Sunday, October 9, 2011
Welcome to Prairie Village, KS
Yep, Prairie Village, that's where we live now. We arrived here on Sunday the 28th and were really excited to see the house. I think we may have set our expectations just a wee bit high and when we arrived we were a bit shocked at the condition of the house. It was not very clean, had a bad smell, had cob webs every where, didn't look that nice, the back yard was a disaster, there were no window coverings, the washer and dryer were disgusting, some of the construction hadn't been finished, overall it just wasn't what we wanted. So naturally, rather than being calm and rationale about the situation we completely freaked out and considered briefly getting back in the truck and driving home. It was a rough few hours let me tell you! Luckily, Jeremy's parents and sister were here and kindly talked us back off the ledge. After we decided we may have been being a bit dramatic we went back to the house and decided to just make it work. We went to work that first week cleaning our little guts out. I have never cleaned so much in my life. It was ridiculous. I have probably also never sweated so much in my life. We would get to the house and open the windows to air it out so we would turn the A/C off and it got real hot real fast up in here.
We also got to spend a ridiculous amount of money that week buying a new living room set, a new washer and dryer and blinds for the whole house. That was a lot of fun for a couple of unemployed bums. But in the end we survived and got the house put together. Again, this would not have been accomplished without the help of Jeremy's parents. They worked themselves to death. Particularly his mom. It seemed like every day we would get tired and want to stop or go eat or something and she would just be working away pushing us to finish one more thing. I'm pretty sure if it was just Jer and I it would have taken at least a month for us to clean this place. We need a lot of timeouts.
Now that we've been here for a few weeks and have the place organized we are really starting to like it. The neighborhood is really quiet and seems safe. We are in a good location for our jobs and the ward we are in has been really, really great. We are really happy to be here now. There are still some issues with the house like the plumbing and we still don't have floor transitions between the tile and the wood but overall we are really happy here.
I just quickly walked through the house and snapped some pictures and didn't really feel like cleaning things up so go ahead and judge me unrighteously for the disorganized house and the crappy pictures.
This is us getting ready to spend our life savings:
This store is huge and sells everything. I lost my iPhone in one of the chairs we sat in and nearly had freak out #2 because I thought it was gone forever but luckily Jeremy found it for me so we were able to avoid that.
The Move
It's about time I get on here and post an update about our life since we've made the journey to the Midwest. I've been meaning to do this for awhile but I am really lazy and never wanted to take pictures or upload them but now I am finally forcing myself to do it.
Jeremy quit his internship on August 25th and I quit on the 26th. It was weird to leave Nelson Labs knowing that I wasn't coming back. I have been working there for so long it was very strange. My coworkers were so nice and threw me an awesome going away party. They wanted to focus on all of my favorite things so they just brought a lot of food made out of processed cheese. It was wonderful! Some of my good friends also put together a Kansas City survival kit filled with inside jokes from our time working together.
Also on the 26th, we packed up our condo and loaded it into the U-Haul. We had been packing for the past month so we had a lot of it ready to go but it took basically all day and we were so hot and tired and gross by the time we were done. I think every spare inch was used to get all of our stuff packed up. Luckily we had a lot of help from our families, we would have died if we had to do that all our selves.
We spent that night in Heber City and got up early on the 27th and hit the road. Let me tell you, driving a U-Haul is NOT fun, but I did in fact drive it.
Ok, if I'm being totally honest I drove it for about 40 minutes and Jeremy drove the other 19 or so hours, so I pitched in a lot. We were doing really well on the drive until we hit North Platte, NE and after that we were pretty much bored out of our minds and really sick of driving. We really wanted to make it to Lincoln, NE though so we pushed through and made it around 10 or so that night. On sunday morning we slept in and then headed out to finish our last 3-4 hours, what we didn't know is that apparently there was a lot of flooding this year and we couldn't find any road that was open that would let us cross the river into Iowa so we could drop down to Kansas. We ended up just taking a lot of small back road highways and worked our way all the way down to St. Joseph, MO where we were able to cross the river.
I think we ended up averaging like 9 miles to the gallon on our trip which was pretty sweet and cost effective (insert sarcasm font here). Overall it really wasn't that bad and I'm sure it will be a lot better in the car rather than a big truck.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
It's True!!!
It's True!!! I'm sure you've all heard the rumor about how if you drop your phone in water you can stick it in rice for a few days and it will suck the water out and your phone will be fine. I've always wondered if this is true but never had the 'opportunity' to find out for myself. Well unfortunately I found this out for myself recently. Yep, I dropped my iPhone in the toilet. Worst. Day. Ever.
I've seen people post updates on Facebook about how their phone isn't working because they dropped it in the toilet and I always thought to myself, "what a moron, how do you drop your cell phone in the toilet?" Well, I'm that moron and this is my story:
It's really quite simple actually. I was wearing jeans at work and I put my phone in my back pocket. I went to go to the bathroom and forgot to take my phone out of my pocket so when I dropped my pants/bent over the phone took a swan dive right into the toilet. I heard the thunk/splash and my heart dropped because I immediately realized my mistake. I turned around to see this:
(Not the actual toilet, or my cell phone pictured above)
I didn't even think I just reacted and reached in and grabbed my phone out of the bowl. I hurried and wrapped it in toilet paper and tried to dry it off. Then I started shaking it vigorously to try and get any water that was inside it out of it.
Then I sat down and peed.
Then I cried.
Okay I didn't really cry but I wanted to.
After washing my hands THOUROUGHLY I returned to my desk where I immediately emailed Jeremy to ask him what to do. He told me to turn my phone off, which I did and to try blow drying with my hair dryer (thank goodness for having my shower stuff at work!). So I spent a good chunk of time blow drying my phone. After work Jeremy took the phone apart and used some compressed air on it and the blow dryer again. Then he put everything back together, stuck it in a bag of rice and let it sit all night. Everything seems to be working perfectly fine so I think my phone survived it's first and hopefully only toilet bowl swim.
I've seen people post updates on Facebook about how their phone isn't working because they dropped it in the toilet and I always thought to myself, "what a moron, how do you drop your cell phone in the toilet?" Well, I'm that moron and this is my story:
It's really quite simple actually. I was wearing jeans at work and I put my phone in my back pocket. I went to go to the bathroom and forgot to take my phone out of my pocket so when I dropped my pants/bent over the phone took a swan dive right into the toilet. I heard the thunk/splash and my heart dropped because I immediately realized my mistake. I turned around to see this:
(Not the actual toilet, or my cell phone pictured above)
I didn't even think I just reacted and reached in and grabbed my phone out of the bowl. I hurried and wrapped it in toilet paper and tried to dry it off. Then I started shaking it vigorously to try and get any water that was inside it out of it.
Then I sat down and peed.
Then I cried.
Okay I didn't really cry but I wanted to.
After washing my hands THOUROUGHLY I returned to my desk where I immediately emailed Jeremy to ask him what to do. He told me to turn my phone off, which I did and to try blow drying with my hair dryer (thank goodness for having my shower stuff at work!). So I spent a good chunk of time blow drying my phone. After work Jeremy took the phone apart and used some compressed air on it and the blow dryer again. Then he put everything back together, stuck it in a bag of rice and let it sit all night. Everything seems to be working perfectly fine so I think my phone survived it's first and hopefully only toilet bowl swim.
Monday, July 18, 2011
The Incident
As you know, I have recently become a bike commuter. 7.67 miles each way is my daily journey to and from work. I recently had what I like to call a bike incident. I don’t think it can quite qualify as a bike crash or a bike wreck, so I am calling it an incident. I don’t have any pictures of my experience so to make it more vivid I am going to make my own pictures.
It was a Thursday evening and I was riding home from work. Everything was going really well and I even spent the majority of my ride trying out different ways I could hold the handle bars and getting more comfortable in the down position where you act like you are in the Tour de France.
It was something like this:
Notice the big heavy backpack that I truck around with me.
The worst part of my commute is always 3900 South and always on the commute home because there is so much traffic and there is really no room for me. For those who aren’t familiar with the road it looks something like this:
So you can tell there is really no extra room outside of the lane for a biker. And then when you add tons of traffic and stop lights and busses it gets really intense.
Back to my story. I was riding home and I started going east on 3900 South. There was lots of traffic. I got stopped at the light at 500 East and pulled up next to the car in the right lane, like this:
Then the light turned green and we all took off. I was going kind of slow and curved out a bit to let the cars get around me. As I came to the end of the intersection I had to cut back in on the very skinny road that was already full of cars. As I did this went across the gutter and across a big sewer grate that looked like this:
This was no small little sewer grate; it was a big heavy duty cast iron big hunk of metal. Well as I went over I don’t know what happened but I think it kind of slid backward and so it created a little slit between the edge of the grate and the road. As my back tire went over it, I hit it at the perfect angle and my back tire slammed downward into the hole.
I screeched to an abrupt halt and my bike seat went places that it was not welcome nor appreciated. I jumped off my bike and grabbed it and ran up onto the sidewalk. I immediately heard all of the air whooshing out of my tire and the rim was all scratched and bent. I walked over to a parking lot so I could get away from the road and all the traffic and kind of hid behind a parked Suburban because I felt like an idiot.
Luckily Jeremy didn’t have class that night so he came and rescued me and comforted me through my traumatic experience. He also took my bike to the shop that night so that it could get fixed quickly so I could have it for my ride this week. So it wasn’t quite a bike crash or a wreck, it is classified as an incident and I hope I don’t have many more.
It was a Thursday evening and I was riding home from work. Everything was going really well and I even spent the majority of my ride trying out different ways I could hold the handle bars and getting more comfortable in the down position where you act like you are in the Tour de France.
It was something like this:
Notice the big heavy backpack that I truck around with me.
The worst part of my commute is always 3900 South and always on the commute home because there is so much traffic and there is really no room for me. For those who aren’t familiar with the road it looks something like this:
So you can tell there is really no extra room outside of the lane for a biker. And then when you add tons of traffic and stop lights and busses it gets really intense.
Back to my story. I was riding home and I started going east on 3900 South. There was lots of traffic. I got stopped at the light at 500 East and pulled up next to the car in the right lane, like this:
Then the light turned green and we all took off. I was going kind of slow and curved out a bit to let the cars get around me. As I came to the end of the intersection I had to cut back in on the very skinny road that was already full of cars. As I did this went across the gutter and across a big sewer grate that looked like this:
This was no small little sewer grate; it was a big heavy duty cast iron big hunk of metal. Well as I went over I don’t know what happened but I think it kind of slid backward and so it created a little slit between the edge of the grate and the road. As my back tire went over it, I hit it at the perfect angle and my back tire slammed downward into the hole.
I screeched to an abrupt halt and my bike seat went places that it was not welcome nor appreciated. I jumped off my bike and grabbed it and ran up onto the sidewalk. I immediately heard all of the air whooshing out of my tire and the rim was all scratched and bent. I walked over to a parking lot so I could get away from the road and all the traffic and kind of hid behind a parked Suburban because I felt like an idiot.
Luckily Jeremy didn’t have class that night so he came and rescued me and comforted me through my traumatic experience. He also took my bike to the shop that night so that it could get fixed quickly so I could have it for my ride this week. So it wasn’t quite a bike crash or a wreck, it is classified as an incident and I hope I don’t have many more.
Monday, June 27, 2011
One Car Family
On Friday we turned in our Nissan because the lease was up. This was a very sad day. It's like we lost a member of the family. We've had a lot of good times in that car. We took that car on our first date and Jeremy backed it into a pole in a parking garage. I knew how much he loved that car and felt so bad but he just shrugged it off like it was no big deal. We took that car to St. George when we started dating and I slept the entire way down and Jeremy had no one to talk to the entire drive. We took it up to Logan in the pouring rain to watch my brother play soccer and I think that was one of the first times Jeremy had really been around my family. Just a lot of good memories in that car.
We aren't going to buy a new car until we are in KC and until we absolutely have to so we will be a one car family with the Honda for awhile. I've decided that I will be a bike commuter from now until we move. Today was day 1, and I didn't die so I consider it a success. It is about 7.5 miles each way and took me 50 minutes to get to work and about 40 to get home. Coming home was much easier but super hot so I can't decide which way I like better. There are showers at my work so I just use those when I get in. I am too scared to ride on the rode on certain streets and I get stopped at lots of lights so it does take awhile but I am really excited about this and hope I can stay committed for the rest of the summer. Wish me luck!
We aren't going to buy a new car until we are in KC and until we absolutely have to so we will be a one car family with the Honda for awhile. I've decided that I will be a bike commuter from now until we move. Today was day 1, and I didn't die so I consider it a success. It is about 7.5 miles each way and took me 50 minutes to get to work and about 40 to get home. Coming home was much easier but super hot so I can't decide which way I like better. There are showers at my work so I just use those when I get in. I am too scared to ride on the rode on certain streets and I get stopped at lots of lights so it does take awhile but I am really excited about this and hope I can stay committed for the rest of the summer. Wish me luck!
Swamp People
People of the World, you need to listen to me. This is probably top 5 most important things I have blogged about yet. You all need to start watching Swamp People. A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. We have been watching it since it started and it is about to finish up Season 2. Seriously, people do what you gotta do but start watching this show. It is on the History Channel and it is so good. It follows all these alligator fishermen in Louisiana. They only have a few weeks each year to hunt gators and this documents their stories. We have learned so much from this show that we didn't even know existed. First, who knew you needed subtitles to understand what people are saying who live just a few states away? Second, did you know there is a fish that is half gator half fish? I didn't think it even existed but it does, it's front is like a gator and it's back is like a fish and it jumps out of the water and is crazy looking.
This is Junior and Willie, they are a father son combo and we really like them. Willie is so skinny but he just holds onto that rope and hauls those gators in. He actually got shot, by his dad, in one episode and just kept right on fishing. He is crazy. It is also pretty funny how he will be wrestling a gator and all the while a small little cigarette is dangling from his mouth. Too funny! Sometimes when Junior and Willie see a gator just swimming in the open water they use this hook thing and just throw it out in the water and try to hook the gator and then yank it up so they can shoot it. It is really impressive.
RJ and Jay Paul. This is another father son combo and they were just added to the show this year. These two are fighters and they will get into it with anybody. Poachers. Other fishermen. Big huge barges making waves in the canal. They are also very buff.
Tommy and Joe. Joe is Tommy's step father but they have been fishing together for a long time. These two are pretty funny. Tommy is constantly screwing up by not putting bullets in the gun, or leaving stuff and Joe is always on his case. But when they have a good fishing day they are hilarious to watch.
Clint and Troy. Troy is by far our favorite person on the show. He has a great accent and is constantly saying things like "Shoot Em!!!!" or "It's a tree shaker, we got a tree shaker!". Troy is also super nice and super good.
If this hasn't gotten you excited I don't know what will. Start watching today!
This is Junior and Willie, they are a father son combo and we really like them. Willie is so skinny but he just holds onto that rope and hauls those gators in. He actually got shot, by his dad, in one episode and just kept right on fishing. He is crazy. It is also pretty funny how he will be wrestling a gator and all the while a small little cigarette is dangling from his mouth. Too funny! Sometimes when Junior and Willie see a gator just swimming in the open water they use this hook thing and just throw it out in the water and try to hook the gator and then yank it up so they can shoot it. It is really impressive.
RJ and Jay Paul. This is another father son combo and they were just added to the show this year. These two are fighters and they will get into it with anybody. Poachers. Other fishermen. Big huge barges making waves in the canal. They are also very buff.
Tommy and Joe. Joe is Tommy's step father but they have been fishing together for a long time. These two are pretty funny. Tommy is constantly screwing up by not putting bullets in the gun, or leaving stuff and Joe is always on his case. But when they have a good fishing day they are hilarious to watch.
Clint and Troy. Troy is by far our favorite person on the show. He has a great accent and is constantly saying things like "Shoot Em!!!!" or "It's a tree shaker, we got a tree shaker!". Troy is also super nice and super good.
If this hasn't gotten you excited I don't know what will. Start watching today!
Running Fools
As I mentioned in my previous blog Jeremy and I have been training for a half-marathon. We started training in March and the race was June 6. We ran in the Utah Valley Half-Marathon. The race started in Provo Canyon close to the Sundance turnoff and we ran down the canyon and along University Avenue in Provo to Center Street. We had a great time. Don't get me wrong, it was extremely difficult and I struggled to get through it but it really was a good experience and we are both really happy that we decided to buckle down and do it. We had a lot of fun through the training process which included me taking a nose dive on one training run and completely falling on the sidewalk because I didn't pick my feet up high enough, I also puked up GU in front of a line of cars at a traffic light and did other equally embarrassing things throughout our training.
Now before you read the rest of my post you need to read this article: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=5651802
I read this article a few months ago and found it very intriguing because I had always wondered why you never really heard of athletes having to go take a potty break even though that happens in real life. Well during our race I experienced the cold hard truth of pushing your body farther than you have pushed it before and had some intestinal issues. All I could think about while running was how I didn't want to be the girl to poop her pants running through the finish line. I couldn't focus on anything else. Finally at mile 11 we stopped at the port-a-potties but I got performance anxiety. Again at mile 12 I had to race to the bathroom to ensure that I wouldn't have one of the experiences mentioned in the article. I hadn't had any issues while training so I don't know why this happened on race day but after the race Jeremy told me his stomach wasn't feeling so great either so that made me feel better. I kind of want to do another one so that we can get a better time by not taking bathroom breaks along the way but I don't know if my body can handle it. I am just not a runner.
Here are some pictures from the race.
Asking for Water
So Tired
Happy we got our medals!
Now before you read the rest of my post you need to read this article: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=5651802
I read this article a few months ago and found it very intriguing because I had always wondered why you never really heard of athletes having to go take a potty break even though that happens in real life. Well during our race I experienced the cold hard truth of pushing your body farther than you have pushed it before and had some intestinal issues. All I could think about while running was how I didn't want to be the girl to poop her pants running through the finish line. I couldn't focus on anything else. Finally at mile 11 we stopped at the port-a-potties but I got performance anxiety. Again at mile 12 I had to race to the bathroom to ensure that I wouldn't have one of the experiences mentioned in the article. I hadn't had any issues while training so I don't know why this happened on race day but after the race Jeremy told me his stomach wasn't feeling so great either so that made me feel better. I kind of want to do another one so that we can get a better time by not taking bathroom breaks along the way but I don't know if my body can handle it. I am just not a runner.
Here are some pictures from the race.
Asking for Water
So Tired
Happy we got our medals!
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