Good News!!!

Jake is coming home! There was an opening for a Supply SGT at the armory right before Jake left for his school in Reno. He sent in his application, interviewed over the phone, and got the job! This means that he will still work at the armory, and he'll make about the same amount of money, but he won't need the school in Reno anymore. Yea! He is coming home next Thursday! This was the job he had before we got married and he got out of the National Guard. When he decided to go back into the Guard, this job wasn't available so he took a different one. He is glad to be going back to the job he really liked. I'm glad that he'll be coming home.

I feel dumb having made a big deal about him being gone until April, when he was actually only gone for about 2 weeks. Oops. Oh well. I'm still going to watch all of those chick flicks I put on my Netflix list. And I want to thank everyone for their great suggestions. If you still want to come over and watch them with me, just let me know!

Popcorn anyone?

I have decided to educate myself on the history of American Film.

Though I have always considered myself a fan of movies, I have realized recently that there is over a century of great cinematography that I have not seen. I have always dabbled in Hollywood history: I was probably only 10 years old when I first saw Pillow Talk with Doris Day, and in college I was introduced to the works of Cary Grant, and Audrey Hepburn. (Anybody remember watching Wait Until Dark during a summer thunderstorm?) But how can I call myself a true fan until I have really immersed myself in the silver screen?

There are two big problems with jumping into movie watching: finding the time and picking which movies to watch. The first problem with catching up on 100 years of movies is finding the time. Who has the time to sit and watch movies? Well. . . I do. You see, Jacob is going to Boise for training soon. He'll be gone for 10 days. He will come home for about 4 days before going to Reno, Nevada - - - for 3 months. Yes, that's right. Starting on Tuesday, I will only see Jake for 4 days until the middle of April, (approximately 98 days). Sure, I have a lot of things to keep me busy: an online poetry class, a huge scrapbooking project I'm in the middle of, my calling as Beehive advisor, a rubix cube, and research papers to grade, but who says I can't have a movie playing in the back ground at the same time?

The second problem is picking movies. I have gone through Jake's movie collection and marked all of the movies I've never seen and would be interested in watching. I have also reordered our Netflix's queue so that his choices are at the bottom and mine are at the top. However I need recommendations. If anyone has a great film to add to my repertoire please let me know. I am open to suggestions. My only stipulation would be NO horror movies. Unless you are going to come stay up with me all night in this creaky old house, don't even go there.

And feel free to stop by. I'll pop the popcorn.

Christmas Vacation

Christmas was great! We had a lot of fun and saw a lot of family. We have started a tradition of trying to see all of our family in a 24 hour period. We go out to Jerome on Christmas Eve for dinner and some present opening with my mom and dad and sisters. Then we go to Schwabedissen's in Kimberly early Christmas morning to open presents and eat breakfast. We stay there until after Christmas lunch/dinner and then we go to Gary and Heidi's for dessert and games Christmas evening. We got to see just about everybody, except for Nate and Sara who couldn't make it because of the road conditions. I completely understand though: better safe than sorry.

Here are some pictures from Christmas Eve. I forgot to take any on Christmas day so I'll have to get some from Teddi!

The first week of my Christmas vacation is over. I woke up this morning with a desire to do some deep cleaning. I have cleaned out most of the closets in the house, vaccuumed, dusted, and polished the furniture. Jake helped by doing the dishes, sweeping the floor, taking out the garbage and helping me do some heavy lifting. Now that the house is clean I am going to enjoy my week off by putting up my feet and reading some good books. Oh, and I may make a loaf of bread of two with my shiny, new kitchen aid!

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree

It's time to start the Christmas countdown!! I have resisted the urge to listen to Christmas music or make mile-long-lists for as long as I could. Thanksgiving was great. We did all of the traditional Thanksgiving things: stuffed ourselves silly, took long naps, and watched football, but now it's time to delve into the Christmas spirit. (I even gave Thanksgiving the respect of waiting until Saturday before I began changing out my decorations.)

Jake and I broke down and bought a fake tree this year. I like the smell and authenticity of a real tree, but they are soo messy and too much work. We went all over town checking prices against quality. It took several hours before we finally found "our" tree. We knew we couldn't have a huge tree- our living room is only 8 feet tall, but we had never even considered the width of the tree. And for some reason it looked a lot smaller in Lowe's than it does in our living room. It took some rearranging of furniture but we finally got it to fit. While Jake did all the hard manual labor, I made hot chocolate and picked out the perfect Christmas music (Noel by Josh Groban). We had a lot of fun decorating, even though I have decided I need more ornaments since this tree is so big.

Jake (my hunk) put the tree up all by himself, he even put my star on top. We thought we had a 9 foot ceiling (we didn't measure) and so we bought a 7.5 ft tree. Oops. The star is only one inch from the ceiling.

Frank the Cat approves of the new addition to the living room. He wasn't sure at first, because he doesn't like change, but I guess its growing on him. We hung ornaments with bells near the bottom so they make noise when he bumps into them. He leaves it alone when we turn the lights off, but when they go on he loves to cuddle up underneath.

Thanks Sara

A special thanks to Sara for designing and editing our picture! Her photography skills and Photoshop skills are unparalleled. :-)

Photo Tag

Laural tagged me and gave me these instructions:



You go to your pictures folder, choose the 4th picture folder, and then the 4th picture. Post it.

Okay, but Laural I am just going to warn you, I don't think you'll like this. However, that was one of my favorite college memories. Yea for roadtrips!!!!

I tag Alex and Hailie.

Billings or Bust!

I love road trips! There's something very exciting about getting up early in the morning, packing the car, and hitting the road. It's an adventure, a quest. It's fun.




We took a road trip this weekend. I had Friday off anyway, and Jake had Monday off anyway, so I got a sub for Monday and Jake took a personal day of Friday and we headed to Billings, Montana to visit Nate, Sara, and Zsolt. We left around 7:00 on Friday morning (Jake wanted to leave by 4:00 but luckily that didn't happen, I do have limits to my fun). We took the freeway up past Idaho Falls and then in Dillon, Mt we took a highway for a while to trip some miles off the trip. We stopped and ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in a small town off the freeway. It was cold and windy but we got out to stretch our legs and sat together at a picnic table to eat. Cozy.

Isn't it beautiful?

This took us a few shots to perfect.

It was wonderful to see everybody. We had a wonderful time. We cuddled Zsolt, watched movies, cuddled Zsolt, read books, let Sara take a billion pictures of us, cuddled Zsolt some more, played video games, went to Hobby Lobby (that store is so amazing it could be a blog on its own), cuddled Zsolt, ate lots of good food, played with the dogs, and then cuddled Zsolt. Did I mention Zsolt? He may have been the center of attention just a little bit. He was really good about being handed around the room like a hot potato except that we weren't trying to get rid of him, we were trying to see how long we could hold him before someone would steal him from us.

Fun times!

Hi sleepy!

It was fun to be so close to Nate and Sara. I would move to Billings in a heart beat if we could see them more often. But as much fun as it was to see them, it was exciting to jump back in the car and speed off into the sunset. :-) Haha. Seriously we ended up driving into the sunet though. It was blinding. Tuff enough!

Holiday countdown . . .

The holiday season finally started when Halloween snuck up on us. Now Halloween is over and its only a matter of moments before it is Thanksgiving and then Christmas. I've been told that Wal-mart had a huge, decorated Christmas tree in the entrance of their store this morning. Ew! Halloween has only been over for a few hours! I think it is so sad that all of the stores skip right over Thanksgiving and go straight for Christmas. Personally, my favorite holiday of the year is Thanksgiving (right next to the Fourth of July). Although I think I like it because it's not as commercialized, so if the stores did recognize it more it might diminish my enjoyment of the holiday. I love to decorate for Thanksgiving. I collect pilgrim sets. I have at least five sets of them. I am trying to limit myself to one set a year, but sometimes I can't help myself if they're cute enough. Also, I made an apple pie this morning, just to get myself in the baking mood. I'm glad I did too. It tasted good but it didn't set up right so I'll need to practice and get it down to an art before the big Thanksgiving dinner! Yum!

It's beginning to look a lot like . . . Halloween?

I woke up this morning to a huge surprise. . . lots and lots of snow. I looked out of my window before I put my glasses on and couldn't believe my eyes, so of course I grabbed my glasses and looked again. Sure enough, there was snow all over my front yard.

So . . . I was going to post pictures of the outside of my house with the corn stalks and the fall decorations but I guess you get to see the snow instead. The apple trees that were bowing down under the weight of the apples are now bowing with snow and apples that I didn't pick fast enough. My rose bush hasn't bloomed in months because of the heat. Last week the weather finally cooled off enough and the bushes began to bloom again.

The best part is that it is almost 6:00 p.m. and the snow is still coming down! Do I dare get my hopes up for a snowday on October 13th? We'll have to wait and see. . . :-)

Enjoy the pictures!

Potato Harvest

Thursday and Friday were teacher inservice days and I had the days off so I went out to Jerome to help with harvest. I got to stand at the dirt eliminator and pick dirt clods out from amidst the potatoes. I only get to help for a few days each year so I always treasure this time. Picking clods of dirt off of a conveyor belt that is moving rather quickly is a great time to do some self-reflection and discover some self truths.
I learned that my hand-eye coordination really needs some work, (just because I could see a dirt clod did not always mean I could grab the dirt clod.) I also learned that there are muscles in the back of my legs that do not like it when I stand in one place for several hours in a row. You know in Breaking Dawn when Bella has to learn to move around and fidget so that she blends in with humans? Well I tried to pretend I was a vampire and stand without moving my legs. It's harder than it sounds and mostly because of those muscles that begin to scream.

I also learned that cousins are a wonderful blessing. I have some pretty awesome ones too. Annie and Donna are troopers. They work hard and never complain. They look forward to helping with the harvest as much as I do. Annie is optimistic and happy-go-lucky. She is not fazed by the thought of more work or potato trucks waiting in line to be unloaded. Donna is a good counter part. She plans ahead and likes to know what's next. She gets bored easily and likes to entertain. I couldn't ask for better people to work with.

I also learned how important family really is. Harvest time is always a great time to be with family. Everybody has a job to do and it makes us feel good to be needed. Even those people who couldn't take off time from their regular jobs usually come out after work to help. Alex worked on the harvester in the field, and Jake came out to stand on the dirt eliminator with me. I was glad that he came out to help, and so were Annie and Donna. There is something wonderful about having him come up and give me a big hug even though I am covered head to toe in dirt. (That's true love!) The girls love to see him too and they fought over who got to stand next to him on the dirt eliminator. In the end they put him between them and I had to stand on the other side. :-) I don't have any pictures of Jake out there because by that time it was dark and we were working by large flood lights, plus I was too tired to think about taking pictures.

Yea for Harvest!!!