Catch Up

We had a great year but we are excited to say goodbye to 2012 because we can now say we will graduate this year! We will both be graduating in JULY! We can't wait!

As for the rest of our lives, Denton has a busy semester ahead of him. He will continue to work at his internship, while taking a online class, doing a senior project, and applying for a "real" job. The cities we are really looking at are Boise, Denver, Seattle, and Portland though I really hope we end up in Boise :) 

As for me, I am so thankful the school changed their policy about not allowing off-track students to work on campus because I can keep my tutoring job during my off-track. I love being a math tutor. It has been the best job I have ever had. I feel like I am making a difference in people's lives and get to help them reach their goals. Along with tutoring, I have a substitute job lined up through a school in Idaho Falls. I am hoping I can substitute a lot so I can keep busy. I am also taking two online classes which are already keeping me busy.

That is pretty much it. No babies to announce :)

I know we are already 26 days into the new year but here are some of my favorite moments of 2012

Going to the Bighorns

Seeing my family

Seeing Denton's Family

Finding a snow dragon

Going to Yellowstone

Camping

Buying our first (not from my parents) car together 

Celebrating 1 year!

Drive-in movies

Bike rides

Meeting Aleah for the first time

Going to Washington coast

Life

So just a update on our lives right now...

We just finished our sixth semester here at BYU-Idaho and are getting closer to graduating! We will both graduate in December of next year. We can't wait! 

Right now is our seven-week summer break and we are both working as much as we can. I have been working Melaleuca for about six months now and have really enjoyed it. It gets stressful at times but most nights is slow and fun :) I really like the people I work with and the environment is great! 

Denton has continued his internship job and while he really likes the people he works with, he is getting bored haha. He started off as a web programmer but then the company created a new department and all of the interns got put in it. It is testing which is exactly what he didn't want to do. He says that it is too easy so we have been looking for a more challenging job/internship. He got a offer for a internship where he would build their database from the ground up which would have been perfect for him! But it was unpaid so we had to turn it down :(

These are some pictures from a hike we went on

That is about everything going on in our lives!

Our Saturday Night

    Last Saturday, I was in a weird camping mood. Since it is incredibly cold outside, I decided to bring camping indoors. When my family would go camping, we always had tin foil dinners. So I told Denton we should build a fort, make tin foil dinners, and roast marshmallows. He was pretty excited for it. We had gotten a bountiful basket earlier that day so we had tons of vegetables. So we went and bought some meat and used our vegetables and I made the tin foil dinners. It was my first time making them AND cooking them in a stove but they turned out AMAZING! We also roasted marshmallows but forgot to take pictures. Unfortunately, we never got around to building the blanket fort because we were in the middle of season 6 of 24. If you have seen it, you know how addicting it is!! We couldn't pull ourselves away! But it was still quite a fun evening!!

Worst Bloggers EVER!!

      Pretty much I stink at updating this blog. Every time I think about updating it, I am either busy or away from a computer. So the last few months have been especially stressful but we have been extremely blessed as well. In September, we started our fifth semester here at BYUI. Denton was taking 17 credits, which every one in his department thinks he is crazy for doing. Most people in his department take 14 credits or less. I figured out that Denton would be graduating a semester before me if he kept taking 17 credits so we decided to have him take 12-14 credits for the rest of his semesters so that he won't be so stressed out and so he could also get a job!
     That has been our main focus this semester besides school. We are both off-track during the Winter semester so we both needed jobs because we will basically be out of money by January. So at the beginning of October, our school had a career fair and Denton signed up for interviews for internships with two companies. One was with the Church headquarters. He had his interview and the guy seemed to really like him. Denton seemed to think that he would have a pretty good chance of getting it. They told him they would let him know in about two weeks. ONE month later we still hadn't heard anything. Denton called them and they said they still hadn't decided. So another month went by and we still hadn't heard. So Denton called them again and they said all the positions were full. We were pretty mad. Not because we didn't get it but because they never let us know that we didn't get it. The other internship was a company in Boise. Secretly, I really wanted Denton to get the internship there because I would love to live in Boise, if only for a few months. So he had an interview with them during the career fair and then they asked to have a second phone interview about two weeks later. I was pretty excited but I could tell that Denton didn't really want to work there but I kept hoping. So after a month, we hadn't heard anything. We were pretty frustrated because no one was getting back with us. Denton emailed them and to this day we haven't heard anything back from them. Oh well.
     But wait there is good news!!! So on the Sunday two weeks before Christmas, Denton was especially frustrated. He applied for a internship in Idaho Falls that he wasn't exactly qualified for but decided to try anyways. On Monday got a call from them asking for him to interview. We were pretty excited but tried not to get our hopes up too much. He went to his interview and he said it went really well. The people said that they would get back to him soon. On Friday they called and told him he got the job!!!! He only can work 27 hours a week but that will still pay for rent, food, phone, gas, and hopefully some into savings!! We were really excited!!! We aren't getting our hopes up to high but he says that it sounds like he will be able to work there after his internship is finished. He started work last week and while he has a lot to learn, he says he really likes it. He is also looking for another part-time job and I am also looking for a full-time job. Lets just say the job market in Rexburg is less than ideal but I am sure I will find one soon.
     We have been truly blessed this last semester. I was pretty sure that we would not be able to pay rent for January and I didn't know what we were going to do but some how money didn't seem to disappear as fast as it used to. We also have been truly blessed through our family members. I don't know where we would be without them. I know that God is truly looking out for us.
      Denton and I decided that even though we weren't going to be in Rexburg for Christmas, we should get our own Christmas tree. We decided to go cut down our own. So we bought a permit and headed up to the mountains. All the trees that we saw were either really big or didn't have a lot of branches so we found the best one that we could. It kind of looked like a Charlie Brown Christmas tree but we took it home and decorated it! We had a lot of fun getting into the Christmas Spirit.

      For Christmas, we went to Boise to spend it with my family. We had a wonderful time! All of my aunts and uncles were able to come which hasn't happened in awhile. Denton was able to talk with his family and especially his brother, who is on a mission.

 Here are some pictures from the rest of our semester:

We love playing Rummikub! I always win :)

 I made special meat!

 We drove with Whitney, Lola, and Erica to Boise!

I got a new hair cut!

That is pretty much an update of our lives!

Five months and loving it!!

Old yellow oven and gross yellow sink

So I figured I should be like everyone else and start our own blog. Maybe I will be better at it than I tend to be about writing in my journal. Anyways we have been married just over five months and have loved every minute of it!! Well almost every minute...the first place we moved into was a mobile home that was built before the dinosaurs ever roamed the earth and had never been updated. Let's just say I had a few melt downs on how disgusted I was with the place. The guy who lived there before us smoked and we could never get the smell out. The bathtub, oven, and sinks were a nasty color of yellow and were impossible to clean. We also had no carpet in our room, all there was in our room was some nasty looking linoleum that never looked clean and the little piece of carpet we did have on the living room was so gross, I couldn't walk on it without socks. Let's just say we both couldn't wait to move. After months of checking the bulletin board everyday, we found the cutest, cleanest little basement that was about $100 cheaper then our current place. We couldn't wait to move in!!! But we had to wait almost two months to move in :( the owners were completely remodeling it and wouldn't be done until September 1st. As it is now September 4th we have moved into our new place and love it!!! We had to get rid of a lot of stuff but it feels good to dejunk our lives a bit. It feels so good to be able to walk on clean carpet again, I could sleep on it and not be disgusted :)

A small but CLEAN kitchen

Clean carpet!! This new place definitely feels more like home

So about a month after we got married we started our fourth semester here at BYUI and it was a tough one! Denton was taking one of the hardest classes available at byui. He probably would have failed it if we had been engaged, luckily we weren't. He spent hours doing homework for that class everyday. At the beginning of the semester he worked for the school as a janitor. He had to wake up every morning at 3:30 and work until 7. Because sometimes he would up until midnight, he was having a hard time staying awake in class, so about a month in we decided that we didn't need the money right now so we decided to have him quit. Good thing he did because he was able to do much better in the class and now has a tutoring job lined up, where he will tutor the students currently in thatclass. Which is a huge blessing because the class is a database class and that is exactly what he wants to do as a career, so it is a double bonus; money and experience. As for me, this was a relatively easy semester, I ended up with four A's and two A-'s which is my best semester so far! Apparently being married was all I needed to getting my grades up.
Our semester ended around the end of July. The day after school got out, we headed to McCall for a family reunion. We were suppose to stay there for about five days and then go to Wyoming but after the second day, Denton's mom called us and told us that his grandpa was about to pass away, so we left for Wyoming a few days early and was able to make it before his grandpa passed away. I was really glad Denton was able to see his grandpa one last time. We stayed there for about a week. I got to know a lot of his family and had a pretty good time despite the circumstances. After Wyoming, we went back to Rexburg for about a week. Then the weekend of August 13, we went to Twin Falls for my best friend's wedding, Kat Boylan. She married Justin Martin. It was so great to see her get married!! Next we headed to Boise for her reception and to see my family. We only stayed for a day before we headed to Kelso, Washington to spend a week with Denton's family. We had a lot of fun!! We got stuck on the beach and had to call a tow truck. We also went huckleberry and blackberry picking. Denton's sister Britney also came and I got to meet her and her daughter Riley. Riley was adorable. After a week, we went back to Boise, where I started getting a weird itchy bumpy patch on my ankle. Then I got another patch on my other ankle. It looked really weird and started spreading so I went to the doctor. She said that I had gotten into some poison ivy. Ugh!! And because I had an anklet on, it rubbed it and caused a secondary infection. So I got antibodies but there was nothing to cure the poison ivy. So I had to just wait for it to go away. For the first few days all I could do was sit completely still in order for the itch to stop. It is just starting to go away. Lame! I have never gotten poison ivy before. So then after a week on Boise, we came back to Rexburg and began to pack for our move. On the 31st we were able to move in!!! And the rest is history.