About time....

It's been a fairly busy last few weeks! Sorry we haven't posted anything for a while...I went to post something a couple of weeks ago, but then it crashed after I uploaded a bunch of pictures so

I was anti-blog for a little while. :) At the beginning of December I went with Kenny on a little field trip he had for his program down to Thiokel, by Tremonton, to watch a rocket booster test. The picture of us was taken before the rocket was "launched". It was really loud and really bright!!!! Kenny took a video of it with our camera but I couldn't get it to upload for the blog. Sorry.

Here is the actual launch. It doesn't go into the air at all, but it blows the fire and the smoke up a canyon into the mountain behind it. There was a lot of smoke! When we were leaving, it was raining ashes. A pretty cool experience, I'd say! :) There were other school field trips, like elementary, middle, and high schools there, plus other people in their vehicles.

I took some pictures of our house with our first real snow storm. We don't have many pictures of our house, so I thought I would take some.

While I was out on the curb taking a picture I had a neighbor stop and ask if I needed a ride somewhere...I guess that's an Idahoan for you. :)

About a week and a half before Christmas we were finally able to put up a Christmas tree. Normally we cut down a real one the Saturday after Thanksgiving, but this year we were unable to. So we borrowed a fake one from my Aunt LaDean. It fit perfectly into our living room!

Of course our dogs were a lot of help as we were putting on the lights and the ornaments.

And viola! It is finished!

A few days later I heard some rustling in the living room that didn't sound normal. So I went in there to investigate and this is what I saw.......................................
Our culprit.....Kallie Sue. Of course she was sitting in it so cute and so content that I had to get the camera out to take a picture of her before I got her out. Well, cats don't come out of Christmas trees very well, unless you intend to pull all the limbs out, tangle the lights, and break your ornaments....so I just let her be.

Not long after that I hear more rustling around, and of course, here is what I find:

Chevy just couldn't be outdone with creativity in causing havok!

So I let him be too.

Now for another eventful moment of our December: After I just got out of the shower, about 10:30pm, Kenny says, "Chevy's got a mouse!" So, of course, I had to go see it. Sure enough, Chevy had found and caught a little mouse. But he couldn't just kill it and be done with it, he had to play with it. He was so excited to have a LIVE toy to play with (besides the four other cats in the house). He would bat it around, toss it up in the air, let it run a little bit so he could chase it and catch it again, etc. Naturally Kenny and I were entertained as well, but we were just waiting for Chevy to actually kill the poor thing and put it out of it's misery. Well he wouldn't, so just as we were getting ready to catch it, it runs under our fridge!

So we pulled our fridge out a little ways and couldn't see it, so we threw Chevy back there to see if he could catch it again...no such luck there. So then we pulled our stove out too and finally saw it and caught it. Well, obviously, behind our fridge and stove it was very dirty because--let's face it--those things only get moved when they are replaced, when you move, or when you are looking for a mouse. So late at night we are scrubbing behind the fridge and stove, and vacuuming our fridge to get that nasty dust off it.

Finals went okay for me this last semester. I studied hard the week before and the week of finals...that's basically all I did, besides work, eat, and sleep. This is how I ended up:

Hematology: A-

Immunology/Transfusion Medicine: A

Intro to CLS: A

Molecular Biology: A-

Microbiology: A-

Clinical Chemistry: B-

I am kind of frustrated with my Chemistry grade, but I don't think there's anything I can do about it. But my other grades were good. :)

The Monday before Christmas we started our journey to Glendive, Montana (just across the border from N. Dakota--so a pretty far drive) in a snowstorm. We had to take the back roads from Pocatello to Idaho Falls (which took us almost 2 hours). We picked up my Grandma Logan in St. Anthony and continued our trek. The weather was not friendly the entire way there and I am so glad that Kenny is a safe and cautious driver because it could have been really bad! Besides the snow and ice, we had unbelievable windstorms as well. But I'm glad to say that we made it, both ways, in safety. We got there around 9:30 or 10:00 pm (after leaving Pocatello about 6:30 am--it was a long day!). The whole week was so nice! We got to view the little town of Glendive, and my sister, Julie, and her family came from Seattle as well. She is about two months shy of having a baby, so I got to see her fat belly and feel her baby kick! I got to relax, eat lots of junk food (which I'm paying for now), play games, scrapbook, etc., all without having to worry about homework! Yea! Christmas morning was lots of fun, especially with my nephews, Peyton and Ethan. They had so much fun opening presents.

Here is Ethan wearing his "cool-dude" FBI hat that he got for Christmas.






Ethan and Peyton with two of their many racecar sets they got for Christmas. It was hard to get this picture because they could hardly be distracted from their racing. But they did pose long enough for me!





Peyton was actually on top of this present as he was tearing the paper off in haste. I think it was another racecar track.

One of our days there we took a drive to Beach, North Dakota. So I can now mark N. Dakota off my "States-I-need-to-visit". We ate at this little Mexican restaurant and the owners themselves served us. It was yummy! The terrain in that area is unlike I've ever seen and I wish I would have gotten a picture. They don't have mountains; instead non-rolling foothills. They are really choppy, but really cool! We came back on the Sunday after Christmas and the drive was much better coming home. It was a fun trip, but there's no place like home!

Since we've gotten back, Kenny and I went snow shoeing nearby, and we took Kenny's brothers sledding. We met our friends, Shelley and Grant, in Arimo and found a couple of hills to go to. It was lots of fun! We also went down to Ogden to spend more time with Shelley and Grant, and our other friends, Cade, Nicole, Brad and Aubrey to play games and do some more snow shoeing. We are trying to get our fun in while we can because tomorrow our last (yes LAST) semester starts! Wahoo! Well, technically my summer internship is a semester (meaning I pay summer tuition fees, then work 40 hours/week for free). Please pray for us that Kenny might get a job right away! :) Thanks for reading, and sorry this was so long!

Okay, scratch that other post, I finally figured out my color scheme. :)

If you check my blog in the next few hours, please don't be alarmed by the poor choice in color scheme. I'm trying to get it fixed.

Twilight

Kenny and I went to see the Twilight movie last night and let me tell you...it was a ZOO at the theater! We drove by at 6:30pm to get in line to get tickets for a late night showing and the line was wrapped all around the outside! We went and got dinner then went back and stood in line to get tickets for the 10:50 pm showing. We figured that late showing shouldn't be bad, but it was packed! We stood in line for half an hour with flirty teenage girls all hyped up behind us...that was fun.

Now for the review (if you don't want it to spoiled even a little bit then don't read the next paragraph in bold):

Kenny and I thought it was really good. It followed the book really well and I thought the actors, for the most part, fit the characters. I think they demonstrated the realness of starting at a new school, or the start of a relationship very well. It also had some good humor and some good action. I didn't go in with real high expectations because you can't really do that with a movie produced from a popular book, however I think they did a good job. I wasn't really disappointed.

Now back to real life, I am celebrating the start of my Thanksgiving break, although it won't be much of a break. My teachers decided to pile on the homework and I have tons due the week we come back. I am very frustrated! So Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday I will pretty much be doing just homework. BREAK is definately an OVERstatement! Oh well, at least I have Thanksgiving off! :-) I did take my Molecular Biology final exam last Thursday (my teacher wanted to end class early in the semester) and that felt good! I am not sure how well I did, but it's over! YEA!

Clarification

For the post below I want to clarify one thing. The chocolate lab puppy, Izzie, is not the same puppy as the puppy of the owner of whom we think broke into the animal hospital I work at. Just wanted to clear that up in case there was any confusion. So, no, Izzie is not linked to a crime suspect!

Deer meat, pumpkin pie, puppy, and a break in

We've had an eventful weekend! Friday after school Kenny, his friend Josh, and I cut and wrapped Kenny's deer. Josh works at Del Monte so he knew how to cut it up right. :-)

What's left of the deer.

The plate of meat being made into jerky as we speak...or whatever.

We were able to get 3 roasts, 9 round steaks, and 16 backstraps. We also got 10 lbs. of salami and 6 lbs of jerky--these are being made at Del Monte. We already have the salami and it is really good with cheese and crackers! :-)

Kenny and I bought two pumpkins to carve for Halloween, but we never had time to carve them. After we got the meat cleaned up I decided to try my hand at making a homemade pie from scratch. I found a recipe online and got started.

Kenny cut out a section of one of the pumpkins for me.

I cut it into chunks and boiled them.

While the chunks were cooling from being boiled, I made a pie crust...without killing myself!

In the meantime, Kenny was tired of waiting for pumpkin pie, so he decided to make cookies.

I then mixed all the pie filling ingredients together (mashed pumpkin, evaporated milk, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and brown sugar).

I then poured the homemade filling into the homemade crust.

And baked it.

Well, it doesn't taste as good as pie filling from a can--it was a little too squashy-tasting and not as sweet as I like it. But I did it! :-)

Saturday morning I had to go into work for an hour or so to take care of the boarding animals. Then I went up to help Kenny on a job taking out and putting in a retaining wall that runs along a driveway. This was for the neighbor of an older lady that Kenny does some random work for every now and then. This was a lot of work! We had to pull out old, rotting railroad ties and then put up a 3-high wall of concrete, landscaping blocks. It turned out looking so good, plus we made some good money! :-) This is not a picture of the wall we built, but one I found on the internet; however this looks similar to the one we did (same color even, but ours had one less row).After that I had to go back to work to take care of the animals again and decided to bring home a puppy! Let me es-plain. This puppy was brought to the animal hosptial a couple weeks ago by a couple of hunters who found her on I-15 between McCammon and Inkom. She had road rash and a broken leg, but no tags or a collar or anything. So the doc treated her and we've been taking care of her since. Her name is Izzie, she's a Chocolate Lab and has the prettiest blue/green eyes! I wish we could take her, but we just can't right now. We've been trying to find a good home for her, so if anyone knows of anyone who wants a chocolate lab...she is a very good puppy, will need lots of exercise, and a big fenced in back yard. :) I just decided to bring her home for the weekend so she could have some interaction with other dogs. Also so she could play around rather than just sit in a dog run all day, every day. She does really good with our dogs and she's been really good in the house. Isn't she so cute?

Here she is watching Chevy eat. The splint should be coming off in a couple weeks.

Community Animal Hospital

Today (Sunday), Kenny and I were getting ready for church and my manager called me to tell me that someone broke into the animal hospital and released all the dogs to the outside. So Kenny and I went over there to help look for the dogs. I was the only one who knew what one of them looked like because the owners dropped off their two dogs for boarding Saturday evening and I was the one who checked them in. We had treated one of their dogs before, but not the other one. When we got there, they had already found two of the dogs, but 3 were still MIA. So Kenny and I drove around looking for them. One was found while we were driving around, and we found another one--the one that I knew what it looked like--and Animal Control helped us catch him. So both of the dogs that were dropped off Saturday evening were found. The 3rd dog is still missing. This puppy is a long story, and the most likely suspect to this crime is this puppy's owner. If you want the whole story, call me. The hospital's front door was all broken up, but nothing was stolen...kind of suspicious! Anyway, it was an interesting Sunday. I'm glad that we brought Izzie, the puppy, home with us Saturday cause who knows if we would have been able to find her!

Our Halloween

For Halloween, Kenny went deer hunting as a last attempt since it was the last day of the deer hunt. I went to my classes, but it was alright because a girl in my program brought a big bad of candy--the good stuff! So we were all high on sugar, thus making classes on Halloween more bareable. :-) Later that afternoon we went to do more deer hunting with our friend, Mike Nestler (yes, Julie, the same Mike you and Craig know--he and his wife, Desirae, who is from Marsh Valley, are in our ward, plus I am Desirae's visiting teacher). I didn't have a tag, plus I didn't feel like hiking all over, so I just stayed in the 4-Runner and worked on homework. The guys came back well after dark, but Kenny also brought me back a little something! Finally!

So when we got home, Kenny finished gutting it and strung it up under our back patio--a nice little treat for the trick-or-treaters. We only got one set of trick-or-treaters...maybe that's why...hmmm.

Kenny was pretty excited. It was a little 3-point buck, but you can't really tell there's three points unless you look fairly hard.

For the rest of our evening we were going to go to Mike and Desirae's Halloween party, but I was starting to get sick with a cold, so I wasn't feeling well. Plus, I didn't want to share it with everyone at the party. So Kenny and I just watched a movie and waited for trick-or-treaters who never came (we had the good stuff too!). Oh well. Halloween isn't what it used to be, especially when you're too old to go trick-or-treating, and you don't have kids to dress up and take trick-or-treating. And, no, we don't dress up our animals!