our poor, malnourished blog

so amber and i have decided that we want to treat our poor blog better. we so often do not give it the attention it desires from us and so richly deserves. the problem is that we lead... not "boring" by any means, but rather "steady" lives. nothing grand to speak of, other than being happier than i ever thought possible. but writing of that kind of stuff would only lead to mass jealousy from all of you guys. ;) so, in an effort to show our love more thoroughly to our beloved blog, we're going to try to write shorter blogs at more regular intervals. one thought we had was to write about our quest to complete our list spoken of a couple blogs back. you'll have to forgive us for not being english professors and most likely missing the deeper meaning of things, but i shall begin with our first summary.

brave new world - aldous huxley

stories about the future have always intrigued me. not because i'm a big science fiction nerd or anything (i'm a different kind of nerd), but because i think it's fun to imagine where we're going as a civilization. it's always fun to think of what future inventions we'll come up with. in this book, i particularly liked the idea of obstacle golf. it's about time someone made that game more exciting. :) anyways, the book was about a future society where genetic engineering and cloning are common practices. the book boils down to the choice between free agency, including the right to choose misery, or the right to be happy. truth versus ignorant bliss. i don't feel that the book said either was right or wrong, and i personally feel the best answer lies in the middle somewhere (but closer to the truth side of things). i found it to be a thought-provoking read and would recommend it to anyone interested. thank you and good day. :)

The Awesome Pitching Techniques of Amber and Scott

Recently my mom surprised us all and bought a wii. Scott and I were playing the wii sports baseball game and my sister captured these special moments on her phone...

Check out the intensity of those fast balls!

Future Cy Young winner!

:) enjoy

the easton press 100 greatest books ever written

i found this pamphlet a while back and have since made it my goal to read everyone of these books before i die, and since i'm married now, i figure i get to count the books my wife has read too. for some reason, twilight didn't make the list. weird. :) some are pretty well known, others i've never heard of. some are going to be real hard. wish us luck. we'll need it. but i thought it'd be fun to have the list so i can check them off as the years go by. (not in any particular order, just numbered for my sake)

1. twenty thousand leagues under the sea - jules verne (x)
2. the scarlet letter - nathaniel hawthorne
3. dr. jekyll and mr. hyde - robert louis stevenson
4. walden - henry david thoreau
5. gulliver's travels - jonathan swift
6. moby dick - herman melville
7. a farewell to arms - ernest hemingway
8. the red badge of courage - stephen crane
9. the jungle book - rudyard kipling
10. the odyssey - homer
11. the pilgrim's progress - john bunyan
12. a portrait of the artist as a young man - james joyce
13. paradise lost - john milton
14. tales from the arabian nights - richard burton
15. great expectations - charles dickens
16. candide - voltaire (x)
17. oedipus the king - sophocles
18. the hunchback of notre dame - victor hugo
19. the last of the mohicans - james fenimore cooper
20. the sea wolf - jack london
21. cyrano de bergerac - edmond rostand
22. the canterbury tales - geoffrey chaucer
23. collected poems - robert browning
24. the essays of ralph waldo emerson - ralph waldo emerson
25. the portrait of a lady - henry james
26. uncle tom's cabin - harriet beecher stowe
27. treasure island - robert louis stevenson (x)
28. adventures of sherlock holmes - sir arthur conan doyle
29. collected poems - john keats
30. on the origin of species - charles darwin
31. don quixote - miguel de cervantes saavedra
32. collected poems - robert frost
33. the legend of sleepy hallow and other stories - washington irving
34. animal farm - george orwell (x)
35. wuthering heights - emily bronte
36. she stoops to conquer - oliver goldsmith
37. of mice and men - john steinbeck (x)
38. pride and prejudice - jane austen (x)
39. the brothers karamazov - fyodor dostoevsky
40. les miserables - victor hugo
41. the iliad - homer (x)
42. lady chatterley's lover - d.h. lawrence
43. the count of monte cristo - alexandre dumas (x)
44. brave new world - aldous huxley
45. aesop's fables - aesop (x)
46. lord jim - joseph conrad
47. the autobiography of benjamin franklin - benjamin franklin
48. the three musketeers - alexandre dumas
49. politics and the poetics - aristotle
50. the aeneid - virgil
51. the cherry orchard and the three sisters - anton chekhov
52. the tragedies - william shakespeare
53. pygmalion and candida - george bernard shaw
54. the analects of confucius - confucius
55. the prince - niccolo machiavelli
56. jane eyre - charlotte bronte
57. the divine comedy - dante alighieri (x)
58. robinson crusoe - daniel defoe
59. madame bovary - gustave flaubert
60. collected poems - william butler yeats
61. the picture of dorian gray - oscar wilde (x)
62. vanity fair - william makepeace thackeray
63. the decameron - giovanni boccaccio
64. beowulf - anonymous
65. anna karenina - leo tolstoy
66. the necklace and other tales - guy de maupassant
67. the time machine - h.g. wells
68. fathers and sons - ivan turgenev
69. heart of darkness - joseph conrad
70. war and peace - leo tolstoy
71. the history of early rome - livy
72. little women - louisa may alcott (x)
73. the talisman - sir walter scott
74. tess of the d'urbervilles - thomas hardy
75. alice's adventures in wonderland - lewis carroll
76. dracula - bram stoker
77. the rubaiyat of omar khayyam - omar khayyam
78. the red and the black - stendhal
79. a tale of two cities - charles dickens (x)
80. the republic - plato
81. collected poems - emily dickinson
82. faust - johann wolfgang von goethe
83. the comedies - william shakespeare
84. tom jones - henry fielding
85. the federalist papers - alexander hamilton, james madison and john jay
86. silas marner - george eliot
87. the rights of man - thomas paine
88. leaves of grass - walt whitman
89. billy budd - herman melville
90. the confessions - st. augustine
91. tales of mystery and imagination - edgar allan poe
92. ivanhoe - sir walter scott
93. the way of all flesh - samuel butler
94. the sound and the fury - william faulkner
95. crime and punishment - fyodor dostoevsky
96. grimm's fairy tales - jacob and wilhelm grimm
97. adventures of huckleberry finn - mark twain
98. frankenstein - mary shelley
99. david copperfield - charles dickens
100. the histories - william shakespeare

13/100
man, so few x's. we have a long way to go. :)

Celebrating the beginning of Spring!

How did this happen you ask? Well, today Scott and I decided to go to the Hare Krishna Festival of Colors. Neither of us really knew what it was besides a huge colored powder throwing party. Our friends invited us to go and it sounded kinda fun so we checked it out. It was a fun, interesting experience...

This is the Hare Krishna temple in Spanish Fork. Doesn't it look like Aladdin's Palace? We've passed it many times and as we walked towards it today we saw all the people...the place was crowded!

This is a "before" picture for you. We were in line to buy our colored chalk. We got 3 bags of colored chalk to throw...purple, yellow, and green I believe.

This is the view from the Hare Krishna temple steps looking out at the crowd.

A "before" picture of the group

The chalk throwing began. (a little ealier than it was supposed to though)

The "after" picture of the group

As we walked away, the crowd was still throwing chalk, dancing, and having a blast.

The "after" picture of us.

So just a note, we had no idea what this all was, what it was for and why they did it every year but I looked it up online later today and found out we were celebrating the beginning of spring! This Festival of Colors represents the passing of winter into spring and all the colored chalk is thrown to signify the joy and colors of spring arriving! It was a lot of fun. Hopefully we'll be able to get all the chalk out of our ears, nose, and hair! :)

Winter hobbies

So this last Sunday evening Scott and I were at my parents and I saw the movie 'Charly' sitting on their shelf. I've seen this movie before, but it had been awhile so we asked to borrow it and took it home with us to watch. This is the movie based on the book by Jack Weyland. It's a really sad story about a couple who meet, fall in love, get married and then the wife dies from cancer. I'd seen it before a few times and have cried the first time I watched it, but after that I knew what happened so it wouldn't really make me cry again. Well I hadn't seen it in awhile, and Scott had never seen it so we decided to watch it just for something to do on a nice relaxing evening together inside. Well, the beginning was all fun and happy, but then the sad part came up. I couldn't hold it in, I was bawling! The tears were just streaming down my face, and Scott got teary eyed himself and kept pulling me closer like I was going to leave him. I guess it hit me so much stronger this time being newly married and watching it from that perspective. I know the movie is all about looking at the eternal perspective and realizing because they got married in the temple, they will be together again. The ride isn't over for them. I'm so grateful for that knowledge that we will be together forever, but it would be so hard to lose them for that time on earth! I hope that nothing like that ever happens to us, but it is nice to know we can look at the eternal perspective and find some comfort in the fact we will always be together.So on a more happier note... Scott and I are addicted to puzzles, Ticket to Ride, Scrabble, and apple crisp. Those are our hobbies as of late anyway, since we can't do much outside in the winter. :) We get caught up doing puzzles for hours before we can tear ourselves away. At the moment we are currently working on a 1000 piece photo mosaic of the world. It's a lot more difficult than I originally thought. We play Ticket to Ride every chance we get, usually at my parents house cuz they own it and we don't. We like to play Scrabble on facebook, and currently are trying to beat my mom by working together, because she's so good!! And we make apple crisp all the time. It's our favorite dessert as of late. It's so good and warm...mmm...I think I want some more tonight. :) he he.

we shall miss mount stinky

so the greatest thing ever happened.
we've been living in our small little apartment now for a good three and a half months now. crazy how the time flies. it's a cute little place. perfect for amber and i. not too small. not too big. two bedrooms. nice size kitchen and bathroom. best carpet in the complex - sorry jake and katie. :) we have thoroughly enjoyed making these four walls a home to call our own. but in spite of how just about perfect this little place was, it lacked one vital necessity - no washer and dryer! :( we just had an empty closet with washer/ dryer hook-ups that seemed to mock us.
a little too poor to go out shopping for our own brand new set, we started searching the newspaper and internet classified ads, looking for a deal. meanwhile, we took necessary clothes to family members' houses to do a load once in a while. but we took as little as we possibly could, not wanting to ask too much of our loved ones, so the dirty clothes began to pile up. i thought i was a goner once when the pile tipped over on top of me. i lived for two weeks on nothing but lint and some old gummie bears that i found in a pair of dirty pants until amber finally dug me out. :)
well, the blessed day has finally arrived and, as a gift from my sister becca, we finally have a washer and dryer filling our closet now. the poor things have had to work non-stop for the past couple days. never thought i'd enjoy doing laundry, but it feels so good to pull a clean load out and have stuff to wear again. amber had resorted to wearing christmas socks. :)
so maybe it's not "the greatest thing", but it's pretty darn close at this moment in our lives. well gotta go... the dryer just dinged.

The winding road Part 2

So Scott keeps telling me it's my turn to write something. The problem is, I really like this new blogging thing, but I can never think of anything to write about. So this is my first attempt. I'll tell you what happened since the girl in the story (I) said yes. :)

Wedding plans began. Thanks to Scott and my maid of honor, Breanna (both of which I think may be a little o.c.d., he he), our wedding was all layed out and planned after a few weeks. Scott had even drawn out a detailed layout of the reception, including keys on the piano and lights on the bushes. Breanna went with me to find the perfect dress and put together a binder which we labeled the 'wedding bible'. I love having organized friends. :). I'm also very grateful for all the family and friends that volunteered their talents to the wedding.

November 1st came sooner than we realized, but I couldn't have asked for a more beautiful day. The weather was warm and mostly sunny, but we had a nice layer of clouds which worked great for pictures later on. I woke up pretty early to get my hair done before breakfast. You never realize how much hair you actually have until someone has to curl all of it. It took forever!! We met up with close family and friends at Golden Corral for a relaxed buffet breakfast. It was delicious!

After breakfast, we all headed down to Manti, Utah. The temple was beautiful, and the sealing was wonderful. I can't describe the joy I felt that day. Everything was so amazing. I'm so grateful for the blessings of the temple and being sealed to Scott for time and all eternity.

We took pictures afterwards and you know how wedding photos always take longer than you expect? Ours lasted FOREVER. Scott was ready to leave an hour earlier and we both were anxious to be getting back to setting up our reception. So remember how organized we were? We had everything layed out on paper exactly how we wanted it, and we had everything we needed. The problem was nobody else knew the plans. We had plenty of helpers but nobody to tell them how to do it. Oops. So we finally got away from our photographer and hurried to the Salem Community Center, where we could direct and start setting up for our reception.

The reception was fun, I enjoyed seeing all the family and friends that were able to make it. We did a little dancing, a little talking, ate a little cake...well I mean cheesecake. Yes, I had a cheesecake wedding cake. What do you expect for someone who doesn't like cake? :) And when it was all over we left in Scott's Durango full of balloons that had been blown up and had little notes of love and advice put into them. It was over. What an exhausting but absolutely wonderful day it had been!
For our honeymoon, we took a fun little road trip down to Abilene, Texas. We made a few stops on the way though, at Zions National Park, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, Roswell, and the Carlsbad Caverns. We spent a couple days in Abilene, where Scott showed me the sights of where he used to live. We also had a second reception down there which his mom had all planned. On the way back from Texas we made a couple stops in Colorado to visit my siblings that hadn't made it to the wedding, before finally driving back home.

The last three months have flown by as we have settled down and started our lives again as a married couple. It started out pretty busy as we planned for the holidays, went to a few friends' weddings and then celebrated the new year. Thanksgiving was spent with Scott's family up in Ogden where we enjoyed eating lots of good food, and playing games. Our first Christmas was sweet and memorable. Scott worked the night before so I made sure I was awake when he got home and we enjoyed our own little Christmas morning just the two of us. Later Christmas day was spent mostly with my family for dinner and a few games and dessert, and then later up to his sister Becca's for some more fun.

We've kept busy since with new year resolutions and making our house a home. We love our apartment and are lucky to have our good friends move in just downstairs. Life keeps going and I'm continually reminded at how blessed I am. I'm so grateful for a husband that loves me and has all the patience in the world.

We'll keep you posted about all the events and little things that make us happy or sad or even those little things that just make us giggle :)