A Weeks' Full of Fun

Hey all, responsibility for writing in the blog falls to me this week because Elissa is hanging out with book club people tonight. It's actually a busy week for us. Yesterday Elissa had visiting teaching, tonight she has book club, and tomorrow I have Elder's Quorum basketball which I half-volunteered-for/half-got-roped-into. I'm kind of excited -- it'll be the first organized sport I'll get to have a part in since I played volleyball with Lisa & Elliott at their church (yes, before I moved).

This last week was fun. We decided to go out and see the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. It was pretty fun, but as you'll probably guess there weren't too many flowers this time of year. The major draw (besides that it was free this month) was that we wanted to go somewhere interesting to take a walk together. Yep . . . we do get bored walking around our block sometimes. While we were up that way we paid a visit to The County Line (you knew I was

going to put food in here somewhere). For those of you who don't know, they're a Texas BBQ place with good food, and they make really good bread (I know, it doesn't sound that great, but you haven't tried their bread yet). Anyway, that is a picture of their awesome view.

We got to teach our Sunday School class about Agency this last lesson. It was nice to be able to focus on a really important gospel principle instead of trying to figure out how to make a lesson out of a bunch of stories from prophets (they are really cool stories sometimes -- it's just harder to keep focused on important things).

I can't think of anything else to mention about this week, so I guess that means we're done. Hope you enjoyed hearing about our week!

A New Year that Feels the Same

It is a new year, but Daniel and I are still doing the same old things. Funny how we emphasize the coming of the new year, but in reality, everything isn't that different once the clock strikes midnight. I suppose we are supposed to be looking at where we were when we last celebrated the changing of the new year. Because, I think for most people there is a difference. It is just funny because after all the hype and build up, nothing has really changed.

For us, the change from 2011 to 2012 was a small affair. We ended up watching the first 6 Harry Potter movies in 2 days. We made some almond bark popcorn to snack on New Years Eve, and we had a good time. The fireworks started early in the afternoon. I didn't see even one of them, but I heard them even while it was still light outside! It was a good evening, and we enjoyed our little New Years celebration.

Monday we got to spend the day at home for the "holiday." Daniel helped me clean up our house and put away our Christmas decorations. Basically our house was cleaner than it has been in a long time! It helped that we could put things back in our extra closet now that that tree was going back to the corner so that we could stack all of our other things back in! Also, I decided to check the dry vent (the one in the wall) to see if that is why my clothes were taking so long to dry. And, I was amazed to find lots and lots of fluffy dryer lint was living in our wall. I pulled out what I could, and it seems to have improved our dryers capabilities immensely.

Oh, and in case you all didn't already know this, Daniel and I have been reading the Harry Potter books together for the last few months, and last night, we finally finished reading the last one! I admit that I cried lots of times, mostly while I was supposed to be reading. Daniel was tough and didn't cry at all. Also points for Daniel, he didn't laugh at me while I was trying to read and cry at the same time. Which, I assume probably looked and sounded kind of ridiculous and would have been easy to laugh at.

All in all we've had a great week, and I hope that we (and all of you) have a splendid new year!

Dear Santa; Thanks for Finding us in Austin.

This last week was Christmas, and we had a lovely holiday. Don't worry, Santa still found us even though we moved to Texas. (I guess that means moving to Texas wasn't too naughty, right?) For Christmas Eve a family in our ward hosted a kind of "displaced for Christmas Eve" potluck dinner. We aren't exactly displaced, but we don't have any family here so we ended up stopping by. Lots of people came it was an overall fun time.

Sunday morning we went to church for an hour. We had one musical number, and interestingly, they decided to let who ever felt like it bear their testimony.  When we got home, we cooked our cinnamon rolls that Santa left Daniel. (Daniel was nice enough to share them with me.) Then we finished up opening our presents. Some of them were things we already opened, like our computer. We also got a nice gift from BYU, diplomas! We slipped those packages under the tree so that we could open them Christmas morning. We got some other things too. Thanks for all the Christmas gifts, the love, and the thoughtfulness.

Wednesday we decided that we wanted to try out a new restaurant, Maudie's, here in Austin. We had tried one thing from their airport location/ kiosk. It was really good there, and Daniel had also heard it was good from work. We stopped by, and we ended up getting happy hour specials (surprise!). That's right, fortunately, they were the kind of happy hour special where you don't need an I.D to order. We ended up choosing a tasty dip appetizer. Then we had a breakfast and a dinner taco each because we shared orders. (Splitting up entrees at the restaurant is one of the perks of being married as well as not guessing how much you should choose to spend on your plate. )

Anyway, the food was delicious. The restaurant wasn't super fancy on the outside, -- or on the inside for that matter -- but the food was delicious. I think our favorite dish was the breakfast burrito, but the dinner burritos and the dip were really good as well. That is our food review for the month. :P

Exciting Christmas Season

First off, we really didn't mean to skip a week on our blog. There's just been a lot going on. However, as promised we are including a couple of pictures of our decorated living room.

We finished up the Savior of the World performances from our last post. For some reason everyone at church liked to call me by my name and then "oh, I mean Nephi." I think they were probably just letting me know that they'd noticed it was me playing Nephi. I'm pretty sure more things happened between that and our trip but I can't remember what, so we'll move on to our trip.

Thursday we drove to the airport for our flight, got to our gate, and noticed that our flight's time had been moved back since the time we'd printed our boarding passes, so we got to spend a lot of time at the airport -- especially because the plane arrived even later than they'd been planning on. We were a little worried we'd miss our transfer even though they assured us it would be okay. They were right. We got to Utah and stayed the night in a hotel, which was probably one of the only parts of the trip that really felt like a 'vacation'. Then Elissa's parents came to get us and it got crazy:

We just had time to grab a bite to eat, head over to Cortney's hotel, pick up the photographer (Emily Pilmer of pilmerportraits.com) and head to the Bountiful Temple, where we had pictures taken before the ceremony. It was really cold but I suppose it was worth it. After that of course the wedding happened, and one large group picture was taken. Then we headed over to Bella's Mexican Grill for the wedding dinner. They had excellent fajitas (see, we even managed to get food in this entry). Finally we drove to Elissa's parents' house just in time to get in bed.

The next day was really busy as we worked tirelessly to turn her parents' house into a reception hall complete with a heated near-outdoors hot chocolate bar(and yes, it was really warm even with the only separation from the outdoors being plastic. I mostly worked on that with Elissa's dad, while she worked with her mom on basically everything else. I hear she dipped about a million candy canes in chocolate.

Sunday we headed to Orem and visited my family. We only got to visit until Tuesday morning butwe got to see everyone in my family that's in Utah. We had fun making fudge and sugar cookies to take to the neighbors an then saw a large Nativity play put on by the nieces and nephews. It was great to spend that time with family.

We haven't really done a lot out of the ordinary since the trip, so I think I'll call this post officially over.

Performing and Presents

This week has been really full of play stuff. We had practice Saturday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Our first show yesterday. One of the ladies had a camera and took lots of pictures (We are even in some so this blog will have pictures. ) This is us getting into our costumes on Saturday. Daniel is helping me. I wear this white robe thing the whole time. It is probably 5 inches too long so I try not to trip all the time.

Daniel gets to play Nephi, which is cool. He is hard to see in the back there, but if you look close you can see him in his cool Nephi costume. If you choose to, you can also see me on the right, but that is obviously less important.  It has been mostly fun to do this play, but sometimes it was hard to pay attention and smile for the whole time. It is a really awesome story of course.

We are going to perform tonight (Friday), and two times tomorrow. I will be glad to not put on any more stage makeup for a very long time, but it was fun to have something to do on Saturday's around here without having to plan things out.

This week we also got a few early Christmas presents. Daniel's computer died a while ago, and we decided that we had enough saved up that we could get a new computer! After a lot of thought and convincing we decided to get this cool Acer computer. It is smaller that our DVD player and it has a mouse pad that can toggle to be a little touch keyboard. So far we haven't had a lot of time to play with it, but so far it has been lots of fun! We decided to keep ours flat and not standing up like in the picture though.

 Daniel also had his "new" shoes basically fall apart a few weeks ago, so in our free time we have been going to shoe stores to find something for Daniel to wear to work. I just wanted to find something that wasn't another pair of gym shoes, Daniel wanted something comfortable, and we both didn't want to pay alot of money.  Monday we stopped by JC Penny, and after visiting two locations got a pair of these shoes. Daniel says they are really comfortable, and we got them on sale (which is what put them in our price range.) They I think the are a good looking work shoe. Hopefully they don't fall apart!

So, that was our week so far. Next week should be less eventful. Maybe soon we'll get the pictures off of our camera onto our new computer so that we can post our own pictures! Happy week to you all!

Christmas is Coming!

This week Daniel and I did some fun things. Tuesday we got to go help at the Bishop's storehouse again. It wasn't super busy, but it was fun to be able to help there anyway. We mostly helped stock the shelves in the front. The next day I was a little sore from the lifting and the squatting. It was like free exercise? Anyway, it took a couple of days for being sore to wear off.

Thursday Daniel and I started our advent calendar and count down to Christmas. So last night we set up our nativity set. It was pretty fun to get out the pieces and get them set up. It really made it feel real that Christmas is coming soon. We have finished up our Christmas shopping, and we are regularly getting packages in the mail box. (Which is always exciting for me!) We have also planned out fun things to do every night leading up to Christmas!

We also helped my friend do an interview for her class about being married. It was kind of fun to talk about how we feel about being married to each other. It was good to know that we had similar feelings about a lot of things related to marriage. (Which is probably good because we are married to each other)

Pizza and Pumpkin Pie

This week was Thanksgiving. It was a different Thanksgiving because Daniel and I have never done the Thanksgiving thing  on our own. We've always celebrated with family. Someone else was in charge of organizing who brought what for Dinner. Usually, we were in charge of helping some one more professional with a dish for the meal.

We decided that, instead of trying to make a 'traditional' Thanksgiving for two by ourselves, we would rather have pizza. We planned our menu and bought a frozen pizza for our Thanksgiving dinner. Because a 'traditional' thanksgiving meal is based on what is harvested in the North East in the fall, we decided we could pick whatever we wanted to eat. But, since we are American we couldn't have a Thanksgiving without something traditional so we made mini pumpkin pies. We decided that it would be best  They turned out to be tasty, but some of them didn't want to come out of the muffin tins we baked them in. All in all, we had a lovely meal!

We decided to skip all the Black Friday madness, but I did order Daniel a new white shirt online. That seemed safer than going out and physically fighting someone for stuff. I stayed safely at home for most of the day; we did go to the grocery store to get some things to eat this week. We also decided to run down to the temple for the 5:00 session. It was a longish drive, but it was a fun date for Daniel and me!