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.