So Long 2008

The caption is kinda blurry, but reads:

"Remembers: No drinkin n drivin- comes home safe to your kittehs n goggies n those other hoomins u keep in deh house"

Happy New Years everyone! Hope you had a great 2008, and have an even better 2009!

Furry Thief

Our Christmas

I know it's 2 days late, but Merry Christmas to all! I hope your holiday was as nice as mine was.
We spent Christmas Eve with Matt's parents and sister. We had a tasty turkey dinner, opened presents (I got a soft blanket and slippers while Matt got some tools. Thanks Patti and Wendell!), and had a Christmas moment about the symbolism behind Christmas trees.

Our Christmas tree
Stormy loved to hide under the tree
Santa came to our home a little early, so on Christmas eve we just had to open our presents from the big guy. Matt got a mini remote control car, and the cats love to chase it and be chased.

So small it fits in the palm of your hand!
Stormy and Chas look like Godzilla cats compared to the remote control.
On Christmas morning we woke up around 8:00 and found that Santa had filled our stockings with goodies!Stockings by the fireplace

Showing off our loot

Santa brought Matt some body spray, Andes mints, a Homer Simpson ornament, shaving
cream and a Save A Blade. Santa brought me a couple ornaments, gloves,
and chocolate covered cherries.

Matt and I spent the morning opening up the presents from each other, saving one each to open at my parents house later that afternoon. I gave him a hard time about the gifts that he gave me, but I really did love them. See if you notice any theme to the gifts...

Crock pot and pots and pans? I joked around that he was being a sexist by getting me these gifts as a way to hint that I should be spending more time in the kitchen. And then later that afternoon I opened a fitness game for the wii fit featuring Jillian from the Biggest Loser. So now he's telling me I'm fat and need to lose weight? Sexist pig? NO! I actually had all of the gifts on my Christmas wish list, so it was great. But I did love giving him a hard time about it...and still do!
I hope Matt liked his presents as much as I liked mine.

Showing off his new shirt

Doing his best model pose in his new shirtI confused him a little by disguising his next gift

But he figured it out and was very excited. (It's an Ipod)
Then he was happy to get an FM transmitter (so he can listen to the mp3
player over the car radio)

And don't worry, we didn't forget about the cats. They got their own feast on Christmas day! Fancy Feast to be precise! It was so fancy it almost looked good enough for me and Matt to eat!

Chas and Stormy chowing down

Later that afternoon Matt and I went to my parents to continue to Christmas celebrations! The four of us sat around the living room and took turns opening presents in the fine tradition of youngest to oldest!

Me and Matt at my parents

The tasty spread of goodies

Mom showing off her new slippers

Mojo the Christmas puppy

Yeah, a wii fit! Thanks Melissa!!
I finally got Matt his dream car. I think it's a little small though..
Matts new Putt n Hazard. Thanks mom and dad!

Christmas was only missing two things: my brother and sister! It's too bad we couldn't have the whole family together, but they were there in spirit! There were also many other great gifts, I just don't have photos of everything. If there's not a photo of a gift, it doesn't mean that I liked them any less though. It was a great Christmas, so thanks to everyone who made it special for us!

Boots Brought Us Together!

Who knew that on a trip to JCPenny that I would come with boots, and leave with a date. Two years ago my parents had gotten me a pair of boots for Christmas. Unfortunately they didn't fit, so I had to brave the elements and the crowds the day after Christmas in order to try to exchange them. This is when I met Matt.
He was working in the shoe department and helped me try to find a new pair of boots. After a little bit of talking (and he claims me staring) he asked me out, and we've been practically inseperable ever since!!
Since we can't remember when our first date was, or when we officially became girlfriend/boyfriend, we celebrate today as our anniversary! Matt actually claims we celebrate today because it was when he fell in love with me, but I'm not sure if that is true or it he's just watched too many chick flicks!
Seeing how it is so close to Christmas, we didn't celebrate very elaborately. Except for....
the beautiful necklace and earrings Matt gave me! What a good boyfriend!

Is it Christmas Yet??

I'm just as impatient as a three year old waiting for Christmas to come. Just in case there's any confusion about if its Christmas yet or not, check out this website:

http://isitchristmas.com/

Mission Accomplished!

This note is a cease and desist from writing any more letters. Last week I asked you to write lots of letters with sloppy addresses so that I could get more hours. Well I was able to get a few hours of overtime without the risk of going postal, so good work everyone! Thanks for all you help. You can resume your perfect handwriting.

I Need Your Help

Christmas is only two weeks away, yikes! Which means I've got to be buying Christmas presents for my loved ones. I love shopping, especially for others, but something is missing. Money! I thought that I'd be swimming in the proverbial overtime cash, but not this year..at least not yet.
This is where each of you comes in. I need you to write REAL mail, not this electronic mail that I've heard about. And not do you need to start using the United States Postal Service, you need to write the recipients address almost illegible. Don't write it completely illegible, otherwise that card or letter will probably end up in Singapore. But, if it is written sloppily enough that the computers can't read it, and it will get sent to me. The more letters we get, the more overtime we get, and the more money I get...and the more presents others get. So really this is your chance to do a little charity, and it will only cost you $0.42 per letter. What a bargain!
For now I'm encouraging using real mail over the use of email, but please be ready to go back to email in about a week. After I get a few days of 10-12 hours of work I will be cursing every letter that comes through to me. But for a short while I will be excited to see them, so help out if you can.

Finally!

I was so excited that it snowed on Monday. Finally the weather is actually starting to act like we are in December and only weeks away from Christmas. I really do hate to be cold, but I like the snow, and it just seemed wrong for it to be 60* in December. I just hope it keeps snowing so we can have a white Christmas!

Mold!

I love decorating for holidays, especially Christmas. It's my tradition to decorate the day after Thanksgiving. I had gotten the 24 hour Christmas music station on, taken out my big tupperware box of Christmas decorations...only to lift the lid and find MOLD!!
Not everything had mold growing on it, but as we dug deeper to find the source, we found some black mold. At that point we put everything back in the container, closed the lid, and threw the container out in the garbage! I was sooo sad that all my Christmas goodies were gone, but I had heard bad things about black mold, so we thought our health was worth throwing away $200 worth of decorations.
There was a little good news to come from this, I got to go shopping for new stuff. But the bad was that I don't have enough money to replace everything, and some stuff had some funny memories behind it. Oh well, I'll just make new memories with the new stuff!

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished!

Not to toot my own horn, but in the spirit of Thanksgiving I made a donation to the Utah Food bank. All week various radio stations have been doing food drives, tugging on the heart strings of their listeners, and it finally got to me and I decided to go to the store and buy some various Thanksgiving-y food items.
As if it weren't enough to just do something nice for those less fortunate...I got rewarded also. They gave me a c.d. of local artists, and some Jazz tickets for the game vs. the Boston Celtics in February. I almost felt guilty taking the prizes....but who am I to refuse??
I know the economy has affected all of us in different ways, but I encourage you to seek out a local charity that you could help out, even if there's not any prizes in it for you. As they said on the radio, if you know where your next meal is coming from then you're better off than a lot of other people out there!!
Happy Thanksgiving!!

I like it, I love it...

...I want some more of it. Bolt, that is! Matt and I saw the movie this weekend, and I loved it!! In fact I think that Matt and I laughed more and harder than anyone else in the theatre. The cool thing was that we saw it in 3D too! I would highly recommend it to anyone, especially if you are an animal lover like me! It's fantastic!

I Thought This Day Would Never Come..

Finally!! I found gas in the Salt Lake valley for under $2. Yes, I filled up at $1.99 per gallon! When I started driving in 1998 and gas was less than a dollar per gallon, I never would have thought about being happy paying $2 per gallon. Well after paying over $4 a gallon during the summer, I was so ecstatic to be paying $1.99 that I wanted to take a picture and scrapbook my receipt!

High School Musical 4 ???

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BFF's

Jesus is My Friend

I Rocked The Vote!

I did my civic duty and voted today. I wasn't planning on it, but since I didn't have to even go out of my way or wait in a line I decided that I might as well. Some people waited in line for hours just to vote, so I would have felt lazy for not taking 5 minutes to go and cast my ballot.

Why I Love Halloween...

...And why pets probably hate it...

Thanks to Jenn for sending me the email with all of these cute pictures. There were even more, but these were some of my favorites.

Wii Love it!

As if Matt and I don't spend enough of our free time in front of the television we found another reason to. Yep, we both a Wii!
It is so much fun! It came with the Wii Sports games: bowling, tennis, golf, boxing, and baseball)
My two favorite games are golf and tennis!
We also bought Mario Kart, which is a fun racing game that you play with a hand-held steering wheel.So even if you're not a huge gamer, I would still recommend the Wii. It is nice to be playing something that is interactive. Eventually I think will get the Wii Fit and be able to get a good workout at home!

Picture Tag

Koriann tagged me, and I was actually happy to be tagged because I love pictures!! So here is what you do. Go into your pictures and choose the 6th folder. Once you've opened the folder, go to the 6th picture in it, post it, and give the story of the picture.
I was hoping I would have stumbled upon an embarrassing picture of someone other than me so that I would have a legitimate excuse to post it, but instead the picture I came to was one of a whole bunch of USU people at Diana and Cameron's wedding!
Diana was my very first roommate ever in college at Utah State. During our second year of college we both lived in Old Farm, but weren't roommates. (Jenn was the lucky one who got to be roommates with her!) That was the year that she met her future husband Cameron. We all knew that one day those two would get married!
They finally got married in the summer of 2004 (I sure hope that is right!) in the Manti Temple. Jenn and I made the trip down there and stayed at Koriann's house (even though I was totally freaked out by all the dolls they had in the hallway. I swear they were watching me when I woke up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. Creepy!) Their reception was later that night, and Jenn and I were assigned to the book since we were the unofficial bridesmaids.
You can't tell in the picture, but my dress showed off quite a bit of my cleavage. This became a source of embarrassment when people who came to sign the book got quite the view from above since I was sitting. And I was known as cleavage girl for at least a few weeks after that!!
One of my other favorite memories from that night was Diana's mother trying desperately to give us wedding cake. We tried to say no, but she wouldn't take no for an answer. So we tried to just share pieces of cake, but she insisted that each of us have a piece of cake. Some of us even ended up taking a piece home too! She was a cute lady!
So the photo was taken near the end of their reception in Alpine. I can't name everyone who's in the picture, but I know the important people because they were my good USU buddies and still are good buddies today! It was a fun evening, I wish I could see that gang more often.

Car Drama

On Saturday the 18th Matt got into a car accident on his way to work. The other car involved careened into the side of his car when the tire basically fell off and made the car lose control. Luckily he was at a stop light and the other car was attempting to slow down, so both were able to walk away from the accident. We were told that everything would be taken care of by her insurance, but that the claims adjuster would have to come from Denver and would look at the car either Monday or Tuesday.
Sunday night we tried to get a rental car, but most places were closed, so we set it up to pick one up on Monday. So we both made it to work on Monday with just one car between us. Later that evening I picked up the rental car. I was the one who had to rent it because I had a credit card and Matt doesn't. Well since I only have liability insurance on my own car, I had to get insurance for $18 a day from Enterprise. I'm sure when Matt saw the rental car, he was glad it was for me to drive.
While I drove the Bug, Matt drove my car. The Beetle was fun to drive, but ultimately not worth the cost of the rental plus insurance. So Tuesday came and went, but still no word from the insurance company or claims adjuster.
On Wednesday we decided to return the rental car because we were worried about being reimbursed by the insurance company since we hadn't heard from them yet. We decided we could suck it up for a few days and share a car so we could save some money. Later that evening Matt finally got a hold of the adjuster and found out that the lady that hit Matt was delinquent on her insurance payment, and therefore didn't have coverage!!!
Thankfully Matt has full coverage, so he's going to go through his insurance and only has to pay the deductible to get his car fixed. Geico has treated him much better than those flakes at American Family anyway! They offered a rental car, but we would have ran into the same problem as we did before, so he turned it down.
Thankfully I have the best parents in the world!! My parents had an extra car at their house, so we played musical cars with them so that we all could have a car. My dad is now driving my brothers car, while I drive my dad's car and Matt drives my car. We'll be finding out soon how long Matt's car will be in the shop, but just hope no other car drama happens in the mean time. Thanks for helping out M & D!!

Don't Invite This Guy to Your Wedding

Not Useful, But Funny

Yet another thing I came across by listening to the radio for hours. The Incredible Peeing Pug! Hilarious!

Useful Info

Since I listen to mostly talk radio while I'm at work, I get at least 8 hours of people rambling in my ears, usually about mindless stuff or politics (which makes me go mindless!) But today they read an interesting article from Yahoo called 10 (more) Reasons You're Not Rich. I thought it was very interesting and somewhat educational, so I thought I'd pass it on! If you already have all the money that you need then don't bother, but I think the rest of us could use some advice!

God Bless HDTV

We have had our plasma HDTV for a couple of months now, but up until Saturday we were HD-less. We held off for those few months for a couple of reasons, but with football season already started we decided to bite the bullet and get HD set up.
I was skeptical that the difference would be noticeable and worth the hassel of having it installed, but the minute I saw the HD in all its glory, I knew it was worth it!
Actually the first thing I saw in HDTV was LDS General Conference...the Mo Tab has never looked so good, and the apostles have never looked so old! I had heard stories about news anchors being upset with being in hi-def because it showed their flaws. Well, I hate to say it, but some of them have a legitimate complaint!
Now HDTV, just like the DVR, is an extra convenience that I will not be able to live life without!

Funny Politcal Stuff

With the election coming up in November it seems the world has gone crazy. At least the world wide web has. Whether you're Republican or Democrat or other, you don't have to search hard to find videos, blogs, or pictures supporting or degrading your presidential choice. Here are just a few things that I found either funny or interesting.

If you're not a fan of Sarah Palin, and are a fan of pitbulls check out this website.

Or maybe you really love Sarah Palin and would like to name your children like she has. Try the Sarah Palin baby name generator.

I think most everyone has seen Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, but just in case here it is. The resemblance is amazing, she's even got the accent down.


This one might be my favorite.. John Mccain gets Barack Rolled

A Day at the Zoo

Since we've got great Fall weather to enjoy, Matt and I went to the Hogle Zoo. I love animals, so the zoo is one of my favorite places.

We sure had quite the adventure. First I almost got my head bitten off by a lion...If it hadn't been for the glass separating us, I'm sure this little guy would have tried to throw monkey poop at us!

Matt really liked the monkeys! Maybe a bit too much...

...and I did my best gorilla impression to fit in...
After fleeing the monkeys, we ran into Casper the "Ghost of the Bayou". Our Santa Clause friend at the front gate had told us how there are only 10 albino alligators in existence. He also said that they are all male, so they are definitely on the path to extinction. Poor fella! We were happy we came when we did though, because Casper was getting ready to leave the zoo on Wednesday.

Casper the Alligator
Me and the "Ghost of the Bayou"

Most of the animals are in cages or enclosures of some nature, so I was shocked when I came face to face with this cute animal on the loose.

...Then a bald eagle just landed on my head...

...Luckily for me some elephants showed up and scared the eagle away before it clawed my eyes out.And while the elephants were getting a drink we snuck out safe and sound! It was a great day at the zoo though!