There are more important things than blogging ....

I know, I know ... what could be more important than blogging?? In my life, what's NOT more important than blogging :) Anyway, sorry it's been a while.

First things first ...

I never posted the pictures from Valentines Day. I only have pictures of the cute breakfast that my most wonderful husband made me, but that was the best part anyway!

So, not only did he cut out all those letters and make me heart-shaped pancakes, but he also bought me a recipe book full of quick recipes! If you look closely, the recipe book has a yellow plate on the cover .... do you see it? So, we have that EXACT yellow plate in our cupboard!! Isn't that weird??

So ... the number 1 thing that's more important than bloggin is spending time with my one and only true love, Preston. (side note ... as I was just typing I spelled "Preston" wrong ... I just thought it was funny that my one and only true love was "Presotn" ... yeah ... I guess it's not really that funny any more.)

The next thing that's more important than blogging is my crazy little puppy. We just love her and she makes us laugh so much ... almost as much as she makes us cry :) hehe. Just jokin. Anyway, so Sadie's getting bigger and bigger, although I couldn't tell for a while. She still likes to chew things, but she's now moved onto the walls ... great! She chews the corners ALL THE TIME! I guess she really doesn't like her food if she likes wood that much. But, we did find this cool "bitter spray" to make animals not want to chew certain things.

This picture was actually taken a while ago ... she's gotten better about the whole book chewing thing. But, this is Preston's adolescent development book with no more index or glossary. :)

Sadie also really LOVES going outside and bugging our neighbors. She loves kids and other dogs, so anytime she can escape, she takes off to play. Sometimes we chase her around the neighborhood and sometimes we just give up and wait for her because she always comes back. The neighbor kids all seem to know her now and sometimes ask us to let her play, so that's a little comforting to us. But, since she loves outside so much, we started only taking her out on a leash during the day and letting her out late at night when neighbors can't be bothered. She seems okay with it and still loves to play out there. She usually finds a rock or stick that makes a great toy. Something about chewing those rocks is just so tempting to her (again ... is there something wrong with her food?). She likes to bring souvenirs in with her, usually a rock or stick. She did bring a pincone in the other day and decided to chew it in the best possible spot ... our bed! Pretty much we slept in pinecone crumbs. Of course, it's our own fault that we happened to not make the bed that day (we ALWAYS make the bed ... except that day).

So, I wasn't too worried about it when I heard Sadie crunching something when she came in on night last week until I saw feathers. Yes, I saw feathers because her souvenir of the day was a bird's skeleton! I don't know where she found it, but here it is:

The only thing I could tell myself is "at least it's not alive!" It just makes it a little less sad when the whole bird isn't there. BUT ...

This is what she brought back 2 nights later!!!!

Poor birdie ... :(

I do love my little Sadie pup. I just have to post about all the crazy things she does because those are the main things I take pictures of for some reason. But, here's a couple more normal ones that I have. She is the cutest cuddle pup when she's not hyper and she just lays in your lap or gives you kisses. She's been a great addition to our family!

The final things that are more important than blogging are school and friends. I don't really want to think about school any more than I have to (even though it is important and I enjoy it ... most of the time), but I have some great friends!! Last Friday was pretty fun. First of all, I got to teach the SFL 399 R class because my boss/the teacher was out of town. It was pretty cool. The lesson was about how to handle a bad day and I heard some pretty good "bad day" experiences. I only mention that because I have a few friends in that class, including Audra. Who happened to invite me to go to lunch with her and Heidi. She had these great coupons for a free sandwich at Arby's if you buy a drink. It was like a whole meal for less than $2! So good! Plus the company was great!! The car ride was pretty great too ... Audra's car struggles a little and almost died in several intersections. Always an adventure! Heidi and I thought it was pretty funny, but I'm sure Audra didn't like it so much. It was just great to catch up though! Thanks Audra and Heidi!

Pretty much I have the greatest life and am so blessed with a great husband, puppy, friends and education. And sometimes life gets in the way and I don't have a chance to blog. But, I'm not really going to do anything to change that because some things just ARE more important than blogging!

Barbershopping

Preston's recently gotten back into a hobby that he loves ... Barbershop. It's really fun to see him so happy and working so hard at something he loves. Apparently he was singing (I don't remember why or with who, but he was singing) before our guitar class last week and then a couple guys came up to him and said that they have a quartet and needed a new tenor. They were trying to put a quartet together to compete in a competition on March 21st ... yeah, a little short notice! Anyway, Preston was super excited!! So, he's been singing with them almost every day since and is still loving it.

He was SO bummed when he found out that he couldn't compete in the college competition because he was TOO OLD!!! I don't think we've ever been too old for anything before! Don't worry though, they called around and found out that you can be up to 26 if you're still in school. So, he's safe for a couple of years. You should have seen how bummed he was for the day and a half that he didn't know whether he could compete though! Maybe it's good you didn't see him ... it was pretty devastating.

So, now we'll be taking a road trip down to Vegas on March 21st and staying the weekend with his parents, who were already going to the competition before they knew Preston was competing. His family are big barbershoppers :D

Apparently the hardest thing for Preston's quartet is not singing the music, but picking a name ... They finally had to pick one last night so that they could register for the competition, but even then it was hard to tell when they actually decided :) Here's some of their top choices:

• Vocal Cheese (Preston really liked it and had a vision of all their fans wearing cheese heads)
• Encore
• Stacatto Wholenotes (haha, they decided this would be their first album name)
• Captian Crunch and the Berry Tones (this was my personal favorite ... partly due to the fact that I thought of it and because 3 of the 4 guys are actually barritones just singing different parts.)
• Lemonjello (spelled lemon jello, but pronounced Le . mon . gel . oh. This one was funny because it really is someone's name and his brother is orangejello, pronounced or . on . gel . oh)
• Lumos or Lux

I can't remember the rest of them ... there were so many! but, they settled on one that they hadn't even talked about - Cosmo. Not bad. Way to represent!

18 Months of Marital Bliss

As of yesterday (the 25th), Preston and I have been married 1 1/2 years!! It doesn't sound like much when you think that we'll have a whole eternity together, but it's still pretty cool! Unfortunately the most that we did to celebrate was to sleep in for 1 1/2 hours (which wasn't planned, but seemed like a fitting "celebration" that we could both enjoy). I thought we should eat 1 1/2 burgers or something just for the occasion, but we just had a yummy casserole for dinner instead (which you can't really measure as 1 1/2). So ... there you have it. Yay for us! Yay for marriage! And mostly yay for blissful marriages that make life SO much better than you ever imagined!

Ode to Michelle

So, I went to Michelle's bridal shower last weekend (good job by the way Liz! It was great fun!). It just reminded me of all the good times we had in high school. AND I never see her any more since she's in good ol' Cedar City. So, I just figured I'd post my favorite moments with Michelle along with pictures of her shower ... double duty!

TOP 17 MEMORIES
(why 17? ... I don't know. It was only going to be 10, but there were too many!)

1. "Studying" statistics together

2. Singing in her living room or with other friends

3. Watching 13 going on 30 while eating Razzles ... that was probably more enjoyable for me since that's one of my favorite movies (though Enchanted has recently taken over the #1 favorite), but Michelle was nice enough to do it with me :D

4. Our matching pajama bottoms that had matching rips in them ... kind of creepy cuz it wasn't planned.

5. Taking pictures at every ride we went on at Disneyland

This is definitely not our best one, but it's in front of Indiana Jones.

just a random extra picture from our same trip :)

6. Sitting across from her in Madrigals ... who wouldn't like seeing her beautiful face every day in class?

7. Having 6 classes together senior year

8. Trying to get phase 10 cards to stick to our faces long enough to get a picture.

9. Jumping on the bed at choir tour ... who does that? :)

10. Toilet papering Michelle ... not her house, just her. What can I say? We were weird :)

11. The ultimate April fools prank ... switching houses in the middle of the night (it would have been better had it not been spoiled by one of our seminary teachers who called her parents to tell them so that they could move her car)

12. Seminary council meetings.

13. Thinking we were getting pulled over on our way to a madrigal's performance at the Assembly hall, but having the cop just pass us by. We were even speeding cuz we were late... close one!

14. Visiting Cedar City the day before I got my patriarchal blessing ... needless to say, I had to leave super early to get to Salt Lake by 9 for my blessing. The sad part was that I left my phone in Michelle's room on my way out AND I locked the door behind me ... I don't even remember how that worked out.

15. Sitting on the dark bus on our way home from choir tour while everyone else went to the mall (It was a Sunday).

16. Buying 2 dollar pants at Macey's. I still wear mine!

yes, I tried them on over my pants in the store to see how they looked :)

17. I don't know if this counts as one of my favorite memories because I didn't actually remember it. I just happened to find this picture and it made me smile. We were in our High School's drama closet basically ... really it's a whole basement.

I seriously think that I have pictures of most of these events, but I'm at work right now, so I'll have to add them when I get home. I just decided to check facebook and see if I had any of these pictures on there and found some! But, I'm pretty sure I have more and some better ones, so check back later and I'll see what I can find. It's always fun to think back about memories when you were young and weird. Yes, we were very weird. But, weird is fun and that's what matters!

Anyway, so now we're all grown up and mature (or something like that) and having bridal showers. Here's all those fun pictures :)

Ka and Chloe came! Chloe's getting so big and was so cute ... for some reaon I didn't get her in a picture, but you'll have to take my word for it!

This is the remaining group after the shower had been over for about 20 minutes or so. There were so many people there and it was so great to see everyone!!

So, I really didn't take many pictures, but it was a very well done shower. We watched all the cute parts of movies and had to guess what the movie was and people's names. It was great :)

Promised Pictures

Here are the pictures I promised from Preston's birthday. Are you excited?

1. Breakfast .. crepes with bananas, lemon filling and syrup

2. The birthday boy getting ready for his special day

3. Getting ready to open his birthday present after breakfast ... what could it be?

4. An iPOD TOUCH!! Just what he wanted :)

5. I didn't get a picture, but Dan and I decorated Preston's seminary office the night before, so Preston got that surprise before the next one. That's right ... I'm just the best little wife. Or something like that :)

6. The decorations at home for the surprise party.

7. The cake Kim so kindly made for the party.

8. Preston conducting his "Happy Birthday" song ... what a silly goof.

9. P-man blowing out all 24 candles ... just wait 'til next year when there's 25! Then we'll see if he can get them all :D

10. The group after pretty much everyone left :) I didn't think about it before. But, Thanks to everyone who showed up! It meant a lot to Preston!

11. An awesome picture of us throwing balloons. HAHA. Makes me laugh every time!

12. A normal, way cute, picture of the group with me in it instead of Dan (who so kindly took the great picture for us!)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY PRESTON!!

24

This is our 24th post!! It also happens to be the day that Preston turns 24 :) HAPPY BIRTHDAY PRESTON!! It's been a great day already. We had crepes this morning for breakfast, I gave him his birthday present (an iTouch), and he walked in to a decorated office at seminary. It's not over yet. . . Tonight when we get home from class, we'll have a little surprise party. See, we don't get out of class until 8, so everyone will already be there waiting to surprise him :) It was really last minute ... like, I decided to do it 2 days ago :) But, so far, there will be 15 people there for sure, so that's not bad. I have pictures too, but I gotta hurry to class, so I'm going to add those later. Then I can tell you how the surprise went! And YES, I am posting about a surprise party for Preston before it happens. Don't worry ... I'm 99.9% sure that he won't get on and see this post ... he never does :)

The Interview

We had our interview last with the human resource brother. If you remember from a previous post, that's pretty much the last step for us until we find out about the job. I thought you'd all be waiting in suspense to hear how it went. Well ... ok ... maybe not, but hopefully you're at least interested.

So, there's no way of knowing if it "went well" because we were pretty much just talking. Brother Ringer (I think?) asked us both 3 main questions. He told us there was no right or wrong answers, which is true because they were all soul searching questions. And there was a lot of searching :) The questions were, approximately: 1) What is your biggest accomplishment, 2) what do you do best, 3) and what is you biggest goal in life? Why don't you think for minute how you would answer those questions?? There are just way too many directions you could go, so which do you choose?? Well, I'm not really going to tell you our answers. Lame, I know. But, I will tell you that I got to answer all of them first ... I was secretly hoping that Preston would go first and inspire some great insight in me, but unfortunately it didn't work out quite like that. I think that we both had good answers though. That's all you need to know.

Besides the 3 questions, he just talked to us about where our family lives, if we would be willing to live in Idaho, Utah or Arizona (the three main places) and if we preferred rural or urban places. So, we've put our two cents in now and we just have to wait and see if we get a job offer or not. The only thing that gave us any idea of what he was thinking about us was when he told us a couple of times that we would be a great addition because we're very talented (Preston with his singing and piano and me with my singing and harp). Although, the hiring freeze really makes it difficult to know. Just keep praying for us and we'll see what happens. Whatever direction our life takes, at least we'll be together, right?