You know you've been in the library too long when...

• You start thinking of reasons you've been there too long.
• You start playing with the drinking fountain water on a "break" from studying.
• You've watched employees at the desk change at least five times.
• You can laugh at the dumbest things.
• You start drifting into La La Land.
• Everything starts blurring together and you could swear you're doing the same exact thing as an hour ago.
• You start exploring places in the library like the elevator or the BARN.
• You never want to study in the same study room ever again in your life.
• You start sending calls from Santa to everyone in your contact list but of course you use another friends number as the caller as to not give away your identity of the silly call!  www.sendacallfromsanta.com
• You realize that your time could have been better used sleeping or eating because your brain has imploded or exploded... you choose.
• You start smelling things like the eraser.
• You wish you had a room full of Silly Putty.
• 5/8 + 3/16 could easily = 7/25.
• You learn just about everything but what you tried to study.
• It's way past dinner time and you want real food.
• You start looking at facebook and other sites just hoping that reality will never come back.
• ...

We did something besides study and work!

We went to a Physics Demonstration night (Friday)!  It was really pretty neat.  We watched the guy turn a pickle into a lightbulb.... we liked that experiment a lot.  We didn't get very many pictures because they were going from thing to thing so fast that it was nearly impossible to take the few I did take.  Anyways here is the guy blowing packing peanuts out of a cup by giving them a charge:

Then he put a mop on the thing.  That was pretty neat because he could make the strings not stick up by poking his finger at it:

Some cool things with magnets, wires, and capacitors:

He used his electromagnet to fling an aluminum ring at the ceiling.  Of course to get it to go that high he had to freeze the ring in liquid nitrogen.  He also made magnets hover by freezing them.  It was so cool.

This was the biggest thing of their show... they had some pretty monstrous 2500v charges coming off of that thing:

So yeah we thought it was fun to do something for once.  I don't recommend turning a pickle into a lightbulb by the way because it smells pretty bad.

My New Hobby!!

My hobby started out with my new favorite store named "Hobby Lobby"!! Very fitting, I know. Anyways, I decided that I LOVE making cute felt and fleece baby booties. And no, I am not pregnant, I just like baby things. This was my first attempt, and I think they turned out pretty dang cute, if I do say so myself. Also, another plus side, this pair of shoes pictured here cost me about 15 cents and about 2 1/2 hours of my life!!!
Prepare to be seeing a whole lot more of them, because I just cut out 5 more to make tonight. :)

Credit Card Offers

So we've (most addressed to me) been getting so many credit card offers lately that I decided to keep all of them for a month... but then it turned into only keeping them a week... because there are way too many.  If I waited a month I would have a stash so large it wouldn't fit anywhere in my apt!  So yeah... there it is 14 of them in one solitary week!  That is crazy!  I think it's really funny how bad Chase wants us.  Sometimes we get 2 from them in one day.  As you can see most of those offers in the picture are from chase.  Yeah... I know you can opt out of receiving the pre-screen selections by calling 1-888-567-8688 but I'd rather not.  Someday we just might join Chase because they do have some cool offers, but just not today.

Plant

After giving my plant a hair cut and filling the entire garbage can...this is what it looks like now!

Our Schedules This Semester

Kristen has an easy to remember schedule.  She is student teaching every M-F from 8:30 to 4:30 and has a music for elementary teachers class on Thursdays from 7-9pm.

My schedule is:

Yeah... ECE is so easy that it is boring and I could pass without even going to class.  Calc II probably just killed me with the test I just took today and Physics will probably do that with this Fridays test.

School Has Started

Well we're both going crazy with school already.  Kristen is doing student teaching at Millville Elementary (5th grade) and has one class on Thursday nights.  I have 2 "easy" classes and 2 "insanely difficult" (Calc 2 & Physics) classes.  Someday I'll get the schedule posted but not today.

Yay... my birthday is coming soon (Sunday)!  I guess we aren't having any party because there wouldn't be too many people coming.  I'm still excited about it... and dreaming as my wishlist grows.

I just wanted to make a post since it has been a while so yeah... we are still alive!

Our Oregon Vacation

We got lucky enough to be able to take a sort of last minute vacation to Oregon and had tons of fun for a few days.  The first day we went to Multnomah Falls:

Then later that day we went to Blue Lake Park:

We didn't get many pictures there but thought this tree in particular was super interesting.  We had fun in some pedal boats but have no picture proof of that.

Then we went to the beach/coast and camped there:

We also visited the Rose Gardens:

On the last day we went to Clear Lake... wow very beautiful... the water was so clear you can see the bottom and everything in it! It is also very freezing cold:

Workplaces

Here is Joan's place... the lady who was the first to hire me to do yard work and has the 1.75 acres which I have already told you about.  By the way the pictures don't even do justice.  I would have needed at least 16 more to show you the whole yard but here's some for an idea.  She constantly has a mountain of mulch in her driveway for us to use while working in her yard.

Here is Louise's place who was next to hire me.

Louise then passed me on to her son-in-law's parents:

Oh yeah... and Louise said she hasn't used her barbecue for at least two years and didn't even know if it still worked so she gave it to me!  (It works perfectly by the way and will probably need more propane really soon.)  It even has a really nice cover.

Kristen wanted to add something about our Logan Zoo visit:

So, Alex and I went to the Willow Park Zoo on Friday and it's more like a glorified aviary.  But there are a few big animals (Elk, monkey, bob cat, wallaby, etc.)  Anyways, there were a TON of birds of all sorts and I particularly loved the baby ones that were sticking out of the bird house and the other fuzzy ones that were walking around by their mom with their cute little stubby wings.  Very cute!!  We had a lot of fun!!

Work and Summer Stuff

The weekend after Memorial Day Weekend we went camping in Sublet Idaho.  It was quite fun and interesting other than the rain.  We went fishing and had a good time overall.  I could say more but it has been a few weeks ago now.

We were supposed to have an outdoor BBQ and yard games night in our ward last Friday but it was so cold and rainy that we had to cancel it.  We have rescheduled it for tomorrow and hopefully it should not rain.  We do have a back-up plan this time at least if it does be nasty weather on us but the whole point is to have fun outdoors.  I even stayed up till 2:30am the night before when this activity was supposed to take place so I could build a ladder golf game set thing.  I got it done in time but nobody got to play it... hopefully tomorrow!

Kristen had a wonderful birthday party last Saturday... she got lots of fun things that she wanted but has been so busy with school that she hasn't been able to enjoy a single one of them yet.  Thanks to everyone who came and made it possible!

Some of you know that I have been working for a lady named Joan doing yard work ever since school got out.  That job is almost complete now except the weeding here and there once a week.  We (myself and others I worked with) started out weeding all flowerbeds and mounds and the garden.  Then we edged around all the trees and mounds... taking out all of the grass.  That took quite a few days.  Then we started planting and doing just about everything you can do with a yard.  I've decided that trees and Joan are like many women and shoes.  See a good deal... gotta have it.  Looks cool... gotta have it.  Adds variety... gotta have it.  Have room for more... gotta have it.  Yeah so you get the picture.  We planted truckload after truckload of plants, shrubs, trees, etc.  We took 5 or 6 truckloads of weeds to the landfill.  We went through 6 yards of mulch.  The house sits on 1.75 acres.  Now I just need to take a picture of the place so you all can see what we did, but you'll have to live with the google image that I found for now.

All of the brown is where we weeded and planted millions of flowers, lilies, shrubs, trees, and other plants.  The green dots are all of the trees... no we didn't plant them all as you can see there are shadows of the pre-existing ones, but yes we did plant lots of them.  All of the trees have a 4ft diameter mulch circle around them.  This image is at least 4 years old though and doesn't really help you see the bigger picture because they have nice green grass and a paved driveway now.  Oh yeah, one day when we were waiting for her to write out our paychecks we counted 70+ trees in just the one front corner of her yard alone.

The last little while I have been working for Louise too.  She has a big house but not so big of a yard.  She has me do things from shopping to repairs, etc.  You could say I'm her maid/handyman.  I do things that she can't do because of her bad knee.  It's fun and I like it and she even gave me a huge raise after only one day of work.  I think that one of the biggest reasons she gave me the raise besides "you do excellent work" is because I got her a discount on her landscape bark.  Anyways she is fun to work for.

That's about the latest of our summers... school for Kristen and work for me.  We both thing the weather in Logan has been un-summer-like because there have only been two nice warm hot sunny days and the rest have been full cold air, dark clouds, and rain.  Maybe someday we will have a true summer?

Small Quick Post/Invite

There's plenty to write about and pictures to post but I'm so busy right now I'll just quickly write this little bit:

On Sat (12th) at 3 pm we're having a birthday party for Kristen (it is her 21st birthday) and you're all invited... here in Logan at our apt.  If you need more details please call us!

Summer Activities

We should probably post more... but that would mean we would have to do more fun things than we do right now.  We can face it that we are pretty boring people.  Kristen has started her summer classes and last week she had a really intense, almost all day one.  She's always doing homework or classes or something and I'm just looking for jobs and trying to make money in any way possible.  I'm going to build a really nice queen-sized bed out of pine but don't think it's going to be ugly when I say pine because it's going to be amazing.  Can we start the bidding please?!  Just kidding, but if you are interested tell me so... I can build more than one and we can talk customizing options.  It will be similar to the one that we have posted pictures of here on the blog that I made in shop.

We worked for Grandma and Grandpa in Idaho on Saturday and it wore us out pretty well.  There were a bunch of breaks in their sprinkler lines and lots of roots to cut out and trees to remove.  That was intense... all day long.

Today I was hired as a temporary helper to help a family in Salt Lake move across town.  Kinda interesting.  Hopefully it works out and goes well.  I would like a longer temporary job but anything is better than nothing.

Oops.  I didn't realize that Kristen already wrote a post last night or I wouldn't have written this one... you better read hers too or she will not be happy!

New Post!

I guess I put off writing a new post because no one except mom ever comment on our last one. I thought all of our new furniture was really cool!! If everyone saw our apartment they would be very impressed with how much we can stuff into this little place! It's pretty incredible.
Anyways, Spring semester is over. Alex didn't fail anything and I got a 4.0 again! I am now taking 17 credits this summer so that I can do student teaching in the fall and graduate in December. So far I am feeling pretty overwhelmed with how crazy everything is with all my classes. I will hopefully be done with one of my classes by the end of this week, but we'll see how much time I want to spend writing lesson plans and textbook reflection cards. Oh joy!!
I actually need to write a lesson plan right now, so ta ta, good night, talk to you later!!!

Our new furniture!

I am writing this blog from my phone. It is pretty fancy. Alex says I can only post one picture at a time. So I might have to make 4 posts. I'm just trying it out for fun. We'll have to see about doing multiple pictures. Now that I know how to blog from my phone, I might blog more often. Mom would like that! Anyways, here are some pictures of our new apartment layout. Dad brought us a huge truck load of my bedroom furniture and remaining things from my room. I did such a good job organizing...we ended up with extra room. Still not enough to add anything else, but the vacuum fits under the bed again. Hooray! Ooh, it looks like we figured out how to add more pictures. Enjoy!

Oh, so apparently my phone can't do everything cool...I am still editing this blog on the computer, but it can do multiple pictures, it just can't put a caption under them. It'll only do one block of text. The last picture of my bookshelf is pretty exciting because my practicum teacher gave me all the books on the top shelf! Hooray!! I like new books. Specially free ones! FUN!