Hey, so remember how last month I was here:

Well last week we said goodbye to our beloved apartment.


It served us well for nearly a year. We really enjoyed living there. The location was prime for both me and Luke. We had a great ward. And it allowed plenty of space for the both of us.

We are currently- what I like to call ourselves- "floaters". We have no apartment, nor will we have one for a couple of weeks. Luckily, I have a kind aunt and uncle who have allowed us into their home until we find a more permanent place to stay. Seriously we feel so blessed that they opened up their home to us.

After a series of events, we have watched our lives fall into place. The past few months we have seen little miracle after miracle occur as doors have been opened for us. Luke's friend heard that Luke was looking for an internship and set him up with a company that could provide not only the internship, but also a permanent job after the required internship hours were fulfilled. The amazing thing is that Luke and his new boss had never met until today.


Here's Luke on his first day of work!



Well while Luke has been at work the past two days I have occupied my time with apartment hunting, grocery shopping, laundry-ing, flower-watering, dog- feeding, and......


oh ya. beaching.

Ok, so I felt a little bit guilty that I was laying out on the beach while my husband was busily working. But I justified it by concluding that I was actually doing him a favor. See, Luke claims to not really enjoy the beach. So my going while he is at work saves him from having to with me after work or on Saturday (although I'm sure I will drag him along one of these Saturdays). See.. I was being thoughtful. Although it was rather overcast today I still got pretty burnt. (That goes to show just how white I am from living in Utah. Any drop of sunlight is seriously attracted straight to me. I promised myself that although I am super itchy from the burn I WILL NOT COMPLAIN about it because I am just grateful to see the sun and the beach at all.)

Anyways.... a little more on the update:
Last week was my birthday. I am now 21! I must admit that I kind of forgot I was only 21. A few weeks back I wrote in my school calendar for April 21 " My 22nd Birthday", which I embarrassingly had to scratch out and rewrite "21st".
With the expenses of moving Luke agreed to keep it simple. He took me out on a surprise date a few days before my birthday, and on my actual birthday he got me a nice pair of flip flops :)
Remember my recent blog post about the bug vacuum? Well my in-laws got me one. Seriously I'm so excited. Of course it would be better to not have any bugs to vacuum up in the first place, but since that isn't possible, I'll settle for second best which is owning a bug vacuum.
We spent the day walking around the outlets in Vegas, going to Luke's brother's volleyball game, going out to BJ's with Luke's fam, and ending it by seeing The Last Song which Luke and I both enjoyed.

This past weekend my family came down to Vista, CA for my cousin's farewell. We drove to La Jolla where we had an awesome dinner and watched the seals.






It was really fun. I love my family and I'm SO excited to live only 5 1/2 hours away from them instead of the 12 it takes to get to Utah.

My birthday is in less than a month! I'm super excited for it for a few reasons. One main reason is for the new birthday present Luke just tacked onto my wish-list of presents. I've been working on a list of just a few ideas of things for him to get me and this new and possibly the best one was just discovered today. A bug vacuum.

Lately we have found quite a few spiders in our apartment :( In most of the places I've lived, if there was ever a spider-encounter it was usually with a daddy long leg, which are gross but easy to kill because it's just a dot of a body with long legs. These spiders that we have here are much, much worse. The bodies are big and they're way wider than daddy long legs.

Since spring is around the corner we have found a lot of these unwelcome visitors exploring our apartment. One day we came across SIX within just about 2 hours. GROSS. Ever since that day I check everything for spiders. Every cupboard, every closet. I even check our bed every single night, because seriously that would be the worst thing if I woke up to a huge spider crawling on me. We hadn't seen any for about a week and a half.... until today. Luke was in the bathroom gellin' his hair and I walked out into the family room to find the biggest one yet crawling on the ceiling. Seriously it was enormous. Luke thought I was a cry baby until he came out to examine it himself and agreed that the body was huge. Now i"m back to my paranoid self and can't go anywhere in my apartment without checking everything for spiders first. I told Luke I wanted to go back to California where there weren't any nasty spiders, but then I remembered that last summer our apartment was infested with cockroaches. I can't decide which is worse. We just can't escape the bugs...

That's when we discovered that Walmart has a bug vacuum that sucks up the bugs and kills them with a chemical. Among other things, I sure hope that this is one of my b-day gifts. I can't live with these creepy, crawly things anymore!

March 7, 2010

Welp today is our one year engagement anniversary. Ya. Crazy to think that it was already a year ago. It seriously feels like just yesterday.

So I know that not many people do anything for the anniversary of the day they got engaged (most people don't even remember the date) but I thought I would just do something really simple, just to do a little reminiscing. I wanted to surprised Luke and go to the place that we got engaged and have a little picnic. I had everything figured out... I was going to make one of his new favorite meals, wrap it up, grab a picnic blanket, get Luke into the car and head to our spot. There were a few set-backs to this plan.

1st of all: We got engaged at this park that was along the bike trail. For the life of me I could not remember where this park was. My mom was making fun of me because "girls are supposed to remember these kinds of things" but honestly I don't. The day Luke proposed I thought we were just going for a walk along the bike trail, so I didn't pay any attention to where he was driving or where we parked to start our walk. AND after he proposed, I was too excited to look around and remember the directions of how to get to there. So for the past few weeks I have seriously driven to every park along the bike trail that I could see. I even looked at Google Earth to find it, but without luck. and I asked every girl at work if they knew of any park that matched my description. No luck .

2nd of all: The weather the past little while has been absolutely gorgeous. We've hit the high 40's and I think we've even gotten into the 50's a few days.... Until maybe 2 days ago when it started POURING snow. Today is freezing cold and rainy, so I knew that making a nice lunch and having a picnic was now out of the question.

So.. instead of having a cute little surprise afternoon, I just asked Luke to drive us to the park after our Stake Conference. He agreed and we got out to revisit the place that Luke proposed at one year ago today. We stood looking at the jungle gym for a few minutes and both decided that this didn't really look like the one we were at last year. We both thought the swings were on the left side of the jungle gym, not the right. And the slides looked a little different as well. However, we decided that instead of walking around in the cold rain trying to figure out if this was in fact the right place, we would just claim this as our engagement spot whether it was or not.

It's crazy to think about all the things that have happened within the past year, but I sure am glad for that day ONE YEAR ago today where Luke got down on his knee and I said YES. We sure are happy, and I sure love him.


PS: We have become great fans of Jimmy Fallon's late night show. He is so stinkin' funny. The other night we were introduced to this "Let us play with your look" segment. Please check this out. I die every time I see it. It's SO random.

You Should Know I Bleed Blue.

I've decided that I need to be better about blogging. I get so caught up in reading everyone else's that I never really get around to writing my own. I usually just wait until like 5 new blog-worthy things happen and then write about it. So here they are:

1.Superbowl Sunday.
We had a mighty fun party in hopes that the Colts would pull through for us, but that was not the case. However, our party was not in vain because we still had fun nonetheless. It was made up of lots of friends who brought lots of yummy food. I think we had like 80 different types of dip. Jk more like 3.

Luke, of course, got into the Superbowl spirit and made a collage of all the pictures he could find of the Saints or the Colts in the past year's worth of ESPN magazines. It's still on our wall. In fact, he just came home 5 minutes ago, admired it, and said, "I think this should stay up here forever". And it might. We also had blue streamers up across our ceiling to show our Colts pride.




He was so sad the Colts lost... :(

I need to be better at taking pictures. I told myself to take lots and then ended up with only like 4.


2. 80's Roller Skating
Our ward had an activity last night at Classic Skating, and it was 80's themed. Who knew that roller skating was so hard? Geez, I remember being like 5 and flying around the rink. Or maybe I just thought that I was super good, but really wasn't. Either way, I was sufficiently worse last night than I was when I was younger. I didn't fall though. And props go out to my hubby for doing very well on his first roller skating experience. We did so well, in fact, that us and 2 other couples won a super cool flash light ring for being really good and winning a game! Woo woo.






Here's my flashlight ring. (Does any one else think I look creepy/ weird in this pic? Maybe it's because I'm SO stinkin' white. Summer! Please come!)

3. I love my new coasters!
We often bring drinks and snacks into the family room while watching t.v. or a movie and we started to see water rings on the end tables from our cups, so I bought some coasters, and I absolutely love them. They make me happy.



4. Valentine's Day is coming up.
Our plans consist of spending time up at a cabin with some friends. Should be lots of fun. It's fun to think that this will be our THIRD V-day together, and each year we have been in a different stage. 2 years ago we were friends and Luke took me out to Tucanos. Last year we were dating (ha... but it also happened to be the day that I bought my wedding dress.) and this year, of course, we are married and loving it.

5..... Ok so I don't really have a #5.
So I'll just make a quick shout out to Jay-Z for making my current favorite song, "Empire State of Mind", from which the title of this post comes.

Basically.. that's the latest around here.
:)

I just heard Luke say, "This is like the real military!!" and "Where'd you go? I'm so lost without you, baby" and then began singing "I'm all out of love. I'm so lost without you" to Nate while playing Modern Warfare. Haha. I love listening in to them while they play. They have absolutely no idea what they're saying because they're so focused. So funny.

The Place We Call Home.

This post is mainly for my sister, and any other bloggers who may be interested in the apartment Luke and I call "home".


We'll start with the kitchen:

That door is our back door and leads to the parking lot.






This is the other side of the kitchen going into the family room. The wall on the right is my "holiday wall" and obviously I haven't really done much for with Valentine's Day yet. But I DID make that heart wreath.

Family room:

Other side of the family room from the couch:
(On the right is our front door )


Office:



Bathroom:
(Okay so our bathroom isnt' really that great and it was hard to get a picture of the whole thing, so I just took a pic of the toilet to show the pom pom flower balls I made :) )
And... our bedroom is still pretty bare, so I thought I'd just show the newer additions. Thank you, IKEA for providing us with a great dresser. And thank you, Tai Pan for having a $130 mirror on sale for $35 :)

And here's a picture frame I made that is going in our bathroom as soon as I find a pic to go in it. I thought it'd be weird to have pictures of me and Luke in our bathroom so I'm trying to think of something else I can put in it....?



Anyways.. that's a tour of our little place. We love it. It's been fun decorating and experimenting on our first place. In fact, Luke had a surprise date for me the other day when I came home from work. He took me out to lunch and then we went shopping for things around the house. I love that he loves it just as much as I do. We both cannot wait, though, to have our own HOUSE that we can do absolutely anything with (basically PAINT!)

A brief overview of our lives:
-We had SUCH a fun Christmas break, and were able to visit both our families.
-We were able to be at Baby Kai's blessing.
-I went snowboarding for the first time. It was an interesting experience. I struggled even getting UP the bunny slope (I couldn't even hold on to the rope that takes you up the hill), my dad broke his collar bone within the first 20 minutes of our first run and had to walk the whole way down the mountain. I was scared to death and had Luke hold my waist the whole way down. Mason hurt his knee, and we lost Emerson. I must say that I'm glad I went and actually gave it a try. For all you snowboarders out there: I admire you so much. Snowboarding's hard.
-We had our annual hockey game in our cul-de-sac
-Us kids made our annual Christmas video and were able to add Jared and Luke into the great fun.
-We had a 2nd Christmas at the Stephensons. They were very generous and we got some fun things from them.

-We spent our first New Years together as a married couple at the Stephenson's playing games and watching the ball drop. We had a lot of fun!

-The Stephensons came up to Provo for a day. Most of them went snowboarding while Mom, me, and Tori had a girls' day and played games, watched movies and ANTM marathon all day.

Now we're back in school. I LOVE my classes. I'm finally getting into stuff that I enjoy.
Luke likes his classes and is now a TA for one of them.
We're both busy busy as always, but we're loving it.
One thing that we're enjoying is being hooked on ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT.
Thank goodness for some friends of ours who lent us the first season. We've watched most of it already.

And one last thing: I miss the beach, and I miss being tan, hence the background change to palm trees even though it's the middle of winter.

My man asked me on a surprise date earlier this week.

He picked me up at 5:30 and took me here:



The Mayan!

I had been wanting to go here for so long! He's obviously pretty good at getting hints because every time we passed it I was sure to let him know that I wanted to go there sometime.

So this surprise dinner was the beginning of our date.

We then went here:


SLC

to see the lights. It's one of my favorite things to do during Christmas time.
However, we were not able to enjoy it very much because it was SO cold. We literally stopped at every tree we liked, snapped a picture, ran into a few buildings to defrost, and left.




We cannnot wait to be done with finals, take a few weeks off from work, and go HOME! I haven't been home in SO long, and I can't wait to see my family. I hope that everyone enjoys their holiday as much as I know that I will. Merry Christmas!