St. Valentine's Day

I suppose we should blog about our first Valentine's Day after being married. Emily and I have talked about it before and we both aren't really into Valentine's Day. Every day is Valentine's Day as far as we're concerned! Last year we didn't do anything for each other. So why should this year have been any different? I came home on Friday the 13th planning for us to head up to Washington to visit my best friend, Jeremy, and his wife, Mary and then go back home on Monday the 16th. Much to my surprise, I opened the door and saw that Emily made me an amazing cake as an early Valentine's Day gift! It was so nice of her and the cake was so delicious! I loved it, but it made me feel bad for not doing anything for her. Here are a couple pictures of it:





After we enjoyed the cake together, we left for Washington. Emily drove the whole way and had no problem with it... until Seattle. She hates Seattle! And bridges too. And driving at night. But other than that, it was good! Because we were on a trip, I decided it would be OK to eat at McDonald's. More on that later... we got to Jeremy and Mary's at around 10:45 or 11:00 and talked with them for a while. It was good to see them again. After a while, though, I started feeling horribly ill. It was definitely from the McDonald's. I took some Pepto-Bismol that Mary gave me, and that seemed to help a little, but I still felt like I needed to throw up. At first I didn't want to throw up, but eventually I wanted to just to get it out of my system. Luckily I fell asleep without throwing up. So that was my Friday the 13th -- getting sick from McDonald's. Come to think of it, I got sick on Friday the 13th in May of 2005 from eating a burger, only that was in the Philippines.

On Saturday, Jeremy and I went to the store, then went home and made breakfast for Emily and Mary. I felt better after doing something nice for Emily. We had strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, bacon, some kind of Danish thing, and orange juice. It was quite good! Emily wasn't able to enjoy the bacon, though, since she's been getting sick from meat. No, she's not pregnant.

After breakfast, we hung around for a while and then went to Deception Pass. It was fun, but freezing! We got some cool pictures there:









Aside from going to Deception Pass, we also played a lot of board games. The one I had the most fun with was Crazy Uno. We had a dinner planned, but we were too full for it because we went to Applebee's and got a bunch of appetizers. That's about it for our Valentine's Day.

On Sunday the 15th, we went to Fort Casey State Park, where, once again, we froze! It was a cool place, though. At one point, Mary wanted to take a picture of us, but Emily saw that I had a booger. She was having me remove the booger before we took the photo, but it turns out that Mary was taking photos throughout the booger removing process:



After that, we watched Uncle Buck, which is classic. Oh, and one of their cats pooped on Jeremy. At first he thought it was just her breath. Boy, was he wrong! We ended up having the dinner that we were going to have on Valentine's Day. Jeremy accidentally spilled grease in their oven, though, so we had to cook the meat on their barbecue instead. We played more games, which included more Crazy Uno. The cool thing about their deck is it's a Nintendo deck, which includes a "Power" card. That card can be used to block the "draw 2" and "draw 4" cards. We also used it to block the "draw 5" punishment for being the last one to slap the 5, in which case the second to last person would have to draw 5 (unless, of course, they had a "Power" card). It was a lot of fun.

On Monday the 16th, we hung around a little in the morning and then went home. Once again, Emily drove the whole way. It was pretty nice driving in the daytime. We had a great time with Jeremy and Mary and a great Valentine's Day weekend.

Now for a little news pertaining to the here and now:

We just finished playing Yahtzee. Out of six games, Emily beat me by 60 points overall. I did pretty good, though, considering that Emily got three Yahtzees and I only got one.

Emily and I are currently liking this song ("Breathe Me" by Sia).

Oh, I never said how things went with our talks in church on the 8th. Emily did good, as I knew she would. However, her talk only lasted about five minutes! My talk went well too, but I wasn't able to fill up all the time. I think mine was about fifteen minutes. Thankfully, the bishop had two members come up and bear their testimonies. My dad was there, and he enjoyed both of our talks. That same day, we both got callings! I'll be teaching the youth Sunday school class. I'm not positive about the age group, but I think it's ages 14 to 16. Emily will be teaching the primary. Again, we don't know about the age group. This Sunday will be our first time doing it. Hopefully it goes well!

Wedding Photos and Videos

We just finished getting ready for the talks we'll be giving in church tomorrow (or today, if you want to get technical). It was quite an ordeal for Emily. She'll do fine, though.

Last week we finished going through our wedding photos getting rid of the blurry ones and all that. We ended up with 117. If you're interested in seeing them, you can find them here.

We also bought Wii Fit last week and have been having a lot of fun with it. Emily is a lot better at the yoga poses than I am. I was able to get a perfect score on the soccer game, though, which is cool.

We've been watching Brotherhood 2.0 lately. Emily's seen many of them before, but I had never seen it until just recently. It's pretty entertaining. We've also found some other funny videos:







This next video may seem kind of weird for us to like, but I think it's the accents that make us like the video so much.



We should probably get to sleep now... good night!

Christmas and New Year's

I was doing the dishes when I decided to see what Emily was doing. I went into the living room and was floored when I saw that she was writing a blog post. She never writes blog posts! It was crazy.

I've actually been meaning to write another blog post so that we could have the memories of our first Christmas and New Year's Eve being married written down. That way in 20 years from now, if our kids ask about how it was, we'll be able to tell them.

It continued to be snowy around Christmas time, as shown in this photo album I put on Facebook. Our plan was to spend Christmas Eve with my family and Christmas Day with Emily's. We were somewhat concerned about going to my parents' house in Silverton since it's about 15 miles away from where we live. However, we made it out there just fine. It was a pretty quiet Christmas Eve. My nephews were a little bit crazy, but not too bad. That's to be expected of kids their age (one is one, one is two, and one is three). We had spaghetti for dinner, which my sister, Jacquelyn, and Emily made. That's kind of a non-traditional meal to have at Christmas time, but it was good. Our original plan was to leave that night, but we ended up staying because of the weather. The next morning (Christmas), we opened presents. We got a lot of nice things. I really liked my Firefox shirt and Gorillapod. It was nice to be able to spend the morning there. We left at about 10:30 and made it home pretty quickly. The roads were very clear, which kind of surprised me. Also, the fields that were white the day before were now mostly green. When we got home, we got things ready at the apartment and then Emily's parents came over in the early afternoon. We talked and had a nice French onion soup, which Emily made. It was very good! We also played Rummikub and watched a few videos on YouTube. Emily's parents are really great people (I promise I'm not just saying that). A lot of people have issues with their in-laws, but I really do like mine. It was very nice to spend Christmas with them.

Since Jacquelyn was going to be heading back down to California on Sunday the 28th, we spent time with her on Saturday the 27th. On our way to meet up with Jacquelyn and my mom, we saw this:



It was pretty neat to see. Once we met up with Jacquelyn and my mom, we did a little shopping at Target. Emily got some earrings and some kind of body spray and I got some audio stuff and a headset. I got the headset so that I could record nerdy screencasts. After that, we ate at Taco Del Mar. It was then that we decided that Emily and I would spend the night at my parents' house, so we went back home afterwards to get our stuff together. Then we met back up with Jacquelyn and my mom at Good Will, then spent the rest of the night at my parents' house. We played Speed Scrabble, which is always exciting. I also took some random pictures while we were there. I like how this one turned out:



As for New Year's Eve, it was so different than it has been for the last few years. For 2005 and 2006, I was on my mission in the Philippines, so it was very interesting (especially with the fireworks). For 2007, I was with my best friend, his wife, her brother, and his wife. That was when I first played Apples to Apples. For 2008, I was at Scott's old studio with several friends. This year, however, we just stayed at home. I had a pretty bad headache and fell asleep at around 10:30. I woke up a few minutes before midnight and heard people making noise outside and then fell back asleep 30 or 45 minutes later. We had a New Year's kiss, though, morning breath and all. It was nice :) That was about it for the real New Year's. Emily already talked about our New Year's celebration last night. Before we left for Eugene, we were at Fred Meyer looking for a toy for Chloe and we found an awesome Elmo toy. I was having a lot of fun messing with it. We got a video:



Emily's reading Harry Potter right now. I'm going to see if she wants to play a board game or maybe Dr. Mario.

first blog post of 2009

it's finally 2009!! and by finally i mean holy crap it's 2009!! we had a fun christmas season and new year. we had a lot of snow days and i ended up having over a week off. if was nice to stay home and be domestic. i actually kind of like it. we were finally able to organize our spare room and find homes for the things we have. i never thought i would be excited by cleaning, and i guess i'm not such a freak that i am excited about cleaning, it's more the results that i like, the process sucks. how do you like that run on sentence?
last night we went to autumn and alvin's apartment for the first time. it was fun :) we got to see chloe for a little while before she had to go to bed. she is an awesome kid. cody and scott were also there. this was our new years celebration because we couldn't really do it on thursday. we had a white elephant gift exchange. we took home a HUGE tub of black licorice and this amazing light bulb:

on the way home we got a little lost trying to find our way back to the freeway. we found it after about ten or fifteen minutes...or maybe more, i don't know. so we start following the signs to "portland" and after not too long we saw a truck diving on our side of the high way in the wrong direction. kind of crazy. luckily he passed us without incident, we called 911. hopefully they caught him. but because we were caught up with the 911 operator we missed our exit and went into springfield. oops! we were able to get turned in the right direction and safely home to salem in just about two hours. (it normally takes about an hour)

...ok the end

A Snowy Day at Home

Church has been canceled due to the snow, so we're relaxing at home right now. Emily is playing Bubble Spinner. In fact, she just cleared all the bubbles for the first time and then more came! Her final score for that game was 606.

We have most of our thank yous done now. We're planning to finish the rest of them up today. I'm also planning to make a CD for my sister's Christmas present. Whatever we end up doing, it will be nice to be warm at home.

We had friends over for the first time last night. I posted some photos on Facebook.

On the topic of photos, we have a photo from last week of some old broccoli cheese soup that was left in the fridge for too long. It looks like a brain!:



We're getting excited for Christmas. We're going to my parents' house for Christmas Eve and then having Emily's parents over for Christmas Day. It will be great fun!

virgin blogger

adam is making me do this. he says it would be good for me to make an appearance on here...i guess so. i'm not very good at writing so this really is out of my comfort zone, just thought you should all know. AND this is my first blog ever!!

so today was another snow day for adam, and i had about a half a day of work. which was nice we got some extra time together:) we are working on our thank yous for the wedding. i've decided it's hard to be grateful on paper, and a lot of them tend to sound the same, but they are genuine so that's what matters.

back to the snow! i want to go play in it and actually be able to use my snow clothes this season. and maybe build a snow man and make snow angels and have a snowball fight...and then have lots of hot chocolate!

k bye

Nose Hairs, Thank Yous, and YouTube

Emily just plucked my nose hairs. The joys of being married. Actually, the joys of being in a relationship (she did this before we were married too). She claims that she does it to help me breathe better, but I think she just likes to see me wince.

This week has been exciting due to the snow. Monday was a snow day and tomorrow will be too! Unfortunately, we don't get paid for those days, but it's still awesome. Hopefully we can finally get our thank you cards out to people this weekend since we'll have so much time to work on them tomorrow. People probably think we're ingrates... but hopefully they don't.

I have been watching this video quite a lot lately and it never gets old!:



Emily likes watching me laugh at it. This next video is pretty fun to watch too. It's just somewhat amusing throughout it, but then the ending is amazing!:



This one is awesome too:



Here are some more: