Austin Anniversary

We recently celebrated two years of marital bliss. I can't believe it's been two years already. Luckily for us, my cousin decided she too wanted to be married on the 14th so we made a quick trip to Austin, TX.

We met up with my family at the airport on Thursday night and headed out to The Salt Lick for some change your life BBQ. It was seriously, really really good food. You should all be jealous. If you haven't heard of this place look it up on man vs. food or one of those shows so you can be properly introduced and become even more jealous of us. They cook everything on a large open pit and it has a really good smoke flavor. We did the all you can eat group buffet and so we got to try everything. Again, you should be really mad you aren't me. Jeremy was in heaven. Literally. I believe if Jer were to choose his heaven it would involve him spending eternity at this restaurant and never getting full.

Friday was our actual anniversary and my awesome cousin bought us groupons for a local bike shop so we rented a tandem bike and rode around Austin. It was so much fun/could have potentially been a terrible way to spend an anniversary. A tandem bike requires a lot of trust and a lot of communication. So really we had a therapy session for our anniversary and called it biking. There were a few moments of frustration i.e. Jeremy wrongly accusing me of not pedaling, or me accusing Jeremy of trying to kill us because he turned the bike and I couldn't see where we were going. Overall though we had a lot of fun and our relationship is now stronger due to our therapy session.

Austin has tons of food trucks everywhere. It was so cool. We rode our bike downtown and ate lunch at a couple of food trucks. I got Korean BBQ mexican food and Jeremy got kielbasas. It was super good. After lunch we rode to another food truck that makes really unique donuts. My dad had one with maple frosting and bacon. I had the son of a peach donut that I shared with my mom. Jeremy had nothing because he felt like puking after biking up the hill to get there. I didn't think the hill was that bad and thought it was strange that he kept thinking I wasn't pedaling :).

Friday night was the wedding festivities. The reception was right downtown and we were on a balcony overlooking the very hipster nightlife. Austin is super hipster and I don't think I would be cool enough to live there but I really want to be.

Saturday we had to fly home but not before a quick trip to the Waffle House. Who doesn't love a good Waffle House breakfast?

Overall it was a great way to spend our anniversary and we had so much fun seeing my family and extended family that I haven't seen for a few years.

I'm posting this from the blogger app on my phone so we'll see how the pictures turn out.

Louisburg Bike Ride

We went out to the Louisburg Cider Mill on Saturday and watched them make some cider and bought some cider donuts and fresh cider. It was pretty fun. After the cider fest we drove out to Hillsdale State Park and rode our bikes around for awhile. It was fun to get out and see the countryside.

I love cheese

I love cheese and could never find these in Utah but I found them in Kansas

I don't care how much supposed MSG or cancer causing artificial flavoring and colorants they have, I love and respect my cheese balls

New Car

After living the dream of being unemployed for about a week I was pretty much done with that and in need a job ASAP to keep my sanity. Luckily I found one pretty quick and started last Monday. However, because Jeremy is working downtown and at client offices all over the place and I will be in Lenexa we needed to finally get a second car. When we were in Miami this was our rental car:

I thought it was very hipster and I really like their commercial so I told Jer that I wanted to get one. He didn't believe me. Then Kia came out with this gem: And I really, really, REALLY wanted one. I LOVE this commercial. Sometimes I just play it on repeat on the computer and wish I had those moves. But, in the end Jer said no, we would not be buying a hipster Kia. So we bought this instead:

Yeah, it's kinda purple. Whatever.

Dominican Republic

After a week of being in Kansas we left for our last big hoorah before becoming recommitted to employment. We went to Puerta Plata, Dominican Republic for a week. We flew from Kansas City to Miami and then from Miami to the D.R. We had a great time and the weather and beach was amazing. We stayed at an ok resort. It wasn't nearly as nice as the place we stayed for our honeymoon and was kind of a disappointment. Our first day there we used as a beach relax day. Unfortunately we were temporarily brain dead that day and didn't think to put on sunscreen until it was too late and I got fried like a lobster. Like really, it was super bad. The next day we went on this amazing hike called 27 Waterfalls. We couldn't take our camera with us because we couldn't keep it dry. Basically you hike through the jungle up this river and then when you come down you get to jump off of a bunch of water falls and cliffs and slide down natural slides. It was so much fun. It was definitely the highlight of our trip. The next day we went on a dune buggy adventure which was really just driving crappy go karts through a field. It was fun at first but after about 30 minutes my back was starting to hurt really bad and it just wasn't that much fun. They kept taking us to these spots where they would just try to sell you crap. They did take us to an amazing beach where we got to jump in the ocean and clean off the mud.

We also went to Ocean World which is their version of a small Sea World. It was pretty fun because there were very few people there. We got to go through these bird exhibits where the birds actually sat on our heads and shoulder. We also went snorkeling in a little kiddie pool and saw the dolphin and sea lion shows. It was very touristy but it was fun. We didn't get any pictures, which is a theme for the trip because we were too worried about our camera being stolen. The other days we pretty much just hung out at the beach and ate the average food they had at the resort.

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.