{Sweet Tooth}

I have a sweet tooth. No, let me rephrase that - I have a mouth full of sweet teeth! [sweet teeth....that sounds weird. Moving on...] During the holidays there is a surplus of sweet deliciousness and I can't seem to get enough.  At my work office they had a sign up sheet for the full time employees to bring treats for everyday in December - happy times, right? Of course!! But.... they put the treat table right next to my desk. I mean, RIGHT next to my desk. I could scoot over a foot and be able to grab any of the wonderful goodies sitting on that table. I am currently looking home made sugar cookies decorated with frosting and sprinkles, mint oreos, and doughnuts. Tempting? Yes!! Do I give in? Yes. But I try to refrain from multiple visits to that little table of happiness - today I was slightly unsuccessful....

Speaking of Christmas goodies - would you like to know some of my most recent recipe discoveries?

Too bad - I'm posting them next.

{Post-Thanksgiving Awesomeness}

After our wonderful Thanksgiving at the Binns' house we stole their daughter, Sean's cousin, my cousin-in-law, Miss Julianne, and had a grand ol' time!

PS - be prepared for a lot of pictures. Pictures just make posts more exciting in my opinion.....

First off we started by decorating the house for Christmas!

And of course taking much needed hot chocolate breaks!

Yes, that is real mistletoe. I picked it off of a mistletoe tree in Texas back in.....2007?

 I packaged it up and sent it to my sweet Husband who was on a mission at the time :) 

No, that wasn't a distraction for him, it was just .... motivation?

The children were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads.

Ok - Julianne is not a child, nor is she dreaming......but it works, right?

The next day we woke up and made some biscuits and gravy [for those of you not from the south this is the greatest breakfast in the world. I'll share the recipe sometime soon] for breakfast because Julianne had never had it before! They turned out delicious and she seemed to like it quite a bit! [I do have pictures of this but I refuse to post them because my morning look in my bathrobe is not my most glamorous look - too bad].

Then Julianne went to DI to grab some materials for some crafties for the rest of the day!! I can't exactly say because some of them were Christmas presents! Anyways..... we had such a great time!

Isn't she awesome?

Weirdos and updates

Lemme finish with the first word of my title.

First, some updates, since I've been gone so long:

1. I spent 11 hours yesterday working in Stata (and Word), writing a 22 page report on the connection between democracy and tourism for my Econometrics class. I ran about 50 or 60 regressions for that thing...
2. It's Fall again. I guess Mother Nature decided to switch things up and deliver winter in November and Fall in December. I'm just happy that it's almost warmish.
3. Heidi was awake for 22 hours straight yesterday. She's awesome. I didn't wake up quite as early as her, so I was only up for 20 hours or so... Oh the joys of college. Sorry, sibs, I know high school and middle school are "hard", but just wait.
4. Remember that class that I failed a test for a while ago? Just got my second midterm back for that class - with a 40.5 point improvement! My professor said since that was such a huge jump, if I keep that up for the final he'll drop the first midterm. Thank heavens! literally.
5. I cannot wait for Christmas.
6. I have the best wife ever.

Ok, and about the first word in that title up there:

I'm in the Wilk right now (the Wilkinson Center - the student building on BYU campus), upstairs in that lounge-ish area that overlooks the central area. I've read, slept, and studied here a dozen times - today I came up here to eat (there's a microwave around the corner) and catch up on my Google Reader. Soon after I sat down I realized that I've arrived in the middle of a non-mainstream board-game night. I first noticed because the group of students sitting next to me were debating the (recent) demise of the Pokemon franchise, then went on to debate the more recent seasons of the Power Rangers...

Need I say more? They're all playing board games now, and I can hear some fellow over my shoulder excitedly explaining the difference between sanity and stamina in the game he's teaching (apparently some monsters attack your mental faculties in addition to or in place of your physical self). Some kids over my other shoulder are playing Magic.

Oh, the diversity of BYU. How did I fail to notice you before?

{Toys}

Last Saturday the husband and I went out for dinner. We wanted to go to Texas Roadhouse but once we arrived we found out the wait was for 80 minutes. We probably should have thought that one through and made reservations for a Saturday night. Oops. So we decided to go to California Pizza Kitchen.



Those of you in provo who have not been here yet -GO! It's delicious. They have a billion different kinds of pizza and they are fabulous. Husband and I split a Thai Chicken Peanut pizza [or something along those lines]. It was sooo good!

Anyways...... It's right next to the mall so we cut through the mall after we were finished to get to our car on the other side of the mall. In the mall we decided to stop at the Toys R Us or whatever that kid toy store is in the mall - that was an interesting experience. There are so many stupid toys out there...it makes me nervous for when have kids. So much useless stuff that just turns into clutter 10 minutes after it's bought and it's charm wears away. We've decided our kids can have puzzles and crayons. Yeah, that's pretty much it...I don't know what else to say. Kid toys are not the same as they were back in my day...there were some stupid ones, but now basically all of them are.

I don't know what the point of this post is. I usually don't know what the point of the majority of my posts are. I apologize. :)

{I want this chair}

No time for a real blog entry... but while sitting in my Biology test review I will share this lovely chair with you. 

I don't remember how I found this...but here it is.

http://www.dskmtg.com/work/sukima.html

It's not the most beautiful chair in the world, but it's super neat!!! 

I would love to have this in my future library room which I mentioned earlier.

{Thanksgiving!!}

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Remember how I said I would make up for the last post by putting a lot of pictures in the next one? Well, I wasn't lying. Be prepared - there are millions!!! Just kidding...sorta.

Uncle Matthew carving the turkey!

Husband and I making candied yams :)

  

Uncle Matthew and Aunt Judy = True Love

Miss Julianne and I

Beautiful table setting

The Family! We had the Cook Grandparents, Binns Grandparents, 

Matthew and Judy and their cute kids, and us! Quite a fully house, very fun!
The food was delicious as well!!! Loved loved loved it.
[Plus they were kind enough to send us home with some leftovers!
Turkey sandwiches on rolls=heaven.]

Nathan taking a turkey nap :)

Decorating the Tree!!

Balancing Snowflakes on our noses.....don't ask.

  

Cute Sam

All done! TA-DA!!  

It was a wonderful Thanksgiving!!! Thanks for having us over, Matthew & Judy!!!

{Clutch...}

Husband and I got a new clutch this weekend!!!


Unfortunately it was not this kind :



It was this kind:


Not quite as fun or glamorous, but a whole lot more expensive. [Yes, I drive stick! Impressive, no?]

Please forgive the rest of this post - this is written by me who knows nothing about cars. Nothing. When asked what my favorite car is I reply with "One that has 4 wheels and an engine." That's about as technical as I get. So forgive me as I type this remaining post with little knowledge on what exactly happened. :)

On our lovely trip up to Husband's aunt and uncle's house for Thanksgiving [more on that later!] Our car decided it wanted to give up on life. Bummer. We had planned to stop at the Walmart between our house and theirs that morning to pick up some drinks [I know....Walmart on Thanksgiving morning.....But in our defense we tried the Walmart at our house the day before looking for a particular kind of which which they didn't have so we were going to try all the ones between our house and theirs to try to find it....]. Thank goodness we were planning on making that trip because as we were on the freeway our car decided to give up. By "give up" I mean that Husband was giving it gas and reeving the engine and our little car decided it didn't want to go more than 50 mph...on the freeway and if Husband tried to hold it at 50 mph the RPM gauge needle would sporadically between 2 and 4.5....bad news. Luckily, we were right near the Walmart exit so we took it and barely made it to the parking lot. Our car began to die faster and faster and we had to drive the last block or so with our caution lights on [I think that's what they're called....] because the car decided it didn't want to go more than about 5 mph despite the fuel we were feeding it.

So... we made it to the Walmart parking lot in one piece. We parked, popped open the hood, and stared at whatever all that stuff is. Husband is nearly perfect, but he's knowledge of cars is more in the "nearly" category than the "perfect" category :) So we stood there in the freezing cold staring at this car. Fortunately/Unfortunately I was able to look pathetic standing in the cold with my perplexed face sending the message of "well, now what?" that a very nice guy pulled over and said "Are you guys ok? Do you need help with your car? What's wrong with it?" Since Husband was on the phone with one of his buddies who is super smart about cars I told the guy what was wrong and he got out of his car and had a look. He said he didn't know a lot, but he knew more than us! He poked around under the hood and he wasn't sure what was wrong with it, but he did suggest that we didn't drive it anymore today. He did come up with a theory of what was wrong, but I can't remember. This nice guy, Husband's car friend, Husband's Dad, Grandpa, and Uncle all had different theories about what could be wrong with it.

Long story short [or shorter than the long version...], Husband and I walked around Walmart for an hour while his Uncle drove down to pick us up and drive us to their house for Thanksgiving dinner. We drove Husband's brother's car home which he left at the Grandparent's house after they dropped him off at the airport a few days later. That was fortunate.

Since everything BUT Walmart is closed on Thanksgiving we had to wait til Friday to call the tow truck and then our car was in the shop until yesterday afternoon. But now it's back! And the clutch is totally different. I drove to work today because I was running late [it's the end of the semester and I'm dying....] because I slept in and didn't want to take the 25 minutes to walk to work. So it was a different experience. I stalled the car twice on the 5 minute drive... twice. I haven't done that since the first week I was learning to drive clutch. It's much more sensitive now and not as forgiving. It'll take some getting used to.

So... That's our clutch story. New clutch = $$$ = Merry Christmas to us.

Sorry that was so heinously long......The next post will have lots of pictures to make up for it, mostly just because I love pictures!!!!