Our newest family member

So although we're still sad about the loss of Thelonius, we HAVE moved on. Yesterday Ryan and I made our first major purchase as a married couple. We bought this 2005 Honda Pilot and we got a GREAT deal on it! It had been rear-ended and so it has a rebuilt title, but the damage was so minimal and was completely fixed. It looks and runs like new (yes, we took it to a mechanic first who said that it's great) and it only has 32,000 miles. So we are now officially SUV owners...which does mean no props from our current president, but uh...ask me if I really care. Until the "Czar of Transportation" (aka the "Czar of try-to-force-everyone-to-drive-a-smartcar-or-a-hybrid) decrees SUV's illegal, this is what we'll be driving. And guess what? I'll be using it to go through the drive-thru at Wendy's too. Until drive-thru's are banned as well, that is, at which time I'll probably form a support group called MIDASDT - Mothers in Defense and Support of Drive Thru's. If you would like to join, just let me know. ;)

On another note, Happy 4th of July! I love this country. I love that I was born here and that I have all the rights that I have. I'm thankful every day for the freedoms that I enjoy here and I pray that we'll continue to be able to enjoy those freedoms always. Of course, as you might surmise from the sarcasm above, I do feel slightly nervous about our future. I find myself wondering all the time what the world will be like when my children are teenagers and adults. I wonder if they'll know the United States that we know now, or if it will be a completely different place. I hope they'll continue to be able to enjoy little things, like having a barbecue and going to see the fireworks on the Fourth of July. And I hope they will always have many reasons to be proud of their country. We live in a wonderful place and I hope to never take it for granted!

Car Trouble, Confusion, Conferences and a whole lot of COUGHING!

Ok, I have decided that I will never again say anything about ANYTHING before it's final EVER again. Remember how my last post was about how nice it is when things just "fall into place"? Weeell let's just say that things fell out all over the place right after I posted that.

Ryan and I have both owned Honda Civics for the last few years and have really liked them. They're great cars! Very dependable, good quality, etc, etc. Well, this year our cars decided to play a little game with us called "Let's Take Turns Getting Sick." So at the end of last year Ryan's car needed some very minor repairs. No big deal, his muffler just FELL OFF on one end as we're driving through Park City. Ok, fine, not a huge problem. We both use my car until it's done, end of story. Except THEN my car decided that it would be fun if her passenger window got stuck in the down position in the middle of winter. We didn't have the money to fix that one right away so Ryan custom-built a "Vote For Jim Matheson" window replacement. I mean, not that I don't LIKE feeling like white trash driving down the road, but it was a LITTLE hard to see through. Besides the fact that it was after the elections were over so it's not as if we looked like die-hard Jim Matheson supporters. No, we really just looked like white trash (for the second time that year if you count the muffler-dragging episode).

So we finally get that fixed somehow and we have two working cars again...for all of about one week. Thelonius (Ryan's car) remembers that it's his turn and decides to do something a little more exciting. The transmission...and about a zillion other little things. We almost decide to just part with him rather than spend all the money it will take to get him back in working order, but then we decide, "Aw heck, let's just fix him. We'll get another couple good years out of him and avoid a car payment." So, we do that. He's fixed. Two working cars again. For two weeks.

I bet you know who's got problems now! That's right! Little Goldilocks! Everything's good and then one Sunday after having already gone and come home from church in her, I go back outside to go to a meeting...and the car won't start. But it DOES start beeping and all the blinkers and tailights start blinking. Well, turns out, there was an alarm installed in the car before we got it, but it wasn't activated, nor did we have a control for it, it was just there. Well it picked this particular day to think I was breaking in (seriously? I mean did I like SMELL different or something?) and didn't let me start the car. And it messed up a bunch of other electrical stuff and killed the battery. AHHHHH!!!!!

Lucky for us, a friend of a friend that happened to come to our house that day was able to fix it a couple days later at very little cost. YAY! And things started to look up! That woman popped up out of no where when we needed someone to buy our contract, we got everything moved and got settled smoothly.

Two days after we moved, I'm headed up the canyon to go to a doctor's appointment and wrap some other stuff up. I'm in Ryan's car (yes, it is his turn at this point, but I thought the game was over!). Rattling noise...starts softly and then gets louder and the car starts shaking and I barely have time to pull over before it dies completely. Stranded at mile marker 173. Wonderful. After being rescued by AAA and my aunt I finally get into Park City (after having missed my appointment completely) and I get a phone call from the management company saying that this lady can no longer move in. Again...just wonderful.

Two days later we find out that the engine in Ryan's car has blown up. The mechanic tells me he'll buy the car from me for $200. Instead I opted to sell it on KSL and got $650. So, Thelonius now belongs to a man from Armenia. Happy trails Thelonius.

On another note, I went to the Writing and Illustrating for Young Reader Conference at BYU last week and it was awesome!! Every morning we met in small groups of 13 (and with and author) to read each other's manuscripts and give feedback. I had a wonderful group and our author was Lael Littke who is just amazing! She looks like Ryan's Grandma Pat. She's written and published 43 books and is still going. Besides getting great feedback about my own book, I learned so much about the publishing process and what it takes to really be successful as a writer. I feel completely driven now to do what I need to do to make this book great and try to get it out there! I've also been able to expand more on the ideas I already had for my second book, which is going to be completely different from my first one. So, it was definitely a successful week and really worth it.

But...this week I have the flu. Go figure.

Moving Stinks

So here we are. It's Monday morning and I no longer live in Park City. Yesterday we went to our branch for the last time and got released, which made me cry more than I expected to. Then we had to speak, and I cried some more. So silly! It's not like we moved to a different state! Changes just make me sad. Well, sad, disappointed and worried...but also happy, giddy and excited to see what's going to happen next. It's just a roller coaster.

What was amazing is that we found someone to rent our place so quickly. We still had 3 months left on our contract but felt we should leave now. I had tried to get a hold of the management company since the beginning of May to know what we should do and NO ONE called me back until like 2 days before we were going to be moving. Of course the nice woman told me we would have to continue to pay rent until we found someone to take over (even though they didn't keep up THEIR end of our contract in SO many ways...but that's a story for another day). So I freaked out for a day and then posted it on KSL. The next day I got a call from a woman who was interested. She came to see it that day, and wanted to move in the second we moved out. AWESOME! It just made me that more convinced that this is what we should be doing right now.

We are currently living in my grandma's basement while we're looking for a home just for us! So we have stuff here, and at Ry's grandma's and today the rest goes in a storage unit. I hope we find a place we can stay in for at least 10 years because after we move all the stuff in, Ryan will probably refuse to ever take it all out again. I'll have to negotiate the 10 years. Thanks to everyone who helped us so much this last week!

My Last Twenty

This weekend we celebrated my twenty-ninth birthday. Yep. Twenty-nine it is.

Megs treated me to a quick trip to the Great White (and Aggie Blue) North that was looking quite green this time of year. I love Logan. I think it's a great city. I don't think it needs two WalMarts, but they didn't ask my opinion. I digress.

We did lunch at Pita Pit before playing with Ty in the park for a couple of hours.





We went out to eat at Cafe Sabor (which recently closed its Park City location and opened another on Bear Lake). I know it's not the most authentic Mexican food you can get, but I enjoy eating there quite a bit. It's tough for me to visit Logan and not eat there. I had a great pollo con crema, Megs had the taquitos, and Tyler ate some of both. The addition of horchata to the menu was long overdue, and we liked it. I think Ty expected it to be milk, so it wasn't his favorite.

We took Ty swimming at the hotel. It took him a bit to get used to, but he was jumping off the edge once he got used to the water. One time he was playing on the stairs into the pool, and he decided to slide down to the next stair. He does the same thing at home, so I don't think he realized that the water wouldn't just move out of his way. Instead he slid down to the second stair and got a mouthful of water. Lesson learned. No more sliding down the stairs in a pool.

Saturday morning the three of us went to the Logan River Golf Course to hit a bucket of balls. I hadn't brought my clubs, so I borrowed a few from the aptly named clubhouse. For the most part, Ty enjoyed running around on the grass behind the practice tees. I thought for sure that he was going to run out to the range to grab all the balls, but he was content to play with the ones in my bucket. He and Megs both got a few swings in, as well. It didn't take long for me to remember that I still have not gotten better in twenty years of golfing. Like we saw with my skiing with Heidi Voelker and Picabo Street, it doesn't really matter who tries to help me. Sometimes you're just not going to be really good at the things you like to do. Not that I'm giving up. I love both golfing and skiing, and I'll keep learning as I go.

We also took a quick trip to Bear Lake for some raspberry shakes and a walk on the shore--the shore of a freshly melted iceberg! There were a lot more people than I expected, but it was still a lot of fun. It's funny that I live just off the shore of one lake (the Jordanelle) but I travel two hours away to visit one that I can't even get in right now. Such is life, I suppose. If the Jordanelle had a place to drive right onto the shore, I'd probably do so. It doesn't, so I can't. Aside from the great shakes we got, Megs also claims to have found the best french fries in the world. Tyler didn't care much for them. He was more interested in throwing (and eating) rocks.






Short as it was, we had a really good time. It was nice to have a staycation for my birthday. Thanks, love.

After coming back from Logan, we did cake and ice cream at my mom's. It was fun to have both sides of the family together even though we missed having Kel and Jodi's families there. Megs continued to hone her skills as a cake artist. This time she paid homage to my favorite candy bar. Nice job, sweetie. It was mmm, delicious.
Now that the birthday fun is over, anyone want to help us move on Saturday? Bountiful, here we come...

MegRy 2.0

Yesterday we had our ultrasound and found out that we're having a Gaby, not a Ben! We would have been excited either way, but I am definitely super happy that Ty's going to have a little sister! The doctor said she looks great and she's growing right on schedule to be born October 9th. I'm crossing my fingers that she'll be smaller than her brother was when he was born, but she's actually bigger than he was at this point. Great. I don't know that I could physically DO a ten-pounder. Eight pounds was hard enough to recover from! Come on Gaby, think SEVEN! We like that number!