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!

Birthday Girl!

I turned another year wiser this week. I usually either look forward to or dread my birthday for several weeks ahead of time, but this birthday kind of just snuck up on me. My visiting teachers came over on my birthday eve to bring me beautiful pink potted tulips that are blooming in our kitchen right now. I know the Lord loves me because he knows that I love tulips but my visiting teachers didn't.

I also love roses and gerber daisies and Jason brought me three lovely red roses just before I started teaching my class that morning. As a result my class sang "Happy Birthday" to me. My good friend Sara was kind enough to take me out to lunch at Kneaders. I had never been there before, but highly recommend it. It was delicious!!!

That night Jason and I celebrated by going out to dinner at Mimi's Cafe and then to Color Me Mine. For those of you not familiar with Color Me Mine, it's an art studio that allows you to buy white ceramic kitchen items or decorations, and then paint and glaze them any way you want. They provide all the glazes, brushes, stickers, tools, aprons, etc. and then they fire your ceramic artwork in the kiln for you. Jason and I were there for over three hours. I decorated a square serving plate and he decorated a utensil cup. I think the most random part of our experience is that we ran into one of Jason's freshman dorm roommates, a guy from our university dance class last year, and the friend of one of my former students at Cedar Ridge who recognized me as the teacher who got her engagement ring in class.Saturday Jason and I played racquetball with a couple other guys from our ward and that night we went to the BYU v. U of U basketball game. We went sitting up in the nosebleed section, but we could still see fairly well. It was a pretty loud and exciting game and crowd was really into it. Jason's ears were ringing afterwards and I got a headache from all the noise. I'm glad BYU won in the end.

Today Jason and I were sustained as the Ward Employment Specialists. Apparently the Bishop is pretty concerned with the number of members who are either unemployed or under-employed. Hopefully we can connect them with some resources that will be helpful.

We enjoyed a delicious dinner at Jason's parents' home tonight to celebrate Jason's and my birthdays. Both sets of grandparents were there for the occasion. Jason and I did 4 truths and a lie as the honorary guests. Nobody could guess my fib, but Jason so focused on coming up with his truths that he kind of forgot about the lie part. It was kind of funny. :)

Thanks to all those who called or wished me a happy birthday! It's nice to be reminded of how many people care every one in a while.

Social Butterflies

I got released from being "Primary President" today. People kept asking me if I was sad about it, but the truth is that I wasn't really sad at all. In fact, I was a little relieved. It's been a great calling, but I'm ready for a change and my favorite child just moved away, so it's good timing.

I don't know that I really have that much to write about, but we'll see what I come up with. Friday night I didn't feel like cooking and since I have a birthday coming up, I found birthday coupons. We ate burgers at Red Robin. Jason doesn't like eating at restaurants, but he does it just for me. I ate more french fries in that one night than I did in all of 2009 I think. They were YUMMY! And not surprisingly I took home half of my burger.

We were actually social this weekend. We went over to some neighbors on Friday night for a birthday party, were invited over for dinner and games at another neighbors house on Saturday night, and we invited another couple over for dinner at our apartment tonight for curry. We usually aren't that social, so I guess it's feast or famine with us.

My new job is going well. It's kind of fun, exciting, and stressful at the same time. The part I like most about it is that my work informs fairly big decisions made by the administration and Deans of colleges at BYU and will affect thousands of students and hundreds of faculty. It's kind of fun having a job that is so directly influential. It's for that very same reason that it can be stressful though, not to mention that I work for people that have a lot more clout and are very accomplished. Who am I to give my opinion in meetings full of people like that?

A New Semester

Well, this new semester has brought a few new changes. Jason started several new classes this semester including a History of Civilization class, a Seminary teaching class, Media in the Family, Korean Conversation, and Hebrew 101. It’s an interesting mix that keeping him really busy. He’s cut back on the hours he works in the coding lab, but he still pokes his head in every few days to see if they need anything. Jason was also released as the ward clerk this past Sunday. He has really enjoyed working with our Bishop and the whole bishopric are amazed how on top of things he always is. He says he’ll miss being in the “know,” but not the early morning Sunday meetings.

I didn’t really know how this semester would turn out, but it flipped very quickly from not knowing what to do with all my time, to not knowing how to get everything done in my time. I was offered a job at the Center for Teaching and Learning at BYU as a Research Assistant/Evaluator. I am hired to work on two pretty big projects, a significant but quick project with the American Heritage course, and a technology research project to find out the technology needs/wants of the faculty in connection with Course Management Systems such as Blackboard. I didn’t really realize how big these projects were when I took the job, but the last few days have been both exciting and stressful!

The End of Another Year

For New Year’s Eve we all went over to Jeff and Sally’s new home. We all enjoyed hanging out, sledding down their hill in the front yard, watching Night at the Museum 2 on their home theatre system, having a family dance, and playing games before celebrating the new year. It’s hard to believe it already 2010. I still distinctly remember being in 6th grade and having people refer to us as the class of 2000 and thinking that the year 2000 seemed so far away. It has been a good year, but it will be interesting to see what happens in 2010. I could be in very different circumstances a year from now.

As we were gathering things up to go, we realized that one of the brothers that had driven our car to Jeff and Sally’s had left the lights on and killed the battery. All the guys went out to help jump the battery while the rest of us enjoyed watching someone’s illegal but very pretty fireworks display out the back windows. Fortunately they were able to get the battery going again and we made it back to Alpine around 1:00 in the morning.

Jason and I enjoyed sleeping in until 9:00am the next morning. I must say that sleeping in has been one of the advantages of not having kids yet. Most everyone else is up early in the morning with the kids, but Jason and I have slept in most mornings—even though that meant missing breakfast at times.

Skiing

We left at almost 7:30am for Powder Mountain to go skiing. Jason and I were in the van with Andy, Chelsey, Mom and Dad.

It snowed most of the night and snowed all the way through the afternoon. The roads hadn’t been plowed so it was a slow and scary drive up the mountain. It was so foggy, that we couldn’t even really see where we were going or if we were going the right direction at times. The roads up the mountain were especially bad. We passed a police officer coming down and asked her how the roads were. She replied, “The roads are horrible.” We attempted going up them anyway though after a plow and road salter truck drove past us. Twice I thought we were going to run into cars as we tried to pass them on the road. We had to pass them because they had gotten stopped in the middle of the road, but if we had stopped behind them, we would have never had the momentum to make it up the steep hills. We were still sliding all over the road even with the salt, but without the salt laid down we would have never made it. At the very last hill Andy and Mike had to jump out of the car and push the van up a part of the hill to help us not get stuck. There were a few moments that I really didn’t think we were going to make it up, but I’m very grateful we did. Because of the bad weather and bad roads, it took us three and a half hours to get there.

We went to Powder Mountain because Jeff’s business, Peak Capital, owns a lot of the surrounding lands of the ski resort. Because of that, we received royal treatment. We had several pairs of skis rented for free, plus all of our day/night passes for free, a catered pizza lunch, and access to a Yurt (a tent the size of a front room with couches and a fire going), basically the equivalent of thousands of dollars.

It was snowy and foggy, but it wasn’t extremely cold or windy which was nice. Because of all the recent snow, we were skiing in about 12 inches of fresh powder, which is awesome for experienced skiers and a little unnerving for inexperienced skiers like me. Jason skied most of the afternoon with his brothers and mom while I happily stayed back with two of the sisters-in-law and eight-year-old Dallin.

One time up the ski lift, we had the four of us on one chair. As we were getting off, somehow one of the sisters-in-law bumped the rest of us and the other three of us got carried a little two far past the drop-off point and then fell off into the snow. Now that I think back on it, it must have looked really funny. They had to stop the chair lift and people came down to see if we were okay. I think Dallin got it the worst because one of his skis had come off, but we were all okay.

A little later we went down a path that led us to a tow rope lift. We didn’t know that we were going to that particular tow rope and the only other way down, we were told, was a black diamond. Well, the tow rope was kind of tricky. We waited in a long line and then Dallin was the first to try to get up the hill. He fell flat on his face three times in a row, meanwhile the people behind us were getting ancy. Next Sally went up, but she fell off half-way up the hill and had to come back down. Lisa tried it and fell off and then I tried it and fell off. Finally we let other people go ahead of us in line while we tried to figure out what to do. Sally made it up, Lisa tried again but then had a hard, painful fall. Lisa and I were about to take off our skis and walk up the dumb hill when the attendant convinced us to try one more time. Lisa finally got on and then the attendant helped me get on as well. As soon as I was somewhat situated I looked up ahead of me only to see that Lisa had fallen down but hadn’t let go and was being dragged up the hill backwards and holding on for dear life. It felt like a long trip even though it only lasted about 8 min. but I kept expecting Lisa to fall off. She stuck it out until she was almost to the top and heard someone yell to let go. She finally let go and then furiously tried to roll over in the snow with her skis on to avoid being hit by me coming behind her. Fortunately she wasn’t hurt, but it was a pretty exhausting trip to the top for her. I wished I could have taken a picture of her, but both of my hands were busy holding the tow pole and my ski poles.

I didn’t really fall down much, and when I did, it was a really soft landing into a bunch of powder. It was a lot of fun! We left about 4:30pm and had much better roads going down the mountain, but we still didn’t get home until around 8:00pm.