Us

Us

Sunday, April 19, 2009

A Sign from Above

So, it being a lovely day in Rexburg today, Chad and I decided to enjoy the weather and go for a short walk. We were almost back to our apartment when I felt something wet splash on my feet. I look down only to see a splash pattern of bird poo right there on my feet. Both feet and my ankles, but not my clothes, as far as we can see. Eew.

"Lord, that was uncalled for."

Suzy Homemaker I Am Not

So recently Chad has found that nearly every pair of his jeans has a hole in it. This is due to the fact that he wears jeans to work every day.

He now only has one pair left that doesn't have a hole. It was time to buy new jeans, or else try to fix the old ones. After a trip to Wal-Mart, I found myself equipped to try the fixing. I pulled out my sewing machine from mom, and my laptop. I found a YouTube video by a lovely "fashion designer" with some kind of accent who called the thread "cotton" all the time. So I had the machine threaded by the time I was done with that and then tried some stitches on scrap fabric. I called mom somewhere in there because the machine kept getting jammed up. After about half an hour to forty-five minutes, she decided there was something wrong with the tension. (Which was set to zero) After fixing that, things ran smoothly for a bit, and I finally got one pair of jeans mended. I didn't want to do the next pairs until Chad had seen what I had done to the first pair, just in case it would be a waste of my time.

So. One bobbin full of thread, two machine needles, and three hours later, I mended
one pair of jeans.

Friday, April 17, 2009

There's a mouse in the house.

Well, we got back from Wal-Mart last night around... 8:30? We carried our groceries upstairs, but when we got to the top of the stairs, I heard a noise. I shooshed Chad and he finally stopped rustling his grocery bags. We both heard a noise. It was coming from the ceiling. We listened for a few seconds, to hear what what sounded like something scurrying around in the ceiling. Grrreeeeeeat.

We went into our apartment and put down all of the groceries, deciding that if it hadn't been in our apartment yet, it probably wouldn't be, whatever it was. I walked back to the hallway to listen, only to have my attention drawn up to the fluorescent light in the ceiling. There are fluorescent lights in the hallway ceiling which we leave on all of the time. They are set up in a cubby in the ceiling, that's supposed to have some kind of surface covering to make the ceiling all one plane. Those coverings got taken down who knows when, and so it sits, open straight up to the bulbs. There's a little hole in the ceiling in the corner of the light cubby, in which I saw something yellow move. Not like, yellow as in a yellow animal, but yellow as in an animal pulling a piece of food into the hole. Something like that.

I told Chad what I saw and asked if there was possibly someone working in the ceiling. Yeah, no. But I figured I'd be optimistic. It really sounded like someone had a wire that they were trying to push through the ceiling. Something was up there.

We locked our door and went to bed, thinking of all of the open holes in the walls in the apartment we're living in now. There's one behind the cabinet in the kitchen, but if something fell down through the hole, we don't think it would be able to climb back up. I guess that's not much of a consolation. There's another hole behind the stove/fridge so you can get to the water pipes to the shower. Even if something came in there, it wouldn't be able to get to the food. So, feeling pretty confident that this animal(s) wouldn't be able to break into our fortress, we watched a movie and went to bed. This morning Chad got up to put a new doorknob on our door. The old one worked just fine, but nobody had the key to it, so we couldn't lock it when we left. The door that leads up to these apartments from the street has a large deadbolt-ish lock on it that's supposed to be kept locked all the time, so we weren't really worrying. But, especially with some kind of animal roaming around, we decided we better have a working lock just in case. So I was still laying in bed when I hear the drill start going. A few minutes later Chad comes into the bedroom.

"Yup, there's definitely something out there. I could hear it as soon as I started up the drill. But now it sounds like it's in one of the other apartments, not the ceiling."

Knowing that the doors to all the other apartments were securely closed, I didn't think he had too much to worry about, except the creepiness factor. He went back to the doorknob and I went back to my snoozing. He comes back in just a few minutes later and says

"Okay, that was creepy. I just heard a noise like a door opening. Like the weather-stripping brushing across the floor. Why don't you get up and get dressed and keep me company? (Or something along those lines)"

So, with visions of giant mutant rats running around in one of the apartments, big yellow eyes a-glow with ferocious greed, I put in my contacts first. I was not going to be attacked by something only to have my glasses knocked off and be rendered completely defenseless. Think Piggy in Lord of the Flies. Not happening.

So I got up, got dressed, and put in my contacts. Armed with my multi-purpose weapon of choice, I joined Chad in the hallway. I poked by broom handle into the ceiling a couple of times, and didn't hear anything. I walked down to the hallway that leads out to the roof (where Chad said he thought it was coming from) and looked through the grates on the door. There, at the far end, was the culprit. Yes, my dear friends, a bird. I watched it fly around in the hall for a few seconds. There was a box and some kind of packing paper material in there that it kept flying into, and that was the noise Chad kept hearing. His comment to me was: "I'm glad you had the guts to look, cuz I wasn't going to. I didn't want to look in and see a giant rat." I was feeling pretty self-assured. We didn't know how to get it out without getting attacked by it though. It looked pretty irritated. When I first saw it, it was flying head on into the window in the door that leads outside to the roof. Over and over again. Before I could protect my head, open the door into the hallway and shoo it out the opposite door to the roof, it flew into a hole in the ceiling, and we haven't heard from it since. We're hoping it found the exit. It explains the movement near the light last night though, if it got stuck up in the ceiling and was looking for the way out, it would have been confused by the light. But the light was probably hot and so it could see the light but not get out that way.

Anyways, I, the conquerer, feel much better to know that I don't have to worry about rats invading our kitchen. And I, the conquerer, am realizing what a wuss I married. ;o)

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Finals

Once we got back from the birthday celebration, it was time to finish up with finals and juries. As I have told most of you, I didn't think I was going to have a jury this semester because I got my wisdom teeth taken out on March 13th. Juries would have been less than a month since I got my teeth out, on April 6th. I talked to Brother Holman on March 24th and he decided to have me do a jury anyway. I was planning on taking an incomplete, but if I did, I wouldn't have completed a full 14 credits, and my academic scholarship wouldn't continue until I had. Assuming I had taken 14 credits this summer, that would mean that I wouldn't get another scholarship until the fall. So taking an incomplete would cost me about $1500 in tuition. Boo. So I had a jury. I didn't meet with my accompanist until the night before my jury for about 20 minutes. (I was unaware of the fact that she had to leave so quickly.) She was supposed to have picked up the music the week before (she asked me to leave it in the music office for her to pick it up when she was on campus). She never picked it up. She was sightreading for those 20 minutes of rehearsal time. I was not happy about that. And it might be understandable, but she's a grown woman, not just some student who's too busy with finals to pick up my music. Ugh. Anyways, needless to say, my jury was not spectacular, but I did well nonetheless.

So I finished this semester, and said goodbye to Goldie Haun at my last horse class. Totally worth the 100 bucks.
For all of those inquiring minds out there, here are some pictures of the infamous horse.




This is a video of me barrel racing. It's not terribly exciting to watch, but it's definitely fun to do.

Grades were posted today and I am happy. I was expecting a B+ in my lame online New Testament class, but I did better than that, though I'm not quite sure how. Don't ask questions.



Happy Birthday to US!

Okay, so the weekend after my official birthday, Chad & I went down to Utah to celebrate with the family. The trip also included bowling. I have some pictures of that, but someone will have to post pictures of everything else because I don't have any.





After bowling, we got some pizzas from Papa Murphy's and went home and ate, and then opened presents. Erin made Mollie a German Chocolate cake and she made me an ice cream bomb (I think that's what she called it). A good time was had by all.

I got some music dictionaries from mom and dad. I know, dictionaries for your birthday? But I requested them, and I'm sure they'll prove quite useful to this ignorant music major. They also (with the help of Erin) gave me some money to go clothes shopping, in the form of the money I could have saved by switching to Geico. The problem is I don't want to spend the money cuz it's so cute! And I smile everytime I see it hiding in our little china cabinet of sorts. I got food gift cards from Erin & Bryce (yum! thanks), the DVD of Pixar short films from Kyle, and Mollie was going to take me shopping but we never got around to it. She helped pay for my Vera Bradley bag which will be coming in the mail sometime next week!! YAY!!!

Thursday, April 02, 2009

Happy Birthday To ME!

A quick post about the birthday -

I got up and went to class at the usual 7:45. Lame. But when I got home around 9:00, Chad had gone to work, but had decorated the apartment with a "Happy Birthday" banner. He also recorded himself saying "Happy Birthday Megan! I love you!" and put it on repeat on his computer so I would hear it when I came home. (Kinda creepy, but) Aw.

I went back to class from 10:15-11:15 where I got the previously mentioned peer edited paper back.

Chad and I had lunch at home - and I opened my first birthday gift - a magic towel. It was way cooler than the magic towel I bought in Disneyland.

Before:


After:


I watched TV and took a nap until 3:00 when I left for my horse class. We did barrel racing, and it was the most fun ever! I think I'm a natural. And I may have the oldest, most stubborn horse in the class, but we still won our race. We trotted around 3 barrels and then loped back to the middle. And I didn't even have to kick her to get her to go! I was happy.

When I got home, I waited for Chad to get home from work at 5:45. Once he got home, we left for Applebee's because they have their 2 for $20 special going on - an appetizer and 2 entrees for 20 bucks. We did order drinks and an extra appetizer, so it was a little bit more than that.


Yummm....
Trying to eat my riblets. Lovely picture.

I opened all but one of my gifts at dinner.
From Chad:
A t-shirt
A pillowcase
A bow tie (for my very own party clothes)


Top Gun (I mentioned the other day that I wanted to see it)

From Chad's parents:
Season Three of The West Wing! I was VERY excited about that.


After dinner, we came home to change our clothes and then go bowling.
It was league night at the first alley we went to, so we went to the more expensive one.

We bowled a game. Chad won.


After bowling, we went to the arcade and played some ice-ball. I love ice-ball.

We got 106 tickets, and spent them on some cheap toy cars that we will be bringing to Will and Sawyer when we go down this weekend.


When we got home from bowling, Chad put the candles on the cake (er...pie), sang me Happy Birthday, I blew out the candles, and opened my one last gift.


Guess what it was! The drumset for Guitar Hero World Tour!!!

I've had fun playing it even though there is not nearly enough room for it in our currently apartment.

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

To: Mollie

Ode.

Peer Edit, Shmeer Edit

Hello my dear readers, once again.

I got my peer edited draft back today. Here are my favorite comments:

Mine: ... a theatre famous for its opera comique...
Hers: ... a theater famous for it's opera comique...

Mine: There was, at this time, a licensing law
Hers: There was a licensing law

Mine: The public, however, continued to attend the performances
Hers: However, the public continued to attend the performances.

Mine: ... The typical Bouffes-Parisiens audience would be "[quote]"
Hers: ... The typical Bouffes-Parisiens audience would be [written note: I'm not sure if a colon needs to be there or not]

Comments:
"Pretty good. Some of the sentences are really long. Instead of having one sentence with four comma's [sic] try breaking it up. It will be easier to read."
Of note: There is not a single sentence in my paper that has "4 comma's". There are, however, a couple of sentences with three commas because they are lists.

Guess where this Peer Edited paper is going? In my special file.

In other news - HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME! More to follow later.