A Lil' Touch of Fall

ok, I LOVE this time of year! I might even possibly love this time of year a little bit more than christmas-which is saying something cause I LOVE christmas!  So despite the fact that the weather here is still summer I really wanted to get in the mood of fall-ya know, pretend that the AC i'm feeling inside is the same as the weather outside.  Though, I really tried extra hard to not start decorating before October but I just couldn't quite help myself today.  I blame it on Walmart's sneaky selection of mini pumpkins, festive wax arrangements, and lots of fall colors in the flower section-no fair!  So I might have started to decorate but I haven't put up EVERYTHING yet....(mainly because I don't have enough surfaces to put things on-seriously I can't wait to be in a house with lots of shelves, banisters, and mantels.  Anywho, in my defense though-most of these things I already owned so I didn't go completely crazy at Walmart:

These were the flowers guilty of getting me in the mood-some orange daisies and some pretty yellow ones and I randomly found the green runner in a box left over from the wedding (I'm guessing).

We have a feux mantel from BB&B so I sprused it up with a few fall touches:

and the whole effect:

Here are a few other random fall touches throughout the apartment:

just in case you can't tell what this is: some pumpkin shaped pou-pouri (sp?) that has all the great smells of fall

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You had a birthday shout hurray

Something that I've always enjoyed is my parents' story.  They were both born within a week of eachother and actually were in the same nursery at the hospital-how many couples can say that?!  They of course went their separate ways with Dad moving throughout his childhood and mom staying put in Utah.  They met later in college through a blind date set up by my aunt (my mom's sister) and the rest is history :)

Sunday Code and I went over to celebrate their birthdays together.  We played rook and watched guys and dolls-I hadn't seen the film version yet with sinatra and brando etc.  I was feeling creative for their cake but not creative or ambitious enough to make my own fondant so thought it's not as clean as I would like it to look we did the best we could:

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As I'm sure you're guessing right now-they both turned 57.

Happy Birthday guys! Thank you for all that you've done and continue to do for me.  I'm so greatful for the christ-centered home that I was able to grow up in and for all of your support over the years! I Love You!!

Zzzzzzz

It is amazing what a little sleep can do...or rather, what losing said sleep can do.  So last night we had the Jacksons over for games and to watch the BYU/Utah game.  I've never seen a worse game in all the games that I've watched over the years-and I watched throughout my childhood.  Now, me saying that doesn't make me a fair weather fan or mean that I'm abandoning my team, just as a parent hasn't stopped supporting  their child when they are scolding them. 

Anywho, it was fun though to hang out with and play with Elise and Andy.  We played monoply on their ipad-love this game on ipad/iphone!  Normally I don't like the game cause by the end I'm really mad and feel victimized when all of my money is taken from me, but this game for some reason presents it in a way that lessens the blow.  First of all, you don't have to do math (big deal for me) and it goes really fast-doesnt' take all night.

In trying to be festive for the game I made chocolate-covered pretzel rods  with cougar blue sprinkles.  By the end of the game it was all I could do to stop from the shoving one of them in my eye.  After the game I couldn't go to sleep right away-was too frustrated so I messed around online and finally ended up watching some episodes of GG (Gilmore Girls) online, that's when I know that I am desperate for comfort material.  Needless to say today I feel completely trashed.  Church was ok, but I just felt so drained, and things that normally don't frustrate me did today.  For example, I know that we've only been in the ward a few months and that it takes time to establish some really deep and close friendships-at least it does with me, but today in the third hour when Code goes his way and I go mine- I felt myself throw a little tantrum inside: "I don't want to go in there!"  Now, I normally really enjoy Relief Society (a meeting where the women of the congregation who aren't busy with the kids/youth of the ward have a class).  Everyone is really nice-I can tell that.  I just don't have any friends.  I know that it's up to me-that I can get up just as easily and sit next to someone, say hi etc, I just felt so drained today, I just didn't have it in me. 

Here's to next week

here's a pic of just some of our yummy treats from the game:

 

A Little Venting and a Little Laughing and we're all good.

This is what happens when an introverted person is tired after a days work of running after three year olds, talking to parents, and comes home only to say hi to the hubby and turn around in five minutes to head back out to Enrichment Night-or whatever the heck you're supposed to call it. I get frustrated because I am not allowed to recharge-I need my recharge!! and mingling and chatting it up with a bunch of people I don't know-no matter how nice they are, is not my  idea of recharging! Tonight I could have really used a calm sit down spiritual type of lesson where there is a lot of time to think to yourself etc.  Granted, the night was way cute-they put a lot of effort into it...it just wasn't quite what I needed tonight.  Oh, and I haven't even gotten to my vent part yet-yeah...I'm a real gem tonight.

So my vent: this is just a tip to all people who are meeting a younger person than yourself  who just moved into the ward: do not use the term cute to describe their lives.  Life is not meant to be "cute".  A puppy dog is cute.  A little kid with a speech impediment who can't say their "r's" is weewy cute, but life in general is not cute-whether you're 25 or 75.

What happened: not even a big deal, and I know that the person didn't mean it in a bad way, but ever since having moved out of a college ward (aka: fake ward according to the "real world") I have noticed little things here and there that aren't meant in a mean way but bug the heck out of me.  So I was getting to know the sister to my right who had just moved into the ward a month ago-great I think, I can relate.  So I ask the usual questions-where did you move from, how are you liking it so far, do you have any kids? etc.  And naturally she asks similar questions to me since I eluded to the fact that I had recently moved into the ward.  I told her that we had moved from Utah-that we had just graduated from BYU and moved out here.  Her response: "oh cute!"  I wanted to say, "which part? the graduating college part or moving out here part?" 

i don't know what it is but i canNOT stand condescension when it comes to my level of life experience.  This sort of all knowing attitude of: oh just wait, you have no idea-like the life I'm living somehow isn't "counting" yet because it's somehow not real.  Here I was thinking that my life was full of deep and meaningful things.

I can't explain it, there's just this ever-so-slight feeling of not being taken seriously in an older family ward towards young couples that I don't handle very well.  Whatever, their loss.  Did i mention that I was tired?

and to close on a note that makes me happy (no i'm not visualizing faces on these people....)

 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tY_Emf8SSA]

Korean buses have panhandlers, but Houston buses have a weird brown liquid that drips on you.

Here in Houston I ride the bus to work each day. The only other time in my life that I rode the bus this much was in Seoul, South Korea as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And wow, the bus experience is very different here in Houston.

First of all, let me tell you that both Seoul and Houston are very modern cities with good bus systems. But you can see some interesting differences in culture -- both in the people and in the bus system itself.

In Houston bus culture, you never sit next to someone unless there is no other option. When it's time for you to get off, you press the button and remain seated until the driver comes to a complete stop. Then you are free to get up and take your time getting off the bus.

Houston buses will pause at every stop, even when there are obviously no people waiting there. And if the bus is ahead of schedule, it will stop and wait until it's back on time.

If you want to get off somewhere that's not a stop, just tell your Houston driver where you want to be let off. If it's on the route, he or she will gladly drop you off there.

It is common in Houston to know your bus driver's name when you take the same route every day.

But the weirdest thing is this strange brown liquid that sometimes drips from the ceiling on Houston buses. It's woken me up by dripping on my arm once, and today it stained the paper I was writing on.

Contrast all of this with Korea, where bus drivers go as fast as humanly possible. you had better be out of your seat and at the door when your stop is coming or you're going to miss it.

You can never get on or off at a non-bus-stop in Seoul. Each bus stop has good signage of every place the bus stops and when the bus will be coming next.

There's often standing room only in Seoul buses, but the buses come every 3-4 minutes. So if it's too crowded, just wait for the next one. It's totally okay and accepted to be smashed in like a sardine during rush hour.

Which one is better? I don't know. But there is one thing in common in both countries: when you reach the last stop of the route... the driver usually busts out of his seat for a long anticipated smoke break.

Texas Tea

Today for work I got the chance to travel down to Galveston, TX and visit the Ocean Star Oil Rig museum. It was awesome!

The Ocean Star is an actual oil rig that was decommissioned a few years ago. They dragged it into the port of Galveston and converted it into a museum -- complete with a self-guided audio tour and a complimentary 1980's-style introductory movie on the history of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. You can walk on the pipe decks and drilling platforms and see all of the machinery that they use to get oil out of the ground.

I can't believe how massive these oil rigs are -- and this is a small one. But the most impressive thing that I learned is how much technology has been developed to explore, drill, and extract oil from the bottom of the ocean.

For example, in the 1940's when ocean drilling started to become popular, we were really just shooting in the dark on where to find oil. Drill a hole here, another one there... going on nothing more than a hunch because we couldn't see underground until we actually put a hole there.

Now we have all kinds of awesome sonar, magnetic resonance, and other visualization techniques that can give us a good picture of what's underground before we even start drilling. And while there are still times when we get down there and find that there's no oil... we've gotten a LOT more accurate even in the last decade.

And the most surprising part for me: running even the smallest oil rig costs an oil company on average $500,000 a day and it can take up to 10 years before a dollar of income can be made from the oil from that well. No wonder 'big oil' tries to keep so much cash on hand.

Anyway, here's some pics. What few I was able to get.

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No Pictures so here's 1000 words

Code and I had a GREAT weekend in Conyers, GA (just outside of atlanta) with the Nolden family!  We flew out Friday evening and proceeded to have an AMAZING weekend.  We played an old fav from BYU with the kids-basically capture the flag with each person having knee highs full of flour to hit opponents who enter your territory.  That's right, no claiming that you weren't tagged :)  It was way fun and eventually we had to call a truce cause we couldn't find each other's flags in the dark, haha.  It of course turned into  "let's hit Cody with them as we walk into the house."

We went tubing down a river that was a few hours away.  It was way fun and the water was so cool and refreshing-very much unlike the warm waters here in TX.  There were some low tides at times that resulted in sore bottoms, but some super sweet rapids and mini waterfalls to go through as well.  Code was of course awesome in coming to my rescue every time I got stuck on rocks etc.  I swear I felt like a beached whale every time haha. 

We ate out a few times of course throughout the weekend: IHOP and Chick-fil-a.  One of my favorite parts was going for an evening walk in their neighborhood and just talking.  I saw some fireflies that totally made my day-I love those!  Sunday was fun-went to their ward and then Aunt Sandy, Larry, and the kids came over for a BBQ and a bazillion cookies that PJ felt inspired to make all while we were fasting...yeah...it was hard, but worth it in the end.  Code and I stayed up and watched forever strong with Liz-it was way good and I hadn't seen it in awhile.

Monday we got together with Sandy and the gang again for a volley ball game that was sooo much fun! My serve was on which made it fun for me :) yeah...I'm sore from that too.  Ashley was my lil sous chef in helping me make some pizza rolls that were a hit-even Don liked them which is saying something :)  We visited Liz at her work (at tutti frutti) before going to the airport Monday night.  Of course that's not to mention all of the card games that we played like zion's check and spades.

It was an amazing weekend and it's a little hard to come back to reality of working every day.