Giving Thanks!

Becky says it's my turn again...

I've heard it's always good to start out with a joke so here you go (you'll probably need to click on them to see the punchline)...

Thanksgiving was with the Packers this year and we spent the day up at Mom and Dad's. It was fun to have the whole family around and to have my cousins Joelle and Paul join us. The day started with a 8am Turkey Bowl @ Sugarhouse park. Thankfully (I'm still in the Thanksgiving mood) there were only 2 minor casualties: the 1st being a cell phone (thankfully not mine) that was enhanced to include a nice cleat mark in the display area, and the 2nd my big toe nail that was also maimed by a rogue cleat.

Ok, I should correct myself before I get in trouble, the day actually started at 5:30am when Becky got up to make the rolls. If you haven't tried Becky's homemade rolls (which I understand are the same as Cindy's. Thanks Cindy!) then you are missing out. They were fantastic and in my opinion, are very much worth every minute of sleep that I didn't lose when Becky got up early to make them.

So...rolls, turkey bowl, then on to the Packers' for lunch at 1pm. We had a fantastic meal so thanks to all those that made food for it. I thought the meal was one of the best that I can remember. After lunch, in typical Thanksgiving fashion we lounged around reading books, watching a movie, playing games, and playing with the nieces and nephew. Oh yeah, Becky made her first gum-drop turkey. Gum-drop turkeys are a timeless Packer family tradition. The picture below is of our Thanksgiving decorations and will give you a good idea of what a gum-drop turkey is (minus the head that I ate before Becky took the picture). Unfortunately we don't have any other pics of the day.

Friday was pretty uneventful, Becky joined countless other Black Friday shoppers around 7am and managed to get most of her Christmas shopping done without much hassle. I stayed home (asleep in bed) and held down the fort until she came home several hours later.

Saturday was one of the best football games that we've seen in a long time. Rise and Shout cougar fans!! We watched the game from Jake and Stacey's while eating Cafe Rio and what a game it was. Towards the end of the game Becky decided I wasn't safe to sit by so she moved to the far side of the couch. It was pretty intense. She moved back when we took the lead again and the game was in the bag. Chalk up another W for the Y. We also ran into this hooligan on the way to the game...the flag attached to the truck is the Ute flag, the animal tied to the back is... wishful thinking. Maybe next year Mr. Ute. Go Cougars!!

California Round 2 + Early Christmas

I flew out to San Jose again this week - fortunately, this time was for training so I wasn't working as much. I flew out there Monday night, and was able to meet up with a couple of former roommates for dinner after training on Tuesday. It's funny to see how things have changed, and yet not changed since I left almost a year ago. None of us are living in the "Naked Lady House" anymore, but in some ways it felt exactly the same. It was fun to catch up with them. I was supposed to have training Wednesday morning until noon, but when I got there it was a training the 3 of us from Salt Lake had already done, so they let us leave. We hurried to the airport to try and catch and earlier flight home, and unfortunately, there were only 2 open seats on the earlier flight. Me being the gentleman that I am, let the two guys have the seats and I spent the next 5 hours having a fabulous time in the San Jose airport. I guess that's what you get for equality in the workplace! (in all honesty, they are nice guys and would have let me go if I wanted to - they just both had good reasons for needing to get back earlier so I let them take the seats).


While I was in training on Tuesday, we had a short break and I decided to indulge in my addiction of checking the classified ads for furniture (instead of chatting with my adoring husband who also happened to be online at the same time and was waiting to hear how my training was going). I found a table and chairs I liked that seemed like a good deal, so I sent the link to Nate. When I finished training that evening and called, he was on his way over to look at them. I trust his judgment and had seen pictures, but I was still slightly nervous when he called back shortly after and said he had bought them. We went and picked them up when I got home the next night, and luckily I like them :) Apparently the kids in the family we bought the table from are granted quite a bit of freedom, and one of the chairs was covered in kids' paint, and most of the others had paint spots on them. It took us several hours and almost a whole can of furniture cleaner to get the dust and paint and grime off, but they look pretty spiffy now!

Before:




After: (I'm not sure how to rotate it...)

The table: (this is from their craigslist ad - we don't have room in our apartment so its legs are off and it's against the wall behind our couch)

Here are four of the six chairs set up with our table now. It just looks slightly better than the metal folding chairs we were previously using (yes, that is homemade bread placed strategically in the picture ;)


We're pretty excited about our purchase.

I also went to a bridal shower for my former roommate Elise on Thursday - it was fun to catch up with her and her twin Kristina. I'm excited for Elise's wedding reception this weekend, and that she's moving to Utah!

And, in conclusion, favorite quotes from Primary today:

Primary President, trying to introduce the Sharing Time on Thanksgiving: "What is happening on Thursday?"
Cute little Sunbeam: "It's going to snow!"

later...
Primary President "Who passes the sacrament?"
same little Sunbeam: "The sacrament boys"

a quick update

It's been a while since we posted anything, and I'm at work waiting for a HUGE email file to send before I can go home, so I'm going to give you a quick update of what we've been up to the last few weeks.

1. Another Jazz game with EY (this one trying to convince recruits with offers to sign with us).
2. Dinner with the Morris siblings last Sunday - I got a message from Dave on Friday saying he was coming to pick Camille up at the aiport and "we thought it would be a good idea if we came over for dinner". We were happy to have them over though - it's always fun to hang out. We went on a walk and got in a good game of 10,000. And I used the excuse to pull out some of my cool serving dishes I got as wedding presents.
3. My trip to San Jose to help out with one of my clients - I was only there 3 days, but they were LONG days with lots of work :(
4. BYU football game on Thursday - I think this is the first game we've been to together where it didn't rain on us, hooray!
5. House inspection Friday - it wasn't an official one, but we met with our sales guy / now friend to go through the house and look at what's been done so far - framing, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and A/C), electrical, and plumbing. When he suggested going through it I was thinking that it might not be very helpful because I wouldn't know what to change, but we did decide to move a few things (does anyone know what a "half-hot" is? I bet Kim does. We moved it to a different spot so it's not where our TV will go. Now I can sound smart with my new-found electrical knowledge :) and added an electrical outlet on one wall, etc. Minor stuff, but much better to find it now when it can be changed. After our meeting we went to a couple of friends' houses who moved into soon-to-be-our neighborhood recently. It made me impatient for the next few months to pass by, and excited to decorate!
6. Babysitting niece Abby on Saturday - we learned the joys of going shopping with an almost-one-year-old. She was actually really good for us, no crying or whining - just too many fun and exciting things in the store for her to try and reach out and touch. She didn't especially like sitting in her stroller the whole time :) She sure is cute though.

I think that's about it. Sorry there aren't any pictures this time. I'm headed out to CA again tonight for a couple of days - at least this time it's just for training so I'll have time to see some of my Stanford Ward friends :)

Bridge Builders

Hmmmm...it's time for the weekly blog post...what to write about??? I'm trying to remember the highlights of the week. Uncle Ernie continues to treat us well. He took us to dinner again on Monday night. (Thanks Uncle Ernie!) We left the dinner a little early and headed over to the Utah Foodbank and stacked boxes. They looked at us and quickly decided that they better not let us near the food so we were the designated box stackers (or "packers" if you will).

Thursday night we went to the Catholic Community Services (an organization that helps the homeless population in SLC) dinner because they were highlighting Ivory Homes with an award. It was impressive to hear about all that CCS is doing in the community. It was also neat to get more exposure to the Catholic community here in SL. I think it's often overshadowed because of the predominant presence of the LDS culture. After the dinner we ran down the street to see this year's Warren Miller Ski Movie! The movie was awesome and made Becky really excited for the ski season. She even said she would try a backflip this year. Oh yeah, she also said not to try to talk her out of it.

The final event of the week was today when we went and watched some construction workers work on the 4500 South bridge across I-215. For those of you thinking we are really lame and need to get out more, it actually was much cooler than it sounds. For the past few months we've seen the new bridge being built on the side of the freeway. Apparently they are trying out a new construction technique that they use in Europe that is supposed to be much easier on traffic. Instead of putting up extra barriers to reduce the lanes while they work on sections of the bridge, they build the replacement on the side of the road so they don't have to work around traffic. They build the new bridge, then shut the whole freeway down for 2.5 days to take the old bridge out and move the new bridge into place, then open up traffic again while they finish the process. In total the freeway was only shut down for the weekend and they said that traffic should be able to cross the new bridge 10 days after they closed the old one. Pretty impressive if you ask me. I think I like this way better than the standard UT method. Some of you may be asking, "How do you move a bridge?" Well, I didn't think it could be done either but the new bridge is now in place. I wish we could have seen them actually move it. You can see in the pictures how big it is. It would be like watching a live version of "Mega Movers" on the Discovery Channel. We included a few pictures so you get an idea of what we were looking at. The first one shows you where they built the bridge on the side of the freeway. The second picture is of the new bridge already in place. You can see the red things holding up the bridge are the things they used to move it from where it was to where it is (notice the wheels on the bottom).

I've got to admit, when I heard they'd be moving the bridge this weekend I felt pretty dumb because I wanted to go sit on the hill near the freeway and watch them. What kind of person wants to sit and watch construction workers? I felt better about myself when I heard that several hundred people actually lined the sides of the freeway and watched when they moved the bridge. Then today when Becky was the one who said we should go see the bridge I felt completely justified in my curiousity.

My Nice Husband and family

I have to admit, I felt pretty spoiled last week on my birthday. Before the real day, I had already had a special birthday dinner at the Packers' and came home with some fun presents. The night before my birthday, Nate made me stay in my room, and when I went out into the living room the next morning he had decorated with balloons, a sign, and red roses. He bought me croissants and made me waffles for breakfast! We didn't have any wrapping paper, so he displayed his gifts for me wrapped in lovely ribbon :)

Yes, I know I look like a dork in the pictures. I'm not very good at posing by myself. After work, I found 27 notes (well, maybe I didn't find them all that day) left for me all over the house. I have to confess, Camille had to explain to me (I was on the phone with her when I got home) why there were 27 :) We went to dinner at the Garden on the top of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. Here are a couple of pictures, but they didn't turn out great - either we were blurry or the temple was dark - I'm attaching one of each.

On Friday night, we were down in Provo for a recruiting event at BYU with my work, and went over to get together with Jake and Stacey, Dave, Camille, and even Shane came out for my birthday (ok, the truth is he was in town for recruiting, but it was nice of him to come over :) We brought them pumpkins (thanks to the Packer family Pumpkin Patch!) and they brought a cake. Yum.

This was on top of multiple emails, phone calls, cards, and presents. I was definitely spoiled!! Thanks everyone!

Thanks Uncle Ernie!

Nate decided this week that he likes me being a manager at EY. We were lucky enough to enjoy some perks this week courtesy of "Uncle Ernie" (aka the Ernst of Ernst & Young).

The first perk came on Wednesday, when we had 10th row half-court seats to the Jazz came against the Milwaukee Bucks. It was pretty cool to sit that close - we actually watched the players instead of the big screen overhead. We were even close enough that Nate went down and talked to the players, giving them a little pep talk and some advice before the game. Unfortunately, it didn't work so well as the Jazz lost. But it was a fun game.

The second perk of the week was a promotion dinner for new managers and their spouses at La Caille on Friday. The partners in the office and their spouses were there too. Neither of us had been there before. The atmosphere is pretty neat. We knew it was going to be fancy when we walked in the door and they offered us ostrich hors d'oeuvres. I'm putting a picture of it below for those of you who haven't seen it. We had a little room on the top floor and our own taverness and server boy (the servers dress up in a French tavern style. Nate called the women's costume something else, but I figured I'd edit for him). We even had a nice view of the balcony out the back, where the occasional turkey, peacock, and other unidentified birds wandered by. We almost brought the turkey home for our Thanksgiving dinner - he was pretty big. I wasn't sure we could sneak him to our car without the valet guys noticing though. The flapping wings would probably give it away. The food was good too - we even got crepes for dessert, and they lit Nate's on fire. It was a fun night.

Oh, and by the way, February is getting closer!! We're all framed except the stairs (who needs those anyway?) - at least from our un-construction-educated perspective. We hope we get to keep the scrap pile in front for future projects.

General Conference with the Morris Family

Last weekend my parents and Jessica and Shane and Landon drove out for General Conference. We were fortunate enough to get tickets to the Saturday morning session for all 10 of us, which was a really neat experience - to be there with all of my family and to be so close when we sustained President Eyring and Elder Cook.

We all went to Red Robin for lunch in between sessions, then went to mom and dad's hotel to watch the afternoon session. It was a pretty comical sight with all 11 of us sharing 2 queen beds and two chairs to watch Conference. As you'll notice from the picture, laying on a bed isn't the position most conducive to staying awake during an afternoon session of General Conference, but I caught almost all of it.

The girls all went shopping while the boys went to the Priesthood session, then we played games at the hotel afterward. It was a really fun day - it would have been nice to have more time together, but we definitely enjoyed it while it lasted! Here's a picture of me trying to get Landon to go to sleep - I definitely wasn't successful since he found it quite entertaining to have me puff up my cheeks with air, then he would poke them with his finger to get me to blow the air out. I can't wait for our new nephew, niece and unknown gender niece/nephew to be born!

It was a fun, relaxing weekend. Nate didn't even ever put real shoes on on Sunday - we did get out of the house, but he wore his slippers up to his parents' house, where we watched Conference, went on a walk (it was a gorgeous fall day!) and ate yummy food.

Oh - another highlight of the weekend was that my mom found my cookbooks / recipe books that I had been missing since I moved to Utah in January. I'm pretty sure I had blamed everyone I could think of for their loss - former roommates, Jake, mom, etc. They turned up in my box of Christmas decorations - why didn't I think to look there? Totally logical. Sadly, I'm pretty sure I put them there myself, so I would like to issue a sincere apology to everyone I at one point implied had stolen them :)