best idea ever.

hey mindy, why don't you get a second degree ulnar collateral ligament sprain during the holidays and almost pass out so you can ride down the mountain enclosed in a toboggan fearing you will roll to your death with every turn. Consequently this injury will make it so you can't go snowboarding for the rest of the week. good idea, i'll do just that.

food for thought.

why does making baked goods prove your womanhood to the world? anyone can follow baking recipe's just fine when they want to. do i lose wife/woman points because i don't want to get fat after eating all the cake or cookies myself? because that is ALWAYS what happens. i would rather avoid that if i can.
I wish the rest of the world would realize this. but instead the women keep baking to be womanly, and i keep eating.

Hussein.

Whitney is teaching a man, Hussein, on her mission in Norway. He can hardly speak english or norwegian so he can only understand a little bit when the missionaries teach him. But he loves the gospel because of the spirit he feels when he is at church and when he reads the book of mormon. He makes me want to be a better person. A much better person. Here is a part of whitney's letter that was sent to me:

He has lost his family because of his belief in Jesus Christ, he has heart problems because of it and has to have an operation where he only has a 50/50 chance of living through it. He was willing to put his opperation on hold even if he loses his life in the process of waiting because he wanted to be baptized first. He gave up smoking and drugs and coffee and tea the first day we talked about them and hasn't done them since. He travels 1.5 hours every time he comes to the church which is several times a week and he can hardly even understand anything of what is being said. He sits through hours of church that he doesn't even understand. He takes his book of mormon with him everywhere he goes and he reads every chance he gets. He reads an hour every night before he studies for his classes and always prays morning and night.He has given everything he possibly can, the only thing left he has to give is his life and he has put that on the line too.

Without even knowing him, He is a great example to me of sacrificing anything he has to for the gospel. i hope i can live up to his standards of determination.

i'm in a predicament.

my class finally got our list of clinical locations for the first semester of internships. seeing as almost every person in my class (about 30 of the 40 students) are married men with or without children, they are all wanting to stay in utah for these rotations. so i get these great choice:

1. fight all of these men to try and stay in utah for my clinicals so jake can still go to school
2. make jake take school off for 4 semesters while i hop around from state to state doing my clinicals
3. hope to get a location in utah but when i don't live away from jake for 8-15 weeks at a time while he still goes to school and works

please help.

the gimp and the sick

having an ankle that could possibly be broken and a husband with the flu, i can officially say that yesterday was the dirtiest our apartment has ever been and the most sparse our refrigerator has ever been.
and neither of us cared because we couldn't do anything about it.
however, after going to the doctor and discovering my ankle was only sprained, it suddenly became a necessity to limp my way through the grocery store to get some gatorade for jake (cause that's what his mom always got him when he was sick) and some toilet paper. now we don't have to keep using paper towels.
oh, the joys of charmin ultra soft.

National Student Conclave

This halloween was a little different than i expected it to be. Not only did i not dress up on halloween, but i paid 200 dollars to leave jake in Utah for the halloween weekend while I went to the east coast. Cruel you say? if it had been jake leaving me over halloween i would agree, but he was really cool with it so i got to go with my some classmates to a national conference for the weekend. conference...not very fun (except i decided i want to specialize to be a hand therapist). philly....very fun.

no i have never been to a byu womens conference, but i feel like after this weekend i know what it would be like. there were probably 10 guys out of the 1000 students there and 4 of them were from our class. so many women.

 

This is us with the president of the American Physical Therapy Association. I guess it's kind of a big deal. but I'm bored already with these pictures so i will show you Philadelphia instead. 

Of course being with 4 boys and myself we had to go see the rocky statue. it's amazing how every single person taking a picture by him always seems to do the same pose.what a coincidence.

After missing our bus to Manhattan we decided to console ourselves with a philly cheesesteak at Geno's. Apparently it's the best place to get them.

and i'm not gonna lie. for not being a fan of a huge sandwich full of just meat and a little cheese, those were extremely good.

being the detective that i am, i'm pretty sure i came across the train station where they filmed My Best Friend's Wedding. i'm pretty good. ok so maybe after googling it i found out it was filmed at the Chicago Union Station. but they still look the same.

George Washington and i have stood on the same ground.

i can finally stop.

Congratulations, you won the game! you have the fastest time for this difficult level!
that's you see after you beat advanced minesweeper. 
after 2427 seconds and 164 tries i finally found that out.
so worth the last 3 hours. i will forever remember this day.
now i can start studying for my 4 tests next week.

I do love him.

how rude of me. 

i failed to be the wifey homemaker blogger that i am and announce to the blogging community how much i LOVE jake 

and

how the past year, one month, nine days, and 12 hours have been the best of my life 

and 

how we have been sErIoUsLy So bLeSsEd this past year

and

it's all because two people fell in love 

and 

that we are looking forward to many wonderful years to come.

All blog joking aside, being married has been great. yes, i realize that i fail to blog about how much i love my husband, and i hate more then ever having to answer the dry question "how is married life." so i apologize that i am not that type to gush my heart and soul onto my blog and i apologize if you were ever one of the victims of my heartless answer to that heartless question.

To get the facts straight: I love being married. I love that all my wishes on shooting stars and on 11:11 for 3 years straight finally came true and now i can never think of anything to wish for on the spot. I love how much jake talks in his sleep and i write down his funny sayings so i can tell him about it in the morning. I love that i have taught him how to snowboard and he has taught me how to mountain bike. I love that I am actually cooking every night of the week and enjoying it. I love asking him over dinner what the best and worst parts of his day were. I love being married. I would recommend it to anyone. who is in love. It was the best decision I ever made.

However Jake might have different opinions. In fact let me quote one of his only facebook status updates of the year: "hey if you are thinking about getting married, don't. cause when you leave facebook to go to the bathroom, then your spouse defiles your facebook status."

hp overload.

what is it with everybody attacking me with the fact that they have gone to harry potter land and i haven't? doesn't having dreams about me dating al dumbledore count for something? or that i have spent the last week trying to decide what my horcrux would be? am i not worthy to attend hp land because i can't think of an item i love/hate so much as to condemn it by putting my ripped soul into it? i know, my life is full of so many questions.

week of bliss, ewoks, and ents.

who says you cant fit a whole summer break into one week? because our wonderful school and work schedules a week is all we had this summer. But don't you worry, we found ourselves in many adventures.

the first weekend we again went to st george (we went there in like april for a weekend as well), but this time I knew how to mountain bike so that was our sole purpose of going.

the following week was spent sleeping in, exercising, hiking (with millie), reading, and cooking while jake went to school. yes i do admit i read 5 books during that time, 3 of them being the hunger games books. (i thought the first was pretty good but i was thoroughly disappointed by the others).

then on thursday off to oregon we went. the first time for both of us, and unlike the hunger games books i was not disappointed one bit.

the drive was totally worth it. because we got to listen to harry potter. and see this. and go mountain biking on the #1 trail in the nation. riding on the 26.5 miles, crossing 15 bridges, passing 3 waterfalls, crystal blue pool, 4 lakes, and lava rocks covered in a thick layer of moss got me to decide we were either in endor or fangorn forest. because of my limited star wars knowledge and my greater than average lotr knowledge i couldn't decide if i was going to see ewoks poking their heads behind the trees or seeing the trees walk around. but it was definitely one of the two.

 i still don't understand how a pool can be this blue. 
or how a roaring river could be flowing away from it.

 

 who knew a bike seat could fall off? good thing we had this toilet paper to fashion a new one. 

too bad we still had 2 hours left of riding.

so after seeing it what's your vote?

star wars on endor?

 from here

or Lord of the Rings in Fangorn Forest?

from here

finally.

they are making the hobbit the movie. peter jackson is directing it. they are making two parts. these 3 facts make me incredibly happy. the only bad thing is i have to wait until i graduate to watch it cause it doesn't release until December 2012.

how did i not know about this earlier?

i did learn something from girls camp.

i learned to hate crafts.

girls camp ruined any kind of love i could have had for crafts. we were always forced to make the ugliest most useless crafts ever.

1. we had to sew a little pillow and would put pins on them according to young womens value things we signed off at camp. why would i want a pillow full of pins?
2. we had to make/paint bird houses and put bird food in them to take them home. mine definitely stayed at camp aeries to feed the birds there.
3. we had to make this "really cool" recipe book that stood on the counter and you could just flip through the rings to find the 3x5 card needed. why would i want to take space up under my bed for a 3x5 flip book that didn't have any writing on it? i didn't even finish making it.
4. the one good craft we made were rain sticks. mine was so cool looking all painted artsy splotchy. my friends and i definitely found uses for those when we danced around the fire doing our choreographed rain dance so the rain would get us out of doing more crafts.

In all actuality i would like to make cute things to go in my house or make some cute headband or skirt. but when a sign up goes around relief society and it has the word craft up on the top in that cursivey-cutesy font, i automatically pass it on.

So instead of going with all of the girls in jake's family (aunts and cousins) to the craft fair at bear lake, I am the only girl that stays back and goes mountain biking with the husbands. is there something wrong with that?

if there is i blame girls camp.

(this thought was sparked by a conversation with kringphil, formerly k.ringer.)

ps

i didn't post that last one to brag. i posted it cause it made me feel really bad. to the point that when i took my next test i was a little relieved when i got an average score rather than a high one so people would step off.

growing up.

think back to 4th grade. remember when you got the highest score on that one test and everybody hated you because of it? not just hate like be jealous. hate like whenever you walked into a room everyone would stop talking and look at you and then someone would say some stupid comment like: "way to ruin our curve. wait you didn't just ruin it, you stomped on it, spit on it, and threw dirt on it," or "what did you get on your other test? what? i got better than you? oh my gosh, i finally beat you at something."

wait, was that 4th grade? or was it 1st grade? no, it was when you were in your Doctorate program for Physical Therapy.

weird how some people are never able to grow up.

pleased to meet you. soon.

Keys to getting me through the end of the semester:

• watch this video and many like it
• go mountain biking at least 3 times a week instead of studying
• plan our trip to the McKenzie River Trail

McKenzie River Trail, we look forward to meeting you
and the entire state of Oregon over labor day.

thank you for the motivation you give me.

 from here

from here

f

from here

summer thunderstorms

i love thunderstorms in the summer
because the dry Utah heat leaves and is replaced by warm raindrops.
because it reminds me of when i was a kid and always played in the huge puddles by my house.
because listening to the thunder is more exciting than studying.
because it reminds me that i have still never been to Washington and i still really want to go.
because it reminds me of playing in the rain with jake the summer before he moved away to college and then his mission.
because i still drop everything i am doing just to go run around in it again.

But i don't like Utah thunderstorms because by the time I have dropped everything to go play, the storm has stopped.

people say we are annoying together. i say we bring out the best in each other.

whit leaves for her mission to norway in 4 days. so i decided to make a post about  my love for all we have done together and why i love her. and why i will miss her. 

 because we took ugly pictures before we were even friends.

 because she makes fun of my modesty tan lines.

 because she lets me put my finger in her mouth 

to increase our disneyland firework experience

because we studied AP american on the bio trip.

and because our pic is still up on crazy Jones's wall

 because she is a pretty medieval princess

because we are hard core

 because we are SO good at looking like men.

 because we are only kind of good at looking like women

 because she has had to climb all kinds of mountains

 

because she makes a great sunburned contortionist

because she loves harry potter as much as i do.

because we have awesome ideas like going to a foam soap car wash

because our mother's blossoming friendship is crazy like ours

because she pulls her own weight in our timp band

because we took an hour to climb a mountain 

to snowboard down for 30 seconds

because she is a good addition to our family and totem poles

and  because we'll always be best friends.
because we really do bring out the best in each other.

utah at a glance.

St George

 first mountain biking of the year. second of my life. i might have been scared for my life. 

but i can successfully blame it on my too-big-for-me-man-bike.

 we got to the unknown finish line right when the first place runner was coming in. 
however this is the second place guy.

cool old books. not cool enough to pay 12 bucks for them.

blur master. and far away. dang stranger.

tribute to juneau.

i'd have to say i was a little disappointed with the lack of scariness that was expected. 
but i was impressed with the view.

Bear Lake

We didn't take any pictures on that trip but it was just as fun as the others. We went biking every day, some on the road but most on the snow (which isn't the easiest on a bike), and some on the trail. And of course we had to go to La Beau's because that was the main reason jake wanted to drive all the way to bear lake.
also i don't know how do change the HTML to center this. deal with it.

Moab

very sick of Delicate Arch pics

i was exceptionally happy on rachel's bday

i know i'm creepy in this pic. but the background is very not creepy. 
so don't mind me.

we felt like as we drove closer to these we might get slowly
and nightmarishly chopped up into pieces.