Birthday Month

    This year's birthday was pretty much awesome! Jared spoiled me the best he can with the budget I gave him and we made it last a week!

    I had Monday and Tuesday off work, so I sat around home and cleaned. Nothing big, but it was relaxing. Wednesday was the birth-day and I worked, which was actually fun! Alexa, the girl with me back in the drive-through sang Happy Birthday to me a couple times in Spanish!

    Everyone else didn't know it was my birthday so I got my wrist slapped when I was getting ready to leave and told everyone that the day was my birthday. They like to get cupcakes or something for the special person.

        But now I get to mention the best part! While I was still sleeping Wednesday morning, Jared woke up early and made me 22 birthday cupcakes!

They are confetti cupcakes with chocolate frosting and pink candles :)

    It was so much fun waking up and seeing all the cupcakes on the table ready to eat! Jared is such a great husband and does the nicest things for me! For dinner we went to Dairy Queen so I could get the Brownie Batter Blizzard of the Month, which was so yummy!

    Jared had to go to Scouts, but when he came home later that day he gave me a cute birthday card and a delicious bag of MnMs!

    I got a free rental from Redbox, so Jared got Just Go With It with Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. We both really liked it!

    Friday wasn't too exciting during the day. Jared worked and I got the day off. So I ran a couple errands and relaxed at home watching Num3rs on Netflix. A great thing was Jared let me get a Big Kids Meal from McDonalds. Apparently I can't eat more than a Happy Meal because just the Big Kids Meal got me full.

    But fun news! We got a great house plant that I love! The plants outside are still working on coming back to life, so we wanted something that could live in our house and make our living room look more lively and pretty. It works! We haven't named him yet...

    Saturday we went to the temple after a quick surprise pedicure! When I was in the shower, Jared made me an appointment at a nail salon close to our apartment. It was so nice and a happy surprise! We went and had lunch at Chick-fil-A and made our temple visit. After that we went shopping! 

    Jared's mom got me some gift cards, one to Old Navy and the other to Bath and Body Works. It was so fun because Bath and Body Works was having a sale, so I still have a lot on my gift card after I got 2 soap things, a candle and lip gloss!

    I looked online earlier the week at Old Navy and found stuff I wanted, so we went to an Old Navy to see if they had anything I found. Nope. We drove all over trying to find the silly place and it turns out they didn't have ANYTHING I found online. But it's OK. Jared was nice about it and I just ordered the stuff online. 

    By that time we were kinda hungry and had plans to go to this Mexican place I heard about from a friend (Alexa, the same one who sang to me at work), Rose Pepper. It was so fun! The restaurant looked really cool and the food was amazing! We got the cheese dip (I loved it) and we got Chimichangas! Woohoo! It was pretty cheap and for only a dollar more, we could get two of them, instead of the one. 

    Oh my goodness. We ate half of one each and we were both happily full. So we got to take the rest of the plate home and even the cheese dip and had it for lunch on Sunday, which got us happily full again! So all in all, the one meal from Rose Pepper fed both of us TWICE! We will for sure go back again :)

    I also finally got my shoes! Jared got me some nice black pumps and had them sent to his office. But the shoes were sent to the wrong suite so Jared never got them and looked all over for where they might be and who might have signed for them. After a call to the place, they sent a new pair to the right place and I got them on Monday! They look totally great!

    Anyhow, it was a great birthday. I appreciated the text and phone call from James and Chris wishing me Happy Birthday. I appreciate Laura, Jared's mom for the gift cards. I loved the key chain from Rachel and thought it was sweet of her. And I just absolutely adore Jared for everything he did for me!

    My mom will be coming over this weekend, which will be so fun and I include that in the birthday festivities!

Another Day Off

    I had yesterday and today off work, and I've run out of things I've wanted to do. Yesterday, my big project was to reorganize our storage room and it took all morning, which was great!

    All of our travel bags are now empty and I sorted everything and put them in bins, which I labeled very specifically. After all of our moving, we thought we lost a few things and had accepted the chance we left it somewhere and forgot to pack it. 

    Good news is, most of what we thought we lost, we found! And I found stuff we totally forgot about! For example, I was thinking the other day that it would be a good idea to get a flashlight for storage. Jared forgot he had one packed away in a suitcase, but now we have one!

    My goal today was to clean the whole apartment. The storage room looked great, so it's only fair the rest of the apartment looks just as good. I guess it wasn't that dirty because it only took me two hours (and that includes breaks and changing my songs on iTunes). 

    All the floors are vacuumed, the kitchen sink is free of dishes, the shower was cleaned, the bathroom rug was shaken outside, the bathroom sink and mirror are all clean. Our bedroom is all picked up and I made the bed. The only thing left I really have to do is clean off the table, but that's going to have to wait. I've decided to throw away all my stinky school books, rather than keep them and hope they sell on Amazon.com. It's supposed to be a rainy day today and they are super heavy for me to carry alone. 

    So I will wait until Jared is home so he can help me and we can do it in one quick trip in between rain spurts. 

    Tomorrow is my birthday, which is funny, because I work that day. I suppose I could have worked it out where I could have gotten it off, but it's ok. Jared is working anyway too and I get lonely when I spend all day by myself. So we'll have a small birthday thing tomorrow night before he goes to Cub Scouts. The real partying will be this weekend. I was able to trade shifts and get Saturday off so I can sleep in! Woohoo! 

    And believe me, on that day off, I will NOT be cleaning!

Birthday Month

   June means birthdays, which means shopping, which means irritation. Somehow, over the course of a year, I forget how picky I am. Jared and I went to the mall and looked around so I can figure out more of what I want and to give him ideas for a birthday gift. It was no help. 

    I am picky about my shoes, I want a watch, but I am picky about those too. My sunglasses just broke so I want a new pair, but I don't like the way some sunglasses look on me. I've given Jared a suggestion to get me some funky colored nail polish, but he doesn't really like that idea. 

   So now I'm stuck with just one idea. Mostly, I want the newest Kenny Chesney CD. I've heard a couple songs on the radio and love them all. In fact, I want all of Kenny Chesney's CDs. I have a couple of them, but I want them all! :)

    Oh, and I also want the movie Tangled. Such a great movie! I'm sure I can watch it a couple days a week and still laugh at the funny parts. 

    Now that movies are in my head, I also want Veggie Tale movies! As child-like as they are, I find them funny and entertaining. 

    Birthdays were always fun when I was around lots of family, like out in Utah when we'd celebrate Chris, James and my birthday with a big dinner and presents. We'd also celebrate uncles' birthdays too because they are close together. But now that I'm away from all that, I just want to keep things a little simple. 

    I can't decide between going out to eat or making a favorite food of mine. But I know I want cupcakes instead of a large cake. 

    One thing I KNOW I am getting is a Brownie Batter Blizzard from Dairy Queen! It's the blizzard of the month and it sounds SO yummy! I am also getting a bag of mini milky ways. I LOVE milky ways. 

    If Jared just gets me the blizzard, the milky ways, and a indoor plant for our apartment, it will be an awesome birthday!

Life! Death. and Magic

    So one of the eggs hatched outside! It's way exciting and we are doing our best to still water our slowly dying plant around the nest so it can live and not get wet/cold. But I went out the other morning and I didn't see the ugly little baby bird in the nest...

    Either it got translated into heaven where it will be an angel missionary, or it somehow MAGICALLY grew overnight and flew away. 

    The other eggs have not hatched and one of the eggs is missing. I am so confused by what is going on with these birds. But I am optimistic and am sure they are doing fine!

    Other good and magical news, I have only seen one spider in our apartment in the past week. Miracle! And I killed this annoying hornet the other day. Stupid thing got stuck between the glass door and the screen on the patio. So when it was on the side farthest away from me, I opened the door a little bit, got my pest killer stuff and sprayed it! 

    That may sound like a terrible and cruel thing to do, but I do not tolerate bugs, especially ones that can get inside my safe place and hurt me. 

    Jared's little brother, Spencer, would be a little peeved at me for all the bugs I have killed. When I scream and tell Jared to kill a spider, even if it's itty bitty, I don't think about the icky thing's feelings...I don't even believe they have feelings. If they DID have feelings, they would understand my fear of them and stay away from me. Until that day of mutual understanding, I will have Jared kill every bug I see. And if he is not here, I will get a very thick wad of paper towels and smash it (or spray it if it flies).

    In fact, that sounds like a magic trick! There are a few magicians I used to see on TV who would put something in their hand or on the ground and put a cloth or towel over it. After waving their other hand a few times or whatever, and smacking it on top of the cloth, whatever was under the cloth disappears. Imagine: spider on the floor. I have a cloth (paper towel). After waving my hands around and running around the apartment, I cover the spider with the cloth and smack it. When I pick up the paper towel, TA DA! The spider disappears (into the cloth), never to be seen or heard from again.

    On a side note, Jared and I went to see Super 8 this past weekend. Oh my heck it was soooo good!

Bookies

    Now that I am done with school (HOORAY!) I find myself with lots of extra time before and after work and also on my days off. I just finished the last season Netflix has of Bones and I don't know what to do with my life on my own!

    So I set up a library account. They have free internet access/wifi and I got a card so if I find a book I like, I can check it out or take it to work with me so I can read when I get down time. 

    For some reason, today I am not scheduled to go in to work until later this afternoon. After dropping Jared off and sending in my passport to get my name changed (for free) I came to the library and am enjoying people watching. 

    At the table next to me, there are 3 VERY elderly people. They each have a little bag, which I assume is their lunch. Every now and then they break their staring out the window to make a little comment to each other, comments which make no sense to me. 

    The table I sat down at, there was a rather large black man who seemed to be focus in his book. I don't normally think I disturb people, so I quietly unpacked the laptop and cord and sat down to begin this blog post. As soon as I sat down, he looked at me, put down his book and left. 

    Did I break library protocol? Am I not supposed to sit at a table if there are 3 open chairs? I took the seat farthest from him...

    I feel as if I need to go talk to a librarian about the proper protocol of this library. There seems to be talking, so complete silence is not expected. What's the system with tables? Are there more tables I just don't know about? Do the elderly get special privileges in being able to eat in a "no food and drink" area?

    Until I figure out how this library works, what are some good books I can read? It's been a while since I've been able to read a fun book, not associated with school in ANY way. 

    I would appreciate all the help I can get! Leave comments and give me suggestions!!

Fun Weekends

    Jared and I have had some really fun weekends lately, jumping in to having an awesome summer. 

    A few weekends ago, we went and visited my family in GA for Ben's graduation! Grandma and Sara came from the Hunt side. Grandpa and Marilee came from the Voegele side. We had family pictures taken, which was nice. Ben was totally funny and wouldn't look at us very often when he was graduating, but we still got some funny pictures! 

 Not looking

Not looking again

Not looking and yawning

 Finally got him looking in our general direction as he got up to walk on stage

This was Jared and I outside waiting for Ben to come find us. It was sunny outside...

    Ben also got his Eagle Scout thing. I just got pictures of the program.

    It was pretty much a weekend about Ben. The rest of the time was just fun and hanging out. The big events were the graduation, pictures and Eagle Scout thing. 

    A little bit after that, Jared and I got tickets to a Steve Martin show! He saw them on Groupon and it was such a great deal and we couldn't pass it up! It was an outside concert and was just so great! Steve Martin is hilarious; we still laugh at his jokes! And all the banjo playing was amazing. He is with the band The Steep Canyon Rangers and they just had a CD come out, so they are going on tour to promote it. At the very end during an encore, Steve did the famous King Tut song and it was awesome!!!

     Us with our tickets! What a silly guy behind us. Thought he could get away with picking his nose!

The stage waiting for Steve Martin

He's telling a joke before playing. He has some pretty good ones.

 Can you tell it's him? White suit, black glasses. Totally Steve Martin

    I'm now working on Saturdays so our weekends may not be fulled with stuff like that every week, but we'll still find fun things to do. We like to lay out by the pool and get tan and once a month we go to the LDS temple down here that's just a few minutes away. 

    We're still waiting for the eggs in the nest outside to hatch. We'll let ya'll know when that happens!

I'm back!

    So the past few weeks have been stressful with me working really hard to finish school before the deadline. But good news. I finished! All of my grades are in and finalized and I should be getting my diploma mailed to me in about a month! 

    It'll be nice for the first little bit now of having full days off work and not having to rush somewhere and do Accounting, or go through a giant stack of Humanities flash cards. After a while though, I'm sure I'll be dying for something else to do. 

    So I'll be looking for another job or will be trying to work extra hours at other bank branches. One week I was able to work a full week by picking up shifts at another branch that needed help. If I just let people know I am very available to pick up extra shifts, maybe they'll ask me to help again!

    Other good news, we have a bird and her nest and her eggs in our little flowers outside! It's so fun! We noticed our flowers looking a little off and every now and then we see a bird in the flowers and it'll fly off when we try to get a good look at it. 

    

    Jared went out one morning to water the flowers (thinking they were dying and that's why they didn't look so good) and the bird flew out. He noticed a nest! So we got a better look and there are 4 eggs in the nest!

    We are trying our best not to spook the bird too much so she won't leave the nest. We want the eggs to hatch and have a cute little bird family in our flowers on our patio!

    Now that I have all this extra time, I am back into keeping this blog updated! The next couple blogs might just be racaps of things going on or that have happened. 

    For example, I still need to blog about our trip to GA for my brother Ben's High School graduation. I have pictures and everything!

    Another thing, we are going to start working on food storage. Just pick up something each time I go out shopping. Are any of ya'll working on food storage? What kinds of things do you buy that I can just get piece by piece?

    It's good to be back :)