Reno Roadtrip

For mom's birthday this year, she and I took a weekend trip up to Reno mostly attend the Reno Jazz Festival.  On the way up, we stopped at both the Sacramento Temple and the Reno temple. Beautiful! The weather was absolutely lovely and our visits at both temples was perfect.

Sacramento was particularly lovely being that it reminded me so much of the Redlands, CA temple which I attended frequently in my Southern California days. And the stonework and architectural design was really beautiful. 

 A fun side note about the Reno, NV temple, my Great Uncle Mose was over the construction of this temple and 2 others (Medford,OR and Fresno, CA). So it was neat to be able to attend and have a little family connection there. I really love the feelings that I get when I am in the temple and the strength and joy that comes home with me after our visit. (Click here for more information on LDS temples)

 We made it to our hotel in Reno late that night and were able to relax before our long day in the Jazz world.  The festival is held at the University of Nevada, Reno which as a side note was an absolutely beautiful campus. Mom and I compared it to that of Brigham Young University in Provo and found that it was of comparable size and beauty. Granted, I am biased to the cougars, but this was a really nice place.  The festival highlighted groups from collages and high schools all over the western states. I must admit my favorite was a vocal group from Mt. Hood Community Collage in Oregon. They sang a gospel number that I just didn't want to end. Incredible.

You may wonder why there are no pictures of me or mom in them, and I don't really have a reason, but you know how trips like this can go, you enjoy the entire day and then realize that your camera was in your purse the whole time and you didn't take it out once! My bad.

A delightful getaway. And very fun to spend it with my mom.

Electronic Soda?

Have y'all seen the new soda machines? This is insane! Not to admit our slightly overzealous habit of eating out, but on a visit to Wingstop the other night, we were quite enamored with the new gadget Coca-Cola has created.

It's touch screen. And you select the type of soda you want, and a second screen comes up with a variety of that kind of soda.  So Fanta had 3 or 4 different flavors, and the Sprite you choose diet or regular, and Coke had the with lime, and cherry, and diet, and zero...it was wild. They say it can carry over 200 flavors of Soda in one machine. This makes dining out a whole new experience!

What will they come up with next?

Hello Ladies

Sarah, Tabitha, Me, and Michele

A few weekends ago, I was able to get together with some of my High School chums from days gone by.  It was such a throwback to be sitting in the park there talking about our lives gone by. Especially since two of them had 3 and 4 kids, and Sarah and I are just starting out. Such a fun group of girls.  It makes me laugh to remember how we thought we knew everything then, running around with the Miller boys and the Jackman's and Danny and Brandon. What fun memories.

Something's changed.

Things were moving in a perfectly quiet and small direction until about 2 weeks ago. And now my little boy doesn't fit so neatly like he use to. Consequently, my wardrobe has been minimized to 6 shirts, 2 skirts, 1 dress, and 1 pair of jeans. Nice. My love of sugar is back full force, as is my love of Mexican food.  I am lucky to still not suffer from heartburn but sleep will never be the same for me. I really am in dire need of a hair appointment, a personal chef, and a maid would be nice. Doctors still can't settle on a specific due date, alternating from one week to the next, and then back again.

In other news-You'd think I'd misplaced my camera with how much I have documented in the last month.  When I said I was going to try to double my blog entries back in January, what I guess I meant was I was going to cut them in half. I did finish my 2011 Photobook/album and it is Amazing. And I try to show it off to everyone that I meet. Which is a little awkward for them. I also finished crocheting an afghan for the baby's blessing day and I must admit - it too is absolutely amazing. I should have that photographed and documented and blogged. Note to self. Mark is finding more and more success in his new financial planning gig. He is merging out of half of our pool business by the end of the month. And he is not loving that the weather jumped into the 90s almost overnight. He is still in Young Men's, I as Gospel Doctrine teacher. We are still the youngest in our ward - bringing the first new baby in 5 years to the congregation. That makes us sort of well received. And I recently finished my "season" wall which is my new obsession and brings happiness and color all on one shelf into my home.

Hopefully my next blog will be more interesting as this is getting really bad. Luckily, I am no alone in the "abandonment of the blog" syndrome.

Cheers

Memory Lane - Provo, UT

-- I lived in the Campus Lane apartments with some pretty fun girls. For the ward "lip sync" night they wanted to do their Where is the Love number by Black Eyed Peas. Of course they wanted back up dancers. Which is where we come in. Lisa, me and Kaylynn were to create a number to do behind them during the "rap" part of the song, and then we all had a dance during the chorus. So - we did what any truly talented choreographers would do; the head bob. 8 to the front, 8 to the side, 8 to the other side. Repeat. Mix in a hand snap rotation after 2 bob rotations. And we may have accidentally stole the show as the audience thought our dance was far more entertaining than the soloists in front of us. It was really funny.

-- One summer a friend invited myself and 11 other people to accompany him to St. George as he was participating in the Marathon there. Somehow this weekend trip was dubbed "the platonic weekend". He procured his grandparents RV and we all piled in and took a unforgettable trip that was seriously out of control. So fun.

-- I was obsessed with Rascal Flatts. When it comes to music I am WAY behind the curve so the fact that I knew some songs on the country radio was sort of a big deal for me. Part 2 of this story is my job. One of the 2 jobs I held while in school was that of the Cold Food Vending Machine stocker. It was RAD. And I had the absolute best vending partners of all time. One year - my partner was Dallas. He too liked country. And we had a rule that when a rascal flatts song came on the radio, we could not leave the truck to work until the song had finished. It was fabulous. I smile thinking of it.

-- And while we're on the subject of vending. My other partner was Cami. And we had too much fun too. We tried to learn the words to O Canada for our boss and sang it over the radio one day. She had too much money on her food card so she got me Jamba Juice all the time. We, by far, were the most efficient vending stockers you had ever seen; whipping out a machine in 7 minutes flat. (ok, so I made that number up but we were seriously rock stars). We would call in the radio stations during the "winning song" of the morning to try to win. In fact, we would sit in front of the Smith building for far too many minutes trying to get through each morning. Fail.

-- My last vending memory, (I'm telling you, it was a killer fun job). One summer I was assigned the FHP route. yes, the feminine hygiene product route. Cami went home for that summer so I got another route partner. It was a slow route until we were assigned the MTC. And a part of me felt like I was entering the forbidden forest. And it was fabulous. And I had a friend who was in the MTC and we tried to find her room. Fail. But such a fun memory.

-- My first winter semester there, I was graciously invited to go on a road trip to the grand canyon by the girl who would become my best girlfriend. We stayed in a cabin close to the canyon and although I don't remember the vast majority of the trip, I do remember Chelsea trying to keep Badger awake on the car ride down with her very random break-the-silence question starting with "so Badger...". And when Lauren and I would recap our days events usually ending with a little chant - Zim-Zim-Zimmer; Who's gonna get Ben Zimmer.

-- The second job I had while in school was the BYU Bookstore Custodial job. 4 AM baby. Another sweet deal. While many 4am-ers would say they did not enjoy their job - I totally did. It was a piece of cake. Vacuum the carpets one day, sweep the floor the next. I always wanted to be assigned the garbage route but there was only 1 guy who got to do that everyday. Guess he was somebody special. And again, the team was awesome. We had the best time. So fun.

Weekends

Life is happily moving right along here in our corner of the world. Although most of our daily life is fairly mundane and ritual - there have been a few noteworthy events that I can post just to keep my blog from looking neglected.

Several weeks ago I took a trip up to visit my dear friend and her family in Portland. We certainly enjoyed catching up on each others lives and of course reverting back to our College habits of eating too much, talking for hours, and watching movies. My favorite part of the trip was our visit to the Portland Temple. Simply beautiful and very rewarding. And to top it off, I also ran into another old collage neighbor whom I haven't talked to since we moved out 7 years ago. Kaylynn Boggs - the only girl with my name. :)

A simply delightful trip visiting a simply delightful friend always leaves us planning for another get together soon.

Another fun thing Mark and I did several weekends ago was to visit the Palace of Fine Arts and attend the A Capella Regional competition there. It was just a lovely evening and the Palace didn't dissappoint with a little romance and "mood setting".

We found a park bench overlooking the pond and dome and ate a little picnic lunch. Then it started to rain, and Mark didn't have a jacket, and we were freezing. But we stuck it out anyway because this is what I had planned dang it, and we were going to experience it rain or not! And so we did.

The singing contest was delightful, even if we were the youngest ones in attendance by about 2 generations. But alas, you attend what you like - and clearly we are a little behind our time.

Most of our weekends are just cleaning the house and catching up on bills and whatnot. You know, the usual stuff. So it is always wonderful to have a little something else to fill our scrapbook pages.