School Already?

Well... Here we go again! Yesterday was my 17th "first day" of school. (Not including preschool or the first day of spring semester.) I can hardly believe it.
This is my fourth year at college and I will be graduating this Spring. Most of the other seniors I know (or have known through the years) can't wait to get out of college and get started with their "real lives." But I don't feel the same way. I have absolutely loved my college experience. Utah State has been the most incredible place and I truly feel at home here. I am not anxious to leave this blessed campus. Every day as I walk around campus I feel such gratitude for living in such an amazing place. When I walk across the Quad beneath the ever present A atop Old Main Tower, looking out over Logan and seeing the beautiful mountains... a warm feeling starts bubbling up in my heart and I can barely stop myself from skipping across the quad.I fell in love with Utah State, and Logan, when I was a Junior in High School. I attended Utah Business Week here and felt so at home I couldn't believe it. I loved everything about the campus. I loved the buildings, I loved the people I met, I loved the atmosphere. I think that is when I decided that I wanted to attend USU. Up until that point I had always thought that I would go to BYU. My parents had both gone there and I knew that it was a good school. However, when I went to tour BYU as a senior... I remembered the feeling that I had at Utah State, and BYU just didn't compare. (No offense to BYU, I think it's a great school.) My family moved to Morgan my senior year, which made my choice to go to USU a much easier one (instead of the 4 hours or so from Logan to Ephraim, it was only a little over an hour to drive from Logan to Morgan.) Little did I know that my future husband had already made the choice to attend USU instead of BYU.
My Utah State experience has been the best I could have ever imagined and I am sure that you can imagine I get a little sad when thinking about leaving this wonderful place. David has been filling out Applications for Grad school, and we are seriously considering three schools. Utah State, Oklahoma and Oregon. I used to want to go away for Grad school so I could Student Teach in a different environment than Cache County. Although I still think that this would be the best for my teaching experience... the thought of leaving Logan makes my heart hurt. But, even if we stay here... things just wont be the same as if I were going to school.

David and I often take it upon ourselves to convince every person that we meet to go to school at USU. It is such a wonderful place. We really are Aggies through and through. Who else would have the Block A as their cake topper?




Sorry for the rambling post! I guess here is the moral of the story in a nutshell:

• School started yesterday, and I am not super overjoyed at the thought that this is my senior year.
• I love Utah State.
• I am already procrastinating doing my homework (which at this point consists of printing off my syllabi and organizing my notebooks.)
  

Haha! Hope you are doing well!

100 Books.

I have already posted about my love of books. So this shouldn't come as a shock to any of you. But I have been looking for a list of books to read (you know, the lists of famous "Classic" books that everyone should read in his/her life. (ps. why are all the "Classics" written by white European authors, mainly boys?) My uncle posted this one his facebook, and I liked it because it has some other books on it as well. I needed a place to keep the list when I need it to look for more books so I thought I would copy him and make a post of it. The Xs are the book I have already read. The Os are the ones that I want to read the most! (If you have any other suggestions of good books, please comment and let me know. I just finished my most recent book series (The Alvin Maker series by Orson Scott Card), and am looking for more books!

The BBC produced this list and said that the average person has read six of these books. (Thanks to High School English requirements I am sure.) I have read 17.5, yay for me!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien x (This is a little X because I read most of the series, but I got stuck and just couldn't finish. Blah. I loved the Hobbit though!)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte O
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Total: 5.5

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X (SO sad, but such a good book.)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X (LOVED this book)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger O
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

Total: 3

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Total: 1

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma-Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen O (Just watched Lake House and HAVE to read this!)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X (I don't know how this is different from the Chronicles of Narnia.)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

Total: 3

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (Tried to read this and hated it.)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

Total: 0

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Se
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafo
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Total: 1

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Total: 0

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

Total: 1

80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker O
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Total: 1

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X

Total: 2

New wish list item...

David and I went to the Logan Fair last night (SO much fun) and saw these pictures in a booth there. We fell in love with them instantly. The big sizes were 50% off and so were selling for only $140 dollars. Unfortunately, we don't really have that much money to be throwing around right now, but I thought I would share my new #1 item on my wishlist!


David and I are also avid Aggie Fans, and Old Main is our favorite building... ever probably. I would LOVE to have a large print of this picture in my house as well. They look so incredible. (Even more beautiful in person, I promise.)


The company that makes these incredible pieces of art is called Framed Legacy. Their website is www.framedlegacy.com. Go check them out. Go into their gallery and look at the frames they use for their pictures. They are incredible (For some reason, the frame didn't come over when I copied the pictures.

I love the style of these pictures and my dream is to someday own one of them. :) (It's a good thing that I only brought 10 dollars in cash to the fair, or else David and I may have left with a very large souvenir!

A Saturday of Roofing

Last weekend we went down to my Grandma's house to help re-roof it with my family. It was really a ton of fun. I know that you probably think I am lying because you might think that roofing cannot be fun and the August heat, however, it was great. Shantel and I enjoyed being in the sun and working hard, most especially we enjoyed working with my family and serving my Grandma. I just want to share two awesome things about the day. Well....maybe three. First we drank a lot of gatorades. My sister Wendy came bringing them up to us and we drank at least 50 between 10 of us.

However, the first thing I really wanted to tell you about is my Dad and how amazing he is. He is the hardest worker I have ever known. He has been working the last couple weeks to get the roof ready so we could shingle it on Saturday. However, when they tore off the shingles they found that they had to replace all of the plywood. He had not planned on that but he got up at 5:30 AM for a week to get it done. Unfortunately the day before we were going to shingle the roof he sprained his ankle while working on the roof. Most people would just take the weekend off but not my Dad. He wanted to get the project done and would finish it no matter what. He could not really walk so Shantel got him a chair (only after being told she was not liable if he rolled off the roof) and he sat on it on top of the roof giving us directions. However, he had to move around to show us certain things and make sure some of the more technical parts were done correctly. I love my Dad and admire how hard he works.

That brings me to my second thing, my wife Shantel is amazing. She is such a hard worker. She spent the entire day up on the roof working just like the rest of us. It was so much fun to be up there working with her. The best part though is that she is the one who did all the most difficult work. The most technical work was around the chimney and valley. Well my Dad needed someone that could do the labor if he told them how to do it. So my Dad spent a good part of the morning giving her directions and she did all the cutting, placing and nailing of shingles. She was amazing and I am grateful for her.

Really my whole family was awesome. My brothers Jeff, Bruce and Mike worked super hard with me. My sister Amy also was on the roof the whole day working just as hard as everyone else. My sister Wendy kept the drinks coming and my mom got the food and made us lunch. Melissa would have helped I'm sure except she is very much pregnant, but she came over anyway just to be part of the fun. It was a real family project.

Here is my Dad sitting on his chair atop the roof.

Here is my Dad, he could not resist getting up and working despite the fact he could barely walk.


And...best for last. My beautiful wife working hard cutting some shingles to fit the "hip" of the roof. She was so awesome. She even looks so beautiful when she is working and sweating on the roof.

Two Month Anniversary...

Yesterday was August 5th. That means that exactly two months from yesterday David and I got married! It has been an amazing two months. We have had many adventures, eaten lots of good food, spend lots of time with family and thoroughly enjoyed being married. (I realize that those of you who have been married longer than two months may think it is silly to celebrate such a short time of being together. But every day is so wonderful that I feel like I should have a celebration EVERY day. That isn't really possible, so we chose to make yesterday a special day.)
We had such a good day. I wanted to show David how much he means to me, so I woke up early in the morning and surprised him with breakfast in bed. I would have loved to spend the day together and not go to work, but we still had to go to work. However, on the way home we did pick up a pizza and came home to a delicious dinner. We had a list of things we needed to get accomplished and did everything on our list! One of the things on our list included me cutting Davids hair for the time all by myself! It turned out so well! (See pictures below.)

One thing that has been so fun about being married is finding the little quirks in our relationship. I am so grateful for a husband who finds my quirks endearing instead of annoying. Here are just some of the quirks in our relationship that make our life together SO FUN:

1. We each have our own tube of toothpaste, because neither of us likes the others Brand choice.

2. I love cold pizza for breakfast (or any meal for that matter) and David can't stand the thought of it. (Although, every time I am eating it I still offer some to him!)

3. I like to eat most things in a bowl, David prefers to use a plate. (For foods like spaghetti, salad, potato supreme etc...)

4. David would eat potatoes with every meal if he had the chance. I, however, would be a happy camper if I could eat some form of pasta every day for the rest of my life.

5. I am a morning person, and David is a night owl.

I love the things that make our relationship unique. I also love the things we have in common, like our love of otter pops, popcorn and board/card games. I love that we both love to watch movies that we have never seen before even if they are silly little kid movies (City of Ember for example). I love that we can spend hours walking around the grocery store just enjoying being together.

Here are just a few pictures from our "2-month anniversary celebration." Take note of the amazing job I did cutting Davids hair!

The very delicious and very large pizza we bought for dinner.


Davids hair, before. (So wonderful and long!)


Nervous to let me cut his hair without parental supervision. (His dad taught me how to once, back in December. I am proud to say I remembered everything perfectly.)

Post haircut. Such a handsome guy!


Side view. Look at what a good job I did. :) Be proud.

ps. Be excited for the upcoming post about re-roofing Davids Grandmas house! Both David and I have a lot to say about it!