Adventures at Home and on the Slopes

Well, since there's still several inches of snow on the ground, I don't need to change my blog background this time 'round! That's a first... Speaking of snow, Geran and I finally had time to go snowboarding when the temperature wasn't below 0 degrees! Since this could be the only time we got to go, we made the drive up to Grand Targhee. It was definitely worth the drive; the snow was superb and the weather was great. Here are a couple of pictures:





I thought the stark contrast of the white snow against the blue sky was strikingly beautiful, though this picture doesn't do it justice.


Besides our snowboarding adventure, we have stayed busy with work. Geran is working on several projects for ISU, including two remote controlled UAV's, a blimp, a nerf-dart-shooting gatling gun, and a cube made of LED lights. Sometimes I think he has too much fun with his job.... :) He also has been doing more INL programming work, which, in addition to his work projects, adds up to a very busy guy! Since he's been busy with that, I took on another little crocheting project. A friend at work taught me how to do more complicated patterns and we both made a little dress. Here's the one I made:



I think it would fit about a 1-year-old.... It's kinda short for an actual dress, but wouldn't it be darling with little leggings or something? :) I made little matching booties (not pictured) and a little flower to put on a headband. So the next baby girl in the family can have claim to it! Or, ya know, I could made another one. :) I quite enjoyed the process of creating something cute and useful out of a collection of string; very satisfying! :)

Well, I think that's it for now. Thanks for reading my ramblings!

A New Year Has Begun!

Well here I am again, keeping my "blogging every three months" trend! It's kind of fun this way though, because every time I update our blog, I get to pick a whole new background and everything to match the current season, since I seem to never blog twice in the same season! Maybe I'll keep this cute background around for a while though, since it stays cold here in Poky until April/May! :)

One of my new years' resolutions is to take more pictures! Geran and I both have decent digital cameras, but I haven't taken pictures with mine in so long, I'm not even sure where it is! I guess my first goal should be to find my camera, then start documenting our lives better with it! Fortunately, other people take pictures, so I'm not completely without!

A couple of fun events have taken place since the last update; Christmas and Thanksgiving of course, and my little sister's wedding! We'll start with Thanksgiving: I don't have any Thanksgiving pictures (hence my new years' resolution), but pictures or not, we had a wonderful time! Geran and I both took the whole week of Thanksgiving off of work so we could spend the entire week in Washington with the Call's! I think it's the longest we've ever been there in one stay! It was wonderfully relaxing. I always feel so comfortable and happy there. I love hanging out with Geran's sisters and Mom, too! They are so much fun! We all had a good time scarfing the turkey and ham, and of course shopping! We miss everyone terribly back in Idaho, and I always cry when we leave.

Since we were in Washington for Thanksgiving, we trekked on over to Kuna for Christmas. Because of our work schedules, we couldn't leave till Wednesday the 22nd, and had to return again on Christmas evening. My engaged sister also came home with her fiance'. We played a lot of games and ate a lot of treats! Geran taught everyone how to play Canasta; it will probably become a new family fave! We have a tradition of acting out the story of Christ's birth on Christmas Eve, complete with costumes (aka sheets and pillowcases!) Here are a few pictures of that (There are pictures my mom took, although I somehow escaped all of them, not even on purpose!):

Geran was Joseph (I was Mary, but as I said, I'm not in any pictures! :( ):



Tressia and her fiance', Hiram, were the shepherds:


Diana and David were the wise "people"/men (Obviously, Diana didn't know someone was snapping the picture! Ha!):




And Royal was Lo, The Angel of the Lord (Obviously, Royal did know someone was snapping the picture, and posed accordingly! He's pretty good at that....):


My mom banned anyone from being the donkey carrying Mary or the sheep this year, because she says we get too silly.... Imagine that! She probably made a wise decision. Plus this year, we barely had enough people to cover the main roles! Anyways, it was still fun, as usual.

Wow this is turning out to be really long! But I must continue to Tressia's wedding! I happened to be the family member that lives the closest to her in Logan, so I got help out with all the fun wedding stuff! I love weddings. Boy did this open my eyes to how much my mother-in-law did for our wedding! There is a lot that goes into wedding plans, and Renae did so much for mine and Geran's wedding. She is classy yet practical, and here is a long overdue THANK YOU to you, Renae for making our reception and luncheon perfect! Tressia and Hiram Knapp were married December 28 in the Logan temple. It was a wonderful sealing, and of course everyone was just bubbling over with happiness, especially the bride and groom! Tressia looked beautiful, not just because I did her hair! ;) Here are a couple of pictures from her reception:






She made a beautiful bride, and will be a great wife! We all love her husband and wish them the best!

Well, that's it for now! If you're reading this, thanks for sticking it out through all those pictures and babbling!

Fall is Here!

I love Autumn! It's my favorite time of year. What's not to love: the beautiful trees changing color, crunching fallen leaves on the sidewalk, college football season, it's the season of Thanksgiving and Halloween (two wonderful holidays), and a precursor to Christmas! If I wasn't so ansy to marry Geran, and if school wasn't in the way, I would've wanted a Fall wedding. The hot weather here finally broke this week, and it's been wonderful. And yes, I know it's been a LONG time since we last updated this blog. I really just don't have much to blog about, and you're probably not interested in the petty details of our lives! Geran has been busy working at Idaho State, and has also been doing extra programming work, so he's ultra busy. Which often leaves me bored, since he doesn't have much time to hang out with me. :( It makes me wish I lived closer to the Call sisters so I could participate in all their fun crafts and activities!!! To occupy my time here in Idaho, though, I've been helping my little sister Tressia, who is getting married December 28, with some wedding plans. What fun that is! I love weddings. :) I have also taken up more crocheting.... I like to be able to sit on the couch next to Geran while he's programming, and it's nice that we can both be working on our own projects (his programming, and my crocheting) but still be with each other. :) My older sister had a bag full of yarn she got at a yard sale, so she was nice enough to send me a bunch. :) I'm definitely still a beginner crocheter, but I did somehow kind of figure out how to make a baby cardigan:



It's not as small as it looks in the picture; it would probably fit a 6-month old baby. I didn't mean to make it that small, but since I couldn't understand any of the patterns I found on the internet, I was on my own. It's also slightly lopsided, but maybe if it's actually worn, it won't be as noticeable, I hope? Next time I will try harder to keep track of my stitches; I tend to lose count very quickly..... Oops.

Thanks to youtube videos, I also learned how to crochet flowers (one of which is on the little cardigan.) There were a million flower patterns, but that one on the cardigan looked pretty easy so I decided to give it a try. It ended up being super easy and only took like 5 minutes. Flowers are fun! I was thinking of little Aubree and her cute crocheted flower she is wearing in her Maisydaisy outfit! I kind of wish my sister and sister-in-law were having girls so I could make them flower headbands.... Guess I'll just have to wait for the next girl to come along.

I have also FINALLY finished our wedding scrapbook. I am definitely NOT a scrapbooker, which paradigm was solidified as I was working on this one. I've made very few pages before; mostly at young women activities! My admiration for people who create a scrapbook for all of their kids has increased 10 fold! Our kids will have to settle for the less cute version of photo saving; with the amount of time it took me to make this scrapbook, our kids would be all grown up by the time I got done with one! Our wedding scrapbook is only 12 pages, with about 38 pictures, and it took me over a year. Ha ha. Anyways, here is a picture of the cover:



Well, I think that is all that is remotely blog-worthy..... We are both so happy together, down here in our little basement apartment. :) Sure miss the Washington crew! We can't wait for the holiday season when we will be with family.

Just a Quick Update!

I started getting quite embarrassed that our last post was way back before Christmas, so even though we live rather hum-drum (but VERY contented) lives, I thought I'd give a quick update anyways. :)

We are VERY excited for Jared and Chrissy and their soon-to-be baby boy! I'm sure we'll meet him this summer! I'm glad I married into a family where I became an instant aunt to 4 nieces and 2 nephews (almost 3)! What a blast!

Nothing too exciting is happening down here in Pocatello.... Rexburg is still getting A LOT of snow, (I don't how Geran, Chrissy, and Jared lived in Rexburg--it's soooo cold there. And they are still getting blizzards in April!) but Pocatello hasn't been too bad--just windy. My friend and I are training for a half marathon, and on windy days I think I'd rather have the snow instead of the 25mph wind gusts! Oh to feel the warm sunshine sink into my skin and the gentle breeze again! Ha ha. It will come eventually! We've decided to stay around here (despite my dislike of the weather) for at least one more school year to see if any teaching opportunities arise for Geran at ISU. He loves the program and (usually) enjoys his work a lot--building robots and experimenting with all sorts of electrical gadgets! What could be better? I am hoping to get a job as a rad tech in Blackfoot where I'm doing my clinicals so we'll see about that--I guess I have to graduate first. Speaking of graduation, it's only 3 and half weeks (25 days to be exact) away now. I'm getting pretty excited, if you can't tell. :)

Well, I guess that's it for us! Sorry our lives aren't more interesting! Thank you for the birthday wishes for Geran. :) Wished we all could have partied together! Maybe next year. Love you all!

It's Beginning to Look a lot Like Christmas....

Not only have we set up Christmas decorations in our house, we've woken up to a beautiful blanket of white snow two days in a row now--it looks like Christmas inside AND outside now! Thanks to Renae, we have a beautiful pre-lit Christmas set up in our little living room. We now know we have 7-foot ceiling; it's a 7-foot tree and just barely skims our ceiling! And thanks to Collin, who apparently has a tendency to throw glass ornaments which often results in broken shards, Nina has generously allowed us to borrow her breakable ornaments so we can decorate our tree. :) We are grateful to be able to have a beautifully decorated tree adorn our living room. I also had a few decorations that I've accumulated over the years so the Christmas-ness can be in more than just one corner of the house where the tree is! Here are a couple of pictures:





In other news, Geran is starting his job at ISU on Monday. We are excited for him to get started. I have only 3 more days of clinicals this semester, and only 2 finals, so things are definitely winding down school-wise. Graduation is now only 5 months away for me! It was great to see everyone at Thanksgiving and we are looking forward to next time, whenever it may be.....

Little Homey Touches

First of all, congratulations to Nina, Mark, and Collin for their new little addition, Aubree! Can't wait to meet her in person! Second of all, I want to thank Geran's family (namely Renae, Richard, Chrissy, Maddie, and Gabe) for coming to see us while you were down for a wedding in Twin Falls, or for a Jon Schmidt concert the following weekend. What a treat it was to have you guys visit! Thanks for putting up with our less-than-optimal living conditions! Haha. It was so much fun to see family and spend time with you--and it made me evermore excited for this summer when we will hopefully be moving closer to all of you! :)

Since we have moved into our little basement apartment, I have been excited to hang up whatever pictures we want and to make our house a home. We finally retrieved our wedding pictures--Geran's parents brought them to us when they came to visit--so we now had pictures to hang up! It was fun to pick out which pictures we wanted to hang up and then go frame shopping! So here is our glorious Wall of Wedding Wonder (don't mind the cords on the left that are leading up to our projector...Ha ha):



When Geran's family visited, they also brought his sewing machine, which has enabled me to make little curtains for our little windows. :) Don't get your hopes up or anything--simple curtains are the extent of my sewing ability, and even that was rather a daunting task for me! I just finished the kitchen ones this morning, so we now have adorned windows (the first is our kitchen, the second is our living room):





Yay for no more blank walls and unadorned windows! Looks like all we have to do now is decorate for the upcoming holidays! I can't believe October is almost over.... Oh and we did promise to post a few more wedding pics once we got them, so here are a few of our favorites! (These and more are all on facebook, too, so don't feel obligated to look at them twice if you've already checked them out on facebook!)

Home, Sweet Home :)

Hello, everybody! I guess it's been awhile since our last update.... Our bad! :/ We will be better now, I promise!

We are happily settled in our little, cozy basement apartment here in Pocatello. Geran is still on the hunt for a job, and I am moseying my way through my last year of school. (Yay for being a senior!) It has been so much fun having our own place where neither one of us has roommates! (Except for each other, of course. But we like living with each other. He even cleans up after me once in awhile!) I LOVE having my own kitchen, where everything is ours and we don't have to label any food! Haha. I don't think either of us misses the single life....