Utes and Shamu and Teacher Sweaters

I found some pictures from December that reminded me I should post about our first Christmas together. I couldn't decide what to get Jared. I wanted to get him something good but he's hard to shop for. Jared is a die-hard Utes fan and they were playing in the Poinsettia Bowl in San Diego. He had mentioned going and I, being the football fan that I'm not, wasn't very excited about it so he dropped it. I woke up one morning with the great idea to surprise him with tickets. With some encouragement from my friend at work, I called and bought the tickets and I booked hotels...excuse me...Motels for us. Since it was before Christmas, it had to be an early present. I am so bad at keeping secrets like this but I managed to hold it in until the day he finished finals. At school, I had one of my girls with really bad handwriting and spelling transcribe a letter to Jared.

It said:

"Dear, Jared do you whant to go to the pointseta bull with Mrs. Madeo? She wants you to go so much you can go to sea wold, beach, zoo. You can ride the troly and eat in little Idly. You will have to dive to sandeago do you want to go? Ceck yes or no in the box. it will be SO SO much fun!!!

from: Jane*"

(*names have been changed to protect the innocent)

When he got home from school that night, I was sitting on the couch acting as if I was correcting papers that my students had written. He sat in the recliner and was doing something on the computer. While I was "correcting papers" I kept handing him papers and saying "oh my gosh this is so funny you have to read this one." By about the fourth paper I handed him I could tell he was getting annoyed. So then I said "Okay just read this one last one" and I handed him the letter. He read it just because he is too nice to tell me I'm driving him crazy. He was so confused at first but then I pulled out the tickets and handed them to him. He was way surprised and excited to go.

We left a few days before Christmas. I think the game was on the 22nd or 23rd. We drove to Vegas and stayed with my cousin Maranda. Then we headed to San Diego. When we got there we checked into our motel. Needless to say, going with the cheapest Super 8 I could find was probably not the most sanitary of ideas. For reasons why please refer here. We crashed for a couple of hours and then saw that the clock on the nightstand said 4:00. I think the game started at 7:00 so we figured we would ride the trolley down, get something to eat, and then make it to the game about an hour early. We got off the trolley at Qualcomm stadium. Right when we got off the trolley we had to go through a security checkpoint and found ourselves in the parking lot of the stadium with the guard saying "no re-entry." Wonderful. Next we looked at our phones to check the time and realized that the clock in the motel had been an hour fast. It was actually 3:00 when we left. We were four hours early to the game, couldn't get into the stadium yet, couldn't leave the parking lot, and there was nowhere to eat. We wandered around for about 3 hours, even waving at the players as they arrived (yeah we were there before the players...) until they finally opened the gates and let us in. We ate some ginormous polish hot dogs, and then found our seats. Lucky us...we were seated next to some very drunk U students and could barely see the field. We decided to take a walk up to the very top of the stadium to kill some time and see if maybe we should just sit up there instead. When we got up there, a man randomly said to us "Hey if you guys need some seats you can come sit by me...I've got a bunch of unused tickets." We thanked him and when we went to find our new seats they turned out to be like 12th row on the forty yard line. Thanks Mr. Nice Man who offered us your seats. Unfortunately I don't even remember if we won or lost. (I usually end up watching the people around me more than the game.) I think we won. But either way the game was really fun. (Funny story about the game and Amy being stupid: I could not figure out why I smelled peanut butter and jelly sandwiches all around us. I kept asking Jared who was eating PB & J. Finally he realized that what I was smelling was beer. For some reason it smelled like peanut butter sandwiches to me. It was my first beer-smelling experience. You might not be surprised to hear that I am from Utah.)

(**Okay looking at this picture of the score board I think we won.**)

Since we went to the football game, I got to pick what we did the next day and I picked SeaWorld. We watched the shows, petted dolphins, got attacked by seagulls while eating lunch, and saw tons of animals. I was in heaven. The Shamu show was a little lame. But overall it was a really fun day and we were surrounded by tons of other Ute fans there for the Bowl Game. And the best part was it only cost $3,000,000 a ticket to get in. Okay so I'm exaggerating but I'm blown away by how much theme parks charge.

That night we ate the best Italian food I have ever had at a dumpy looking restaurant in Little Italy. The next day we drove to the beach for a little while and then headed home to make it back in time for Christmas in Nephi. I wish we could have spent more time there. San Diego is beautiful. I hope we can go back sometime soon! Keep watching for a future flash back post of our New York expedition.

P.S. Jared also surprised me for Christmas with some fabulous Christmas teacher sweaters from D.I. My husband is the best. I can't believe I put this picture on cause I look like trash but you just had to see one of the sweaters. Do you think it's slimming and matches my softball sweats and Ute t-shirt? The next day I wore one of my sweaters to meet Andy's girlfriend. I think she was impressed. (Here's to Mrs. Ogden!)