Drywall!

OK, so we finally got our sheet rock dudes to come over and put up the drywall, and two of them did the whole room in less than three hours! I know it would have taken me three whole days to do all of that, so I really have an appreciation for their work. The next step is the mudding and taping, and then we'll be left with the finishing touches (paint, carpet, etc). It's starting to feel like a real room. If you compare these photos against the pictures two posts below, you can see just how big a difference some walls make. Jenny is getting all sorts of excited to get our TV downstairs, and to only use our bed for sleeping, and not as a sofa. Madeleine is also getting excited to have a new place to play in the basement, and you can see her excitement in the final zoomed-in picture of her in the doorway. Isn't she a cutie?

On a different note, I was appreciative of all the comments appended to my last post. I am amazed so many of you read all the way through to the end! It seems like the entry that got the most comments was #10, the issues I have with some people's English usage. Travis, thanks for pointing out some other good ones, like using "good" when "well" is proper. Ben, you also bring up some excellent points about proper Sacrament meeting etiquette. I always do my best to get out a good "Amen," and you will never hear me finish a talk or a testimony with a "name of Thy Son," because I am addressing the congregation, not the Father! Oy. Jenny was trying to tell me that people do that because they just get confused and are used to saying "Thy Son" so often in their prayers that they just slip it in at the end of a talk on accident. My thought is that people just think that's how you end everything, and aren't thinking about what they're saying or who they're addressing. Thoughts? Any other Mormon quirks that irk you?

And lastly, on a television note, I think I'll pick up the Lost DVDs eventually, but currently I'm spending my free TV time test driving the Battlestar Galactica DVDs at the advice of a friend. For those who don't know, I'm a giant Star Wars geek, although I have the good sense not to broadcast that too widely. So, I'm excited to get into a good science fiction show. I like what I've seen of it so far. Anyone else have any opinions on BSG? Dwight from "The Office" loves it, so it can't be bad, right!

10 Things I Hate About You

Well, I don't hate you, dear reader, personally. This is just something everyone does on blogs, and Jenny challenged me to do this a few weeks ago, so I'm just getting around to it. You're supposed to come up with random facts about yourself that are perhaps not generally known. So, inspired by one of the more well-known movies of the late Mr. Heath Ledger (not that I'm a fan or anything, the title was just too easy), here are 10 of my more controversial points.

1. One of my all-time pet peeves is people praying for or about “moisture.” Moisture is like what forms on the window when you take a shower. 10 inches of snow is NOT "moisture." It could be a complete lightning and thunderstorm or dropping three feet of snow, and people would still be thankful for all the moisture outside. We should start calling the Elder's Quorum for Moisture Removal from the church's sidewalks. That can sure be some heavy moisture! I hate when my basement floods with 4 inches of moisture! Please, just call it what it is, rain or snow.

2. I firmly believe that BYU should abolish their intercollegiate sports programs. Ricks College/BYU-Idaho did it, and I don’t think anyone has lost their testimony because of it. BYU athletics only serves to bring a black eye to the church when players get in trouble with the law, and additionally cause so much righteous indignation and enmity toward the church (see also BYU v. Utah, the “Holy War,” and all other such nonsense). And for anyone who says it is a great missionary tool, I beg you to show me even a single person who was converted because they happened to flip to a BYU football game (pre-Mountain Network, of course).

3. I am a giant fan of all Utah State University athletics. My desire for them to get greater national and particularly, local, respect of course has nothing to do with the rant above.:)

4. Nothing drives me more insane than game shows like “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader” or “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire” where they take TEN FREAKING MINUTES to ask a question and deliberate about the answer. “Jeopardy!” is more my style, with quick-hitting action (I bet Jeopardy’s never been described as "quick-hitting" before!).

5. The best show on television right now (well, kind of, with the strike and all) is “The Office.” If you don’t agree after watching it, I don’t know if we can ever truly be friends.

6. On the flip side, I cannot get into “Lost” for the life of me. I have tried to watch episodes, but I don’t know who people are or why they are in conflict, or what the heck they are doing when some billowing cloud of living smoke comes after them. A lot of my family is really into it, so maybe I’m going to have to rent the DVDs sometime and get over this.

7. I really hate exercising. I get so bored, it hurts, and there’s no immediate gratification to it. Running for the sake of running is especially hateful. I’ll chase a ball all day long, but why run if you’re not chasing anything?

8. I was born in Kentucky, and grew up in the suburbs of Chicago until I was nearly 11. I hated Utah for probably the first year or two after we moved here. I missed my friends and familiar surroundings, and as an ornery, emotional teenager, I was very vocal that I didn’t approve of my parents choice to move. For what it's worth, I pretty happy to live in Utah now.

9. As a result of my Midwest upbringing, I remain a big fan of the Chicago Cubs, Bulls, and Bears. I lost a lot of friends during the ’97 and ’98 NBA Finals while my hero Michael Jordan was beating the Jazz senseless. Luckily I had my brothers to lean on as a fellow Bulls fans.

10. Another major pet peeve is people saying common phrases incorrectly. At the top of the list are "supposably," "irregardless," "mute point," and "could care less." If you are reading this and thinking, "Wait, what's wrong with those phrases?" then you are an offender. The correct words are "supposedly," "regardless," "moot point," and "could not care less." Think about it, if something isn't interesting to you and you "could care less," then why don't you just care less? If you care less, it won't bother you so much. However, if you "could not care less," it is physically impossible for you to have any less interest in a certain topic.

OK, that's it for my rant. Nevermind, here's one more. I hate when people are "tagged" to continue this trend. It's just a type of fancy, New Age chain letter. And I hate chain letters. OK, now my rant is over. Since no one is tagged, I'll continue my rantings at some later point with less controversial topics, and more lesser known random facts about me. In the meantime, do I have anyone who has been offended or who agrees with my way of thinking?

P.S. Obviously, long blog entries are not one of my pet peeves!

Home Improvement

So, it's been a while since I posted on here, so I thought I'd give it a shot. Here's just a quick update of what I've been up to lately.

Since Christmas break I have been consumed by our latest project, which is finishing the basement into a family room. For those who haven't had a chance yet to visit, we bought our house with roughly 1500 finished square feet, which translates into a living room, a kitchen/great room, 3 bedrooms and 2 baths. It's a comfy size for our little family. However, the spacing of the house is such that there's not really a great place to have a nice little family room where we can crash, watch TV, and play with the girls. We were using the third bedroom for that job, but when Tori came along and claimed the last bedroom as her own, our TV got transplanted to our bedroom. When we got married, we swore we'd never have a TV in our bedroom, but here we are with our bed doubling as a sofa.

We are tired of it, so I enlisted the help of my extremely capable father-in-law to teach me the ways of home improvement. He spent a day with me framing the necessary spaces. In the time that he put in roughly 400 nails, I'm pretty sure I knocked in 25 of my own. He is really good at it. I am really bad. But I am sure good at handing him what he needs. In the weeks since, I've gotten a crash course in wiring, duct work, carpentry, and lighting. But, I think it's going to actually turn out OK. I even pre-wired the room for surround sound and an eventual home theater (that will come after the backyard is finished, the rest of the basement is finished, and we buy some couches that we are older than . . . in other words, Summer of 2034).

Anyway, it's ready for drywall. We are having our good High Priests Group Leader do it for us, since I certainly don't trust myself to do finish work that people will actually see. He does it for a living, so it'll look nice. Once that's in, it's just doors, paint, and carpet, and we can have a nice getaway in the basement! Here are a couple of beautiful pictures of my handiwork. I'll admit, it doesn't look like anything special, but it represents a lot of hard work and learning experiences to me. Hopefully we'll follow up soon with some nice "after" pictures.

Oh, and since I feel no blog entry is complete without a gratuitous picture of a cute kid, here's a good (albeit fuzzy one) of Tori. Enjoy!

Indoor Skydiving

We just celebrated our 5 year anniversary last week on January 2nd. I can't believe it has already been 5 years! It's seems like it has gone fast, yet we've sure done a lot together. We really wanted to go on a short trip somewhere, but with Tori being so small it was best we just stayed home. So Matt surprised me on Christmas with a certificate to go do some indoor skydiving at iFLY Utah in Ogden. Awesome!!! You can see what it is at http://iflyutah.com/. I've always wanted to go skydiving and this is the next best thing. It's a vertical wind tunnel that they put you in and then you "fly". It basically simulates the free fall of skydiving. So we did it and it was tons of fun! We were flying! It makes me want to do actual skydiving even more. We unfortunately don't have any pictures, but we do have a DVD of us flying. Pictures of us in those jumpsuits wouldn't have been very pretty anyway. So if anyone gets the chance you should go do it. We spent the rest of the day going to lunch at my favorite restaurant Olive Garden and then going to see a National Treasure. Yes, a movie in the theater. I don't remember the last time we did that. It was a a great day and so much fun to spend it with my wonderful husband. Matt is fantastic and I love being married to him! I'm a lucky girl! It will be fun to see what we do in the next 5 years.

Happy Holidays!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! There were a lot of really fun activities we did this year, so here's a little recap.

Christmas all began with finding our Christmas tree. Although I can see the logic in getting an artificial tree, I just can't do it. The Christmas season isn't quite right without first searching through a Christmas tree lot in the cold brisk air looking for that perfect tree. And we found a good one this year. It was around nice and tall, about nine feet and fit perfectly in our front window. It was also a good price. I thought for sure they had priced it wrong.
Madeleine got to help decorate it for the first time and she did a pretty good job. The only problem was that after we let her touch the ornaments, we spent the rest of December trying to keep her away from them.

I was really excited to be able to put lights on our house for the first time. Matt wasn't as excited, but after being bugged about it for awhile he finally made the venture on top of the roof. He was rather nervous about the whole thing and I didn't get nervous until I looked outside and saw the shadow of him on the roof and actually thought about the possible dangers. At that point I didn't care if the light looked good, I just wanted him to hurry and be done. In the end no one fell of the roof and I think our house looked pretty good for the first time hanging lights. My favorite part was our Christmas tree lit up in the center of our front window. Now the funny thing about all of this is that three days before Christmas our lights stopped working. Oh well. Our house looked festive for a few weeks.


Amongst all of our holiday fun, Madeleine has discovered a love for snow. She doesn't seem to care how cold she gets, she just wants to play in it for as long as she can. One Saturday, as Matt was shoveling snow, they decided to build a snowman with some neighbor kids. And in order for it to be a proper snowman it needed all the fixin's. So a cute neighbor girl went door to door for the carrot nose, used rocks from her huge "rock collection", got a hat from her mom and the best part are the hangers for the arms, an idea thought up by this girl's mom. It was one good looking snowman, the best on the street from those made that day.

This Christmas we also did the traditional activities. We went and saw Santa Claus at the Davis County Rec Center. He made his entrance by being part of the Bountiful light parade. The parade consisted of vehicles decorated in Christmas lights. My favorite was a little VW bug with those light-up reindeer attached to the front, lit up presents on the top of the car, and santa driving. I wish I had taken a picture. It was a fun, short parade. Then we saw Santa and Madeleine did great. She spent the entire time pointing out her sister to Santa, but she seemed to like him. We asked her what she was going to ask Santa for and she said a new car. We're in trouble already.

Madeleine also got to participate in my family party nativity as an angel. She was by far the youngest kid involved. Because of that she was quite the irreverant angel. She spent a lot of the time walking around the front, taking off her shoes, hitting her shoes against the wall and various other things. At the end she finally stood there next to the other angel and held her hand. I don't think the other angel wanted to hold Madeleine's hand, but she let her anyway.

Christmas has been so much fun this year. Madeleine has gotten so excited about it. She spent the entire month saying, "Santa Claus coming to Madeleine's house. Bring Madeleine presents." She also learned Santa Claus is coming to Town and was always singing it. She also got really good at pointing out baby Jesus and could name Mary and Joseph. It got me more excited for Christmas than I have been in a long time. Christmas morning she really didn't get it, but was excited to see the presents and to open presents all day long. You know I think Tori was actually the most excited for Christmas morning. She was the first one up and stayed awake the entire morning of opening presents. Madeleine got some needed toys like a doll house and table and chairs and food for her kitchen and yes, she got her new car. A pink Barbie beach convertible. Tori just got boring things like socks in her stocking and baby toys. Matt got a new suit for Christmas and I got a lot of new clothes. We had a lot of fun with our families Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

We spent the rest of our holidays relaxing, sleeping in and hanging out with family. Matt actually started the finishing of our basement family room! Yay! And New Year's was the quietest we've had. We played games with friends, who left before midnight. Yep, we're quite the party animals! So it's been a fun month and Christmas is just going to get better from here on out as Madeleine gets more and more excited for it. So Happy Holidays, and I'll leave you with a picture of our Christmas morning mess. Yes, that's Tori all by herself asleep amidst the chaos. Looks comfy, doesn't it?