In January we had the opportunity to go with most of Lin's family to Cabo San Lucas. It is located on the very tip of Baja California. It was my first time out of the country and it was amazing. Lin's brother has a timeshare so we stayed in an awesome hotel right on the beach. Most of our time was spent on the beach, in the ocean or in the pool.
Our awesome 11-seater van
It was beautiful there. One of the days we went into the city of Cabo. We walked through the market area and went down to the bay. Some of the group was getting hungry so they stopped at a bayside restaurant to have lunch. Lin and I didn't really want to eat there so we volunteered to go back to the van and get some items. On our way to the van we stopped at a small taco shop and had delicious street tacos. They were really incredible and very cheap.
After lunch we took a glass bottom boat ride in the Sea of Cortes and out to the point of Baja.
The point (Pacific Ocean on left and the Sea of Cortes on the right)
The Skinner Family
The hole in the rock. At high tide water from the Pacific comes through to the Sea of Cortes.
The Arch (looking through to the Pacific)
Fish under our boat
During the boat tour they let you get off at a beach on the peninsula and go snorkeling. This was my first time snorkeling and to be honest I am not very good. I am not good at diving down so I stayed on the surface and Lin and I were both having trouble breathing through the mouthpiece so we opted to just use the masks and come back up for air.
So as you may have noticed I have not blogged in quite a few months. In fact we are now closer to 1 year since my last post. A few big things have happened in our lives since then so I will try to catch you up without boring you. My last post was in early Fall. I was just starting a new semester which had me taking 1 class, doing 20hrs of my internship per week, working 15 hrs with the Cannon Center and teaching clogging on Saturday mornings. Lin was also working and going to school. It was a very busy semester and we were both running on empty. For my birthday Lin decided we should get away. We save up money in a jar for special occasions (birthdays, christmas, etc). Somehow we actually had enough to get a room in Park City for a weekend. It was so much fun to get away and Lin took me on a shopping spree at the outlet stores.
After that trip it was back to the grind of the semester. My internship was going well. I interned at Stouffers in Springville. They pretty well let me design the internship and had me doing a lot of ergonomic studies and recommendations. I also had the opportunity to work with an ergonomics team put together from different plants around the world. This was an awesome opportunity as I got to be on a couple international conference calls and talk about my ideas and knowledge about ergonomics (which is not a lot so it was nerve wracking).
Novermber came and it was suddenly the last few weeks of my very last semester at BYU. This was a very exciting prospect but also a little scary. We would be stepping into the unknown when I graduated. I officially graduated on December 16, 2011.
Christmas was a simple event this year because we would be taking a trip to Mexico with Lin's family in January. I will post about that in a subsequent post.
That about catches you up on the last few months of 2011.
So much to my dismay, I have very little time to blog although I want to. So here is an update. Lin and I just got back from Ft. Bridger (sorry no pictures my camera is having problems). It was so great to get away. That is truly the only place I feel like I get more relaxed on a vacation. We got there Friday night and stayed through Sunday evening so we could drive home when it was cooler. We rented a fire-pit while we were there and we roasted hotdogs the first night and made a jiffypop. In the morning we made a great breakfast with sausage, eggs, peppers, onions, and bacon (I know we have both bacon and sausage- I meant to put the bacon back because the sausage was cheaper, but somehow we ended up with both and since we had a cooler we decided we better cook it all). The days there were quite warm (I got sunburned), but the nights were freezing; literally. There was frost on the ground in the mornings and we are pretty sure it hit freezing Saturday night. Thankfully Lin got me an awesome sleeping bag for our anniversary so I was fairly warm. Lin is so funny, he LOVES Ft. Bridger and the primitive camping idea. He and his dad are planning on making a fire cooker and we are thinking about buying a canvas tent for Christmas. We are both really excited about it.
Other than that we both have started school. Lin is taking 14 credits on top of working 40+ hours per week. I have started my one class and my internship. I like it so far, but it is a lot of work. I am putting in 20hrs per week at Stouffers for my internship, working 12-15hrs at BYU and filming football Friday night. I know that is spreading me very thin, but we are trying to save as much money as possible so when Lin's work season ends we won't be totally broke. . . I am also trying to start up my clogging classes. My adult class has 1 for sure person and about 4 maybe students. Hopefully that will take off.
So life is good other than Lin and I not seeing each other EVER, but I know that at some point that will end. Until my next post. . . .
So this is my 100th post. . . . to be perfectly honest this is part of the reason I haven't written in awhile. I felt that this post needed to be special. However I didn't know what that should entail. Therefore I just avoided writing. Today I had an experience worthy of being my 100th post.
My ultimate dream is to be a mom and to teach clogging. While neither Lin or I feel it is the right time to start our family I did begin to think it was time to start teaching. I wanted to teach last summer, but I couldn't find a place. In June of this year I called up Charisma Studio in Springville. The owner, Tresa, was willing to let me look at her smallest studio, but unless I could protect the floor in someway she wasn't willing to have cloggers. While I was there she suggested I look into a marley floor because I would be able to leave it down and her dancers could dance on it as well. I began to look online and found the flooring to be pretty expensive. It was around $1000 for that size of room. I thought about it, but still wasn't sure if it was right to spend that money at this point in our life. After talking with Lin and thinking if over for a few weeks, I decided to go for it as long as rent for the room wasn't too expensive. I called Tresa again and found out that she was expanding that small room but would be willing to pay for the additional floor and split the cost of covering the whole room. Today I went to talk to her, see the room, and show her the sample floor piece. As we talked she really wanted to put that floor in and we figured out how much we thought we would need. As I was leaving she decided to just call the company and have them figure out if our calculations were right. She invited me to stay.
I waited as she talked with the company. The total price (including the floor, tape, and shipping) came to $1800. I had already committed to myself and Lin that I was going through with this unless it was much more than $1000 for my cost. I was still unsure about how it would work out, but resolved that I needed to take action.
Part of my resolve came from a lecture video that we watched in my stress management class last fall. I have embedded for you because it really is an amazing video. It is an hour long, but well worth the time.
In this lecture he talks about achieving dreams. One of the points he makes that has stuck with me is that brickwalls (things inhibiting us from achieving our dreams). "Brickwalls aren't there to keep us out; they are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. They are there to stop those that don't want it badly enough."
I felt that this floor and price was one of those brickwalls and I want to teach; I had to not give up. Back to the story. I was at Tresa's studio and she was talking with the floor company. I was going to go home and get her a check for half of the price. She went into her office to get the information for them to get the payment from her. When she came back (off the phone) she sat down next to me and said, "I have been thinking it is kind of unfair for you to pay for half of the floor now that the studio is bigger and it wouldn't be as plausible for you to take it with you if you went to teach somewhere else. I would then need to buy the other half again and the parts of the floor you get might not fit in the place you go to teach. I have been thinking that I should just pay for it all. I think it is going to be some of the best floor in my studio now so it really is good for me and my business. Would you feel like it was fair if maybe for the first year you paid $15/hr instead of $10/hr rent?" WOW! That is definitely a deal! She continued to say how she figures I am a young married, student and $1000 is ALOT of money. She doesn't want to put that burden on me. She said that the Lord has blessed her. Yes she has had trials, but He has blessed her and she feels right about doing this.
As I left her house I was overcome with such feelings of gratitude for her and for the Lord that I couldn't decide if I wanted to laugh, cry, sing, dance or just yell. I truly believe the Lord blessed me for being diligent and trying to accomplish this dream. I have felt like it is really the right time and therefore I didn't give up when those brickwalls came. I just trusted that it would all work out and the Lord rewarded my faith. I am still very amazed and relieved.
I am extremely grateful for this blessing from God letting me know that He is there watching out for me even when I am not as diligent as I should be at some of the small things. I am grateful he knows my heart.
I feel this is a great post for my 100th because it is a testimony builder for me as well as an opening of a new chapter in my life.
I should be doing my reading for class tomorrow, but I am really having some attention deficit. I am ready for school to be out! So I thought I would share my new organization tip. Lin and I are on a really tight budget because he decided to go off of salary pay back to hourly in order to be able to leave work early to go to school in the fall. Unfortunately with this rainy spring it has meant less hours and therefore much less income. So one of the ways I have tried to save is on food. We were already pretty good at eating inexpensively, but now we have gotten even better. We don't eat out (except lunch when Lin works out of town-work picks up dinner) and are going 3 weeks strong. I have also gotten back to planning meals. I try to plan about 2 weeks of meals so that I can go shopping every other week. Since money was very tight this last week I decided to try out Buy Low market. It was great. I got almost the same amount of food I usually do for about $20 cheaper. That is a lot for us :) I was pleasantly surprised by BuyLow and plan to shop there again (although I will always have a bias towards Maceys in Spanish Fork). Well I am on a tangent. . . . .While I was planning my meals I decided to search for cheap recipes on the internet. I stumbled upon the 99cent chef and was pleasantly surprised to find a delicious salisbury steak recipe using ground turkey or chicken. (Lin made it and it was delicious) I also found on the blog a comment about saving money by using leftovers. I try to use leftovers, but lately we either haven't had enough leftovers to use as a meal for two or it just hasn't seemed appetizing later. The comment said to make a list of leftovers as they get put in the fridge that way when you go to the fridge hungry you can know what is in there and avoid the disgusting science project I came across last week. :b Lin thought it was a great idea because then we can also put a date on the list so we know how long its been there. He suggested a white board so we could just erase the item we eat or use. Since we are trying to save I didn't want to go buy a whiteboard unless it was very cheap but I was excited about the list so today I improvised a whiteboard and I think I like it better. I simply took a piece of cardstock and slid it into a shiny, smooth sheet protector. I stuck it to the fridge with magnets and viola! a dry erase board. It works really well and I even labeled the paper with pen (leftovers/date) so that we can erase the leftovers without erasing the category. This is important because I also put a grocery list spot on the paper broken down into categories (meat, produce, breads, cans, dairy, & non-food). I feel so organized and I love it. How do you plan meals, save money, or what are your cheap dinners?
So I am once again behind on my blog posts, but on a happier note I have 3 weeks left of school including finals :] Then I will be onto summer and hopefully have time to clean my house, find a studio to teach at and catch up my blog. This semester has been crazy to say the least. It has literally flown by and I am technically taking more credit hours than I ever have (10 which is equivalent to 20 in normal length semester). Plus because Lin hasn't been getting enough hours at work due to the rain I have been working my normal 10 hours at the Cannon Center and picking up a few shoots with SF17 (my old job). I am not complaining though. I am enjoying all I doing and I know that it isn't forever, but now you can see why I don't do things like blog right now :)
I forgot to mention that someday I want to attempt to learn to paint from Bob Ross. He is amazing. I love to watch his show on PBS. He is incredibly talented and makes it seem so easy to paint masterpieces. I watched him paint a mountain scene with a beautiful sky full of clouds and a pond surrounded by trees. It was incredible. While I highly doubt I could paint that well in the near future I still would love to try it out.
So I just felt like writing. I don't really have much to say, but maybe something will come out as I type :) I am finally getting over this cold that I have had. It will be one week tomorrow. I had forgotten how horrible it is to be sick since it had been around 9 months since I was last sick. Today was the first day my nose and eyes weren't watering uncontrollably. It was great. I could actually concentrate in class.
Speaking of school, this term (yes its only 7 weeks counting finals) is going to be interesting. I am taking 10 credits which is the equivalent of 20 credits in a normal semester. Health 100 Intro to Public Health is like taking a high school course again because it is the intro to the major and only 1 credit. Most of the class is based on attendance and readings. Health 420 Injury & Violence Prevention is so far kind of common sense. The difference between intentional and unintentional injuries and that even though they are commonly called accidents they aren't accidents because they can be prevented. Health 439 Program Planning and Evaluation is a combination of my two group work classes from last semester (social marketing and methods of health promotion). Basically we research, form, and write a proposal for an intervention of some sort figuring out marketing and cost, etc. I will be honest I am not super excited about this class I am sick of group work papers. 5-6 people is just too many without a boss farming out assignments. (I will stop my ranting there, but if you want more just call me up and ask me about group work). My last class is Health 310 Chronic Disease and Prevention, this will probably be my toughest class because it will move super fast and is pretty technical. However sometimes really hard classes excite me. Hopefully I will be able to balance all of these and not go totally crazy, but if I disappear for awhile you will know why.
Today I was reading in the Daily Universe (BYU's newspaper) and there was an article about journal writing. It was talking about what makes a journal valuable for future readers. I have always struggled to write in a journal, but I feel that this blog is somewhat of a journal, although I don't write everyday I do keep track of events in my life both big and small. Perhaps that is why I am writing now. . . .
I feel like life is at such a weird spot right now. It can be so hard, yet wonderful. Most days Lin and I don't really see each other, and when we do, one of us (or both of us) are tired or stressed so we usually get annoyed really easily. Luckily we both know that we love each other and it isn't our fault that the other person is ornery. Yet despite this we are on the cusp of something more, something better. We are both so excited for the future. I will be graduating in 8 months and will hopefully find a full-time job, with benefits. Then we won't be living paycheck to paycheck (something that stresses me out quite a bit), and when I will come home I won't have homework (meaning I can actually relax at home). If I make enough Lin can go part time and focus on school so he can get out of his manual labor job. Then we can start a family, get a house and live happily ever after. . . ok so I know it probably won't work out exactly like we plan, but the future is so near, and I feel like school has been such a long endeavor, good but long. I am ready for the next adventure in my life.
Well if you are still reading, thanks. . .
So I had a brief break between Winter semester and Spring. Friday was the first day I didn't have any school work weighing on my mind. It is amazing how much I can get done when I don't have school stuff I "should" be doing. Here are the projects I finally got done on Friday.
Organized my closet. This shoe rack is wonderful! It makes my side of the closet so neat and tidy.
Lin made these frames when we were first married, and I finally got around to painting them (its only been 3 years). Now we just need to get glass and backing.
I planted my peas in my garden and planted all my starters. Zuchini, Butternut squash, Onions, Tomatoes, Cherry Tomatoes, Jalapenos, Bell Peppers, and Hungarian Hot peppers (they looked fun). I also started some flowers for one of our flower beds.
And finally my quilling project. Dusty Nance taught us how to Quill at young womens. I had to leave early and decided to finish mine at home. I finally got some Mod Podge and finished it. There are things I would do differently but for my first one I think it turned out pretty nice.
So school is finally over for this semester. I am amazed I survived. 3 group work classes are more than I can handle, but everything worked out, and I am glad it is over. I start Spring classes tomorrow and I have a huge load. 10 credits (yes they only allow 9, but I got special permission) my 10th credit is Intro to Public Health. This is the intro class to my major, but I have never been able to fit it in my schedule. This is my last chance because it has to be done before I can do my internship. So the next 7 weeks are going to be very full and busy with school and work, but I think I can do it (my house may be a disaster however). After that I will have a break for the end of June through the end of August. Fall is my last semester and I will have my internship with Stouffers, one class for my major that is yet to be decided (I have proposed to substitute a class and am still waiting to hear back. If it goes well I will be taking Positive Psychology. I also may take Turkish language 101. I haven't decided. I am kind of obsessed with Turkish culture (music, dance, and language). I would love to be able to understand the songs I have, and someday I want to go to Turkey. So I don't know if I will, the only reason I am considering it is because I will still be working and I would like to have the late morning shift (10:30-2:00). The Turkish class is from 9-10, so it would work out perfectly. . . we will see what happens. Other than that I have 34 weeks until I graduate!!
