Trying Hard

Every year I'm always so excited for my birthday. I am a "birthday person," if you will.

This year is different though.

I'm trying hard not to be sad that I'm about to be 24. Can't shake it.

The Spirit of a Good Hair Day

I am currently (ok, well, obviously not exactly "currently") working on organizing our office, and I just found a book I sent to Stace on his first Christmas as a full-time missionary. It is a personalized book of speeches given by General Authorities and the like I created on the BYU speeches Web site. I remember I was so excited to send it to him. I titled it Eternal Encouragement. I just reread the note I inserted in the inside front cover. I told him that I had included two talks from the general authority who'd given my favorite conference talk at the previous General Conference, as well as 13 other great talks. One of those 13 talks is entiled "Goals" by Elder J. Thomas Fyans. I was just flipping through the book and I stopped at one of the lines that Elder Sirmans had put a star next to in Elder Fyans' talk:

"Living the gospel is somewhat like combing your hair-- no matter how well we did it yesterday-- we have to repeat it today."

I really like this quote. It doesn't matter so much if I read my scriptures or said my prayers yesterday, or if I plan on doing those things tomorrow (although it still much better than not doing them at all)...how am I doing today? How does my hair look today?

Yesterday I got to thinking...and realized that perhaps one of my most favorite things in the world is the feeling in my heart when I say my prayers in the morning. There is something so refreshing and renewing about the hope of a new day, the hope that I can be better today than I was yesterday, and the hope that I can try to do those things my Father in Heaven would have me do-- today. I just love it.

Stace's Surprise Graduation/ Congrats-on-Getting-Into-PhD-School Party!

I told more lies than I ever thought possible to pull this thing off, but with the the help of lots of family and friends who were willing to lie for the cause, I did it!!! He was totally surprised! We held the partay at Stace's parents' house and celebrated with Stace's extended family, my family and a few of Stace's close friends & their families.

The cakes!

The UF cake is a red velvet cake (recipe tripled!) with cream cheese frosting. That jar in the middle was for people to guess the amount of pennies inside since Stace is getting his PhD in finan$e. Total count: 883! Winner guessed 888! Not bad!

The FSU cake is two layers of yellow cake (recipe doubled) and 1 layer of chocolate cake in the middle, with chocolate icing. Total amount of time spent baking/ frosting these cakes: 13 hours (now I know why cakes cost so much at the bakery!)

The party favors for the kiddos: piggy banks and graduation cap pens.
Good friend Mary Ann helped tremendously by letting me ice the cakes at her house and helping me frost!

We had Stace's favorite place cater! SONNY'S! He's been begging me to apply for the manager position available here in Gainesville...not happenin! I hate Sonny's!

My freshman roommate Katie Waeghe! She came all the way from Orlando. We love her!

Mary Ann and Ann...I love them so much:*(

Stace and I with our nieces (center: Caroline & Kate), their cousin and our good friends' (Emily and Gaylen Raines) daughter, Amelia, and my little Emma!

UF Cousin Crew! The newly made UF boys and their wives! Trent is starting dental school! And congrats to Amelia who just graduated with her masters in accounting from BYU! Awesome!

Making Memories of Us vs. Waste of a Day?

Here I am sitting on my bed in my new abode in Gainesville...with lots of boxes still yet to unpack. There is so much I want to catch up on on this here bloggy, but I have to put all those other posts on hold because I can't keep what happened to us yesterday to myself much longer. Ready? OK!

There's no easy way to say this, so I'm just going to draw it out. Since the beginning of time...

Ha, just kidding! (That was a Michael Scott Office reference, and I couldn't help myself.) But seriously, I'm gonna draw it out because this is a long story with lots of details.

So, once we got all moved in on Wednesday, Stace continued his obsessive search for the perfect new couch. Now that we are in Gainesville, we have easy access to a little place called Orlando, and there is a TON of stuff on Orlando's Craigs List. At 12:30 AM on Friday morning, we found the CUTEST little love seat and matching chair! I was so excited! It was located in a town outside of Orlando called Sanford. We called and talked to the owners at noon and much to my joy, the matching set was still available! So at 1:30 PM, Stace and I jumped in my car and began our 3 hour drive to Sanford.

Now, we knew full well that there was a good chance we wouldn't be able to fit both pieces of furniture into my SUV, so we were prepared to pay the $15 for a U-Haul trailer (Stace looked up the cost before we left).

So, we finally get there (seriously, it was a long drive-- traffic was lovely). We pulled into a beautiful neighborhood with large houses and parked our car at the final destination. There was Joe, waiting for us outside his beautifully-decorated home. He led us upstairs to show us what we'd made the drive for, and there they were!


Aren't they just so cute?! Well, I thought so. So, we sat in them and thought they were comfy and we were ready to purchase! But then Joe asked "now I have one question: did you bring cash?" No, we'd brought a checkbook. But no worries, we'll get back in the car and and go get cash from the ATM at Publix! When we get back, Stace and Joe take the love seat downstairs and put it into my car. It fits! But there is no room for the chair. Then we call around to some U-Hauls in town. But it's 5:30 and nothing is open. No worries! There is a U-Haul open until 8:00 in Lake Mary, Florida (about 20-25 min. away). Neither of us thought I had a hitch, and so we knew we'd have to buy one at U-Haul. We ask the U-haul guy and he says, "ok that'll be $200." WHAT?! So, we stress about that for a brief moment while he walks to our car and points out the fact that we do, actually, have a hitch already. phew! We just needed the little ball thing (what we thought was the actual hitch) which was $30.

No worries. Ok.

So then we find out that the $15 cost we were prepared to pay for the trailer was an in-town rate, and our total when we checked out was a whopping $115! But we couldn't turn back now, we'd already spent so long trying to get this set!

So we drive back to Sanford and I grab the pillows and Stace and Joe get the chair and we merrily carry it down to our trailer.

Merrily, until I notice lots of yellow all over the seat-back cushion I'm carrying.

"No way that's pee?!" I think to myself. But then the wind carries the lovely smell of cat urine all around me; I'm enveloped by it, actually. OH. MUH. GOODNESS.

I point it out to Mr. Joe (yes, that was awkward), and then we look at the chair: it's on the actual chair too! We didn't notice it before because it was hiding under the massive amounts of over-stuffed cushions that I loved so much. Now, this wasn't just a little spot, y'all. This was massive amounts of cat urine! Mr. Joe says he'll knock $20 off the price. ehhhh? $20? Joe kept assuring me it would be easy to clean, but when we tried to unzip the cover off the cushion, it was literally sealed shut by the cat pee and it wouldn't. budge. So Joe took 10 minutes and some WD-40 and finally pried it open.

He walked into his house to call his wife. There Stace and I were, trying to decide what to do! We'd just driven all this way! And rented the trailer! And the furniture was SO CUTE! Could we really turn back empty handed? Stace silenced the thoughts running through my head and said "I'm not paying $180 for furniture with cat pee all over it!" Right. Ok!

Now, mind you, I felt really bad for Joe. I knew he was embarrassed, and I hated that we'd taken his afternoon (he missed his trip to the gym for this). Actually, when I first noticed it, the thought ran through my head to not say anything about the urine because I didn't want to embarrass him. But then I came to my senses and realized we'd be paying $200 for this! And it would be ours! And we'd have to smell it if we didn't get it out. I had to say something.

So, because of my not wanting to say anything, I asked Stace to please tell Joe when he comes back out that we weren't going to get it. After some deliberating with him and after Joe showed us a cleaner that might work well, Stace broke the news to him. We helped him load it back into his house, and then waived goodbye to Sanford towing an empty trailer.

Luckily, we were able to turn the trailer back into U-Haul at 7:45 and get our money back! Thank goodness! We ended our trip by going to one of my all-time favorite restaurants, Pizzeria Uno, and told ourselves it made the whole trip worth it. And then began our drive back to Gainesville.

Quote of the Day

This morning we were figuring out how much $ we're going to make from the stuff we are selling before the big move. We calculated the number and then Stace said:

"That's a flat screen TV! I love you...and...my love would just blossom if we had a flat screen!"

"Blossom"? bahahaha!