I'm Baaaack!

I had a wonderful, amazing, marvelous Christmas! My parents and brother flew out to St. George and my sister and her husband came down from Provo. Aaaand, my grandparents are spending the winter down here already. The last week I've spent all of my time with my family, and it's been the best!

We picked up my parents and Taylor at the airport Sunday afternoon. After driving the strip and a pit stop for some Mexican food we were back in St. George at the Grandparents house.

Christmas Eve we braved the store to go shopping for some last minute stocking stuffers and groceries for Christmas dinner. I took over Grandma's kitchen to make all of our favorite cookies and Chad started a new tradition of making his mom's cinnamon rolls. We had KFC for dinner, and a piece of fried chicken may or may not have found it's way on to my plate, whoops.... mmmmmm. We then dragged Grandma out into the cold to see all of the lights at the St. George temple. On the late drive home Chad, Taylor and I managed to avoid getting ran over by the biggest tumble weed of all time.

Then we played dress up with all the animals while Chad stayed up until the wee hours of the morning finishing his delicious cinnamon rolls.

Ash and Pat joined us Christmas night where we ate too much, opened presents, took naps and played Christmas bingo. Grandma even had prizes for us all, Taylor was the big cash winner. I got some jerky and Chad and Pat played with Pat's prize of "go fish" into the night.
 

 

Wednesday we headed to Kneaders for a french toast breakfast and then braved the snow(?!) to take some pictures up at Pioneer Park. It was just a tad bit chilly out. We were happy to join the grandparents back at the warm house for leftovers and more cookies :)

We spent the rest of the evening playing pool, playing the piano, swimming, working on a puzzle and playing hand and foot.

The rest of the week brought surprise 2am visitors and a buffet of buffets! But that can wait until tomorrow! I hope that you all had wonderful a wonderful Christmas!

Awkward and Awesome Thursday

Crazy sno cone lips.

Awkward:

• Trying to look up a website to get our logo printed on shoe horns and emery boards and going to a porn site, per the sales lady on the phone. Is there anything more awkward than porn in the work place? Unfortunately this isn't my first time...
• I went up to the church to play the piano last night and a little boy came in. This itself is nothing new. Then he sat down next to me, as I'm playing, and said "When I'm near a piano I just have to play!" He then started playing. Confused as to what the heck was happening I stopped and got up while he continued to "play" his own "music". I use these terms extremely loosely. One of his "compositions" consisted of three notes played over and over and over. I finally just gave up and left so this little boy could play out his feelings alone.
• Our pets have boundary issues. Chad and I will be snuggling on the couch and Sunny will jump up on me and try to snuggle with Chad's face. Rukia also has no problem squeezing herself between us and snuggling down. Penny's the only one who doesn't want to cuddle with our faces. She'd much rather snuggle with our butts while we sleep.
• A family member that was visiting a patient at the nursing home telling us stories of (1) how he had bugs that laid eggs under his toenails. Once they started hatching and crawling out, he just pulled off his toenails. (2) If he gets any sort of tooth pain he just pulls the tooth out himself. He's pulled out one whole side of top teeth and a few on the other. WHAT?! Crazy Alert! He told me to call him if I need a tooth pulled. Uh, yeah. no thanks. I'll gladly pay a trained professional.

Awesome:

• The Voice. Anyone else addicted to this show?
• After hiking Angel's Landing in the dead of night last week with Nikki and Matt we had a nutritious and delicious dinner consisting of the biggest and best onion rings and a "mini" shake the size of my head. Awesome.
• Fry Sauce.
• Chad rockin' out his second round of tests. He's a smarty pants ;)
• Making muffins on Sunday so we can have breakfast this week! No matter how much I hate eating breakfast, it really does help!
• Chad has a mid semester break for a few days next week!
• We are finally out of the 100 degree weather! It may be high 90's but at least we've made it down a little bit. The nights are now lovely, mid 50's, and we can sleep with our windows open.

What were the best parts of your week?

Wrap it Up!

So how did my goals pan out last month? Let's see:

1. Wake up. Hahahaha. Yeah, no this didn't happen at all. Moving on....

2. Take More Pictures. This I did! We went down to the rodeo specifically to take pictures on a date night and I was armed with my camera on our camping trip to Arches. While I may be frustrated that I'm not as awesome as Chad, I'm practicing. And practice makes perfect right? Or at least makes you better :)

3. RUN! This we did! We started running that first week that I made this goal. We are averaging about 3 miles per run during the week with longer runs on the weekend. We didn't run when Nikki and Matt were here but we definitely moved with them! Hiking, climbing mountains, and jumping on trampolines (no matter how fun!) are all definitely workouts. And I've got the sore legs and buns to prove it! We've started running again this week since Nikki and Matt left us forever :(

4. Keep the Kitchen Clean. Check and check. The dishes have mostly been done every night. The counters have been relatively clear and wiped down as well. Now I need to move on to the nasty floors. Between our dog and all of our outdoor stuff (rock climbing, running, hiking, oh my!) we track in a lot of dirt.

5. Get my Cute on and wear something besides scrubs and workout clothes. Done! I dressed my self like a proper adult should do the first weekend and fortunately I was camping the second weekend :) So that means workout clothes were required! :) Last week the Dr. was out of town and I wore actual cute clothes to work twice. Two times is better than nothing! Last weekend was another success as well!

So it's a new month which means I'm updating the goal list. I think that shorter term monthly goals are working out better for me. I can focus on them for a month, hopefully make them a habit, and then add in some more the next month. That or abandon anything good I had going last month and fail miserably. Either way really. We'll see.

1. Wake your lazy butt up in the morning! Seriously. Get. Up.

2. Play the piano more. And when I say play more, I mean play anything in general. Playing once would be playing more. I'm gonna shoot for once a week.



3. Keep on top of the Laundry Situation. Laundry blows. I think we can all agree on that. But it's even worse when you put it off and have to do crazy amounts of loads on a sunday night because you have 1. no clean underwear  2. no clean scrubs  3. no clean pants (Chad).

4. Floss. I. HATE. Flossing. Why? I don't even know. When I'm tired at night I just want to fall into bed and pass out. But I'm already taking out contacts and washing my face and brushing my teeth and putting on lotion (gross, does anyone else hate lotion or am I the only crazy one?). I might as well add in flossing and mouth wash for that matter, especially since I don't know when we'll be at the dentist next.... Oh to be poor college kids!

5. Eat more fruits and vegetables. I used to have really good intentions and would buy us lots of fruits and veggies every week. And every week a larger portion that I would like to admit just sat there and went bad. So I stopped buying very much. Now that the kitchen is clean and Chad is in classes and we've settled into a routine, I'm better at making dinner every night. So hopefully we can be good and eat all our produce now.

While I've got a shiny new list of goals, I'm still going to keep doing my other ones from last month. That's the idea right? Making new habits?

What goals do you have for the month of October? What New Years Resolutions have you already accomplished because you're a rockstar?

Confessions

1. I am an NPR girl. After years of listening to music at work it was sooooo nice to work in a lab where our professsor choose to listen to NPR. I had never listened to it but it quickly grew on me. My coworkers hated it. It would drive them crazy. I l-o-v-e-d it. Still do. Half the time I'm learning something cool and the other half of the time I just sort of zone out to it and have it as background noise. Chad will often make comments on whatever was just said and I'll have no idea what's going on.

2. I'm addicted to fashion blogs. You wouldn't ever know it considering I'm usually found in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, or workout clothes. Chad's family all knows I'm generally wearing a crappy old white shirt with a picture of me and Jared ironed on the front. I like to keep it classy like that. After a long day in scrubs it's hard to come home and put on clothes that actually fit, workout clothes and extremely old (and slightly holey) t-shirts are much more comfy. Maybe someday I'll learn to put my clothes together to look like all the fabulous girls on these blogs I read, or at least on the weekends.



The Day Book

3. After being a complete girl and buying shoes all the time and getting quite the collection (well quite the collection for a college girl on a budget) I can't remember the last pair of shoes I bought that weren't for running, or to replace my cheap-o sandals. While I am strangely proud of this it also makes me a little sad.

4. I haven't played the piano since December. I've got the key to the church so I can go up there if I want but I've been lame and I haven't. Long term goal: buy a nice electronic keyboard.

5. I have a love/hate relationship with my retainer. I hate it because it's a retainer, come on. I love it because it keeps my teeth looking nice and my head from throbbing due to shifting teeth. After abadoning it a month (or so) ago I started getting these headaches everyday. I thought they were from my last wisdom tooth slowly starting to invade my face but I'm hoping part of it was just the massive shifting my teeth were doing without my handy dandy retainer.

The past two nights have been ridiculously painful. I just jammed my retainer into place and swallowed a handful of advil before trying to sleep so I didn't have to deal with the pain. It kinda worked. My teeth are getting back into place and I will hopefully remember to wear my gosh darn retainer a couple of times a week!

6. My wisdom tooth is in fact invading my face though and I need to find a dentist that will remove this thing asap for next to nothing without permanantley damaging my face. I don't think they exist.