Bouncy Balls

Aaron and I have had some good adventures in these past weeks topped off by our car dying on Thanksgiving Day. Luckily Aaron's grandfather was so kind as to drive all the way down from Sandy, jump start our car, (all our neighbors were gone) and then buy us a new battery later in the day. Luckily it seems that after that encounter the car has been starting rather well. (Meaning that it starts on the 4th or 5th turn over instead of the 10th.) My opinion is that it's gotten cold so quickly this year that our car is having issues adjusting.

Another adventure we had recently was working at Shoe Carnival on Black Friday. My fabulous husband agreed to join me for the nightmare that is working that day for this year. Our shift began at 4:30 am with the doors of the store opening at 5 am. I was working as a cashier this year which just means I got to stand in the exact same spot for approximately 11 1/2 hours. Aaron only was scheduled from 4:30-1 but I was scheduled from 4:30-4. He used the extra 3 hours to try and work on our car so that it would start a little better.

The last adventure I wanted to talk about was last weekend the 20th and 21st. My sister Cassidee and her husband Jared were celebrating their anniversary that weekend with an overnight trip so Aaron and I agreed to watch all four of their boys for them while they went away. The boys were really quite good, they have definitely matured from past years and will grow up to be fine men. However, there were some...situations I have to share. We woke up Sunday morning (at 5:30 am) to poop and an entire double roll of toilet paper on the bathroom floor. The youngest boy Parker had gone to the bathroom in his pull up in the night, gotten up in the morning and somehow it got all over the bathroom floor. The details are still fuzzy as to how that happened. He and his twin Preston then decided to "clean up" by unrolling the entire roll of toilet paper into the toilet and onto the floor. Lovely. Second to that Aaron was playing with Preston and Parker (they had decided to give his belly a massage) when Preston located a small ball of lint inside Aaron's belly button. Aaron asked him what it was and after thinking for a moment he said, "It's a blue squished up bouncy ball!" Ah, the jewels of insight we receive from a child's perspective.

Changes

I know that I am horrible at posting in any way that could be thought of as a regular basis. My only defense is that not a whole lot changes in my life. How often can I post about shoes, cranky customers or crappy coworkers before you all get bored? However, this post I actually do have something interesting to say! I recently was denied admission to BYU for the 3rd time. After meeting with an admissions counselor I was told that in order to transfer I would need a 3.7 GPA. This is not something that would be easy to do from the standpoint of a 3.25 current GPA. To make quite a long story shorter Aaron and I have decided that I am going to start classes in January at UVU. Through a lot of thought processes I sincerely feel that UVU is where I am supposed to be. One thing that I took into consideration (of many) is this: there are many young people in the world who work their entire lives to be admitted to BYU, it's their dream school. However, I am not, and never have been, one of those people. In fact a lot of my goals/thinking growing up was where can I go that isn't BYU? The question I ended up posing to myself was this. Is it fair for me to take a space at such a highly coveted school when it really has no special meaning to me? Or when my space could be given to someone that has dreamed of coming to BYU their entire life? UVU is the fastest growing school in UT with a student body of 32,000. Even with such a large student body they still keep class sizes small with a maximum limit set at 165. This was important to me because I am not one of those people that learns well in an environment where the professor uses the "spaghetti technique" (throws information out there to an enormous class and expects you to teach yourself). There are many people that can do well in that type of environment, I'm not one them. Anyway, this was a long and thought out decision that I could write pages about but I'll quit there. I just thought you all might like to know!

Keep On Keeping On

I have recently figured out why I never post. This is because nothing in my life ever changes! I go to work at least 5 days a week (6 for this one). Aaron has started school back up and while it is definitely a nice change to actually see each other in the mornings to me it feels like that's the only thing that has changed. I still spend most of my time either at work or asleep, there's still never enough time to accomplish all that I need to in the short time that I'm home and for Aaron there's still always more homework that could be worked on. There is one new addition to our life which is team teaching a Preach My Gospel class during the Sunday School hour each Sunday. Today was our first lesson on Charity...and at this point I have nothing else to say and anything I write beyond this point is just going to be wasting your time so you might as well quit reading. Seriously, stop reading, this is not a joke. Everything that I am writing now is just to make my post look like it is of a sufficient length that I actually had something to say, that way when you first look at it you'll be all excited like, "Hey, maybe Keely actually had some important news that she wanted to let us know about this week." Then, after reading this, you'll realize that wasn't the case and you've just read this entire thing wasting at least 30 seconds of your time.

1 Year Down, Forever to Go

This past week I was able to fly out to CO for my cousin, Kelsey's wedding. It was a really quick trip flying out Wednesday afternoon, the wedding was Thursday and flying back on Friday afternoon. On Saturday it was Aaron and I's first wedding anniversary. Unfortunately I had to work that morning but after I got off we were able to celebrate. Aaron created a slideshow of pictures of our first year, bought a cake and bought me a mouse for my computer, I guess he got tired of me stealing his mouse. To top it all off we went out to dinner at my favorite restaurant which is Olive Garden. All in all it was a marvelous anniversary with many well wishes from all of our family and we look forward to many more years to come.

Whew!

I do realize that I haven't posted in a very long time, what can I say? It got moved to the bottom of the "To-Do" list. I thought I might as well catch up with some pictures etc. Aaron and I have been to two family reunions since I last posted. The first with my side of the family was the last weekend of June. We just returned from Aaron's family reunion last Saturday. I don't have any pictures from my family reunion at Lake Powell but I did take some while at Aaron's family reunion. The first set is of a bike ride I went on around Park City, UT with one of my sister-in-laws, Stephanie, and one of my brother-in-laws, Jared. Aaron decided to go golfing with his father and grandfather that day so he didn't come along.
What a great view of the city, huh?
My two companions for this marvelous ride.

(Stephanie didn't know I was taking a picture.)
It was gorgeous with a lot of wildflowers and picturesque sections of trail.

This was one of my favorite flowers we saw along the way.
Ah, yes. Near the condos we were staying at was the Shoe Tree or should I say several trees, all filled with shoes like this one. My personal favorite was the bright pink pair of Nike women's shoes I would have climbed up and taken them down but they looked pretty dirty...
Saturday, the 17th of July, we were able to attend one of Aaron's cousin's weddings, Steve and Ariel were both quite happy to be married after dating for around two years.
This is definitely not the best picture of us but it's the only one I have of us on that day.
The temple always has such beautiful flowers.
Many of you have been following our ongoing fish saga, well here's the latest. Elmo died shortly after my post. He had this thing about burying himself under the rocks in his bowl, how odd... Anyway Elmo's replacement is just called Mo and fortunately he seems to have zero tendencies towards burying himself under rocks or jumping out of his bowl.

It's Over!

Well I took my final for Chem 105 yesterday and I feel as if I have finally rejoined the world of normal people. A few things of note have taken place since my last post. One of them is that Aaron and I rescued a baby quail about a week ago. The quail live in the bushes surrounding our parking lot and we found this one after it snuck into our neighbor's apartment. After his mother hadn't come for an hour we decided to take him in. Luckily Aaron has had experience raising birds because I didn't have the foggiest idea of what to do. He stayed with us for almost an entire 24 hours before something inside him burst. At least that's what we assume because he suddenly had a big growth on his neck. We decided that if he was to die he should be happy so we let him go in the bushes around the parking lot. However, when we came back to check on him he was nowhere to be found. So he either survived or was carried away by something. Anyway, I took this picture of him (I called him Squeaker) probably about 2 hours before we set him free.

















The other thing that happened to us recently that I thought I should note is that our pet fish Burt died yesterday. Aaron took it quite hard, he mourned for a whole 10 seconds. I did some searching online and found that PetSmart was having a sale on betta fish. So I went and found a new friend, Elmo. Not that anyone really cares but I have already noticed quite a few differences in personality between Burt and Elmo which surprised me. I didn't think that fish were so personable.

Catch-Up

I realize that I haven't posted for quite a while and I do apologize but since starting my spring class free time has decreased to zero. Since my last post a number of notable things have occurred including my sister's oldest son, Brayden, getting baptized on the morning of my 21st birthday, which was May 1st. I celebrated my birthday by promptly buying a whole lot of alcohol and getting completely wasted...no, wait that wasn't me...what really did happen is Aaron and I spent the entire day up at my sister Cassidee's house with family including my parents who drove over from CO for the baptism. Unfortunately on the night of my birthday I started feeling quite ill with a bad headache and ended up throwing up, and no it wasn't due to alcohol consumption, the upside is upon waking up the next morning I felt completely normal and healthy. I've gotten a lot of questions about how my class is going so let me give you a brief run through of one of my days. I get up and go to class, after class I normally have 1-2 hours before heading off to work until around 10pm. Once home I have around 50 pages of reading that I need to accomplish to be prepared for tomorrow's class and, depending on the day, 3-4 hours of homework due at midnight. The other frustrating part is that I also have a lab that I have to accomplish before Friday at 5pm each week. The problem is that the lab is only open certain hours and those hours normally coincide with the exact hours I'll be spending at work. Perhaps now my family and friends can forgive me for not keeping in contact very well with class, reading, homework, a lab, and work sometimes all in the same day. Luckily this class with be over near the end of June and I am eagerly awaiting it.

Hip-Hip-Hooray!

Our top news story this week is that the semester is finally over! (This statement is normally followed by cheering and dancing around the room.) Aaron took his last final Wednesday afternoon and that is when we learned that Aaron has managed to get straight A's this semester! Prior to final's week Aaron and I had made a deal that if he got straight A's this semester we would go out to eat at Olive Garden, which is fairly expensive but also my favorite restaurant. However, if he did not receive straight A's then we would go out to eat at Chili's which is much less expensive and, consequently, Aaron's favorite restaurant. So following his final on Wednesday afternoon we went to Olive Garden and were able to enjoy a lovely meal. We decided we would share the experience with Taber & Rebecca who immediately cleared their schedules when given the opportunity to share our excellent company. But seriously, it was a very good meal and we did enjoy spending a portion of the evening with Taber & Rebecca. Other highlights of this week include Aaron and I going to The Referral Center at The MTC this evening because we are ward missionaries and, in Provo, that means going to the TRC seeing as inactive ward members are far and few between.

Stealing Thunder

Seeing as Rebecca stole my thunder this week with her post about our tandem bike ride I shall refer you all to her blog for this week's adventure. We really should get better at taking our own pictures...

Sdrawkcab Gnippohs

Last night Aaron and I were mooching hot tub privileges from Aaron's old roommate Eric when Eric mentioned that he had a paper to write for one of his classes. To write this paper he was required to break a "social norm" and record the reactions of those around him. We decided that one person breaking a social norm was good but 3 people was better. After some discussion we decided that we would go to the grocery store wearing our clothes backwards and walking backwards the entire time. I was chosen to wear my clothes backwards but walk normally so that I could keep track of the reactions people had when seeing a couple of people walking backwards toward them. (Ha, I was the lucky one!) It turned out to be hilarious and I had trouble not laughing the entire time. Besides drawing every eye in the store, sometimes even for some triple takes, we got a lot of laughs. Some people would try to move up behind us as we stopped so they could follow us away and then be surprised when we began moving the opposite direction. We also learned that carts can be difficult to steer when going backwards...However, the most memorable reaction would have to be one gentleman who walked up to us, asked why we were walking & dressed backwards. We simply said it was backwards day to which he replied, "Ok, but you're really freaking me out." He proceeded to pound our fists and tell us to be ourselves and "Fight the power, man." My second favorite was in the checkout line the folks one lane over kept asking their cashier why we were backwards, they were Hispanic, this was then followed by a conversation all around us speculating as to why we were acting strangely. Aaron told our cashier it was because his birthday was yesterday and he was trying to take off some years...

Festival of Colors

Aaron and I attended the Festival of Colors at a Buddhist Temple in Spanish Fork, UT yesterday. The point of this festival is to stand in an enormous crowd and throw colored powders at each other. The powder is non-toxic but let's just say it took us at least 2 hours of showering etc. before we were completely clean again. We did have fun and I particularly enjoyed showering Aaron in purple powder. Especially the pink on my face is thanks to him.

Couchless-ness

This is a picture of our living room which, as you can see, is couchless. Last Monday when we went to meet with Aaron's previous employer we found out that the couch we thought we would be receiving as payment was already gone. As it turned out Aaron's employer, Chris, was attempting to get out of his lease early without having to pay any penalty fees. So he offered his landlord anything that he had as payment, so when the landlord came by one of the things he chose to take for his payment was the very couch that we had our eye on. So since we couldn't have a couch we took 5 executive, leather office chairs. We decided to give one of them to Taber and Rebecca because Taber was so generous and was willing to help us move the couch (which turned out to be the chairs) back to our apartment with his truck. The other 4 we didn't really know what to do with until Aaron came up with this brilliant idea. We left 2 chairs intact and took the armrests and the backs off of the other 2 chairs. One serves as corner seating with a pillow for a backrest and the other as an ottoman for the remaining 2 chairs. It's definitely not as nice as a couch would have been but the overall goal of offering more seating has been accomplished and I suppose that at this stage of our lives it's okay for our apartment to look ghetto.

Behind The Times

Well there hasn't been much to blog about in the last few weeks. Our lives seem to have fallen into a fairly regular schedule consisting of work and homework. One thing I should mention is that Aaron lost his job 3 weeks ago. He worked for a telemarketing company on behalf of a resort in Park City, called Westgate Resort, calling qualified individuals to invite them to the resort to listen to a presentation about timeshares. Well 3 weeks ago the CEO of Westgate Resort flew into Park City and closed the timeshare division of that resort, all the employees lost their jobs etc. Aaron's company, CMS, had only one client, Westgate Resort. So obviously CMS no longer exists. The kicker about this whole thing is that Westgate Resort owes CMS around $20,000 and CMS owes us 3 weeks worth of pay. Aaron & I have met with and discussed the situation with the owner of CMS who assured us that we would be paid in some way. (That was 2 weeks ago.) After several phone calls Aaron was finally able to get in contact with his employer and let him know that we would be happy accepting some assets of the company as our payment. We are scheduled to meet with him tomorrow evening at 6:00. We are hoping that we can, if not money, get the couch from the office which is a brown, leather 3-seat couch. We're not even really sure if it will exactly fit in our apartment but it would certainly be nice to have some more seating available outside our current little love-seat.

Night Owls Never Get the Worm

Aaron is a night owl and I am not. I am neither a morning person or a night person as I enjoy going to bed "early" (compared to Aaron) and sleeping in late. However, some nights I vainly attempt to stay up with Aaron seeing as most of our time together each day occurs after both he and I return from work, which is sometimes as late as 10pm. Sometimes I am successful in convincing my dear husband to retire to bed "early" but most the time I end up falling asleep watching a movie or waiting for the night owl to settle down next to me. Inevitably the next thing that happens is I wake up at some unnatural hour to find Aaron still awake and in my stupor tell him to stop being ridiculous and go to sleep. Whether or not he goes to sleep at that time I do not know because I roll over and don't remember anything until the alarm. According to Aaron a lot happens while I am asleep, including the development of his new hobby, taking pictures of me while I am asleep. Apparently in this photo I'm praying for him to wake me up so we can both go to bed.

For All The Women

This week was eventful in many ways but the one event I would like to highlight is that I got my hair cut. I was not traumatized to lose my long locks, in fact I rather welcomed it, but I did have to get it cut twice. Aaron suggested that I get my hair cut because I'm sure he was tired of hearing me complain about how long it was and how I couldn't get it to do anything. Well on Tuesday we received a coupon in the mail for a haircut at Great Clips for only $6.99. I thought this is the perfect opportunity! I can get my hair cut and save some money! However...once at Great Clips the gal cutting my hair didn't get it completely wet, she just sprayed it with a spray bottle. This might work for other people but when my hair, at that length, gets wet it flips out fairly extremely. I also asked for some layers so that it didn't look like I had put a bowl on top of my head and then chopped off all the hair showing below the bowl this was another bad idea. Anyway once my hair cut was complete I was slightly dissatisfied with the layers but I figured that's what you get for a $10 haircut. I went home, showered and after straightening my hair out, because it was all flipped out from being sprayed, realized that the hair on the left side of my head was about a 1/2 an inch longer than the hair on the right side of my head. For all of those who may think I was overreacting this is my proof of how bad it looked. Aaron came home from work and said something to the effect of, while I like your hair short that looks like crap and you need to get that fixed. The next morning was spent on the internet looking for salons in the area and trying to find a place that could get me in on such short notice to fix my hair. Luckily I was able to find a salon about 2 min. from my job and my boss, Rusty, after seeing my hair, allowed me to take an extra 15 min. on my lunch break and get my hair cut, again. And so Lisa from Element Salon took me in like the helpless soul I was and fixed my hair most satisfactorily. I am now infinitely more pleased with my hair and the moral of the story is...If you are going to cut your hair short invest the money the FIRST time and pay someone who actually knows what they're doing.

59 is so old!

I decided this week to partially copy Codee and reminisce a little about my dear old Dad and tell about the past week at the same time seeing as the highlights of this week were Dad's birthday and Saturday. I spent Dad's birthday at work where I promptly told all my coworkers what a sacred day it was because it was my father's 59th birthday, they wished him a happy birthday in correct homage to the day of days and I celebrated by buying a $9 pair of shoes...I just know Dad really would have wanted me to get them. In reality I was thinking about Dad and, while at work, appreciating the work ethic he played a big part in encouraging me to develop. Until I started working at jobs with coworkers, as opposed to working alone, I thought that everyone had a healthy work ethic. Now I appreciate being taught that it's easier to spend the time and do it right the first time instead of having to do it again. I also appreciate learning that "We work first, then play," if I had a dime for every time I've heard that one...anyway happy birthday Dad. The other highlight of the week was on Saturday. I wanted to invite people over for dinner, Aaron wanted to watch the BYU basketball game on TV at 8pm. So we compromised and invited people over for dinner that we thought might want to watch the game with us. At 7 our guests arrived who happened to be Taber and Rebecca Cope and Ray Whitcomb. Our menu was potato soup with bread bowls and for dessert lemon cupcakes with raspberry frosting. Don't be too impressed the cupcakes were from a mix we received as a wedding gift. I thought it mostly went well except that Aaron opened the oven before the cupcakes were done and they fell in at the center but nothing a little extra frosting can't fix. But, then as I was trying to get the cupcakes out of the pan I broke most of them in half. They still tasted the same but they didn't look very pretty, oh well life goes on and I've never been much of a baker anyway.

Ordinary, Plain & Simple, Typical Everyday...Life

Okay I know it's been a while but there hasn't been too much to report. Aaron has started a new semester and luckily his classes this semester don't seem quite as intense as last semester or at least he's getting ahead on some of his school work making his classes a little easier. As for me my promotion at work has finally taken effect despite some quibbles in December about whether or not I was actually going to get it or not. The good news with this promotion is that I know get about 30-35 hours a week and I got a $.75 raise bringing my hourly wage up to a whopping $8.25. However, this did eliminate the need for me to have two jobs so I resigned from working at GAP seeing as I only got about 5-7 hours a week there and leaving opened up my availability to work at Shoe Carnival in the mornings as well as the evenings. When I'm not working I have started taking MATH 110 online through BYU Independent Study to raise my GPA so that I can, hopefully, next fall attend BYU full-time. The time that Aaron and I have together is limited because I am normally at home while he is at school and while he is home I am at work. Therefore I have a lot of conversations with Burt who is a very good listener and also happens to be our fish as shown here.

The one thing I have enjoyed about not being in school at the moment is being able to read for pleasure again. When I'm in school and I have all the required textbook reading reading for pleasure doesn't exist because it's not pleasurable. However, in the absence from school I have resurrected a love for reading that has been buried since I graduated from high school. This gives me hope that I will be able to enjoy reading for the rest of my life once these college days have past.

"The Day" 2009

Christmas this year was simple. We were blessed to be together and blessed to be related to such wonderful family. Aaron and I stayed home all Christmas Day and enjoyed sleeping in before Christmas really "began" at around noon, ah the joys of life without children...This was my first Christmas away from CO and home so it took a bit of adjustment but I thoroughly enjoyed having a day without work or anything else but rest, relaxation and Aaron. As you can see in the picture on the left my gifts were placed on the left and Aaron's on the right. We give a hearty thanks to all of those who sent us packages that helped us know you were thinking of us and may we all live as Christ does until his next birthday.