I'm thankful for. . .

. . .this picture from our trip.Because 1) both faces are amazing, and 2) both faces are more amazing together. A perfect pair.

Turns out Washington DC is the place to be if you are cheap, and being never ending students, it suits us perfectly. Maybe just cheap for visitors though.. living expense, not so much. We enjoyed the free natural history museum, free air and space museum, free american history museum, and a free national zoo {odd but true}.

We even got a free place to stay thanks to bfk Kate. Just had to house-sit/walk/feed the laziest {and cutest} dog of all time. No biggie.

George Washintgon's diggs. Quite the sweet estate.Thanksgiving was overall wonderful. One particular high point was all of us teaching Lily how to be a couch potato. Classic.

{don't forget to check out my sweet christmas tunes -->
my favorites are a tie between Christmas Song by
Catherine Feeny or Winter Song by Ingrid & Sara}

Festivities

Halloween and my and my sister's birthdays create an amazingly festive week in my family.

First, if you have not yet seen our amazing costumes, try and guess what we were for Halloween...
Kate was genius enough to think of having a hat themed "Hatty Birthday" party.
And I turned the ripe old age of a quarter century. Downhill slope to 30, here I come!

{got me some of these for my bday present
at the Bijou Market.. definitely going back
when they come around in January!}

CA

Our recent trip to California a few weeks ago with Chris's brothers and their families was so fun! Thank you University of Utah for having a fall break! (and dang you byu for the last four years of no breaks whatsoever!) Here's some of our fave photos from the trip.

Disneyland during Halloween is the COOLEST.

Ally's amazing driving skills..

Lily and I excited for Nemo..

La Jolla, fancy seeing you here Matt!

San Diego State game..go cougs!

Carlsbad south beach, muy bonita.

Henry, being content in his super cute wagon.

Grant's sandcastle handiwork.

The brothas. (They would have been content to only boogie board the entire trip ;) Notice how Chris is the only one brave enough to sport the fantastically 80's wetsuit...oh yeah.

And there you have it. Yet another tribute to why I should live in California.

A QUARTER CENTURY!

It's Amy's Birthday today! Luckily it's on a Saturday, so it's going to be an all-day event. We're starting off with breakfast at Sundance and we'll see where we go from there (it's a secret).

If you follow this blog, you already know that Amy's the BEST! She makes me laugh every day. She never takes herself too seriously. She also works so hard to support me in my pursuits and to achieve our goals. I am so grateful to have her by my side ever day. I love her so much!

Let's give it up for Amy! Woo woo!!

Morph-i-zation

In case anyone wanted to see what our kids would look like. Well..let's hope not.

Chris has been working on an imaging project at the U and got to see what our mugs would look like mashed together. Here's the sequence . . . scroll on down.

I think I definitely have the dominant features. And I think we look more alike than I thought. hmm.

And just in case you were wondering what Chris, Me, Obama and Bush would look like if we shared one face. . .

Looks like mostly Chris and Obama to me. . hmm.

And lastly . . . Guess these 2 celeb matchups! (one is quite obvious...)

Slacker

That's what I am. I have been meaning to post for ages. I didn't really mean for this blog to become an every other month posting...or every two months..shoot! I have resolved myself to facebook less (yuck) and blog more.

We have had an amazing end of the summer! We wakeboarded it up all through the end of August and through September (thanks to another sweet magazine ad trade of my Dad's for some free boats ;). We even went the weekend before last....but had to wear wetsuits...and it was still freezing. I think we're officially done for the year.

Here's Chris being amazing..

And me trying to be amazing.

Here's our finished red kitchen project (we have skills!)

And coming soon . . . UNLV and San Diego State road games. We're road trippin it down through so we can go to both. And Disneyland in between. So excited about this.

But mostly so excited to go with my amazing brothers/sisters in law and their adorable children. My sister in law had the greatest convo with her kids when she told them about the trip. She told them they were going to the beach and they were excited, then told them they were going to Disneyland and they got a little more excited, and then told them Amy and Bud (Chris's name to his family) were coming with them and they started screaming with happiness. So great. There aren't a lot of things we love more than being an aunt and uncle. Here's some proof of our love of uncle / aunt-dom:

And post script . . HAPPY OCTOBER!! (I need a costume idea pronto!)

SLC or Bust

We've been out of internet for a while...and we will be for a while (yay for posting at work ;).

After the townhouse fell through we scrambled to find a place, and we lucked out and found a good one. It is a one floor, three bedroom 2bath condo out in south Salt Lake.

For anyone curious - here are the picts (with someone else's furniture):

We move on Saturday (tomorrow..ah!) and feel quite bitter sweet about the whole ordeal. We are super excited to finally move to a place with a little more room (after being in a 1bedroom apt for three years). Yet we are really gonna miss our ward, and being so close to my family. So here's to change!

Sweet packing find

Whilst packing, we happened upon possibly the greatest picture of all time.

A classic 80's-esque pict of Chris and his brothers.

I particularly like the velveteen van curtains. To me, Steve

(brother left with glasses) looks exactly the same but miniture-ized,

Dave looks totally different, and Chris just looks amazing (top right).

Man we had a good laugh.

Yummm...

My Mom won another recipe contest, just wanted to tell ya'll to
keep your eyes out for August's issue of Cooking Light!
The Sesame Shrimp Scampi truly is to die for.
More of her and my sister's recipes here.

Psyche

Wow I haven't said 'psyche' in a long time. I'm glad I said 'potential' new diggs in my last post.....because turns out the deal fell through.

It's a long horribly annoying story to tell, but to sum up: to get an FHA loan on a house you have to have either less than 10% of the complex FHA, or 100% of the complex FHA. . . and apparently just barely 10% of the townhouses in the complex were FHA. Soooo, we could have either waited for all 99 townhouses to get FHA approved (would take months) or we could have tried to get a conventional loan. So, we tried to do conventional - but turns out the rules have changed on conventional and you now have to put down 10% of the house in a downpayment for condos/townhouses for conventional. Yeah. We don't exactly have 15k lying around to put down.

Hence, we are still in our apartment! Luckily our contract isn't up till August 20th.

But that also means.. we have to find a place, be closed, moved. . by August 20th.

Yikes.

Potential new diggs

I say potential because we still have to close . . but everything else is pretty finalized! The appraisal was just above what we got it for (which is good!), they fixed everything from the inspection, and now we just have to close on Thursday and if all goes well we'll be moving this coming week! We still have our apartment for the next month (no one seemed to want to sublet for just one month on craigslist, go figure). Yay for having a landlord that sells your contract after telling you that you can find someone to take your spot. . oy.

It is a little townhouse in Murray near the new hospital up there. We'll be 15min from downtown SLC and about 35/40 min from Provo. Chris starts research at the U next week, and I'll be . . . commuting! Ugh. Hopefully I'll have more luck and will be able to find a job in SLC in this crazy economy..but until then I get to commute at 4:45am 3x a week. yikes. The other two days I'll still be commuting, just not quite so early.

Here are some picts for your viewing pleasure.

The nice 80's exterior..

Main floor living . .

Basement. .

Upstairs bath. .

and my fave. . a garage!

So at this moment we are packing up and getting ready to haul our life 30 miles north! Turns out we have more stuff than I thought! Exact moving date . . still to be determined. Saturday or Monday. Or both. Or beyond.

Happy 4th and a Happy Birthday!

Hello blogger world! I promise I am still alive! We have been so busy lately that I haven't had time to devote to bloggingdom!

Happy Independence Day! My second favorite holiday! I can't believe July is already here, the year is flying by I tell ya. To celebrate the 4th we did what we do best, we went down the Provo River and had a blast! No mishaps at the bridge of death this time, thank the heavens. The weather was perfect, and the company even more so. Along with some of our fam, our friends Pete and Chrizelle went with us. Pete is our brother in law's brother, and his wife Chrizelle is my friend/co-worker from South Africa who recently created a blog about Africa titled: Africa is a Continent (and South Africa is a country), they are hilarious. Here is our jump in point up by Deer Creek Reservoir (which is full now, by the way, all the way up to the beach)! So if anyone wants to ride the Provo riv with us sometime this summer, let us know! We love love love it!

--------

And last week we celebrated Chris's 26th birthday! Downhill slope to 30 here we come! Chris had been waiting for the iphone to come out with the 32gig for quite some time, and as they came out with it the week before his bday he got one as his present! And don't you think for a second that he doesn't have the light-saber app. And it is exactly what it sounds like...an application where you can swirl your phone around and have it sound and light up exactly like a light saber. Oh technology, you have gone too far.

Since Chris was so excited about his bday iphone, I decided to make a longitude/latitude scavenger hunt for his bday. He was able to do the hunt with his handy dandy iphone gps and even his fancy iphone compass. Destinations included: pizza & a park for a picnic, a hike, and the transformers movie (which really underwhelmed me by the by). The hike at Battle Creek Falls in Pleasant Grove was totally awesome! If anyone is interested in getting drenched by a waterfall on a hot summer day, I highly suggest it.

Chris in all his 26yr old glory

So there you have it! An amazing 4th and even funner birthday. Coming soon . . a camping rainout and our potential new diggs ~