Date Night

Friday night I had one of the most fun date nights that I've had in a while. Kristilyn and Mark took us out to celebrate our graduation as well as our upcoming birthdays. They took us to Tepanyaki for dinner. Neither of us had ever eaten there before and it's one of those restaurants where the chef comes to cook the food right in front of you. We all ordered something different and shared it with each other. It was so much fun and the food was all so good!!! I generally consider myself a seafood hater, but I must admit, that it can be really good when it's fresh and cooked right. I tried fresh shrimp for the first time and actually thought it was pretty good. Jason's salmon was also really yummy.

After dinner we went over to Barnes and Noble and talked while we cleared some room in our tummies for dessert. After a while we went to Maggie Moo's ice cream. I have never had Maggie Moo ice cream before either, but it's kind of like a Cold Stone. Sometimes I have a hard time deciding what to get since I don't know what to mix together, but I tried strawberry and pina colada ice cream with a raspberry mix-in. It was YUMMY! Well worth the shivering to experience the delicious taste! We went back to Mark and Kristilyn's to eat our ice cream. We always have so much fun talking to them and I usually end up laughing a lot. Thanks for such a fun night Mark and Kristilyn!

When I got home from our date, I found that the wireless card in my computer was broken. I wasn't too happy about that because I just replaced it four months ago. I took it back to the repair place and the man was so nice about it. I was there for an hour, but even though the wireless card was only warrantied for 90 days, he still replaced it for free and also gave me a new top plate (laptop keyboard) since he saw that it was starting to break and Apple apparently covers that repair for free too. I'm grateful that my internet is working again.

Work has been pretty stressful the last few days. I have a delivery of 9 courses on Friday which means its likely I'll be working long days all week. At least it's due the day before my birthday so at least I can enjoy my weekend.

Welcome to 2011!

It's still a little surprising that we're already in the year 2011. I'm finally getting used to the idea, but I remember being in elementary school and thinking that the year 2000 seemed far away!

After Christmas break I think I got the January blues for several days when I realized that the next work holiday I had isn't until May. My work is still going well for the most part. I like being an instructional designer, but I think I would like it more if I did it less. Fortunately, I do enjoy the content I'm working with and I feel that I'm contributing to something worthwhile and meaningful and helpful for families.

Basically I'm in the thick of scripting and deadlines for this project until May. Because we're doing so many courses there are two contractors that are helping out with this project. One of these contractors happens to be a girl in my ward. She was looking for a job a few months ago and I mentioned my company was looking for contractors. She applied, was interviewed, and then hired for the beginning of the January. She was assigned to my project so I'm now working on the tricky balance of being both friend and supervisor. The nice benefit of her being hired is that we started carpooling to work and that is saving time and gas money, so I'm grateful for that arrangement.

To help me have something to look forward to, Jason and I planned this year's vacations. I don't get a lot of time off for work during the year, but I'm trying to get what I can out of the days that I have. So, we're taking two trips. The end of May we'll spend a week in New York City with Jason's brother and his family, and then we'll fly to Buffalo to see my sister and her family for a weekend before we fly back. The other trip is a big family reunion in San Antonio for a week during July. A week ago we spent several days shopping for plane tickets to get the best price possible and I think we did pretty well. May seems far away right now, but hopefully it will come quickly. I'm excited for both of our trips! I know they will both be so fun and I'm looking forward to see our out-of-state family.

Jason's last day of seminary was on Friday. He was kind of sad to say good-bye to his students. He doesn't regret the decision of choosing another career, but change is still hard and not knowing what comes next is difficult. He'll be looking for a job as well as checking out graduate schools full time now and I don't envy him at all--job hunting is one of my least favorite things to do. We're grateful for everyone's prayers and advice.

Things have been pretty low-key since Christmas. We're doing a free month trial of Netflix so we've been watching a movie every weekend for the last several weeks. We've seen Toy Story 3, How to Train a Dragon, and Inception. Toy Story 3 was our favorite of the three. I actually didn't make it all the way through Inception. It was a little too intense for me, so I just had Jason give me the detailed version of the second half of the movie. He did a good job so I felt like I watched the whole thing. What a complex and complicated movie!

In the last couple of weeks we've also played games a couple times--once with my parents and once with our friends the Gurrels. We enjoyed learning a new game called Citadels. It was so fun that I hope to play it again soon.