A Matter of Perspective...

So 2 or 3 weeks ago Dallin and I were both extremely busy and a bit stressed trying to finish up the semester and get ready for our finals.  Dallin said that we were in a sprint to the finish but I told him I thought it was more like a death march. I guess it's a matter of perspective, but I don't think it can be called a sprint. I mean who sprints for 3 weeks straight?  We'll Dallin does like to run so maybe that is the difference.  In any case, we survived!! YAY!

So as I mentioned before, I was a tad bit busy this last month and the death march of the last month of school kept me from doing things like updating our blog.  But now I am free, more or less, and actually have time to write, so this is might be kinda long :)

Dallin got an internship with the International Trade Commission doing "legal stuff" (that's a direct quote, he's so descriptive).  We are pretty excited because it pays for part of the summer and is awesome experience! The last few people to intern here have gone on to get really good jobs. He might even be able to keep working there into the school year.  This also means that we are still free agents next summer, we are hoping to be able to get internships out west next summer so we can be closer to family!

Dallin also went to the tea party rally in DC with a friend from institute to listen to Ron Paul talk (I stayed in my office and worked).  He said it was pretty interesting and we had a good chat with an older couple about politics and stuff on the metro ride home, they had come all the way down from northern New York to go to the rally.  He also went to listen to Ron Paul talk, again, Thursday night (again I stayed home and studied).  He really liked it, and is happy that we are near DC right now and he can be involved in politics so easily.

I have been working my tail off trying to finish my research for the semester as well as do all my class assignments.  I now know quite a bit about blood flow in arteries and about the design of stents.  It's pretty interesting.  I can also design a zero-net energy house!  So if anyone wants to make their house more energy efficient, just talk to me, I have some pretty good ideas.  I made a poster for our college's research and development showcase about my research I've been doing.  I then stood in front of it for a whole day defending it to judges and answering questions.  The showcase was a contest and I won 3rd place out of about 60 entries!  It was pretty exciting.

In other news, we planted some new plants this week.  We found tomato seed in target's dollar section and are hoping that by next year we will have some tomatoes growing.  We also bought a sweet pepper plant and some flowers.  Hopefully I'll be able to keep them alive, I have bad luck with flowers.

Oh, and we've been married for two years!! I know hard to believe but we actually have!  We didn't do anything exciting because it fell right smack in the middle of finals and if you haven't figured it out yet we were both pretty busy.  We are going to go down to Williamsburg some time this week though to celebrate!

I know I left somethin out so if I remember what it is I'll put it up later, I also have some pictures, but I'm not sure where they are right now so I might put those up later as well.

Ode to Cherry Blossoms

This weekend we were able to go down to the national mall for the cherry blossom festival.  It officially started this week!  Peak bloom time isn't supposed to be until about next weekend but since general conference is next weekend we decided to go today, and it was sooo worth it!  The cherry blossoms out here are incredible.  After a long snowy winter it was great to see the trees in bloom.  They were really beautiful, if you've never seen them you really should. We walked all around the tidal basin and mostly just looked at the flowers.

We also lucked out and it happened to be the Smithsonian's kite festival.  I have never seen so many kites in one place before it was crazy!  The pictures I have don't really do it justice, it was hard to get all the kites in one shot.  Unfortunately we didn't know about it or we would have brought ours.  We are totally going to go next year with our own kite!

Update *anyone got a better title for this?*

I couldn't think of a name for this update because, once again, I have waited too long to update and have a bunch of things to put on here so... I'll take suggestions.  Anyway, we had a great Valentines Day, we got a gift card for Chili's from our credit card rewards and used that to go out to dinner, then came home and made a heart shaped pazooki and watched a movie.  By the way this was way too much dessert for two people.

Dallin just finished his spring break which was unfortunately for him, rather uneventful because I had to go school everyday, and  so he did too.  He was able to beat some new levels on bloons though, so the week wasn't a complete waste.  My spring break is this coming week and now he has to go to school, bad planning on our school's parts, I wish they would have worked that out better.  My mom is here though so we are going to go have some fun!  Dallin has also started interviewing for summer internships, we are praying he can find a paying one so that we can try and keep our debt down as much as possible, he's had some really good interviews so far so we are pretty hopeful.
I have been working hard on my research and after an epic battle with MATLAB (a computer program that makes cool graphs and things), was able to write a program that does all my work for me.  Unfortunately I'm not sure if it would have been quicker to just do it all by hand than to write the program to do it, it made a pretty graph though so I'm still excited about it.
In other news, we have been able to have the missionaries teach one of our neighbors in our home for the past few weeks and she even came with me to the relief society birthday thing which was a lot of fun!  It has been a real blessing to have these lessons in our house.  The spirit has been strong and we look forward to them.
O and  I almost forgot! We moved! We now live in an apartment that is about 3 miles closer to school than our last one is.   We are still in the same ward, which we really like!  Our new apartment is a little smaller than the last, which is really only an issue with the closet space, but we've just about worked that out.  It is a lot more quiet than our last place though and the rent is cheaper, which is a huge plus.  We can also walk to the grocery store from here (if it ever stops raining), and I can finally play my wiii fit without feeling bad because there is no one below us.
And last but not least, it was my birthday today! Happy Birthday to me.  Thanks to everyone who called or text me.  It was a pretty good day, we went on a tour of the white house today, which actually was a little disappointing, you don't get to see much. And went out to lunch.  We got to have some friends over for ice cream cake too which was really good!
Now we are going to start writing our family newsletter... maybe... so we can give it to Aunt Lisa before the day that it's due, or the day after :)

Christmas, School, Snow...

   Well life has gotten pretty crazy with a new semester and stuff, so I haven't updated this in a while (this might be a long post).  We went to my mom's house for Christmas! It was great, California was sunny and warm which was way better than the 20 inches of snow we left behind here.  We got to spend time with friends and family and my mom is back in my old ward thanks to another ward boundary change so I actually knew most of the people there and didn't feel like a visitor. Dallin took the patent bar while we were there and passed!  He can now file patents, hooray! Hopefully that will help him find a paying job for the summer.  The down side to this was that Dallin had to study while we were in CA, but the upside was that my mom and I got to go shopping and not feel bad about leaving Dallin at home so he could study (he doesn't really like shopping anyways).  We also went to San Francisco over Christmas.  We went up there for my great aunt's funeral but we were able to spend a few days and sight see.  Jessi and Natachia came over for an afternoon and had dinner with us, it was fun!  We got some great Christmas presents and decided to try and put most of them in our carry on bags so that we didn't have to pay for another checked bag.  This led to some interesting conversations at the security checkpoint... Needless to say when you try and walk on an airplane with several board games, some kitchen utensils (including a few whisks), and some other random things, they search your bags.  It took the security guy a few minutes to get my bag closed again because it was so full, I did warn him!  We also found out that the Milwaukee airport doesn't have any good food places, so if you have a layover there, pack a lunch.
   When we got back we started school again.  Dallin had to wait a few weeks to get his grades from last semester and he was pretty nervous.  He ended up doing really well and was in the top 17% of his class!! So now he's still working hard to try and keep it up.  He is really liking his founders constitution class this semester.
I got back and started my research. I finally know how to use most of the equipment and have started taking data.  It's kind of tedious but I'm doing well I think.  Hopefully we will be able to find some useful things from all the images I'm taking.  I have two pretty fun classes this semester, energy engineering and biomechanical engineering.
   Also, Dallin and I are moving at the end of February, YAY.  We decided that we really needed to try and find a new place because our upstairs neighbors are super loud and the apartment we're in is not worth listening to them (and our rent would go up in March).  So we're moving into an apartment a couple miles down the road, we'll still be in the same ward so we at least don't have to try and meet all new people.  Our new apartment will be a little smaller, but it's cheaper and the floors don't squeak when you walk, we checked!  I'm excited to move but not excited to pack.  It should be better than the last move because it's only like 3 miles instead of 3000 miles.  Hopefully all goes well with that.
   Now for the last item of business, we got a TON of snow again!  Whoever told us that it didn't snow that much out here (David and Nic) were totally lying.  We had a huge storm this weekend and got about 27 inches of snow!  The tree behind our apartment lost a bunch of branches and is now leaning at a weird angle. We heard about the storm on Tuesday and decided to buy a snow shovel so that we didn't have to try and dig our car out with a cookie sheet again.   Dallin spent yesterday afternoon digging our car out (I helped a little bit) and then finished it off this morning.  Church was cancelled again, so he also spent a few hours this morning helping people dig out.  We even met a few of our neighbors, apparently when you have a snow shovel everyone wants to be your friend.  Some good things did come from the snow though, I got my first snow day ever! Actually two snow days!  School was cancelled Friday and will be closed Monday too due to the snow!

This is Dallin shoveling off our car, yes there was so much snow on top of our car 

we needed a shovel, not a snow scraper.

Our car is the one in the center

If you can't see it, it's around 26.5 inches!

We also learned the importance of food storage.  While almost everyone else was storming the grocery stores on Thursday and Friday to stock up for the weekend, Dallin and I were home in our warm, dry, mob free house!  This is proof that following the prophet only brings joy!! :)