Painting

It takes forever.

But I'm pretty sure I'll be satisfied with the finished product once we get the room put back together. The painting is done as of today (but only in the one room we've painted so far). We'll wait a few days, then put everything back in the room instead of the hallway.

As for Frankie? He's doing alright. Still causing a constant pain, spiced up with a few jabs of intense pain that can't really be stopped. I'm not sure what brings those on, but I sure don't appreciate them. I'm getting used to typing with only 9 fingers. It's weird and a little hard. I hope I don't get too used to it.

One last thing - the last few days I watched the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice and LOVED it!! (That would be a great birthday present for me in June. Hint hint, Mom.)

Frankie's New Look

Frankie and I went to the doctor this morning to have a checkup. The doctor cleaned up some of the dried blood from when Frankie was created (aka when I got stitches) and redressed the wound. Now Frankie gets his dressing changed twice a day, morning and night. We'll return to the doctor on Friday to be checked again. Frankie still insists on hurting me, but that's what men do, right? (Is it weird that I consider my finger to be a man?) Anyway, I wouldn't mind having company, so if you don't have much going on, let me know.

Until next time.

The Gym is a Dangerous Place

Yesterday I was at the gym working out. I had been using a 75 pound dumbell for squats. I had a couple of sets of arm weights left to do, but was done with squats so I attempted to put the 75 pounder back on the rack. I hoisted it up and dropped it into place. It bounced, caught my finger underneath, and slammed back down onto the rack. I grabbed my hurt finger with the other hand, thinking that it really hurt, but I could finish my workout in a few minutes when it stopped throbbing. I opened my hand to take a look at my finger and was a little frightened to see a hand full of blood. I looked around me for help, and saw a man who looked like he worked for the university and asked him for help. He later recalled that I walked up to him looking at him funny. I felt like I had been yelling for help, but I guess not. Anyway, to make a long story short, I got some help and Mark (who was at the gym at the same time but working out with a friend) drove me to the student center to get me fixed up. Frankie (short for Frankenstein) is the result.

Zumba

I am addicted. If I had the energy (and money) to go everyday, I totally would.

Reasons why I love zumba:

1. It's an excuse to hang out with awesome girls.
2. Booty shakin'.
3. One hour of intense exercise.
4. One hour of blasting super fun music.
5. It ends at 9:30 pm, so I'm totally ready for bed when it's over.
6. Tanktops and booty shakin'.
7. Latin dancing.
8. Did I mention booty shakin'?

Time for bed :)

Good Day

Today was a great day. Mark and I helped clean the church this morning, which is always a good way to bond with other members of our ward. Afterward, I worked out, ate lunch, and almost took a nap but was interrupted by a phone call from the Sunday School president. (Funny insert: he didn't know I had been officially released from my Sunday school calling, and that was why he was calling - to see if I had been released.) He also needed my manual to give to the new guy. During the conversation he asked me who is supposed to teach tomorrow. Me. In other words, the new guy. But the new guy didn't know it (and they couldn't get ahold of him), so I offered to teach. I like teaching. Quite a lot. But not quite as much as directing the choir, which is my current calling. Anyway, I had already given my manual to the Bishop so I needed one from one of the other teachers. (Thank you, Gentri!) I went to pick it up from Gentri and we decided that we should make freezer jam together.

For those of you who don't know me well, I should tell you that I am not much of a homemaker, except I do dishes when they are there. So, making jam was a big step for me. It was SUPER EASY! And it tastes SOOO good!!! If only I weren't on a low carb diet. I would have eaten so much bread and rolls today just so I could eat the jam.Yum.

That's basically all I've done today. But I learned something new, with a new friend, and it feels good.

Happy Sunday tomorrow. It's gonna be a good one. I can tell.

Finals Week

I was having this internal debate about whether to end my break now or in a few days. On the one hand, classes are out for the semester which means school is over. On the other hand, it's finals week which means school is not over. After spending a little time catching up on blogs, I decided it was time to catch up on my own. I have a presentation and a paper due in an hour, and a test tomorrow morning. Today's schooling doesn't worry me too much, but tomorrow's test I am a little stressed about. But I actually studied for it this time... And studying for a master's level math class isn't easy because all you can really do is read through theorems and work old homework problems. Not fun. But I did it, so I'm hoping that helps me on tomorrow. Also, your prayers in my behalf would be appreciated.

This semester was as busy as I had thought it might be. I spent a lot of time grading a lot of quizzes and tests for my classes. Mark spent a lot (and I mean A LOT) of time working on homework and trying to get enough hours in at work. Most nights he would come home around 10 pm. It sucked. But that small phase is over, and a new one is beginning.
Mark is graduating on Saturday with his bachelor's and master's degrees in computer engineering. I'm proud of him and his accomplishments. He is starting the MBA program here at USU this summer, and will be in school through next summer, so we're not done here yet. I'm thinking we should just become professional students and get a million degrees. We would be really smart.

Although the semester was busy and hard, we had some fun times. We were able to take time off for spring break and head out to Virginia to spend some time with Mark's dad. I had never been to Virginia before, so we spent a couple of days in Washington D.C. and a couple of days in Williamsburg/Jamestown areas. It was quite a fun trip, and we got to spend time with some old friends who have moved out of Logan. I may post pictures sometime of that trip, but we'll have to see about that.

I don't really remember much else that happened during this semester, except that it keeps snowing when I don't think it should. Like right now. It's May, for goodness sake. Snow should not be allowed in May. Or June. I really hope it doesn't snow in June. But apparently, the weather doesn't care about what month it is. Lame.

Final thought - I think I'm back for good now. Hooray.

Break

I'm writing this post to let everyone know that I am officially taking a break from blogging - in all aspects. I have had far too hard a time focusing on my schoolwork and blogs are such a fun, easy way to procrastinate. In order to stop myself from overdoing the blog thing (mostly reading them) I have decided to stop for the semester. I will continue to be on facebook, and I always have my cell phone (and I love talking to people) so feel free to get in contact with me there. I anticipate that my life will slow down a bit after this semester, at which point I will probably come back. See ya on the flip side.

Nervous

Time is creeping up on me today. I have an appointment with a surgeon at 3:30 to talk about how we're going to get rid of my pilonidal cyst. My guess: surgery. Ha. I'm funny. But I don't know much about different types of surgery and all that. So that's really what this appointment is all about.
I'm nervous right now. I have so many questions, and I haven't been writing them down so I don't know what they all are. I Google'd "pilonidal cyst" and read about it. There was a picture on the Wikipedia page. Don't look at that one. It's not pretty. Instead, I read on some health website all about it. If you're really interested, you can go read about it, but I wouldn't suggest eating your lunch at the same time.
Mark gave me a Priesthood blessing this morning, which gives me comfort. But I am still nervous. Wish me luck.

Post-Edit:
I'm back from the doctor. No surgery in the foreseeable future. I've just got to continue taking the antibiotics I've been taking and hope that it just goes away. If not, well, that's another story. My prayers are for the first case. Thanks for your prayers and support.

A Few Randoms

Ok, so that last post was a little nerdy. But I've just got to tell ya that I improved on that little beauty. It now gives me a lot more information, and the code is in the form of a function instead of a script. That's not what I came here to talk about though...

Today marks the start of the 41st month of the courtship of Mark and me. Isn't that precious? We celebrated by continuing our monthly tradition of going to Panda Express. And it was gooood this time. Sometimes it's just ok (and even bad on occasion) but not today, pal! It was dee-licious! That's not really what I came here to talk about either...

Since I didn't do a real lovey-dovey post earlier this month (for our 3-yr anniversary) I want to write a few things now. Mark is...
1. Amazing
2. Intelligent
3. Funny
4. Sweet
5. Sexy
6. Fun
7. Practical
8. Tasteful
9. Romantic
10. Mine

My Success

I wrote a program to make pretty graphs, similar to this one.
My life rocks!!

Back to Real Life

As you may have read in the past few posts, Mark and I had a very fun and eventful winter break. But now we're back to real life. Right this second, I am on a computer in a classroom where I teach two classes in a row. I teach another class after this one in a room across campus. I'm taking 3 hard classes along with the 3 I teach. It should be fun.

Luck

Do you believe in good luck and bad luck? I do. And when traveling, Mark and I have bad luck. For example:

We are currently in Georgia. We were looking forward to a break from cold, snowy Logan. However, I look out the window and what do I see? Snow is falling on the Georgia trees. Figures. The forecast is cold, rainy/snowy weather until we leave.
On our way here, we packed so that we wouldn't have to check any bags. As we were boarding our second flight yesterday, an airline worker said, "There's not enough room on the plane, I'm going to have to check this bag for you." There ended up being enough room. Also, that was broken by the people who forced us to check it. Thank you, American Airlines. Thanks for taking our stuff and breaking it.

And that is just the first part of this trip. Now, lets take a look at past vacations.

Portland, December 2008.
Snow. Lots of snow. In a city where it never snows. It melted not too long after we left. Everything we wanted to do was closed or unaccessible. Figures.

Argentina, March 2008
Our flight to Argentina was cancelled; we left a day later than we wanted. They had sent our luggage on before our flight was cancelled and it got lost. We didn't have our luggage with us for a day. Yellow fever broke out at one of the tourist attractions we wanted to go to. The coins required to ride the bus were worth less than the metal to make them, and thus were in small supply, making it hard to get around. On the way back to the U.S. we got to Texas and the weather went crazy. We had to stay in a hotel overnight because of flooding and tornado warnings. Figures.

England, June/July 2005
The day I flew into Enland, terrorists bombed busses in London. London locked down it's city. Nobody in, nobody out. We (the touring music group) had to skip the London part of the trip. Figures.

Lake Powell, August 2004
Big speeding ticket (my fault). Huge lake storm - both ski boats sunk and the houseboat we were on got washed up onto the shore. Rolled the car on the way home. Figures.

The list can go on. Can you say "bad luck"?

Yesterday

3 years and counting...


I love you sweetheart.

Christmas at the Anderson's

This year was a wonderful Christmas. Mark and I were lucky enough to spend a week at my parents house. We went to the Sweet Family Christmas party and had a great time visiting with my aunts, uncles and cousins. During the party, a group of us were sitting around the table and decided to write a letter to my cousin who is on a mission... one word at a time. As we passed the letter around, each person wrote down one word, adding to a sentence. The best sentence we came up with was: "Always remember, we always remember to remember that remembrance never forgets to remember". I hope he has fun reading that letter. Good times.

Throughout the week we mostly hung out, played video games, watched movies, and ate a lot of delicious. Christmas morning consisted of Mom, Dad, Mel, Mark and me there to open presents. Mark got an air compressor and various tools that we could use throughout our lives. I got a Bosch from my parents, a nice knife set from Mark and other various cooking items from other various relatives. I'm excited to get home and do some cooking! I think Mark is excited for me to cook too.

Today is the day after Christmas. We spent the morning sledding, and it was AWESOME! I've got some pictures to prove it. Also, none of these are photoshopped in any way.

This is me in my new snowclothes.

Mark and me on the sled.

A winter tradition in my family is called "snow kayaking". It's pretty cool. Check it out.

Mark in the kayak. Aaron on the snowboard.

Aaron in the kayak.

Aaron in the kayak, with Ginger in the background.

Mark in the kayak hitting the side of a jump

(and still getting some wicked air).

Mark, Dad, and Aaron in/on the kayak.

What are your wintertime traditions?

P.S. We sold my car. Hooray!!

The Trick

The trick to feeding a man is to not ask him what he wants or tell him what's for dinner. The trick is to just make it. Set it in front of him. Let him eat. He'll enjoy it if you don't give him a choice. Mark has always told me that it would work, but he's usually around when I'm cooking (which means he will disagree with what I'm about to cook, and we end up eating mac and cheese). Last night he was around, but on the phone. So I made a dinner of potato and cheese soup (thanks to Wendy's great gift). And he liked it.

And that, my friends, is the trick.

Sigh of Relief

Well, I feel pretty good about my final. As I've talked over it with some of the other students, I've felt more and more confident. When I think about the midterm and it's results I feel even better about this exam.

The rest of this week will be filled with relaxing, cooking, laundering, cleaning, bass playing, performing, sleeping, researching, proctoring and grading. And all of these things will be done with A LOT less stress.

It's going to be a good week.

Ketchup

Since the last time I wrote, two big events have happened. First, Thanksgiving. Since Mark had gone to Bryce Canyon and Escalante with his brothers, I found a ride to Salt Lake to spend time with my sister and mom. It was great! We had fun making noodles for homemade chicken noodle soup, laughing and chatting, and making jello "shots" and trifle "shots" for the Sweet family Thanksgiving. It was awesome to have time to just chill with the fam. It was also awesome that Gramma Sweet was at my mom's house for a few hours making the noodles for Thanksgiving dinner. I haven't spent time with her in a very long time, and it's just good to be around Gramma. Just to be able to hug her when I wanted was wonderful. I love you, Gramma!!
After spending time with my family, the plan was that Mark would pick me up and we'd head back to Logan on Wednesday night. Or so everybody else thought. Mark and I had planned to stay for Thanksgiving dinner with my family on Thursday, and I decided to keep it a surprise. The look on Gramma's face was priceless when she saw me Thanksgiving morning. I hope I never forget that face. She's beautiful. Anyway, it was wonderful to spend time with the aunts, uncles and cousins who were at the dinner. I miss those folks.
We left Salt Lake on Thursday afternoon and arrived in Logan around 6 or 7. Mark and I got bored and fell asleep at 7:30. Lame, I know, but it was awesome. We woke up at 6:30 the next morning, and we didn't go shopping. Weird, right? But we didn't feel we needed anything. So we just had a nice long morning together. Later in the day on Friday, Mark's family held their Thanksgiving dinner. That was also a blast. 4 of the 6 brothers were there (one was in Ireland and the other in Georgia). It was fun to be with all of the nieces and nephews.
I love holidays!

The second big event that happened was that I finished my grading of assignments and quizzes for the semester. You know what that means? This semester is just about over. Not only am I done grading, but I am done with assignments and projects for my classes. Just one final on Monday, then I'm basically done. How awesome is that?!

What's your favorite part of the holidays? Is it the sweets and treats? Is it the hot chocolate by the fireplace? Or is it just having the heat on in your house so that it's a nice cozy place to come to after playing in the (non-existent) snow?

For the Love

Mark left tonight to go to Bryce Canyon with a couple of his brothers for a few days. I don't know what to do with myself. It's quite boring living alone, and I've only been home without him for 20 minutes. Lame. Any ideas on things I can do to keep myself entertained? Or, rather than that, how do I motivate myself to clean the house and get my homework and other things done?

On a different note (no pun intended), I played in an orchestra concert tonight. Have I ever told you what a release music is for me? Sure, the practices at night in the middle of the week are sometimes inconvenient. But when I sit on stage with the lights warming my skin, and the conductor walks on stage and everyone claps, then the house lights go dim and the conductor raises his baton... Then music. From a bunch of people using their talents and working together to provide something beautiful to a willing audience. I get chills just thinking about it. I'm so grateful that my parents instilled deep within me a great love of music. I'm grateful for such supportive parents, who drove through a snowstorm for an hour and a half (one way) so that they could listen to the orchestra play for an hour and a half. I'm grateful that they encouraged (and sometimes bribed) me to try different types of music and instruments. I declare that I have the best parents in the world. I love you Mom and Dad. Thank you for coming tonight. It meant the world to me.

Guest Post

A friend of mine wrote down this story about a recent family home evening in her singles ward because she thought I would enjoy it. And I did. So I got permission to post it here. You're welcome.

"Lap Tag" or "How I Spent the Creepiest Monday Night Ever" by Jill Warnock

In lap tag, you have a group of people (>7) and it must be an odd number. Half the people sit in a circle and then the other people sit on the first groups laps. For notation purposes, the people in the first group are denoted (1), the people in the second group as (2) and the person by himself as (3). 3 is also in the circle. 3 points at two 2s, who have to crawl over to 3 and tag his foot. The 1s hold on to their 2s and don't let them get to 3. The 1 whose 2 gets to 3 first becomes the new 3 and the other 1 and 2 switch.
So then they made me play. And I get stuck sitting on the lap of some guy who came with another girl, meaning I had NEVER SEEN HIM BEFORE. When I got pointed at he wrapped both arms around my stomach and one leg around my knees and we had to wrestle. And I am done with singles wards.

Because I Said I Would

I know you have all been waiting for the pictures of me and Casey. So, here they are!

This last picture I think is best, except the lighting isn't great. But did you see in the second picture how intense our conversation was? Man, it was great. I just love that woman.

Also, do you like the blog makeover? It's kind of fall-ish.. Since it's fall now, I figured it would be appropriate..