Oh BYU

I saw on a friend's blog that every year she has a little memorial to her alma mater, and I thought it was a neat idea, so I decided to do one of my own. BYU holds a special place in my heart because I have so many friends that I met there and learned so much. But I also met the wonderful man I call my husband there.

It's weird not going back to school, that's what we've done for the last like 6 years. It's crazy. The first semester I sent him to school and I didn't go was weird, and this is weird. Life goes on I guess and we have to grow up, but I did enjoy the time we spent there (and I was happy to move too), but we had a lot of fun and had a lot of fun friends. It was weird to say goodbye.

I know some people just plain don't like BYU, and to be honest, I'm not sure why. It's definitely its own world, that is for sure. Example: On Friday, we went on a date and in the booth across from us I hear this guy drop the same curse word at least 7 times (he also used a few others, but the same one 7 times, anyways) and I mention this to the husband and he says, "We're definitely not at BYU anymore." That is for sure. Oh another funny example, when I would go to my parents house and be at the store or somewhere and I would smell cigarette smoke sometimes it would take me a second to realize what it was because no one smokes at BYU. I once went to another university to give a presentation and it blew my mind that people were smoking on campus, if someone did that at BYU everyone would look at them like they were crazy.

Alright enough examples.

So I went through my pictures to find some of my favorite moments at BYU and I found quite a few, so I'll have to just cut it down to some of my favorite moments at BYU with him.

Granted, I did not go to this game with him, but oddly enough he was on the row behind us, and made it into the picture. And at some point in the game I'm pretty sure he fell on either me or one of my roommates!

This is how we got around a lot of the time... lol a lot cheaper than putting gas in Jake.
Halloween
We love to take drives, this was in between sessions of General Conference. Provo Canyon is BEAUTIFUL in the fall.
The lovesac... which technically you already saw
Snowboarding (I'm terrible... lol, but he's good)
Spiking my hair (half glue/half water)
Front row at the football game! He won tickets in a paper airplane contest lol!
My graduation
Fishing/Camping
Air Show
Hiking (this is at the top of Squaw Peak... about 2 minutes before a huge storm hit pretty close to where we are standing.... we BOOKED it down the mountain)
Our first anniversary (I didn't put a picture of our wedding because technically that wasn't in Provo, and our second anniversary is coming up and I'm sure you'll be sick of wedding pictures when that comes lol)
Backpacking (my first time)
His graduation... apparently I'm a terrible wife and I haven't gotten the pictures from everyone else yet, but I swear I had more pictures of us, and I swear I just looked at them recently!
And finally I put a video of our canoe, which is one of my favorite things we did. But just so you know, you may just want to mute it because I was a little nervous and I sound like a crazy person... lol. And you will see some bottles, they did not drink those, they found the bottles and threw them away... we were at BYU lol.

The big one

I wasn't going to post this until the piano refinishing was complete, but folks, let's face it... it's going to be a while! It's coming along, but it just takes a long time. I'm not complaining, sorry if it seemed like I was, I'm just stating the facts. However, it is coming along nicely!

I apparently didn't take a before picture of the piano with my camera, all I had was one from my phone. I took this picture and others of our old apartment, as you can see I forgot to take before shots with the pictures any everything on the walls and on top of the piano before I boxed it all up, so it's kind of bare.
First we removed the top piece (which wasn't difficult seeing as it hasn't been attached to the hinges since who knows when... they weren't attached when we bought it). We decided to see if we would actually like what it looks like painted, so we used this piece since it was the easiest.

I had to strip off the old stain and clear coats. Then we sanded it... a lot. Then we painted it black. I thought I'd like the distressed edges look, but it turns out I liked it better just solid black (although the distressed look still looks good when I think about it in my head, but sometimes imagination is better than it really is.. lol).

We sanded in between each coat

Then we put on a few coats of the clear coat (sanding in between each coat). We used a matte finish clear coat and I really really like the way it looks!

After we decided we liked what it looked like, we moved on to another piece. This is the music stand section of the piano. This is the stripping phase.

Here is what the piano looks like without those pieces (the top and the music stand part)

Here it is with both parts finished (well, mostly, I need to touch up a few parts).

And obviously we've moved onto the foot board (basically I'm making up terms for the sections... but you know what I'm talking about) part.

After I stripped it and sanded it, the varnish was coming off in some places so it needed a little gluing. This little set up worked like a champ. We had to do it a couple of times and currently the glue is drying on another section. After the glue dries we'll have to put some puddy in some places and do a bit more sanding (due to the puddy and because a bird "left it's mark" on my piano!)...

Weekend of firsts

This weekend was a great weekend! It was a lot of firsts for me. We got to experience this beautiful temple! His parents came with us and it was a wonderful experience. We didn't get a picture of us in front of it because there were like a million weddings going on and we didn't want to fight them... lol. Plus, I thought I had one from the day we got engaged, but apparently I didn't have the entire temple in it. Oh well. I took one of us in the car. It was so beautiful though!

Then we went bike riding at the beach (another first). That I just realized I totally spelled wrong, so don't look at that lol. I slurred my words in my head and killed the spelling. As you can see the bikes were a little too heavy for the car... lol! But they made it to and from, so I guess it works, the bumper just needs a bit of fixing. We had a great time looking at all the extremely expensive houses and having a nice relaxing stroll on the bikes (all except when I almost got hit by a car because I wasn't thinking... but that's a story for another time).
After bike riding, I got to experience for the first time the wonders of The Cheesecake Factory! Oh my goodness, it was DELICIOUS! You definitely get what you pay for there! The food was great and the cheesecake was definitely wonderful as well! As was the company! We had a great time! While we waited for our table we checked out the boats (here is another cute father/son moment... lol they are so alike).
Still waiting.. after we finished looking at the boats.
We got to eat outside and it was gorgeous!

Here's the one boat we could afford in the entire place.... lol
And finally a great shot of my handsome man enjoying his food, family, and the view.
It was a great weekend! A big thanks to his parents for being such wonderful hosts, as always!

Family Day

The place where the husband works had a family day on August 13. It was a lot of fun. His dad and I got to check out where he works. We saw some cool planes, ate some great food, got free snowcones (and these weren't wimpy snowcones, they were huge! I forgot to take a picture of them). It was really fun! Basically, he got paid to hang out with us.

B-1

B-2

The actual plane that he works with was in the shop, so we didn't get to see it. Although we went to the plane museum and saw an older version of it.

Another plane at the museum, SR-71. I thought this was a cute father/son moment. He was telling us all about the planes. I'm sure at this moment he's telling his dad how cool this plane is.

Lovesac

(if you click on the picture, it will make it bigger and easier to see)

In February and March of 2006, we started a project. Who knew that we'd still be working on it today... well yesterday actually. We finished it for the third time.. lol. We wanted a lovesac because the couches at my apartment were like cement blocks..aka extremely uncomfortable. But we didn't want to buy one, a couple hundred dollars was a little out of our college student price range. The clubhouse at my apartment complex had real lovesacs so we looked at them and figured, we could make one. So we acquired some carpet padding, bought some fabric, and a zipper and went to work. We made a pattern, he was the genius behind that. We made it out of newspapers. It was going to be HUGE, six feet in diameter. We cut it out, sewed it all together, and then the hard part came... shredding the carpet padding. We worked on that for a long long time. Every day after we finished our homework we'd put on a movie, or watch the Olympics, and shred carpet padding. After a while, we started to think, maybe we were a little too ambitious trying to fill a six-foot-in-diameter lovesac. So we cut it down and resewed it. The sewing on the huge one was beautiful! No tucks, no folds, beautiful! The smaller one... not so much (and it didn't have a zipper). So we did sit on it and enjoy the comfort, but the looks were not so great. Needless to say, after that school year, it stayed at my parents house.

Recently we decided we should revive the lovesac, show it a little love, and fix it. So that's what we did. We emptied it, took it apart, re-cut it, resewed it, made a liner so we can take to cover off to wash it, added two zippers, purchased some more comfy foam, mixed that foam with some of the carpet padding, and now it's beautiful again!

PS The pictures of us recently were our attempts at trying to get the inside to fit with only one 2 foot zipper... yeah that wasn't happening. We tried shoving it in, we tried vacuum packing it (that's what I'm doing in the picture), we tried a mixture of vacuum packing and shoving (that's what he's doing in the picture). It just wasn't working, so we got another zipper and it fit worked a champ!

Family History I am doing it

Okay, not exactly, but this last week I've been working on a project that's made me a little more excited to learn more about our family history, so I guess that's a start.

I noticed that I didn't have a proclamation in our home, so I decided to change that. Well, actually we had some in our home, just not where people can see it. Recently as many of you probably already know, a judge said that Prop 8 was unconstitutional.. so it's been a big issue in my mind lately. I want people know how we feel and what we believe when they come into our home. If you don't agree with me, that's fine, we'll just have to agree to disagree. Although, I'm pretty sure I started this project before the ruling came out, but it just confirmed that we needed to put one up.

I also noticed that I didn't have a big picture of the Savior anywhere, we had a bunch of little ones on this cool Living Christ picture that one of my best friends gave me. Then I realized that I already had one, the frame was just in pieces and at my parent's house. So on one of our visits I took the picture and the broken frame. I quickly fixed the broken frame with a little hot glue and a staple gun (I'm guessing when the frame broke the glass broke too, but that's okay it makes it lighter and it will be fine held together by hot glue and staples lol). Anyways, I decided that I wanted the proclamation to go by the picture of the Savior and our big pictures from our wedding. Obviously I'd need a frame to match (the frame around the picture of Jesus already matched), well I didn't want to buy one because they are a little more than I'd like to spend. So I started the hunt. I looked at thrift stores and craft stores, and waited. I'm proud of myself for this point because I'm not usually very patient, but I waited and waited and then I found a frame that would work at a thrift store (for a $1.00!)! Then we went and bought some gold metallic spray paint and I got to work. I forgot to take a before picture, but here's a picture of my sample section to see if I'd actually like what I'd envisioned

Notice the shiny blue, not quite what I wanted, but as for the gold part, I was pretty impressed. What I did was hot glued these little patterns:
And then added a line in the middle (and removed all the little strings that come from hot gluing)
Then I spray painted the rest of it.
And then a few more times
Then I found as many pictures as I could find of our ancestors, I'm missing quite a few, but there is still room to add them. I made my own matting out of card stock and printed my pictures out on them too. I think when I have all the pictures I'll print them out at costco or something, but for now, I just printed them myself. Then I arranged them (several times), then I decided I needed something to fill in the gaps so I decided to make some flowers, I used this tutorial that I saw earlier that day and made some satin flowers. Then I assembled it all cut out some cardboard from a spare cardboard box, put that on the back, taped it up. And there you go:
Here it is on the wall, I like it!
And these two pictures are a sneak peak at another project we have going on... if I had taken a picture of right below all my pretty pictures, you would see a lot of the pieces of this project!

PS the background to one of the pictures is also another project we have in the works... it's a big project

It works!

Dear Readers,

I have the best husband in the whole wide world! Do you know why? Oh, I'll tell you! He fixed my computer! That's right folks! For a while now, my computer has not wanted to stay charging, and this is a big deal because the battery life of my dear computer is umm.... zero. We've thought that it was the power cord, and after like 7 power cords it still didn't always work. Now, I'm not saying it wasn't the power cords because after he fixed those they would work for a while, but I think after a while we started kind of plugging the power cord in with a little too much force and started to knock the thing it plugs into loose. So my dear husband looked online for a little tutorial to see how to fix my laptop, and low and behold he found just what he was looking for. So we looked on ebay for the part, found it, ordered it, waited for it to come, and it came about a week later. That same day we also ordered a part for his soldering iron so that he could fix my computer, and we did all the same things, found, ordered, waited, but we just kept on waiting, and waiting, and waiting. So we looked and what did we find, our money had been refunded... uhh not cool. So we decided to just go buy a new one, they aren't too much money. So last night we did, and HE FIXED MY COMPUTER! I meant to take pictures of the process, but I was busy working on one of my projects, so sorry there aren't any pictures. But here's a video of what he did.

Yep, that's right, he's the best!

Love,

Me