our trip to UT

I know, I know - it has been almost 2 weeks since we have been back from our Spring Break trip out to Utah and here we are just getting around to posting anything about it. We started out by heading up to Logan where we had dinner with our friend, Stephanie, who we know from back in the good old days in Tallahassee.

The next day we went to the Logan temple and then had lunch with our friends, Bretton, KimberLeigh and their son, Tennyson. Julie knows KimberLeigh from back in the day when she went to BYU, so we go way way back.

Then we headed down to the Provo area to spend some time with Justin's mom and her new husband. They took us back up to Salt Lake and gave a private tour of the Conference Center. Here are some pictures that Justin took on the roof of the Conference Center.



The next day we went to BYU campus and saw an exhibit on the life of Christ and spent some money at the BYU bookstore - you can't go to campus and not buy something at the bookstore!

And then our trip came to a close. Overall we had a good time except for the fact that Julie was sick with a cold the whole time (which actually became a sinus infection by the time we got home). That part was no fun. :(

I have the best husband ever

Last night was the first Enrichment of the year and also the first Enrichment that I was supposed to be in charge of. I say "supposed to be" because due to the fact that I was given the calling so close to the activity and the activity being so close to Spring Break (when we were gone), someone else had to do most of the planning.

Anyway - I was in charge of food. We did cheese fondue and had about 7 different birthday cakes for people to eat. The cheese fondue was a hit and I have gotten many requests for the recipe :).

But, enough about that and on to why I have the best husband ever. I asked Justin to please come up to the church to help me clean up when it was all over. He came straight from work and got there around 8pm. I set him up with some food since I knew he hadn't eaten yet and then he washed every dish that we had used for Enrichment that night. Without his help I would have been at the church until after 10, but because of him I was ready to go home just after 9.

He is wonderful - that is why he is mine.

Sherry and Rick's wedding

Well, they are now Rick and Sherry Ashford. Here are some pics outside the Dallas temple.

Weddings are a beautiful thing

My sister, Sherry, is getting married married today. We hope that today goes by with no other problems because already things have been a headache for her.

A friend from college was supposed to fly into Dallas around 8:30 last night. Needless to say, when he called around that time, we thought he was calling to say that he had arrived safely but such was not the case. Not only was he still in Las Vegas, but his flight had been cancelled and the airline was being very incooperative. They could not guarantee him that they would get him here in time for the wedding but refused to put him on another carrier. The interesting thing is that the employees at the ticket counter kept lying to him. They told him that the red-eye flight was sold-out and they could only give him a stand-by ticket but that there were 100 people on the stand-by list ahead of him. The truth was - there were about 20 empty seats on the red-eye flight. He finally accepted a refund on his ticket as there was no way he would make it here in time.

This went back and forth for a while but Sherry called someone with a bit more authority than who our friend was working with. The result - he got on the red-eye flight and ended up only paying $198 for his fare (even though at one point they said it would cost him $1000 to be on that flight).

As Sherry was dealing with all of that mess, she broke one of her nails. I know that any man reading this thinks that is no big deal but when you are getting married, you have your nails done because people are looking at your hands so much. So, breaking a nail the night before is a big deal. We have our fingers crossed that in addition to getting her hair done right now, someone will be fixing her nail soon and she will have no other problems to deal with today.

This all makes me think back to when Justin and I got married and how stressed out I was. I hope for her sake that last night was the end of all the stress and today she will be able to relax and enjoy.

Tax Time

Justin and I are finally ready to do our taxes. I estimated what our return would be back in January before we bought our bedroom furniture (I have always been really close when I estimate, in fact I have never over-estimated what my tax return will be - which is a good thing).

So if we were able to estimate our tax return why not just file our taxes, you may be asking. That is actually something that has been annoying to us both over the past 7 weeks. On January 15th, Justin sent an email to our bishop back in Tampa asking for our official Tax Charitable Donations Statement so we can itemize deductions on our taxes, the response was that it would be printed and mailed at the end of the month. We had assumed that, but asked for it just to make sure that they hadn't forgotten us and knew where to send it.

When February 15th came around and we still didn't have the statement from them, I sent an email. I kindly reminded them of our address and let them know that that was the only document we were waiting on to be able to file our taxes. I got no response to my email. So then Justin sent another email to someone else in our old ward again asking for the statement. Again, no response. At this point, I was getting extremely frustrated and kept pointing out to Justin that legally they had a responsibility to mail us the statement by the end of January.

Justin sent a final email last week, the morning of March 2. He sent it to everyone in the bishopric asking if they would at least fax us the statement since we had not yet received it. Interesting enough, we got this statement in the mail yesterday. Why is that so interesting? It is postmarked from Tampa on March 2. Looks like the last email saying to at least fax it finally prompted someone to go and drop it in the mail.

That means that Justin and I have a fun night in store for us - getting everything entered into TurboTax. Good thing we kept all of our moving receipts in a file all ready to go!

Post - Valentine's flowers

Because flowers are so expensive right around Valentine's Day, Justin got me some flowers after Valentine's. I am not such a fan of red roses, but when I have my pick, it is the roses that I go for. This is just a couple pictures of the roses that I got this year after Valentine's was over with.

Making curtains

When JoAnn Fabrics had all of their home fabrics 50% off, I bought enough fabric to make curtains or valances for 9 windows. That includes the living room, dining room, breakfast room, family room and master bedroom. I decided that I should start with the master bedroom because there won't be as many people seeing those curtains as in all the other rooms.

Yesterday was the first day that I had a chance to start working on them, so the very first thing that I needed to do was cut the fabric the right length and cut down the width. It turns out that the fabric we picked for the bedroom is 60 inches wide instead of the usual 54 inches wide. Now, I am not a seamstress by any means so maybe I just don't know what I am doing, but cutting the fabric is much harder than I thought it would be. Of course, maybe it is also easier when you are just cutting the selvages off the edge instead of having to cut 3 inches off each side, but it is so hard to keep the fabric straight. I am using a rotary cutter and a 24"X36" cutting mat (which BTW, is one of the largest that they sell) - but considering the fact that one curtain should be 81" long and 54" wide, that mat is hardly big enough. I have this fear that once I start sewing I will realize that what I worked so hard to keep straight is not straight at all.

No wonder most people just buy curtains at Bed Bath and Beyond or somewhere.

The past few days

This past week has been pretty busy for both me and Justin. Well - I guess Justin's weeks are usually pretty busy seeing that he works full-time, mine on the other hand typically have more flexibility.

I agreed to analyze someone's dissertation research data and I put in long hours last week on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday morning trying to get it all done. Much to my disappointment though, I am not being paid well for my work. We had decided that we could work out payment once everything was done - bad idea. She seemed to think I was greatly overcharging her when I told her she should pay me between $15 and $20 an hour for the work I did. Even after I explained to her that the going rate for the work I did is at least $40 an hour. End result - she told me an amount that she would pay me which comes out to only about $13 an hour for the work I have already done and doesn't include the fact that she has asked me for more analysis and work since we met on Thursday.

Anyway - things didn't help that I woke up on Thursday morning with some kind of stomach flu and was running a fever and not able to keep anything done all day. Luckily - it ended up being a 24 hour bug, because I was at a Stampin' Up! seminar all day on Friday and we had some company fly in from out of town on Friday night.

Saturday both and Justin and I did a lot of driving. I drove to Austin and back to go to my sister's bridal shower. Justin drove our guests down to Galveston for a cruise and then drove up to Montgomery to get a family heirloom dining room table and then bring it back home. We unloaded the table and then had to drive to the airport to return the minivan that we rented for the day. All in all - we each drove about 360 miles by the end of the day.

Now - Justin has a cold and stayed home from work today. At least we aren't both sick at the same time, but we are ready for some relaxing days.

Valentine's Day 2007

Justin and I have never gone out to dinner for Valentine's Day. Our reasoning? The restaurants are always too crowded and some of them have special (and more expensive) Valentine menus.

Last year for Valentine's Day I had a soccer game and Justin made it to my game from work a bit late. Quite romantic, right?

This year we went all heart-shaped. I woke up extra early and made heart-shaped pancakes for Justin for breakfast.



And then for dinner it was heart-shaped pizza (as well as I could make heart-shaped pizza without a heart-shaped pizza pan). And for dessert we had miniature heart cheesecakes.



In Justin's words - we had a hearty dinner.

The last of the furniture arrives!

By 1pm today, the last of our furniture arrived. Now, we have a nice complete bedroom set. Do you like? Now we are just waiting on some material so Julie can make some curtains.