Greetings from Georgia!

Well, we are here! After 4 days of driving, and lots of Diet Coke. We are here and not homeless. The boxes are almost all empty and we are only missing a handful of stuff. Somehow we lost all of our silverware, and some misc kitchen stuff. The odd thing is both Brian and I remember packing them and what the box looked like but it's gone. So odd...but moving on. Our house set up. Brian is STILL in in-processing. Which is actually nice cause it means most days he's home by 3:00. I am all set up to sub but have to wait until I can go to the training on the 12th. Both Molly and Rex made it here. Molly has adopted the love sac as her new dog bed, spoiled dog. :-) we are adjusting to life in the south. It's been awhile since I lived somewhere where the cashiers like to comment on what you buy, the weather, really anything. It's humid and has rained every day since we got here. My hair is not happy. After almost 10 years in the land of blonde haired, blue eyed, tiny girls. I feel very white and very small. I swear the girls are taller here. The water is nasty I swear the use bleach to treat it. This also means finding good diet coke is hard, McDonalds does not have dollar drinks. BUT the gas station down the street has 59 cent drinks and it's good diet coke! Hardwood laminate gets dirty and dusty way to fast. I dust mop 2x a day and swifter wet jet every other day. However, the laminate is excellent for sliding down the hall in my socks and begs to be danced on constantly. Church is close by, our ward is full of people our age with lots of little kids. Overall, we are having a good time. It's a 4 day weekend so we may go to the beach or into Savannah. Do some exploring. Someone needs to eat a Costa Vida salad for me, and jamba juice and a Rumbi rice bowl!

Life in General

Lets see a quick recap of life:
June: 

• Brian's 30 year old knee decides running sand dunes in FL is not acceptable- He gets reclassed to a new job no more diver :-( It was very depressing couple of days. 13B-Big Cannon Crew Member here we come
• Finish school, move a whole lot of stuff into our storage unit. 
• Parents leave for Samoa: Day 1 of them being gone does not go well
• Brian goes to Fort Sill Oklahoma for training 5 weeks 3 days. We are very lucky he got to start his new training so quickly. He now should get 10 days off after graduation on Aug 10th. Wahoo! 

July: 

• I attempt to keep the house clean while my parents are away. I vacuum, I do dishes, and then do it again. 
• I go to Provo to get my brother who missed the bus the night before and crashed with some kids he met a few weeks ago at orientation. 
• We celebrate the 4th of July! My favorite holiday. We manage to uphold all family traditions such as BBQ, 1776, and even fireworks. We may have done fireworks at 11:30 at night and had my mother been here she would have had heart attack. BUT no one died or got burned and we had a bucket of water. I also went to the Real Salt Lake Game with Alli, the game was frustrating but we got a pretty good fireworks show afterwards. 
• We have a sibling outing and get ice cream. Then we go home and decide to finish 1776 except we didn't start it until 11:00. None of us saw the whole movie. 
• 7:30 this morning Molly wakes me up insisting to go out. While stumbling back downstairs to go back to bed, I am stopped by Provo bound brother who has missed the bus and needs to go to his 9:00 o'clock class. Sigh, I take him. 

I'm deciding the whole domestic, housekeeper, soccer mom is not a good idea. I don't cook (I burned frozen pizza last night), the cleaning is not happening, and I hate driving.

Birthday Fun

There was fun to be had! Before I start with the actual day of birthday fun, we need to back up to earlier in the week. About Monday my mom started asking me what we were doing for my birthday, then my friend Lindsay started asking me what fun things we were doing. Well, I was not in the mood for birthday fun. It was one of those weeks where I had a lot to do and no motivation to do it. Wednesday hit and I was bummed that Brian was gone and would be missing my birthday. I am not sure why it made me so grumpy, usually we just go to dinner or something its not like its a huge grand event but I was grumpy. I convinced my mom that we should do a combined Mother's Day, her birthday and my birthday on Sunday. Lindsay continued to ask me what we were going to do and I kept telling her I didn't know.  I was mostly planning on sitting around the house doing nothing on Friday. Thursday night I relented and made my mom a list of things I wanted for my birthday (strawberries, ice cream, diet coke, clothes, and a camelbac). Well, being the awesome friend she is Lindsay refused to give up. On Friday I got a text asking what we were doing, she even invited me along to her hubby's birthday dinner with the whole family that night (his birthday was on Wednesday). I was feeling less grumpy on Friday and decided I was going to buy myself a birthday outfit, I enlisted Lindsay's help. We went to lunch and to the mall. It was a good thing she was there cause the birthday outfit turned out much better with her help. I also got my parents and brothers to do Burger Friday at Red Robin..yum cause its my favorite. Fast Forward to Sunday: A yummy meal with real mashed potatoes and peas, family, presents, a strawberry flavored, flower shaped cake, and presents. It turned out to be a great birthday, and in a week I get to see Brian and get Chuck Season 5 as one last present :-)

                                                                My birthday outfit.

                                                             My camelbac...yes I know I have a weird creepy face in this picture. My mom who is taking the picture made an inappropriate comment that caught me off guard. :-)

Update

My sister reminded me that I need to be updating the world on my life. Keep in mind that half of the people who may even read this live in the same house as me and another fourth I see regularly. However, that will be changing in a few months so I am going to try and get back in the habit of blogging. A quick recap of what is going on in our life:
1: Brian passed phase 1 of dive training. Out of 15 who started in his class he is one of 3. It took lots of prayers to get him through the 3 week training with both of his ears injured, but he made it :-)
2: Now he sits around until June 10th when he will go to Florida for Phase 2.
3: I got a 2nd job. I will work nights through June and then whenever during July and Aug. It's at a new Mexican restaurant on State Street called Los Cucos. We'll see if I am capable of waiting tables.
4: Went to Houston for a week to watch Uncle Tom and Aunt Anna's kids. It was great weather and a good week.
5: At the end of Aug. I will move to Florida to be with Brian. We will be there until December. He has been told to plan on Hawaii as our FDS. Anyone is welcome to visit in either Florida or Hawaii :-)

Now family and friends there has been much discuss as to what my next step should be in terms of education. Options that we have discussed
1: Masters in Education
2: Masters in Social Work
3: Work at McDonalds
4: Continue to teach once I get to Hawaii
Suggestions? Input? Ideas?
My true dream is to be Supreme Dictator of the World, since apparently I'm bossy.  But they don't offer degrees in that. So I need a plan B

Pictures...

I absolutely love pictures. I grew up in a family that took a lot of pictures and we have photo albums for each year, some years have 2 albums. I tend to think that most "stuff" I don't really need. I'm not a collector or a keeper of anything. I take a picture and keep that. My poor husband I would put pictures up everywhere. So for all of my love of pictures, I am a horrible picture taker. I never remember to take pictures of anything. I'm usually pretty good about holiday traditions like carving pumpkins and dying Easter eggs. But I want pictures for every adventure and fun thing in life. Brian usually takes pictures of the two of us at sporting events, (cause we went to a lot last year). I've noticed even more so how bad I am at taking pictures since Brian has been at BCT. I always want to send him pictures but I don't ever have any to send him. I went to Cedar City last week and kept saying I am going to take pictures while I'm down there and didn't take a single one. Sigh. I think part of it is I always just take pictures on my phone, but since I'm not carrying a camera around with me, I don't remember to take pictures. I guess I could go find our super old digital camera in the storage unit. I hope I don't get Alzheimers in my old age cause I would only get to remember carving pumpkins, dying eggs, and Real Soccer games.

Growing up...

Remember when you were little and all you wanted to be was big? It all seemed so exciting and wonderful. I don't want to go back to being little but I do sometimes wish I would have been little a while longer while I had the chance. What do we do as grown ups that make our lives so glamorous to little ones? Do they really not see all the crap that we deal with? Do we really shelter them from the "real world" that much? Don't they see the car break down, the house become a mess, us lose our tempers, have a bad hair day, fight with loved ones, get sick and still have to work? Or maybe it's not that they don't see it but they have the better perspective. Really, I remember "bill paying day" it happened once a month and we were supposed to leave Mom alone. But maybe through 10 year old eyes 1 day in 30 doesn't make life suck. It didn't take away my burning desire to grow up. I remember my parents arguing (not very often) but I also saw them dance in the kitchen, go out on dates, hold hands, and kiss. Through the eyes of a 10 year old arguments didn't define a day or a month or a life. Grown ups were like superheros, rock stars.
SOOOOO maybe should put on our 10 year old eyes the next time we have a life sucks and then you die day. Maybe we should remember how badly we wanted this and love all the perks. Maybe we should cut ourselves some 10 year old slack and not get hung up on the little stuff. And maybe we should fight for 10 year olds to stay 10 as long as possible to help us all keep some perspective.

An Early Morning...

I've decided that no day should start with a 4:45 wake up call. But that is in fact how my day started! Brian reported to MEPS this morning to ship to Basic Training. Yesterday, I got to take the day off of work and we just hung out. They put all the new recruits in a hotel last night and then they bus them to MEPS and then the airport. I got a room at the hotel, and when we got there the front desk said they would just assign Brian to my room rather than another room and a roommate. It was nice, except that Brian didn't sleep last night and at 4:15, I started waking up every 5 min paranoid that we would sleep through the wake up call or that it wouldn't happen. So we are now both very tired but it was worth it to get to hang out last night. 10 weeks, 70 days, 1680 hours. I put the official count down on my phone :-). We are excited to have started this next adventure. I'll keep the blogging world posted.