
when ski patrol called us back down because our car was illegally parked on the side of the road. Who would have known? So we came back down and headed down to go rock climbing all afternoon at the gym in Sandy. It was way fun. I was sore for at least four days after, due to previously mentioned out-of-shapeness. :) It was totally worth it. What a fun day!

Then Bill and I headed up to Temple Square to enjoy some lights. They were beautiful!The week running up to Christmas was pretty uneventful. We both worked and I got a few random things done in my free time.

Christmas Eve and Day were wonderful! We spent it with my family this year and had tons of fun together playing games, reading the Nativity story and singing Christmas hymns. We went to a movie Christmas Day after our morning present opening party. It was just a great day and fun to be with family.
We spent the night at my sister's place for Christmas, so when we came back home it was so weird because we hadn't planned a single thing after Christmas. Having a whole week ahead of us with no plans save for Bill working was an awesome feeling. We've done a few things. Most eventful was our sledding adventure last night. We went over to Rock Canyon Park to enjoy the snow that had been falling all day. The sledding was so fun until I ran into a big ice wall at the bottom of the hill, with my hip. We decided to try a different hill, so walked all the way across the open field to the other side. The first time Bill went down he came up over the rise at the bottom and plowed into the icy hill with his hip. Only his was much worse than mine. It took him about five minutes before he was able to get up without feeling like throwing up. He's okay, but that ended our sledding/snowboarding fun. We're both rather bruised today, but it was fun anyway.

It's been snowing all day today, and Bill really wants to teach me how to snowboard, so tomorrow we're going to rent a snowboard and go up into the canyon somewhere so he can teach me the basics. Should be fun. I'm sure I'll have pictures to share when we're through.

I love vacations

Oh how I love breaks between semesters! I've had so much free time and it's been wonderful. I've found the time to start exercising again. I started doing pilates all this week and it feels great! I'm so out of shape that they are making me really sore, but I like it. I'm excited to get back in shape. I have a racquetball class next semester, so that should be fun. I also have big plans to swim and lift weights and do some running. You know, all the things I usually do that I totally dropped this last semester with how busy classes were. :)

I wasn't sure I was going to make it to the break. I was going full tilt on my final projects until 4:30 PM on Friday, the last day of finals. It was stressful, but I did make it and all the projects turned out fantastic. I've gotten a few grades back and the semester is looking good! Yay for resting and rejuvenating for a couple weeks! I'll be excited to start classes again next week, but the break has been wonderful.

Finally, an adventure!

Squaw Peak. We hiked up in it in a crazy snowstorm.

Bill and I, he especially, have been pining after all the adventures we want to go on but don't have time for at the moment because of the busy, busy school schedule. We finally were able to get out Saturday and go snowshoeing, and it was awesome! We're both super out of shape, seeing that since our marathon in September we've run maybe 3 times. Oops! I don't know if I can begin to describe all the busyness of school, so I won't even try. Suffice it to say that we have four more days of finals and projects and then we're free for Christmas Break!

Being so out of shape, we decided to tackle Squaw Peak, since it's not very long. We woke up Saturday morning to more snow and a huge storm over the mountains, but since Squaw Peak is right on the front of the mountains and I've been up there before, we felt okay about it. It's been bitterly cold all week, around 0 degrees most mornings, so the snow hasn't had time to melt, it's just been piling up.

Here's a few pictures of our hike. We ran out of time to get to the top, so we stopped at the meadow right below the last little ascent and then headed back. We had a ward Christmas party to get back to with an amazing dinner. Just couldn't miss it!


These are in the meadow at the top. You can kind of see how much snow was coming down. We went down this trail, even though it was snowing so much you can't even see it in the picture. So pretty!

Bill sporting the balaclava. I wish I'd had one with all the wind, despite it making you look like a bank robber. :)

Someone saw me

I had the craziest, busiest day today. I don't really have finals in my program, just projects/presentations and they're during the last week of classes, not during finals. So that means that my life is absolutely insane right now! I have a dinner tomorrow night for my etiquette class final and my guitar class final right before. Thursday morning bright and early my final project/presentation for three classes is scheduled, and that project has driven me nearly crazy all week. I'm seriously worried about getting done with it in time. Tomorrow I also have a paper due in my government class that I haven't started. Needless to say, I'm stressed! So what am I doing online? Taking a few minutes to de-stress by blogging and then it will be back to the races! I want to tell a little story that happened this weekend.

Bill and I went to the temple Saturday morning and because it was so busy, we got out later than we'd planned. We left the temple at 11:30AM and Bill had to be at a team meeting to work on one of his final projects right then. We didn't have time to go home, so he was starving but just had to go. So I dropped him off and told him I would bring him some lunch.

In one of those good wife moments, I had the great idea to make cookies and bring them with me for him and his group when I brought him food. I decided to make pumpkin chocolate chip cookies and found a recipe that turned out to be absolutely delightful from a ward cookbook that I believe my brother and sister-in-law gave us for our wedding or Christmas or something like that. Thanks Mark and Kelly! So I made the cookies, some pasta and such, and headed up to campus to bring it all to Bill. We had a nice little break while he ate and then I headed home with the tupperware, feeling all good about myself for bringing him lunch AND cookies. Just a disclaimer lest you think I'm congratulating myself too much. I am so, so, so, so, so busy ALL the time with my grad program, so I don't have a lot of time to cook, let alone bake, though I love doing both. I was very pleased to find a minute to do that and get to share it with Bill.

Anyway, the whole experience wasn't a big deal save for what happened the next day. We were both in Relief Society and they had this little Visiting Teaching minute where you share good stories about visiting teaching. One of the girls in our ward raised her hand and said, "I saw Sister Ashman walking out of the Clyde building with empty tupperware in her hands and I just thought, oh yay, they love each other so much!" Bill and I were both a little surprised, but it was really fun. You never know who's watching you and it's kind of fun to be caught doing something nice.

Good news!

I found out today that I vested my 401(k) for the company I've worked at for the last three years. Woot! I've just been working about 10 hours a week since I started grad school, and I really wasn't sure I was going to make it. My company had a three year vesting schedule where it was all or nothing, so for me it was about a $5,000 difference if I vested or not. I'm SO happy that it happened! What a great day!

Our Very First Christmas Tree

Bill and I bought a real Christmas tree tonight! We brought it home and decorated it with a box of ornaments I swiped from my parent's house. They have such pretty ornaments! I wish I did. But my collection is growing. Anyway, we brought the tree home and decorated it tonight. I love it! It's just a little tree, so it fits perfectly in our small little living room. Bill and I decided to take a few pictures in front of it and they turned out pretty cute.

This is Bill trying to untangle some lights. It doesn't seem to matter if you roll them up nicely. They still get tangled pulling them back out.

Here I am rummaging through my mom's box of ornaments looking for the prettiest ones. She's got like 3 other boxes full of them. I'm jealous!
Yay for our tree and our first Christmas married!

Oh, and my sister Tori just had my newest nephew, Daniel Adam James. I'm so excited for them! He's adorable!

Thanksgiving but no Turkey Yet

It's been a great, relaxing day. We are up at a condo in Park City and it is so relaxing and fun. We've just relaxed all day playing card games and Wii and having random photo shoots. Pretty fun stuff. Because two of the couples had plans with other family today, we are having our Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, so this has been our do nothing day. It feels fantastic. Here's a few pictures from some of the fun things we've been doing.

What happens at 1AM when we're all sleeping in the same room. Notice my sweet new pajama pants from my MIL. Love the orange and yellow stripes!


Playing a cool new card game called hand and foot. I'm addicted.My sister-in-law Miriam had a great idea involving a light, a camera with a slow exposure, and a laser pointer. So fun!

A little bit of modeling fun.

Looking forward to Thanksgiving

I'm just about done with all the school and work things I have to do today. After that and when Bill gets home from work, we're heading up to meet his family in Park City to stay for the next few days in a condo. I am SO excited! If I can just get my work done now so I can relax, it's going to be a fantastic holiday! Hopefully I'll have pictures and stories to tell afterward.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Shabby Apple Dare to Design Lawn Frock GIVEAWAY!!!!

Love this dress! I want one!

Shabby Apple Dare to Design Lawn Frock GIVEAWAY!!!!

Mad Craziness

I haven't blogged in weeks because I don't feel like I have much to blog about. School is absolutely crazy. I regularly get up at 5:45AM, am out the door by 7:30AM or so, and I don't get home until 5PM on a good day, and more normally after 6PM. It is insane.

I just love my classes and I love being back in school and learning so many new things, but I am going a little bit crazy with the schedule. Bill and I just don't see each other very often and when we are together, we're usually doing homework. All of the fun things we love to do together aren't happening at the moment because we both have so much homework and go to bed so late at night that we're just dead all the time. It's a good thing we ran our marathon a week into the semester before it got crazy because I haven't been running in probably a month. I hate it! Don't worry though. Bill is getting me to do pullups and pushups and situps at night now and that feels great. I have this crazy desire to start doing triathlons, but I think about the time that will take and it makes my head spin.

So yeah, life is crazy at the moment. I'm trying to hang on and when I start to have crazy reactions to things, I try to remember that I'm ridiculously tired and if people are bugging me like crazy, I try and step back and blame it on that. :)

In other news, Bill got 100% on his surveying midterm. Woot! He's amazing! My group and I just had a 9-minute conversation with the Utah House of Representatives. It was awesome! It's so hard to get time with him, and it was freely offered to us through a contact at the state capital that my teammate Ryan knows from his work there before he started the program. So there's definitely good things going on in my life at the moment, it's just a little more crazy in ways that I can't control at the moment then I would like. I like being busy, but I also like it including things I love to do, like hiking and rock climbing and running and stuff like that. The balance is rather off at the moment.

Mom's Rocking Chair

The finished chair. The detail on the top is so beautiful.

I don't exactly remember when it happened, but somewhere in the last couple years I had this idea to refinish a rocking chair my mom has had in the basement for as many years as I can remember. It was my great-Grandma's, and looked like it could be really pretty if it was cleaned up. Probably 6 months ago, I posed the idea to my dad and more recently to my siblings as a gift to my mom for her birthday in September. Everyone thought it was a great idea, so I started the process.

I got it cleaned up and refinished and had a new seat put on it. It sounds like a pretty simple process, but I tell you, it took a long time and figuring out if we could afford it and that kind of thing. It was finished just in time. I picked it up on the 24th, which is my mom's actual birthday, and had it in my living room until Sunday when we celebrated her birthday.

Mom LOVED it! She had the best reaction I could have imagined when we let her open her eyes and turn to see it. She was completely surprised and touched and happy and it was just awesome. Here's a few pictures from the party.

Mom blowing out her one candle.

Mom's reaction. The picture doesn't do justice, but she gave her trademark squeal of approval that I imagine all my siblings remember well.
Mom enjoying her chair. She was so happy and it was awesome.

Blogging to De-Stress

I'm feeling stressed. It hit me like a ton of bricks this afternoon. I've been going along just fine in my grad program the last few weeks, but it seems that all the projects and assignments are finally getting started, and I already feel like I'm drowning. I have no idea when anything is due and I feel unorganized, and it's stressing me out. I haven't really exercised very much since the marathon a week-and-a-half ago, and that's bugging me too. I have a paper due tomorrow morning and in the spirit of trying to set the stress aside, I'm blogging before I get to it. :) This afternoon when I got home from class, instead of tackling any assignments, I laid out the blanket that we used at the 4th of July fireworks this summer and spent 45 minutes picking out all the prickly weeds and pieces of grass that got stuck to it. It's been sitting next to the front door for two weeks and I finally decided I couldn't stand it being there anymore. It made me feel good. :)

In other news, Bill and I went to our bishop's house last night and went horseback riding with them and they made us an awesome dinner afterward. The Browns are so awesome! I haven't been on a horse in years, and it was tons of fun! Hopefully I'll get some pictures of it from them soon.

This weekend is the BYU vs. Florida State game. We have All-Sport passes, so we'll be there and at every other home game this year. It's going to be awesome!

I'm learning lots of new chords and other things in my guitar class. I can play "She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain" like a pro. :)

Minus being excessively stressed out this evening, things are good. I really love my program, which helps out when things get crazy.

I think I've hit my quota for blogging tonight. Bye now!

Devil's Castle

Bill and I had awesome plans to go backpacking over the weekend with our friend David, up Twin Peaks in Big Cottonwood Canyon. But then Bill and I couldn't get up there until 7:45 PM. And then when we were following David up to the parking lot, which I was sure I knew exactly where it was, we missed it and spent the next hour trying to find each other since there's no cell reception in the majority of that canyon. Then, while getting my backpack together, I dropped my chapstick and shut my car door in order to retrieve it. I stood up and tried to open the door and realized it was locked with my keys inside, nicely stowed away in my pack. So there we were, locked out of my car with my pack inside. If I had it, we would have just gone and figured it how to open the car when we got back, but no luck.

So instead we went camping in David's front room on a pile of blankets. :) That was actually really nice. And we got up fairly early yesterday morning with hangers, intent on going to unlock my car and get on the trail early. Yeah, hangers don't work on Hyundai Elantras, in case your wondering. So we went to try and flag down a cop, which we did. Turns out slim jims don't work on Hyundai Elantras either. But never fear, we have USAA insurance and we finally remembered we had roadside assistance through them! So we called and they said they'd be there in 45 minutes. Awesome! 2 1/2 hours later, they did arrive and open my car and we were ready to go!

Our awesome backpacking trip started about 15 hours late, at noon yesterday. Sorry Twin Peaks, you'll have to wait for another day. You're too long for a 5-hour hike. Enter Devil's Castle! It's in Little Cottonwood Canyon, is quite a bit shorter hike, but very technical. There's lots of scrambling and clinging to rock ledges with large drop offs on the side. In Bill and my terms, that equals awesome. Some that read this may not agree with that, but we sure like it. :)

Here's a couple of pictures of Devil's Castle, looking up at it and then back down on it after we'd crossed the whole thing.

It was an AWESOME hike! Really steep on the way up, then scrambling along the knife-point ridge line you can see in the second picture above. It was incredible! This is Bill and David on our way up. Here's a picture of Bill and I at the top of one of the many high points on it.
Here's a couple shots of the view from the top. And yes, the second picture has a huge drop off about five feet away from me. David, Bill, and I are all much more comfortable with large drop offs like this when we're a few feet away. It was seriously beautiful though. If you live in Utah and have never been up to any of the canyons, you're really missing out.
For the most part the hike wasn't too exposed. We were definitely on a knife edge, but there was usually a decent path or it was wide enough that we could walk without fear of tumbling off any big cliffs. There were just a couple places that made my heart beat pretty fast though. Here was one such place.

All in all, it was an awesome day and an incredible hike. Thanks to David for sticking around to work out the locked out issue. It took FOREVER, but he was so nice to help out. The hike was just great. Now that our marathon is over, it's so nice to not have long runs every weekend taking up all our time. I'm so excited to start doing all the other activities that got shorted because of running 30+ miles a week for the last 5 months. This is going to be a fantastic Fall!

Learning Guitar

I decided to take a beginning guitar class this semester. It's awesome. I'm not very good at it. I love it. I'm going to be better in 4 months.

Pocatello Marathon: We did awesome!

4AM: Wake up in our little 2-man tent at the KOA campground in Pocatello, rollover and decide to sleep for 15 more minutes.

4:15AM: Wake up for real, get up, break camp, get everything prepped to run.

5:30AM: Get on the bus to shuttle us to the start line

6:15AM: After freezing for a few minutes before the race, the starting gun fires and we're off! Bill tells me he'll see me if he sees me, and heads off ahead.

Mile 5: my hamstrings, which have been bugging me all training time, start aching, but it's okay, it's not that bad.

Mile 6: My iPod battery dies. I wonder if the race is going to be intermitably long without any tunes to run to.

Mile 7: Bill and I see each other in passing at a spot in the race where the course backtracks on itself. He's in the top 30 or so runners and he tells me I'm 68. We're both running strong and feeling great.

Mile 12: First significant hill. Get up it no problem and continue my quest to catch the runners just ahead of me. I've spent the time since my iPod crashed enjoying the fabulous scenery in the canyon we're running in and running just fast enough to move up through the runners a bit at a time. I'm pep talking my hamstrings, telling them they really don't hurt all that much, or if they do, it's okay because it's not going to slow me down.

Mile 15-18: Ran up a ton of "rises" that sure looked, and sometimes felt, like hills. I didn't remember them from the elevation map on the website, but oh well. Just running along and still feeling pretty good.

Mile 20-21: Catch an amazing tailwind that gets me halfway up the real hill at mile 21. I'm pretty beat at this point so I start taking breaks every mile or so to walk for about 30 seconds. It's a trick my friend told me about awhile back and I've never tried it. It turns out it works fantastically well to get a bit more energy out of my poor thrashed legs. My hamstrings are more than a little sore by now and I am in the mentally tough mode that marathon training is supposed to prepare you for. That mode where my body is screaming it's done, I'm ignoring it and still putting one foot in front of the other even though I'm not sure where the energy is coming from.

Mile 22: Pass Bill. He looks pretty terrible. He hit the not-so proverbial wall at Mile 18 and hasn't found a way over it. I'm not feeling so great myself (that's a huge understatement), but I could at least keep running fairly normal, albeit at a slower pace. He's barely keeping his feet moving, poor guy, but he's still going, and I think that's awesome! Come to find out at the end of the race that he never stopped running no matter how bad it felt. What a guy!

Mile 25: Pass a guy that cheers me on saying, "Congratulations, Marathoner! You're done!" Oh how I wished I was! That last mile was ever so long! People may laugh when marathons specify that a marathon is 26.2 miles, but there is a reason. That last mile and .2 from 25 to 26 seems like the longest you've ever run. The .2 miles makes a HUGE difference! I couldn't wait to see the finish line and it sure was a long way in coming. I had completely forgotten to bring my watch, so I didn't really know my time, except that my first half of the race was fast and the second half quite a bit slower. I was able to make a push at the end to pass one more guy and came in at 3 hours 43 minutes and a few seconds. What a race! I couldn't have been more glad to finish! I loved the course, the staff was amazing, but man was it a hard run!

After my race waiting for Bill: I got a bit of food, stretched some, and waited for Bill, hoping he would make it in. I was rather worried and I didn't know how long it would take him those last few miles. I was SO excited to see him come in at 3 hours 57 minutes! What a race! And he didn't stop the entire time! Way to go Bill!

Awards Ceremony an hour or two later: We got some food into ourselves, stretched as much as we could, and waited to hear the results. There were 281 marathoners, plus enough half-marathoners, 10kers and 5kers to fill out the numbers to about 1000 runners overall. I went back and looked at the results and saw they were very promising for us. Turns out I was right! I finished first in my age division and Bill finished 4th in his! Woot! What a great way to end the morning!

After the ceremony: We had to book it out of there, drive back down to Salt Lake, stop off at my parent's apartment to take the fastest showers in recorded history and drop off our car, then they took us to the airport so we could fly down to Las Vegas to be at Vince and Megan's wedding reception. It was awesome!

What a day! Oh, and one more thing. We watched the BYU vs. OU game during the reception, and it was incredible! I have to admit I didn't think we had a chance, but I cheered them on like crazy and was so excited when they won. Go BYU!

Back Online

I've had so many things to blog about in the last few weeks, but life has been crazy and I just haven't gotten to it. Here's a few highlights:

Bill and I finally got to go on our late honeymoon a few weeks ago. Most of you that read my blog know about the fiasco we had with trying to go to Cancun in April. Delta was not our friend at that point and we missed out on our trip to Cancun. We did however, get a beautiful digital piano with the money from the flights, and because of the extra vouchers Delta gave us, this weekend we will be able to fly down to Las Vegas for Bill's brother and wife, Vince and Megan's wedding reception. They got married in Ohio and we just couldn't get out there for it, so this is it for us being at wedding festivities. We are running our marathon in Pocatello on Saturday morning, then driving back to Salt Lake in time to catch a flight down to Las Vegas, so those vouchers are just what we needed to make it work.

The trip to San Diego was awesome. I went boogie boarding for the first time while we were there. I wish we'd taken pictures, but we didn't really want to leave our nice new camera sitting unattended on the beach while we were in the water. I'll just say it was awesome! Bill blogged about the trip on his blog. I'm not going to post any since his post pretty much sums it up. We got to see several of my aunts and uncles and my grandma while we were there. They treated us like royalty, and it was awesome. We had a couple nights free at a hotel down on hotel circle, and that was fun. It was just an awesome trip. We'll definitely be back in the future.

In other news, today was the second day of school in my grad program! I'm doing my Master of Public Administration at BYU and I absolutely love it! I'm not exactly sure what direction I'm going to take in the program emphasis-wise, but I'm leaning more towards local or state government. I had thought originally I wanted to do international non-profit, but come to find out most of those organizations are in Washington DC, and with Bill going into the Navy Civil Engineering Corps (unless something crazy happens to change that path), I don't think that's the best option for my career pursuits. It might be a little hard to find a job if we're in Germany or New Zealand or something like that. :) I do think it might be fun and fulfilling to work in a city government and maybe even get to work with the Parks and Rec part of it, running that. I might actually get a decent salary out of it, instead of what I would have got if I tried to do that with just my Rec Management undergrad. Who knows. The first two semesters of the program will give me a good idea of some of the different career options, so I'll refine what I want to study as time goes by.

It is SO good to be back in school! I've always loved BYU and it's great to be back. I spend all my time in the Tanner Building, which is a somewhat elitist place. It's quite amusing, but it's a seriously nice building. They just built a new addition and I spend all my time there. Bill came and hung out with me in the MPA lounge yesterday and he agreed it's pretty nice. :)

Speaking of Bill, we have it set up so that we can meet for lunch or other random times on campus and I love it! It's so fun to see each other in the middle of the day! It hasn't happened really since we got married, except in passing as he was coming home to eat and I was leaving for work. It's so fun to be a married student! Complicated, yes, and we're excessively poor, but who cares? :)

Life is good, and it gets better every day. I love it!

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.