Super Bowl and the Sundance Kids

The past couple of weeks have been pretty exciting to say the least. We had the opportunity to attend the Sundance Film Festival, stand in lines at the DMV, make goodies for THE Super Bowl party, and spend lots of time together.

My boss at Express decided that she would give everyone a ticket to see a movie at Sundance and she’d also give us the day off as long as we didn’t take the same day off. We got tickets to see a movie called “The Dry Land” and so I got Thursday off, trying to match it up with Jason’s school schedule. We decided that we would try that morning to go to the DMV to finally get my name changed on my drivers license. It has taken so long because I work the same hours as the DMV and it’s impossible to get everything done before I start work at 8am. So we got down to the DMV on my day off at about 8am, license. So we had to turn around and head back to the apartment, after waiting in traffic for 15 minutes we made it back and luckily I knew where my passport was.. And we promptly turned back around and headed back to the DMV. This time they let me through and I figured that was a good sign. Since we were there to change my name I didn’t think that I would need to wait that long but no, we were sitting down waiting for our number to be called and finally after about an hour we got to talk to someone. During this time I was worried because our address had changed from the time before and I didn’t think I had anything valid in my wallet to say what our new address was. Luckily, the girl behind the counter took pity on me and accepted a letter I had from the Social Security office and the envelope mom sent our marriage certificate in as proof of address. We finally got out of there by about 10:20.

We decided we would go to IHOP that morning and that made up for all the standing around (Thanks Mom and Dad Poetschlag). Since we had all of our marriage certificate stuff we decided to go to our banks and get that situation straightened out. I think the only thing left I need to switch over is my passport but who knows how often we’ll be going out of the country in the next 7 years, so until then I’ll keep it as is.

That afternoon we headed out to Park City for the Film Festival, it was cold but a lot of fun. We walked up and down Main Street hoping to see a celebrity or two but I think everyone was so bundled up you couldn’t tell who they were. The movie we were scheduled to watch was called “The Dry Land” and I heard from others at work that saw it that they liked it, the only bad part we were told about was they show a slaughtering of a cow, they actually show it and it’s quite gruesome. The movie was…umm…interesting. It’s about an Afghanistan Vet who comes home and it’s about the post traumatic stress he experiences. The movie also contains lots of “F” words, rape, sex, and female and male nudity. As you can tell according to Hollywood those make a great movie and apparently the audience we were with didn’t have any issues with it. Jason and I pretty much kept our focus on the people in front of us rather then on the movie at some parts. Oh well, the best part was the Q&A session at the end of the movie where the director and some of the actors get up on the stage and answer some of your questions. Overall, the experience was good the movie not so much.

We decided that we would hang out with Daniel and Kali and their family for the Super Bowl this year and with that we wanted to bring some treats. After debating for a bit we came up with Sugar Cookies (Football shaped) and potato skins. I’ve got to tell you that they turned out really well. Here are pictures of our creations…I was quite impressed with our capabilities.

Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve in my family was always a big deal; we’d have an amazing dinner by candlelight and have Mannheim Steamroller playing softly in the background. Once dinner was over we’d clean up and grab our scriptures and head out to the living room where we would read the story of Christ’s birth. And then when we were younger each of the kids opened one present most likely pajamas to sleep in that night or when we were older we would open a family game to play that night. Then we would top off the night with a Christmas movie. This has always been a cherished memory of mine.
This past Christmas when we visited with my family in Oregon, things were a little more exciting than usual simply because of the three nieces and one nephew, and having the whole family together after three long years. Our Christmas Eve sort of followed the same structure but this year we went to the Stephenson’s to play the chimes and then home for the amazing meal Mom had prepared. Once we were done with dinner we gathered in the living room for the Christmas story but this time there were some twists, the girls wanted to act it out. Here is a cast of characters

Mary...................Tia
Joseph & Donkey........Jordan
Baby Jesus.............Maeli
The Angel..............Hayley
Innkeeper..............Jason
King Herrod............Clay
Narrator...............Dad

And since these videos are too massive to post on blogger, here are some links.





There is one more but I'll have to add that when I get home from work tonight.

DI Drive

This past weekend our ward had a DI Drive, and we found it to be a perfect opportunity to make our apartment look like it was well taken care of. We went through our closets and drawers and found clothes that we haven’t worn in over a year, we also found some appliances that we had ruined but still kept in a drawer in the kitchen. I even have a dresser that we should have taken to the DI but I forgot about it until we had already dropped our stuff off. This one DI Drive caused us to go through almost the entire house and get rid of things we no longer use or need, we had hampers full of stuff from when we first moved in that we finally went through. Now our apartment looks clean…at least until tomorrow. Another reason why we wanted to clean up the apartment was to make room for our new piece of furniture. We decided that we had too many dvd's and they didn't all fit in the DVD case that we had so we purchased one of these stands and thought we calculated enough but no, we couldn't fit all of them in there so we had to go back for a second one. Now, after organizing here is the finished product.




And I think he's cute while doing his homework so here's a quick picture of Jason doing Math.

A Long Bout of Laziness

I admit it, I’m a lazy bum. After typing all day at work the last thing I want to do is type when I get home so that is why the blog has remained dormant for the past several months. It seems that as soon as Jason’s school started that’s when I decided to become more lazy. We’ve been crazy busy some weeks and doing absolutely nothing on other weeks. Isn’t it crazy how that happens? Our days are full of school, work, homework and fantasy football. Jason is liking his classes for the time being but he is feeling the pressure of having finals coming up in the next couple of weeks. I think that he has an A in all of his classes up to this point, even English which means that I didn’t mess his papers up too bad, we hope we can keep it that way.

We did go to visit with Jason’s family in California at the beginning of October, it was nice seeing everyone again. Jason wanted to take me to Knott’s Berry Farm for their haunted rides and some of the rides themselves, I have learned that I HATE Ghost Rider. It’s one of the old fashioned wooden roller coaster but it wasn’t too friendly on my stomach. We had fun going through the haunted houses with Robert and have many memorable memories of that night, especially getting lost trying to find the freeway to go back home to his parents home even though the freeway entrance wasn’t too far away from where we were, it was 2:30 in the AM, we were tired. Robert taught us a game, Munchkin, that Jason is now hooked on and I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do the first 2 times that we played it but I think I finally got the hang of it, Jason picked it up right away, smarty-pants.

November was a pretty good month, we did celebrate our first wedding anniversary and I have to say I’m surprised at how quickly that first year went by. We were thinking of keeping it low key and not spending a whole lot of money but we decided that our first anniversary is something to celebrate and you don’t get that first year back so we splurged. We decided to go out for breakfast and dinner and go through a temple sealing session. And just a plug for my husband, he is the sweetest most compassionate person ever and I love him more everyday (don‘t mean to get mushy). We received a CD from Daniel of our wedding pictures so I do plan on getting some of those printed and getting more picture frames to put around the house.

We are still working on getting our apartment decorated for Christmas, we both decided that we will put up our tree in a week or so I think…hmmm…I might have rethink that with how quickly Christmas is coming up. We already have our advent calendar up but we need more decorations, something to continue to look for over the next couple of weeks. We are still in our same apartment since we were unable to find anything that was cheaper and that had washer and dryer hook ups, it’s not too bad. We did make some new friends with people in the ward though. There is a couple that just got married a couple of months ago that came over the other day since she is my Visiting Teacher and they invited us over for a game night that evening so that was fun to get out of our apartment and meet new people after living here a year.

I’ll work on my laziness and make sure to update more often…

Oregon Vacation and School

I think it's safe to say that I have been slacking off for a few months on updating our blog. It's interesting that even though I often have time to type it out I just don't know what to type. Since the last time that I updated we have been doing A LOT of stuff. One of which includes going to Oregon to visit with my parents. It was so nice going home and as Brittany mentioned in her blog "walking around on the soft carpet." We had so much fun driving Jason around and showing him places that he didn't get a chance to see when we were in Oregon for our wedding. We got to go to Mill Creek Falls and Crater Lake, which are beautiful and it was so hot and exhausting after we got home from our trip that I think everyone passed out on the couch for awhile. On August 1 we had scheduled to go on a jet boat trip down the Rogue River and it was so awesome. Jason looked so happy sitting there on the boat, he always had a smile on his face with the wind blowing hard and the captain doing donuts in the water, we all had a blast!

We were sad when we had to leave on Sunday but we had to get back to work. Thanks for the fun times Mom and Dad!

Mill Creek Falls

Crater Lake, I have more pictures but for some reason blogger won't let me move things around

At the dinner on our Jetboat Excursion, ignore the shiny faces please, it was hot

Jason's excited to get back on the boat after dinner

I really don't know why we posed like that, I think we have about 4 or 5 pictures in other spots where we all had one leg up.

One of the jetboats, it fit about 50 people on each one.

We had great birthdays in the month of August, with Jason's being on the 9th and mine being on the 11th we decided to have family over to celebrate with cake and ice cream and a fun game of Jeopardy on the computer. I really think that Jeopardy was the highlight of the evening, just ask Brittany, Clay, Eden, Daniel and Kali. We also had a long game of Life on the computer but I think that Clay and Tiff had more fun with that than anyone else. We also celebrated our birthdays by signing up for free birthday meals. We went to Red Robin for our birthdays and they told us that they haven't had it happen very often when there are two people from the same family who turn those in. I think we went to Coldstone Creamery a few days later for the free ice cream.

Other than that we have been working and Jason started school so that has been taking up a lot of his time. He is taking an English class, Communications, two Computer classes, and a Political Science class. So far he is really enjoying his classes...ok, maybe not enjoying the English, but he's interested in Political Science and his Computers class, when he is on his way home he calls me up and tells me all about it. We found a system that seems to be working for him for typing up papers, he'll start talking and I'll type up what he says and then together we paste everything in order and grammatically correct (kind of, I'm not the best in grammar either).

Two weeks ago we dog sat for my boss Christine's two dogs while she was away in Vegas getting married, it was fun but it was rather time consuming. We'd stay the night at their house with the dogs and then we'd leave together in the mornings, Jason for school and I'd leave for work, and then we'd go back to Christine's for lunch together and then I'd go back to work and Jason would go back to our house to get change for work. And then we would meet back at our house for dinner and then drive separate cars over to Christine's to start all over again. It was fun though, we decided that we really want a dog but that we aren't quite ready for one...and only one.

I don't think that we have a whole lot of stuff planned for Labor Day since Jason has to work most of it but we have been starting to look at apartments again. Our lease for the apartment that we are living in now is up at the end of October so we're trying to see if we can find something that has two bedrooms, washer and dryer hook-ups and is cheaper than what we are paying now. It's not easy to find after everyone moved back here to start school but hopefully we will come across something, if not we'll probably be staying here for a little bit longer.

Also, I hope that everyone caught the amazing BYU game yesterday, it was simply amazing. Almost like the "Answered Prayer" video with John Beck and Johnny Harline. I like to think we have turned Jason into a BYU football fan, he kept screaming at the TV last night when something bad happened and would jump up and do a victory dance when something went right, it was great! I hope that everyone has a fantastic Labor day and I'll try and update more often.

4th of July

I've always enjoyed the 4th of July, sitting around and watching fireworks from atop a high place, being able to feel the big boom as they explode...it totally adds to the experience. I remember when we were younger pieces of paper with gun powder with strings coming off each end. It was always fun getting the "Booby Traps", which were thin round connecting the strings to my brothers door; however, after I did that I would find them connected to my door everyday even to the point that I was afraid to open doors and hear that snap as Iflung the door open and ran for cover. The "Snap-its" were a lot of fun too, we use to throw them at other people or at their feet so that it would make them dance, we'd snap them in our fingers, and our foreheads. I think my cousin Amanda got one thrown in her ear one year, but luckily it didn't ruin her hearing (I don't remember if it was me or not who threw it in her ear but since I have bad aim, it probably was, Sorry Amanda).







On the 3rd of July we woke up early to try and get to IHOP for breakfast...ok it wasn't early, it was more like 11am by the time we got there...only to discover that it was completely packed. We decided maybe we should try to get up early on Saturday and try to make it by 9 or so. Since IHOP was packed and neither of us are a fan of Denny's, we went to get donuts intead and they did fill us up. The rest of the day consisted of playing Worms (Remember that game? It's a lot fun) on the PS3 and waiting for Jason to get home from work around 9:30pm. I did do more than that while Jason was gone but I don't remember what we did anymore. I had heard from someone in our ward that the Rio Tinto Soccer Stadium was going to launch off fireworks after the soccer game and since it is only about a mile away from us I figured it might be nice to see it. I was worried that they had already started launching fireworks by the time Jason was driving down the freeway but he assured me that he hadn't seen any fireworks yet so they may have already finished or the game hadn't even ended yet. I hurried up and made dinner (french bread sandwiches and peanut butter twix bars...yep we were eating good) and ran outside to meet Jason in the car. We took off to the Rio Tinto Stadium trying to find the perfect spot to park the car and eat dinner and be able to see the fireworks going off and we found it, in a roller skating rink parking lot that we didn't even know existed. I think parked in 4 different places just to make sure that we didn't have any trees or anything in our way but the spot we found was in a clearing of trees and we could still see the lights from the Stadium. We had our picnic dinner and watched as other people drove into the parking lot only to discover that we had already taken the best spot and they quickly took off to find another spot to park. With mosquitos being rather abundant this year we decided to stay in the car and watch the fireworks from there...which was a great idea but we missed out on the music being played in the Stadium so we opened the windows to listed to it and we let the mosquitos in anyway. When the fireworks started we were able to lay our seats all the way back and watch and feel them as they exploded. It will be something that we will defintitly have to do again next year.







On the 4th of July we did get up early enough to beat the morning rush to IHOP but we still had a 20 minute wait. I bet you can guess what I had? Jason is a little more open to trying new things. Last year for the 4th we went to Sugar House Park and watched the fireworks that were launched from the school there but we had to deal with a lot of traffic after that and decided we didn't want to do that this year. Jason had to work on Saturday until about 6:30 and since he works across the street from Sugar House Park he didn't want to come home and pick me up and then travel back to there so we figured we'd drive around a little before 10pm and find the best ones to watch. So we decided that since we had seen fireworks the night before we'll just go to the store and buy "John Adams" and watch that until 10 minutes till 10:00 and then we'll head out to Draper to see if we could catch all of them. When we went to the Draper temple for Daniel's wedding we were high enough up that we could see all of the Salt Lake Valley and figured that would be the best place to go. We found a spot on the side of the road where other people had pulled off and parked. We decided to get out of the car this time and stand by the hood of the car. We could see about 15 different firework shows going off at the same time, the only thing was that we were missing the loud booms that were coming from these various places. The good thing was that we didn't have to sit and wait in traffic trying to get back to the apartment, it was clear the entire way back.





On Sunday we had made plans with Brittany, Clay, and Maeli to have a BBQ down at their place in Provo so we finally got to see their new place. For dinner we had steaks, bakes potatos, corn on the cob, spicy chicken and Jason wanted me to make a cake with whipped cream frosting and then sprinkle chopped up pieces of Peanut Butter Twix and Reese's Peanut Butter cups on the top. We also got to show Brittany and Clay the movie 3:10 to Yuma that we just got edited and I think they liked it. However, while they were watching the movie we spent most of our time playing with Maeli. Overall, it was a great 4th of July weekend and hope to spend next year with more family and friends...


Here is a shot of one of the fireworks shows going on pretty close to where we were. This was the only picture I took because after that we were attacked by mosquitos - not as lucky this time.



Here is a video of Maeli and Jason playing around.

Date Night, We Should Do It More Often

It's always hard to start out writing especially since I'm not 100% sure what to write about. Also, I don't know about anyone else but it seems like the busier I get the lazier I get. It had been a slow moving month until last weekend when Jason's family came out for his brother Daniel's wedding. On Thursday we went to the airport and picked up Robert, we had to wait an hour or so until his bag finally came around on the baggage claim. On Friday was the ceremony at the Draper Temple, this was our first time sitting through a temple sealing other than our own. It was a beautiful ceremony but we had to chuckle a few times since the officiator couldn't quite get Kalianne's name correct. Oh well, it's the spirit of it all isn't it? We stood around outside so that we could see Kali and Daniel come out of the temple all dressed up. I don't know if you have seen the houses around there or not but they are MASSIVE, and the view of Salt Lake valley is pretty impressive there as well. Once we took a few pictures of the happy couple we went home to change before heading out to dinner at Fuddruckers. Jason and Robert were thinking of doing the 1 pound challenge but both wimped out at the last minute. Fuddruckers is a hamburger joint that serves great milkshakes and hamburgers...however, I'm not a huge fan of the fries. The pound challenge consists of a pound of hamburger, a pound of fries and a milkshake. If you can eat ALL of it yourself they will give your meal to you for free, give you a t-shirt and take your picture to put on the wall. To be honest, I'm glad that neither of them went with it because then they would have been waddling like a penguin out of there. On Saturday they had a ring ceremony followed by a light lunch and a toast 'n roast. As soon as we got to the ring ceremony it was pouring down rain, it wouldn't stop. The ring ceremony was beautiful but Kali's dress was soaked and muddy around the bottom while standing close to the edge of the tent. It was so cold during this rain storm that after the toast n' roast we went home and changed our clothes into something warmer. During the reception the skies had cleared up quite a bit and everything went wonderfully.



On Monday we took Jason's parents and grandparents through the Oquirrh Mountain Temple Open House. It was absolutely gorgeous and surprisingly enough I didn't think about getting a picture of the Angel Moroni and his charred arm and trumpet. There isn't really much to describe but it was beautifully decorated and there were a few interesting decorations in the windows and Jason was able to see for the first and only time the brides dressing room. It was a lot different then the Medford temple that's for sure. There were individual dressing rooms that were a little larger than a regular bathroom stall and then you would go into a larger room where the wall was lined with vanities and full length mirrors. Once walking through they give you cookies and bottled water at the end of it so that was definately an added bonus.



On Wednesday night both Jason and I had the evening off so we decided to go play some miniature golf. We started off on one course and got to hole 2 and found out that the people in front of us took a while to finish a hole. Then there was a family behind us whose son would come and stand on the green next to me while I tried to make my first putt, it was a little awkward. And it was then that we realized the family in front of the family in front of us were taking quite a long time to get through a hole so we got as far as hole 9 and decided to jump to the other course. This one was actually more fun because it gave you a spinning wheel and then it would say things like "crane-shot" "blind shot" and a bunch of others I don't remember right now, anyway, you would have to do whatever it said on that hole. We started making up our own rules eventually like having races and doing it hockey style. We'd set both of our balls on the starter pad and then count to three and then we would have to dribble up to the hole and shoot...It was a fun night.