Extracurricular Activities

This last weekend was filled with sports and family, and sometimes both. Friday evening Jason had a intramural basketball game. I've gone to all of his games this season and with all my experience I can heartily say that Jason is good but his team is not. I think this least they've lost by is 25 points, so the games are kind of sad. They should be playing in a lower division but they're playing in the intermediate division bracket. The tournament starts this week though and hopefully they'll start playing teams more on their level.

Saturday morning my parent drove down to here to attend the Temple with us. We had a nice session and a yummy lunch afterwards. It's nice to attend the Provo Temple with my family because many people in my family have done a lot of temple work there, including my Grandma and Grandpa Rasband who worked there for about 20 years. I'm reminded of them there when I go, and yet I've never even been there when they were alive and working there. Something tells me they're probably still working there even now.

After the temple session, we had enough time to eat and get up to the Marriott Center in time for the basketball game against New Mexico. It was an intense game and very fun to watch. I wish it had ended a little differently, but it was still fun to watch. We were sitting by Jason's parents and his brother and his family were also sitting nearby.

Birthdays and Valentines

This was a busy week since not only was it Valentines, but it was Jason's birthday! It's sad when I feel like I'm so busy with school and work that fitting any other "celebration" stuff can be stressful, but we tried to make it work.

The day of Jason's birthday I was working all day until almost 5:00pm. I rushed home to make fajitas for dinner and then we went cross country skiing as a "cultural assignment" for Jason's Hebrew class. We took three people from his class up to Aspen Grove with us and arrived at the same time as 20-30 BYU outdoors club people, so we had to wait 20-30 minutes for them to get all their gear before we could get our skis and poles. None of us had ever been before. The lady in charge explained how to get to the trail head. I asked her if the trail was lit and she said yes, so I didn't worry about getting a flashlight from our car. Well, we finally got on the trail about 7:45pm and we had to be back by 9:00. We started up this path that the sign indicated, but it was really dark and I couldn't see much. I was convinced that we weren't on the right path because the girl at the lodge had said the path was lit. Well, I wasn't happy about skiing in the dark on the "wrong path" when we had so little time, but it turned out that we really were on the right path, but only half of it was lit. Apparently some people think it's fun to ski in the dark, but I kept falling down because I literally couldn't see where I was going. The path would curve or something and I couldn't see my feet, or the ground, or where the path went, and some parts were pretty steep. So much for a romantic night skiing with my husband on his birthday!

Friday Jason surprised me with a half dozen red roses for Valentine's Day. I think what surprised me most is that he was TWO DAYS EARLY! I love flowers though and they are beautiful. I did find out later that part of the reason he was so early was because he went in with another guy from our ward for dozen roses and then split the roses and the cost. So there is another girl in the ward with roses just like mine. :)

That night we went to another Hebrew cultural activity at Jason's teacher's house. Several class members came over to celebrate Shabbot, or a dinner ceremony welcoming in the Sabbath. It was actually a really cool and interesting experience. I can see how traditions can be so powerful, and if truly celebrated, can bring people closer to the Lord even though some only see it as a bunch of "dos" and "don'ts."

After the dinner we went to the 40th celebration of Young Ambassadors with Jason's parents and Grandma and Grandpa Richards. Many of the alumni came back to perform, including some professional performers. It was a really good show, but my favorite song was from Les Miserables "Bring Him Home" followed by "Defying Gravity" from Wicked. It was kind of funny to have one of my students and her date sit right behind us during the show. It reminded me of a time when Jason and I were dating and one of my third grade students and her mom sat right behind us at a Vocal Point concert. Gotta love it!

After the concert Jason's parents and grandparents came over to our apartment for dessert. They stayed and talked for a few minutes but then needed to head home because of the late hour. I think Grandma and Grandpa Richard might have been up later that we were that night. :)

Saturday we tried to do homework part of the day, but that night we went to the temple to do sealings and then over to a Stake Valentines Dance. I didn't think the music was that great, but the chocolate fountain was yummy! At quarter to 10:00 we ate dinner at Los Hermanos and we didn't have to wait at all. It's been awhile since I've eaten there and it brought back a lot of good memories of other times I've been there for celebrating birthdays, my mission call, and college graduation.

February Already?

I'm not sure how it came to be February so quickly, but I can say that I'm getting tired of the cold weather and long for warmer days and Spring flowers.

This week has been very busy with work. One of the projects I'm working on required me to help put together seven focus groups. Focus groups consist of inviting a randomized sample of various groups of faculty and students to come meet together for one hour. We ask them specific questions and record the sessions so we can look for themes in responses to get a general idea of their challenges and opinions. I reported the results at the Academic Technology committee meeting and will spend next week putting together a survey to continue gathering data. I was a little nervous doing the first one, but by the last one, I was getting pretty comfortable facilitating the discussions.

I also put quite a few hours into revising several parts on my Behaviorism Simulation for my Educational Psychology class. They are testing it out this week and I hope they have some good suggestions for how I can improve it. My committee chair hired a programmer for 5/hrs a week, but he'll be working on trying to put my design into a different platform. All the changes I'm making for the time being are still in Flash and I'm doing it myself. If you want to see what it's like, the link is http://jburningham.net/BehaviorismPro.swf and you can just login as 'Julie.' It still has a few bugs, but you can get the idea.

Jason and I started Intramural mixed doubles racquetball this week. We won our first matches easily on Tuesday. Too easily. We realized we accidentally signed ourselves up for a lower division than we meant to. We tried to switch to a different one, but they won't let us now. Hopefully we'll have some more challenging matches eventually, and it wouldn't hurt if we got some t-shirts for winning our division championship either. :)

Friday Jason had a Intramural basketball game. I got to be a scorekeeper, but unfortunately I mostly only added points to the other team's score. Hopefully the next game will go better. :)
Afterwards we picked up our ceramic things from Color Me Mine and stopped by Cold Stone for some free birthday ice cream. That night we watched "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" which was a pretty entertaining 1939 black and white movie.Saturday morning we went to a 3-hour Ward Specialist Training put on by the Provo/Orem area. It was really cool to see all the resources the Church has put together in "helping the members help themselves."

Sunday my Mom and Dad invited us over for birthday dinner. It was delicious!!! Thanks Mom!