Nolden Snapshots: Where did the time go???

I'm kind of freaking out that it's already February and Vday is already Friday. We did lots of fun things in January, but for some reason I didn't bother to blog. So here's a little catch up. When there was still tons of snow everywhere (it's all mostly melted now in the valley) we drove up to Midway to visit their annual ice castle/fort thing. It was SO cool! There were tunnels and crazy almost cave-like formations of ice and they were all lit up different colors at night.

Jake and I met Code at his work up in Alpine to see his new office/meet the coworkers and then went out to an ok Thai place (the Bangkok grill in orem is better), but Jake LOVED the big elephant figurine by the door and kept pointing to it. It kind of reminded me of a lil figurine we had around the house from my grandparents who lived in Thailand.

It was funny cause a lady who worked there ran over to us and warned us that the yellow curry was too spicy for Jake. haha, lady please- we rarely water down our spices for him and he hasn't complained yet, in fact he loves it (and it wasn't spicy AT ALL-and if I'm saying that, then you know it's true cause I'm a bit of a light weight when it comes to spicy).

Cody surprised me with tickets to go to the Dave Rose Show. It's a radio show with Greg Wrubell and he interviews Coach Rose (the BYU BasketBall Coach for those who don't know *cough* steve-jk), and a different player from the team every week-we had Mika. It's at Malawi's Pizza in the riverwoods (which is pretty good "foody/artsy" pizza. So we got a free pizza and we bought the chocolate pizza cause...well, cause. They passed out paper and pens and asked us to write down any questions we had for Dave Rose. Well, ever since the Gonzaga game I was wondering what percentage of the time the coaches come up with specific plays for the guys and what percentage of the time they're just improving on their own. I mainly wondered this cause Gonzaga is SUCH a sharp looking team. It just seems like they know exactly what they're doing/everyone's on the same page, whereas I feel like we are just winging it a lot of the time/dont' have as many fun plays etc. (I of course left that last part out). Well, much to my embarrassment, they picked my question as one of the 6 or so that they had Coach Rose answer on air. So I thought they would just read the question but they had US read our own. I was a lil nervous, but I read it, and much to my pride/delight he went, "ooh, good question." Yup, I'm a total teacher's pet/nerd. It was fun. So if you listen to the first coach rose's show of February you can hear yours truly :)

Wrubell social media-ing it up before the show

explaining when to clap-ya know, technical stuff

Wrubell, Rose, and Tom Holmoe (BYU Athletic Director)

we brought our new fancy camera to it so we were testing it out-more to come on that...

chattin' it up with Mika

As mentioned above we got a new fancy camera. I think it's the perfect in between camera-it's nicer than your typical digital camera, but is pretty easy to handle if you don't know what you're doing/but can be a good technical camera if you want to learn-still have to buy lenses for it etc. It's an olympus E-PL5 (micro 4/3rds, so it's not as heavy/bulky as some of the nicer cameras but it's still high quality like they are. Again, this is basically just us pointing and shooting:

As you can see we kinda only have one subject haha. So I know some of my friends are itching for some photo tours of our new home. I'll work on taking pics of our finished rooms tomorrow. Our front/sitting room is ALMOST done (I love this room). We have some accent chairs coming this week and then it'll be pretty much done. I know most people don't use their front rooms but I think it'll be my fav place to sit and read. But, to tide ya'll over (cause you haven't seen enough photos by now) here's some outside shots of our house and nearby park area:

to the left you can see our play house thing/into our yard and we're down spying in our neighbor's yard to see if their doggies are out-Jake loves them and always likes to check and perks up when we hear them barking and points outside. (we're thinking of getting a dog in the next year...)