Differences

The longer I'm married to Seth the more I realize how different we are.

Especially when it comes to our family habits.

Take the bathroom, for instance.

I never realized this growing up, but none of the bathroom door locks have ever worked in my houses. Not in Virginia or Arizona.

So the standard rule in my house is, if the bathroom door is shut, knock first because chances are someone is in there. If it's open, you may enter.

Seth's bathroom doors always locked. You just walked in. The only reason you couldn't get in was if the door was locked. When Seth first started visiting at my houses, he lived in constant fear that one of my family members would walk in on him because he couldn't lock the bathroom door.

He complained about this to me today. I hadn't even realized it was a problem. I laughed at him.

And I know it's weird to talk about bathrooms. My sister Katie just informed me of this obvious fact.

I have about a million pictures and a million stories of our Christmas Break so far but I think I'll end this post with just a hint of what's to come.

You'll probably be hearing stories about our break for the next month or so. . . .

Happy Birthday Isaac and Dad

Happy late Birthday, Isaac! (his birthday was yesterday)

Happy early Birthday, Dad! (his birthday is tomorrow)

Sorry that you each don't get your own post from me, but I really don't have enough wit to write more than about one post every other month.

I was also going to post a funny picture of each of you, but I'm in Arizona and all of my photos are on our computer back in Utah.

I hope the quality of this post isn't representative of the quality of your birthdays...

-Seth

Stories for You

Last night Seth, David and I went to In-N-Out. My mother and Jim were at a Christmas party, Katie was babysitting. It was just me and the boys. They had the following conversation:
D: Hey, which do you like better, Mario or Zelda?
S: Oh... that's a tough decision.
Me: You are nerds. (This was preceded by an eye roll)
S: This is a hard choice!
David concurred.
Me: I've never even played Zelda, so I would pick Mario.
They stared at me in shock. NEVER PLAYED ZELDA! What kind of life are you leading!?
I'm pretty sure that's what was going through their heads. They were so disappointed in me, and I couldn't have cared less.

Seth almost had to destroy his old and terrible suitcase. It is huge and hard plastic and there is a 3 digit lock on it. I think his mother bought it for him at a garage sale. He's never used the lock before but when we got here he discovered that somehow it had locked. We think the airline people probably messed with it. Unfortunately Seth had no idea what the code was and so he was thinking he would have to break it open just so he could get his things.
But, I "married a genius", as Katie said after she discovered his method for opening the suitcase without destroying it (and I heartily concur). He figured out what numbers on the wheel were flat-sided instead of rounded, and then he knew the code was the opposite of that.
That's the best explanation I have for you, and as I'm still not really sure exactly how he did it. He is a genius.

Seth lost his boarding pass in the airport. Luckily, it was after we had already gone through security so he just went and asked the desk people to print him a new one. This meant that we were last in line, and since we were on Southwest (they have an open seating policy) I was afraid we wouldn't be able to sit together. But the flight wasn't full and there were some seats together at the very back of the plane. So it all worked out.
He found his boarding pass during flight when he reached into his backpack to get something.

Church is in one hour and I have not showered yet. I'd better go.

It is so warm here! Efforts to convince Seth to move to Arizona have been forcefully renewed.

Goodbye

R.I.P.

My ipod nano of 5 years has finally died.

Unfortunately the only time I really use my ipod is when I'm flying.

Seth and I fly to Arizona tomorrow.

Next week we're flying to North Carolina.

Then a week later we're flying back to Provo.

It was a very inopportune time for me.

Oh wells. At least I have my sudoku book.

Seth is taking his last final right now. I turned in my final paper yesterday. We've been cleaning the house all morning. We'll pack tonight.

And then Christmas Break!

Disgusting

I started complaining to Seth the other day about how everyone in our family thinks our icy door is disgusting.

"But you said it was disgusting...." he said. "You posted it on our blog for everyone to see."

Irrelevant, I thought. I did not voice this out loud.

"Yes, but I don't want everyone else thinking it's disgusting."

Confusion mounting, he said "But you do think it's disgusting. Why did you tell everyone it's disgusting if you don't want them to think it's disgusting?"

"I just don't want them to think I live in a disgusting house."

"But we do..."

I could write more of this conversation but let's just say that Seth still has no idea how my brain works and I remain satisfied with my impeccable logic.

Let's not count how many times I used the word "disgusting."

For the record, we fixed the icy door the day I wrote that post. We put some rolled up towels down outside the door.

And voila! No more ice.

I know. Ingenious.

And my house is not disgusting.

Icicles

So, as Janette recently posted, it has been freakishly cold outside this last week. Janette hates it, but I definitely think there are some positive aspects of Utah winters.

For one, our house has the most amazing icicles that I have ever seen!

Check these suckers out!

Hoping that they would keep growing, I've been fighting the urge to break any off this whole week. I was actually kind of angry when one of our neighbors broke the biggest one we had.

Unfortunately, I probably should've given into my desire since it rained all day yesterday and today and now they are all melted...

Hey.

Wanna see something gross?

This, my friends, would be yellowish-brownish ice frozen INSIDE MY HOUSE.

Yet another tale to add to my collection of house horror stories.

So this really came about as a combination of two things:

1. We have a lovely large space heater that emits water vapor when it is heating our house. This leads to our windows constantly fogged up and dripping water. Constantly. The water here dripped down to the base of the door and was frozen from the cold air blowing in from outside.

2. There is a little gap between the floor and the bottom of the door. See?

Well you can't really see because there is ice in the way. Nevertheless, snow gets blown under there and then water drips down on top of it, freezing everything into ice.

This makes a nice little ice coating around the bottom of our door. In fact, it freezes our door shut. So much so that every time Seth and I go in and out of that back door (we never use the front) we have to break the ice and yank it open.

This afternoon when Seth decided to go out and shovel the walkway some, he couldn't even get it open for fear of breaking the door. So he got a hammer and one of his nail sets and chipped away at it until he could safely open the door.

The aftermath.

Seth and I have theorized that the ice is yellowish-brownish because it dripped down through all the cracks in the door. And though we scrubbed this house clean, I'm pretty sure I couldn't get all the years worth of disgustingness out of the cracks of the door. Please don't judge me.

The door-freezing has been particularly bad this week because the high for the day hasn't even gotten above 30 degrees.

I drove Seth to class every morning this week because the temperatures were between -3 and 3 degrees at 8 o'clock in the morning.

Countdown to Arizona and beautiful warm weather: 8 days

(On a side note, I talked to my mother yesterday. She wanted to warn me that it was unnaturally cool in Arizona. Why, it was even dipping into the 50s!

....I just laughed at her.)

I am in love...

...with our new heated blanket.

I don't think I ever said thanks in this video, but then again I think it is obvious that I am very grateful. Thanks to Seth's parents for an early Christmas present! I still cannot figure out how I didn't own one before this because it seems essential for a 100+ degree weather-lovin' girl like me.

And it came just in time because this morning we woke up to this:

Snow on Sundays is undoubtedly the worst for females because you are required to go outside in the snow in church shoes and a skirt. And surprisingly enough, those items aren't very conducive to snowy conditions.

Wintertime makes me jealous of boys.

Stop Voldemort

This stop sign is located on UVU campus.

I like to drive by it in the mornings.

It makes me happy to be at school.

Egg Nog Wars

Whenever Seth or I think of something we need at the grocery store, we write it down on our little whiteboard in the kitchen.

This past week Seth wrote EGG NOG, so huge it covered half the whiteboard.

I promptly crossed it out. Egg Nog is disgusting and I don't want it.

He rewrote it.

I crossed it out again.

He rewrote it again.

I crossed it again.

This pattern went on for about a week.

Until Seth came up with something else to write on the whiteboard.

I thought it was very clever and it made me laugh, so I left it alone.

And today, I bought this for him:

I said I would buy it for him if he promised to finish all of his thank-you cards before we left for Christmas Break. (We are so close! And I am very determined.

I WILL FINISH MY WEDDING THANK YOU'S. I WILL!!)

So I guess it was a tie.

Seth gets his Egg Nog, I get to cross off my goal.

And we stay happily married.

Hiking the Y

Yesterday we went and hiked the Y.

Hopefully this negates some of the gluttonous eating we've been partaking of all week.

David spent most of his time way ahead of us.

Katie spent most of her time complaining and trying to rest for as long as possible.

The rest of us were somewhere in between.

The view from the top was lovely though.

My family left this morning and we have done nothing all day.

We're not ready for our break to be over yet.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am thankful for:

A Thanksgiving dinner that was delicious, made all the more so by the fact that I did not have to cook it!

Because let's face it, even if I wanted to cook a Thanksgiving meal, there is no way a turkey would fit into my teeny tiny oven.

I am VERY thankful for my gas heater.

(This baby was rated to heat twice the size of our house. It works splendidly.)

We spent the whole day out of the house with family and so we left the heater off. Unfortunately, that meant when we got home at 10pm the house was about the same temperature as the outside (40s).

We have it cranked up right now. Seth and I are both hanging out in the living room until the bedroom warms up.

I love my space heater.

I'm thankful that this boy and I are married.

I'll spare you the sappy details, but he is a marvelous husband and I sometimes still wonder how I ever got to be so lucky as to marry someone like him. The nice thing is that I think he thinks the same about me.

Hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving!

I'm sensing a theme here...

My family is in town.

We're having fun.

This was yesterday, at Burlington Coat Factory.

We also went to (of course) Brick Oven last night.

It was a night of gluttony.

We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

Today we spent up in Smithfield, Utah.

The Toolson family helped found Smithfield and so my Dad took us on a mini tour of some sites (more on that later).

We also went to the Pepperidge Farm outlet.

More gluttony.

But for a great price.

We took up a drive up through Logan Canyon. We went all the way to the scenic overlook to Bear Lake, which is only a few miles from the border of Idaho.

We then stopped at Maddox in Brigham City for dinner.

More gluttony.

I don't think this trend is going to stop, as Thanksgiving is tomorrow.

Craftiness

In a never ending effort to cover up the beigeness of my walls, I decided on yet another craft project for Seth and I to do.

The inspiration was found here.

(You really have to look at the link to understand the rest of this post.)

And these are the results:

The pictures don't do it justice, it really looks cool.

I can't decide if I like the tapered off look or if I want to make more and cover the entire wall. . . .

Regardless, it's SO much better than all that beige.

Rotting Pumpkins

Seth and I always use our back door.

We put our Halloween pumpkins by the front door.

And so, we forgot about them for a long time.

Until they looked like this:

We decided we should probably get rid of them.

We decided this was probably a good idea and we decided we should take care of it immediately.

And so, about a week later, when they looked like this:

We finally got rid of them.

I think our neighbors were happy.

I PASSED

Dear Janette:

Congratulations!  You have been awarded the Novice Level Certificate! I commend you on your accomplishment. Your certificate, certification card, and other information will be sent separately.

The Novice Certification is an entry skill-level status.  We expect that you will follow the Code of Ethics and stay within the areas approved for your level of Certification and skill. You are not allowed to interpret in situations which are limited to Professional Level.

Again, congratulations on your achievement!  I wish you luck in the future.

                                                                                                                       

Sincerely,

Mitch                                                    

Mitch Jensen, Director                                                                                  

Utah Interpreter Program

I just got this 5 minutes ago. I started screaming. 

I AM A LICENSED INTERPRETER!

I am so awesome!

Happy Birthday Michelle

Today is my sister Michelle's 24th birthday.

For real.

Things you may not have known about Michelle:

1. She is hilarious.

2. She is currently in England getting her masters in being a museum whiz.

3. She's the only person in my family who will let me play the music as loud as I want in the car. (with the exception of my father) She also sings and dances to the music with me. (my father does not do that)

4. She is a hopeless romantic. She drove Amanda and I crazy when we were both engaged because she was much too sappy for us. (Ever seen My Best Friend's Wedding? Amanda and I are Julia Roberts, Michelle is Cameron Diaz.)

5. We like to tease her about being the shortest among the siblings, even though she is the oldest.

Happy Birthday Michelle!

Pet Names

Remember my post about Seth's ridiculous list of baby names?

He also likes to come up with ridiculous pet names for me.

I've been carefully recording them for the past several weeks so that I could share them with you, my devoted readers.

Baby Cakes

Baby Pie

Baby Honey

Cutiesauce

Funky Bunch

Hamster Pop

Sugar Pants

Sugar Lump

Sugar Grimace

Schnookums

Schnooky

Shnuggle-Wuggins

Snuggle Cakes

Honey. . . Dew. . . Melon. . . Head. . .

The last one is my favorite. He kept adding onto it as he thought up some new, more clever version.

It should be noted that he is actually not this sappy. He just likes to try and get the best reaction out of me. The range is from puzzled looks to acting as if I'm throwing up. Sometimes there is violence involved.

I know, we're a little weird.

Whenever I tell Seth that he is weird, he always responds with "Hey, weird people marry weird people."

I've yet to come up with a good response to this. Suggestions?

Snow

What's that? Oh no, I'm never dramatic.

Why do you ask?

Modeling

My lovely friend Betina is a photography major at BYU. She is very talented.

 She came over to my house for dinner a while ago and fell in love with my kitchen and wanted to do a photo shoot in it.

She got me to be the model for it, even though I hadn't even taken a shower that morning. (She put a lot of makeup on me...)

And I actually had a lot of fun.

Anyway, here are some pictures I took.

And here are some pictures she took (shamelessly stolen from her own photography blog.)

She also has a second photography website that you should look at.

I'm pretty sure that Betina is going to be a famous photographer one day and then I can say I roomed with her for 2 and a half years and she even took some pictures of me.

It'll be like I'm almost famous.

Playing the Air Guitar.

Seth once told me that he had to learn how to play the air guitar.

I find this concept extremely hilarious. I didn't realize you had to learn how to play air guitar.

He assures me you do.
He says he learned it by playing Guitar Hero.
So see, video games ARE educational!

Anyway, now that he's finally mastered this skill, he is quite good at it.

My favorite thing to do is blast Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the car and watch Seth go crazy. He does it all: the intense air guitar-ing, singing (with great accuracy) the low and high notes, the head banging a la Wayne's World.

It's great stuff.

My other favorite song to put on around Seth is "It's A Jolly Holiday with Mary" from Mary Poppins. He can imitate the animal's parts to perfection.

Lest you think I'm only going to make fun of Seth in this post, I'll have you know I used to look at the word guitar and think it was pronounced "gwee-ter." In my mind this was a different word from guitar.

It took me years to figure it out.

The Mouse Finale

The exciting finale of our mouse tale!

Actually it kind of sucks, in my opinion.

So Seth put out some crumbs to make sure there weren't any other little mice scavenging for food in our cupboards.

They were gone in the morning.

So I finally allowed him to go buy a snapping trap.

Unfortunately he set it up at night when we were both home and doing homework. It was very, very quiet.

So we clearly heard the trap snap shut.

And then we heard the little mouse squeeking in pain.

It didn't kill it on impact.

This is about where I started envisioning the mouse and gagging to myself.

Seth went to go get it an hour later and it was still struggling.

I said no more snapping traps. Or at least to set them up and get rid of them while I was out of the house at school.

He put out some more crumbs but they haven't been touched in days so we're hoping that this is finally the end.

Quittin' Time

Yesterday was my very last day working at Cold Stone Creamery.

I took advantage of my discount while I could.

Names

It is a well known fact in Seth's family that he would one day name his future children "Toast" and "Bucket."

Then I came along and married him. I am still in the process of trying to uproot this plan.

Because over my dead body are my children going to be named Toast and Bucket. (And I use the term "named" loosely, as these are not names, they are nouns.)

A few Sundays ago during Sacrament meeting Seth had fun drawing the ugliest babies ever and pairing them with equally ugly names. Then he would write "our baby" next to them. One of them had lobster claws. One had an onion head. You get the idea.

Anyway, in addition to Toast and Bucket, these are some of the names he came up with during church as well as a few others he plans on saddling our future children with:

Pugsly

Frankensauce

Chuck

Hoobens Bueno

Abdullah Abdullah

Milton

Gunderson

There are more but I don't remember them  now. They're equally horrid.

And what does Seth think about all this?

"I don't know why it fills me with so much pleasure to choose such wonderful names."

I wrote that down last night after he came up with "Milton."

P.S. Please do NOT assume this post was because I am pregnant or anywhere even remotely close to that. I know there were some of you... 

The Mouse, Part 3

I know many of you have been waiting with bated breath for the conclusion of this exciting story.

Never fear, I am here to indulge your curiosities.

So remember this quote, from my last post?

"We're going to try to catch him again this afternoon. Hopefully he's stupid enough to fall for the same trick twice."

Yeah. He was not a stupid mouse.

We set up our clever little trap two (or was it three?) more times.

Each time our little mouse friend enemy would eat all of the crumbs leading up to the cardboard tube.

And then he would knock the tube over into the bucket, as if mocking us for thinking we could fool him again.

Friday night, in despair, I went to bed early. Seth stayed up to eat Apple Crisp.

When I woke up early Saturday morning, I came out to the kitchen to find this:

I was bewildered. I had no idea what happened. I had to wait 2 hours for Seth to wake up and tell me the story:

And so, the man finally outsmarted the mouse.

After we went out to lunch with some friends, we trooped over to the Duck Pond to set the mouse free in a new home far away from mine. Our friend Canada is an aspiring veterinarian and wanted to show off her animal restraining skills she's been learning in her classes.

But when she took the lid off the bucket, the mouse LEAPED out of it. I'm talking like 3 feet of air here, people. Mice can jump.

She chased it down though and did finally manage to "restrain" the mouse for us to look at.

During this whole episode Seth looked up a lot of information on mice and learned that they typically do not live alone. So as a precaution, he set out some crumbs in our cupboard to see if there were any more left foraging for food in our house.

The crumbs were gone in the morning.

I'm thinking this is not the end of our mice troubles.