Fire and a Paper Chain

When Jared started fire fighting this summer, we knew there was a chance he would be leaving on a two week tour. On Wednesday, we were up at Bear Lake with his family when he got a phone call saying "get back here now, we're leaving for California." So we throw our stuff in the car, hurry back, and I drop him off at the fire station and go home alone. I thought I would be okay if he left. But as I pulled away from the station, I cried my head off. Two weeks is a long time! (I don't know how you military families do it!) So I got a pizza and a movie, locked the doors, got my pepper spray, and slept with the light on. Yeah my grandparents live upstairs but I'm a chicken. (They did offer to let me sleep upstairs but I decided to be a big girl.) The next day I packed up the rats and headed to Nephi. Now me and Jenny are hanging out while our parents are on vacation. (Any creepy person thinking that's an invitation to break in, we have two MEAN guard dogs, two vicious rats, and I lift weights...so don't even think about it.) It will be fun to spend some time with Jenny. But I miss him already! In the words of Brian Dansie, this sucks worse than any suck that has ever sucked. I'm ready for him to come home. I think I'll make a paper chain to count down the days.

P.S. I cut my hair short. Pictures are coming soon.

I Have a Stalker

The last day of school I gave my email address to my students so they could keep in touch. A few of them have emailed me. One of them is a little over the top. He has emailed me telling me he cried his head off for days when school ended, said he had written a new series that was coming out in bookstores called "Lightning Kid" (yeah right- he can't even write a sentence correctly), invited me to his dance recitals (ballet to be exact), and now this: The email subject was "I Miss You" and it included this message and picture. Creepy.

I MISS SO MUCH

New Blog

I have a desire to share my new vegetarian views. I know some people (you know who you are) might refer to me as an "environmentalist wacko." But I don't care. The more I think about it and the more I learn, the more I realize this is important! So, to spare those who don't feel like hearing about it, I'm starting a new blog. This will be entirely dedicated to my new diet. It will include reasons to become vegetarian, how to do it, and easy recipes that are delicious and humane. I would love any additional recipes, ideas, and your feeback. If, however, you want to continue wallowing in your ignorant, animal ingesting, hormonally altered existence, then do not click HERE.

Warning: Whining Ahead

I used to love Sundays. With Jared working, they have turned into the L-O-N-G-E-S-T days of my life. I don't know why. I am usually okay every other day but Sundays are really hard. Especially when he doesn't get home until 8:00. I think it's because this was usually the one day we didn't have to go and do anything and we could just stay home and be together. Now I just stay home, don't have anywhere to go, and I miss Jared. I really shouldn't complain because I am so blessed and I know that some husbands are gone for way longer than mine. Plus he did get enough time off in the mornings to go to Sacrament meeting. But I miss him. And he will probably be leaving on a 14 day tour to fight fires in California sometime soon. Then I will really miss him. I'm glad he's having this opportunity to be a fire fighter. But I'm glad it's just for the summer.

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!)

I C O N

I used to work at a place called ICON in Logan where they make exercise equipment. I worked in Human Testing. Yeah believe it...I got paid to work out. It was my favorite job ever even though I got paid $1.99 per hour. I became a "runner" while I worked there and I really liked it. Okay so I kind of jogged more than ran and I wasn't really that good at it. But I got in good shape and I ran/jogged every time I went to work. So I'm just gonna say that made me a runner. Since I left that job, however, I've been going slowly downhill in my running motivation and abilities. I started lifting weights a lot with Jared after we got married and didn't run so much. Then we stopped our gym membership and I basically pooped out. Yesterday I stopped by ICON to pick Jenny up an application, and I saw one of my favorite people who I worked with when I was there. She is a runner extraordinaire and she happens to have a blog. After reading her blog, I'm remotivated to run. So today I went out and ran a mile. Did it almost kill me? Yeah it did. But that's okay. I'm setting a goal to increase my runs by one mile each week for the rest of the summer. That means I should be running six miles by the time I go back to work. Thanks Heidi for the motivation! Wish me luck.

Day With the Girls

Yesterday I got to go up to Logan with my mom and little sister. Jenny is headed up to USU this fall (after some persuasive nudging on my part...go Aggies!). We got her an apartment, talked to an advisor, and ate delicious food at the OG. I'm so excited for her. I know she's going to love Logan. Going up made me miss it. Maybe we will end up there again someday. As you can tell from the picture, we really had a great time.