The semester that would never end has...ended

Today was our last day in the singles ward bishopric. As I was walking out the door after church to go home it hit me that this semester really is over, that though I have 5 finals ahead in the next 3 days, we really are moving on Saturday. We will be in Henderson Saturday night and going to a new ward Sunday where we will actually be living for the next four months. This has been the semester to end all semesters when it comes to how long it felt. It was up and down and all over the place. Hard classes, stress trying to get good grades so people will give us money next year and then looking for summer internships. It felt like it was never going to end, but at the same time I was really worried about what would happen after it ended since everything wasn't in place until just recently. It feels amazing to be nearly done, moving on, and doing something exciting for the summer. The apartment is mostly packed, with half our stuff in my sister's basement and the rest in boxes filling the living room. I'll miss the singles ward and our married ward, but am also so excited for the next adventure. Let's move!

Great Weekend and Only 1.5 Weeks Left!

We had such a fantastic weekend. We attempted to go rock climbing Friday night and took my SIL Hillary along. It took longer than expected to hike to where we were climbing in Rock Canyon, so it got dark and we had to come down, but it was still tons of fun. Then we headed over to Arctic Circle for sweet potato fries, burgers, and corn dogs. I guess it's there 60th anniversary, so we got major discounts. Woot!

Saturday we went to the adult session of stake conference in the morning, then headed out shooting with one of Bill's work friends and his wife. We showed him the super secret awesome shooting site we found a year or two ago. It was tons of fun! Then we headed to CLAS Ropes for a ward activity. What a great day.

Even though it looks like we're shooting over a road, I promise we were safe. :) We're so far out on the mountain, nobody was around.


Sunday was stake conference, so we only had church from 12-2PM. Bill is usually at church from 10-6PM, so it was the best to have so much of the day free! We walked to church in the absolutely beautiful weather and then home after. We spent most of the afternoon packing some of the stuff we are leaving in my sister's basement for the summer. I can't wait to head down to Las Vegas now! Hillary came over and hung out with us all evening. So fun. We ate these lime bars I made and died green and ate far too many of them, and it was just great.

And guess what? There is only a week and a half left of school. I can't wait! I'm ready to get done and have a break. Tomorrow is the last day of classes. I've almost made it!

Las Vegas, Here We Come!

I was having a bit of a meltdown Monday afternoon as I realized we were in the month of April and neither Bill nor I had a summer internship yet and things weren't looking promising. Right about that time I got a phone call for a job interview at UVU in their athletic compliance office. I had totally forgotten about it and was so excited to get the call! I'm not joking maybe five minutes later I got a text from Bill to check my email. What do I find? An internship offer for him to work at Southwest Gas in Las Vegas this summer! Woohoo! It couldn't get much better. We decided a couple months ago that we really wanted to go to Las Vegas for our internships this summer, but then the internship Bill thought he had fell through and Las Vegas has a super high unemployment rate, so things didn't look good. So we widened our search and sent applications to places in Colorado, Idaho, California, and Utah. Then a couple weeks ago he got a call from someone at SW Gas asking to interview him. He had sent an email inquiring about internships a while before that and apparently his resume got passed around and picked up by someone else. He interviewed over the phone and two weeks later they offered him the job. Yay for Bill!

So I canceled my job interview, but they called me back a little later that day and asked me to come in anyway to interview, as they would be willing to work with me to maybe intern in the Fall/Winter if they picked me as the candidate. The interview went really well, and honestly, regardless if I get the job or not, it just feels good to have someone want to change things around to work with me. It really made me feel valued.

So anyway, we have sold our apartment contract, and we're heading south after school ends. I cannot wait! Bill's family lives in Henderson and it will be so fun to be near them for a few months. I'm not a huge fan of the crazy heat, but maybe it'll grow on me. Either way, things turned out perfectly and this is going to be a great summer. Now I just need to find an internship or job there.

Went hiking, wish I hadn't come back

(a view of the actual top of Buckley from the "summit" we got to)

Earlier this week a friend of ours invited us to go hike Mt. Timpanogas from the front side. It's called Everest Ridge and it's pretty insane. It's way out of our hiking league at the moment, but we said yes anyway. :) Thankfully, the plans fell through due to weather constraints with the sun melting the snow too much for it to be safe to climb. (keeping his ojos from getting snow blindness)

Anyway, instead Bill and I decided to hike Buckley Peak, which is just south of Y Mountain and has been on our list for months. We didn't start until about 9am and it took 6 hours. What an awesome hike! (pretty mountain view we saw on the way up)

Buckley doesn't have a trail to the top, so we planned to go up a chute on the north side. We thought we had gotten there and headed up this awesome but incredibly intense chute. It was quite the experience. The chute was full of snow, progressively more so as we got towards the top, and it got a whole lot steeper than we expected the last probably quarter of it. Bill was breaking trail at one point and the snow got super powdery. He ended up to his waist in snow nearly every step. It was super scary since we were on probably a 60 degree angle, but he was a total champ and made it through the incredibly hard part. I took up the lead after that and we made it to what we thought was the top not too long after that section. Much to our surprise we weren't really at the top! We had gone up one chute too early and were probably a thousand feet below the actual summit. It's all good though. It was such a crazy and fun ascent that we didn't even care.
(a view of the chute we went up. It's steep)

Like I said, Buckley doesn't have a trail to the top. There was no way we were heading back down that chute, so we ended up picking our way down the forested side of the mountain through deep snow all the way back down to the trail and then back out the canyon. It was tons of fun. If you've never hiked down a super steep hill in powdery snow, you've really got to try it. You sink in every step enough to feel like you can't fall down, and it is just fun. We were able to go super fast. We did kind of get stuck in a scrub oak part and had to pick our way through low branches trying not to scratch ourselves too much. Bill came away with some war wounds on his hands from hitting them in the snow a bunch on the way up, but otherwise we we got down safely.
It just felt great to be out hiking. Both Bill and I have really struggled to find time to work out this school year with all the time constraints we have with school work, and our weekends are usually pretty full so we haven't been outdoors nearly as much as we would like. I know I feel a million times better when I work out on a regular basis. There's just something about pushing my body hard makes me feel really good all around. It's great.

Taking a moment to ponder

I got a phone call this morning from my mom letting me know that my Grandma Kitty had passed away early this morning. She has been sick and in a care home since December. My siblings and I were able to go down and visit her at the end of February and spend one last time with her. I knew it was coming and that she was very near the end of her life, but it is still sad to know she is actually gone now.

At the same time, I know she's in a better place. She's with her family and loved ones. I'm so grateful for my testimony and faith that helps me to know that. It's sad to have her leave, but I know that I will see her again and be able to give her a big hug. She won't be in a bed unable to even sit up without help.

I have so many great memories of her. I spent many summers in my youth at my grandparent's house in Washington. Grandma Kitty and my grandpa were divorced, but through many miracles in my family, they became friends, so while I was at my grandpa's house, my Grandma Kitty would usually be at my aunt and uncle's house and we did many things together. We painted our nails and went shopping and just talked and had a good time.

While I was at BYU I decided to start writing to her. She loved writing letters and we used to write back and forth a couple times a month. She sent me Christmas packages of goodies and cards and letters. I have a box full of them that I treasure.

This last August Bill and I were down in San Diego and we were able to take her to a Padres game. What a fun night that was!

My mom looks so much like my grandma in this picture. Since everyone says I look a lot like my mom, I hope that I look like her here too. What a beautiful woman!

This was taken 11 years ago at a family reunion in Washington. Look how young we all look! Tori is the youngest girl on the left side and she has two kids now. Time surely does fly.

My grandma was truly a wonderful woman and I'm so grateful for all the wonderful memories I have of her! You will be missed Grandma!

Odds and Ends

Bill and I ran the Rex Lee Run on Saturday. We were slow, but we ran it together and it was nice. I just looked up our times, and I think I'll just keep them to myself. They're not competitive, that's for sure. :) We stayed afterwards in the crazy rainstorm to try and get prizes, but we didn't win anything. According to the announcer, we're super unlucky. lol. It was a good time. I really do love to race, even if I'm slow racing. I was running fast for my current abilities.

Bill and I went on a quick shopping trip to get ice cream for our FHE. A group from our ward was coming over. I made a red velvet cake the night before on a whim for the event. Well, sort of on a whim. I had pulled the recipe out and gotten the ingredients, but didn't know when I was going to make it. It was good! A tad more dry than I would like, but still good. So we ended up bringing home a hot 'n' ready pizza because I really didn't want to make dinner. Then Bill had his best idea of the day. It was one of the first really warm days around here, so we grabbed a couple blankets and our pizza and headed to the park across the street to have an impromptu 20-minute picnic. Awesome! We never just sit like that. There's always something to do, so it felt so good.

Today Bill came down and found me in the Tanner Building and we got wraps for lunch for the Cougareat. Oh how I love those caesar wraps! They're really not healthy, but they taste so good, so we splurged. We sat on the grass again to eat them and it was wonderful. I was ten minutes late to accounting, but it was totally worth it.

We're going to an opera in Salt Lake tonight. Hillary invited us. It's going to be great! I just hope I can stay awake. I'm seriously sleep-deprived at the moment.

Things are looking up

Things are looking up in the internship search my friends! We may not get to go to Las Vegas for the summer, which is a total bummer, but we have possibilities in Boise! I never thought I'd be excited about that, but when summer is looming in a month-and-a-half, and neither Bill nor I have a job or internship, suddenly the location seems less important if we can both find opportunities that will help us get good job experience.

My career services people are absolutely amazing. I was in there at 5PM yesterday and this morning I already have a letter of introduction sent from one of my professors to an agency both Bill and I might have opportunities at. Talk about being on top of things. Props to the MPA program at BYU!

New Art for the Living Room

We have lived in our apartment for over a year and have slowly decorated it so that it's really quite cute...except for one huge blank wall in our living room/kitchen/office. (that's all one room really, which makes it a HUGE wall) Bill came home over a month ago with an idea of something to do with that space that wouldn't cost us hundreds of dollars for a large piece of art. It involved painting 6 stretched canvases different colors and then splatter painting over the top all the colors to tie them together and to our rug we were trying to match. We bought the supplies soon after and they have been sitting in our bedroom for at least a month, waiting for some free time to actually paint. The last two nights we finally got to painting, and I think it turned out so well! We had a great time painting the canvases, and last night we went over to a park by our house to splatter paint them. I didn't get any pictures of that, but the final product looks great. Here's what our room looked like before.

This is the huge blank wall. What do you do with that much off-whiteness?!?!

Here's the rest of the living room with the awesome red couch and the rug that I picked out all the colors of for the art. I love this room. I will like it much better in a larger apartment or house without goofy colored cabinets, but the colors and the piano and the bookshelves just make me happy.


This is the process for painting it. I was worried about paint fumes, but we used acrylic paint and it was no big deal.


And the finished product close up.

Internship Woes

I haven't had too many opportunities to feel the effects of financial recession until now. I had some job troubles at the beginning of 2009, but that was a separate issue. Bill and I have been going to school or working summer jobs for the almost year, so we've been pretty sheltered. We've been looking for internships lately though, and really feeling the financial crunch everyone else is experiencing. Internship and paid just doesn't seem to exist in the same sentence, at least not for me. Bill has more opportunities being in civil engineering, but he doesn't have anything nailed down either. In the public sector, every government and agency is looking at extremely limited budgets and they're worried about keeping their current staff, not to mention any interns. Bill and I have been planning to go to Las Vegas for the summer, but we are seriously struggling to find internships there or anywhere.

I'm really not sure what we're going to do. At least one of us has to have a paid job! It's so frustrating to have a bachelors degree, half of a masters, and see jobs paying maybe $10/hour, if they pay anything at all. Currently I have some fantastic opportunities to "work" over the summer...for free. I'd take a $10/hour job if someone offered. It's really hard to imagine working full time, or even part time, and not getting any sort of paycheck. Bill has an interview tomorrow at least. We'll see how that goes. It's with a great company, so an internship there would be sweet.

Forgive me for airing my frustrations on my blog, I'm just super stressed out about it. Life is too expensive not to get paid.

Trip to California

I headed down to San Diego this weekend with my siblings Natasha and Greg and Greg's girlfriend Jessica. Mark and Rob came down from northern California and we met up at my aunt and uncle's house. We were there to visit my grandma who has had major health problems in the last few months that have put her in the hospital. She appears to be very close to the end of her life, so we wanted to get down there to visit while we could.

It was a great weekend! We talked and told stories and laughed and ate tons of food all weekend. We went to see Grandma multiple times a day, always leaving having tired her out enough that she would always go to sleep afterward. We took a trip down to the beach at La Jolla and saw all the sea lions and walked along the ocean. That was fun.

I forgot my camera, so I will have to get pictures from my siblings, but we had a fantastic time. We did have quite the hiccup when we headed back Monday morning. 20 miles out of town we got a flat tire. It took 5.5 hours and $800 for 2 new tires before we were able to head on again. We had to call so many places to try and find the tires Jessica has on her car. She has a Lexus, and apparently that means all replacement parts are ridiculously expensive and nobody stocks them. On a whim, after calling all the dealerships around and a bunch of tire stores, we stopped by Costco. They weren't answering their phone. Lo and behold they had the tires! They had accidentally ordered them at one point and just had 4 tires on hand. Yay for us! That was definitely an answer to many prayers. We rolled back into town at 12:30AM Monday night. It made for quite the time taking my two tests Tuesday, but I survived. It was worth it to see my grandma, my siblings, and my aunt and uncles.

Suprise Visit

Someone knocked on our front door at about 10:30 PM Thursday night. I opened the door and Bill's sister Miriam is standing there with a friend of hers. They live in Las Vegas, so it was quite the surprise. Turns out Bill's mom decided to make a surprise trip up to Utah for the weekend and brought Miriam and a couple friends with her. So fun!

I don't have class on Fridays, so all Friday afternoon I hung out with them and went shopping. It was awesome. I'm not a huge shopper, but I really had a great time. Suzanne was so sweet to buy me and Bill the pieces of an art project we are going to work on this week. I'll post pictures about that when we're done.

Friday night I had an MPA talent show that I went to and then Bill and I headed up the Aspen Grove Timanogos trail to go camping with some friends up in the snow. For once I had enough clothes and warm enough sleeping arrangements that I actually slept really well camping. That doesn't happen very often, which is a bummer, because I really like camping.

So we headed back down out the canyon in time to meet up with the family again to head up to Salt Lake. We went to the Gateway and did some more shopping. Bill and I picked up the game Blokus. Very fun. You should try it. What is also amazing is eating at Biaggi's for lunch. That place is amazing! I had something that involved sun dried tomato cream sauce, chicken, mushrooms, glazed onions, and pasta. Can I say amazing! I can't wait to eat the leftovers today.

I would post pictures of our camping trip, but the camera is in the car, so that will have to wait for another post. But it has been a great weekend. Homework suffered, but for once, I'm just going to forget about that. :)

Y Mountain in the Snow

I've been wanting to blog for like a week, but haven't had anything to talk about lately. But yesterday we finally got out hiking with some friends and it was tons of fun! We woke up to rain, which is really strange in Utah in February, but looking up at the mountains you could tell it changed to snow at about the level of the Y. We met some friends and started our hike to the top of Y Mountain a little before 9AM. It was an awesome hike! We got to do some snowshoeing in fresh powder, were in the middle of the snowstorm while on the top of the mountain, and came down breaking trail through a pristine snow field. If you've ever been hiking in the winter, it's not usually very fun to break trail, but coming down a mountain in snowshoes and in deep powder, it's like you can run down and never fall. You feel like you're floating and it's amazing. Bill tells me that's how it feels to snowboard in fresh powder. One of these days I'll try it and find out. In the meantime, we had a great time winter hiking. I tried out my new mountaineering boots and they worked surprisingly well. No blisters, just a few rubbed spots on my ankles. That's saying something for such rigid boots.There is a mountain meadow you pass through on the hike where someone had built a snow cave. It was really poorly designed to keep you warm, but tons of fun to take pictures in. This picture is super overexposed, but Bill's pearly whites show through nicely. Hopefully we'll get out a bit more so I'll have things to post about in the next few weeks. Otherwise, it's mostly just school and homework, so not terribly exciting. Good weekend though.

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.