One (Fairly) Busy Week

It was just another week here in Austin at the Larsen house. We did to lots of church related activities though! Friday was our ward visiting teaching conference. We had delicious fajitas, and I felt so spiritually uplifted and motivated to do better as a visiting teacher and as a person in general. We also had a silent service auction based on points earned mostly through by identifying sisters from the ward by interesting facts about them. There were over 200 women on the list. I learned that we have smart, talented, amazing women in our ward! And the things that were provided for the auction were creative as well as showing the skills of the women in the ward. 

Daniel participated in the priesthood MAP activity. They asked the elders to go and find those members that are recorded by the church but that haven't been active in the ward. Generally where the ward is not sure whether you are just not coming to church or if you have moved to a new location. Daniel did have a few doors closed in his face, but at least one person was really nice and stopped to talk with him. As a reward, we got to go to a new and fancy restaurant. Daniel tried their salmon, and I had their steak. (along with salads, appetizers and desserts) We even ended up drinking water from fancy glass bottles. It was a fun evening.

Sunday we had a pretty standard meeting schedule, but we did get moved into a new classroom for our Sunday school class. This room is bigger, is not right next to all the adults in the ward AND it even has windows. What an upgrade! Unfortunately, the students in our class don't do well with change. They had a hard time settling down and getting ready to learn. I just have to remind myself that we all have those same instincts, but we've just learned to behave more maturely in certain situations. (It doesn't mean that we all aren't secretly like 12 year olds at heart!)

Today, I even had book club. We read Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.  We had a really good time talking about the book, and all agreeing that we don't quite understand why the character would behave in the manner they did, but that the story was very well executed in style. We did wonder why all the Bronte sisters wrote about angry/scary men. Conclusion: we have no idea! Anyway, it was a fun night!

  

Learning How to Make Trash into Treasure

This week Daniel didn't have a lot of plans of things to do, BUT the one thing we did have planned was to go to a one hour class on composting put on by the city of Austin. If we had a house, we could now get a voucher for 75% of the purchase up to $75 off of a composter, but where we rent, we aren't really eligible for the deal.  We did get a little kitchen compost collector to take home though! The City is putting on this class to get to their zero waste goal. They want to not send anything to the landfill. So they are doing lots of recycling, and composting helps reduce the waste that they have to process.

Even though we aren't getting the  money, the class was really informative about the basics of composting. I learned all about the difference between greens and browns. I also learned that you never compost meat products! (Who knew? Not me!) The best tip that I think we got was to reduce the risk of making your kitchen smelly, to store the kitchen keeper in the freezer or refrigerator. It seemed like good information to know because compost can make great mulch and is good for putting on gardens. 

All in all, the lady who gave the presentation did a good job making it fun and informative, but Daniel and I agreed that it seemed like it was part lecture and part interpretive dance. It was a fun and different home evening for us because usually we just stay home for our FHE nights. We found out later that she went to Daniel's work earlier in the day to give the same presentation, but I was glad that I got to go with Daniel to the talk for some family home evening!

There isn't much else to tell about this week. No exciting news. We haven't really gotten closer to house hunting stuff or anything. So, basically and average week!

Arrrh! Let Ye Engineer Things

This week I learned that apparently engineers should be like pirates. NI does this cool thing with its R&D employees where it has all of them take a couple of days off engineering to attend presentations put on by fellow employees. I have just attended the first day's worth of presentations. Every hour there were about a half-dozen choices. I attended classes talking about topics ranging from particle physics (talking about our alleged discovery of neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light) to high-level FPGA design using LabVIEW, and of course, how engineers should be like pirates (we need to use things other people have and know where to get them -- but we're not supposed to actually steal them). Anyway, that was pretty fun.

This last week was my birthday. Lots of people had some good birthday wishes and Elissa made me cinnamon rolls (though she would be very upset with me if I didn't say they were frozen cinnamon rolls and not from scratch). On the day of my birthday we didn't really do anything terribly interesting (I mean, I got to talk to my Mom, Elissa's parents, and some others, but we didn't leave the apartment). On Saturday we drove up to the temple and had some Red Robin, then later that night we got a Redbox movie and had some Bluebell ice cream (which is as close as we can get down here to BYU Creamery ice cream).

Sunday was kind of different -- I've never had an Easter service only be 1 hr, but ours was, because there were fumes in the building from refinishing the gym floor. Elissa had to give a talk (and she did a good job, but will deny it if you ask), and the choir did a couple of numbers, but we didn't have to teach our class.

I'm not sure I can think of anything else out of the ordinary that happened this last week, so hope you enjoyed the post!

"It's Not Even a Thing"

This week has been another regular week for us, but I'll try and tell you about the exciting parts! One of the first things that is exciting about this week is that I bought my first grown up purse. Yes, amazing and hard to believe as it sounds I've never had a real, grown up purse before. I just went to college where I always had my backpack, before that I was in school and I had a wallet to hold my things. Upon graduation I won a canvas BYU bag that I have been using as a purse since we moved here. What is worse is that I've been to the store several times looking at bags trying to find one I liked. Several came close, but I chickened out and decided that I wouldn't buy them because I wasn't sure that they were the perfect bag.  (Yes, I am that crazy about my purchases)

So, my bag is basically the one on the left, except it is white, and the top handles are longer. (It doesn't have the side handles at all). I bought it with the reassurance that "I'd leave the tags on it and then if I hated it in the morning, I would take it back." Well, unbeknownst to me the register lady took the tag off (or it fell off while I was in the car on the way home). So, I'm glad that I still like it this morning, or I would be stuck with a bag I didn't like! No one likes that Buyer's Remorse!

Daniel decided to give blood today. I think it went pretty well, but he has a red spot where they stuck him, but he is bruise free. He says they were pretty sure he was going to pass out. Apparently "He didn't look so good." (I tend to disagree, I always think he looks good :P ) He even got a t-shirt that says "Save a Tree, Save a Whale, Save a Life. (Prioritize. Give blood)" It made me laugh a little. Hopefully none of you are out there thinking "but whales and trees are people too!"  Apparently, I feel the opposite about things because as Daniel and I were driving to church he pointed out to me that someone had hit a little traffic cone with their car. Then I promptly replied, "Don't worry about it. It's not even a Thing." Which I tried to clear up by saying a few seconds too late "that matters." It was too late and we were soon laughing about how not only was it not "a people too," it wasn't even "a Thing."