one phone call changes everything

Matt's grandfather has been living with lung cancer for some time now. Matt got a phone call this morning saying pa-pa had been taken to the hospital with pneumonia. His cancer is bad now and they decided to take him off the ventilator because he has always said he did not want to live on life support. We will be going to Cinncinnati for a few days to be with family during this difficult time. Please pray for us to have a safe trip and for God to be with his family and us through this time. It makes me realize how short life is and how much we have to be thankful for. I'm so glad we have each other and our health. Please tell your loved ones how much they mean to you every chance you get, you never know what life has in store for us.

well...

Ok, so the 5th thru the 11th is black out time at work. Just like every other week i've tried to ask for vacation. I swear, half of the calender is blacked out, its ridiculous. So now I'm trying for April 19th thru the 25th. I know it's not blackout time and she has no reason to deny this one that I know of. We are already looking at plane tickets and hope to have them purchased next month. I'm thinking some people who live out-of-town might already be in town for Easter so they could have an excuse to stay longer and see me!
I'm just going to take a second and say how happy I am to be off work till Tuesday. I loved my job at first but I guess I'm starting to really see it for what it is. Lots and lots of BS. Oh well. Matt got the same days off as me so we get to spend all weekend together!! I made breakfast this morning, eggs, breakfast potatos, toast, and goetta (pronounced ge-tta). For those of you who don't know what Goetta is, it is a breakfast meat made of pig stuff. Not just pig meat, like bacon, but the intestines and skin and stuff, also spices and stuff to make it taste better. I'm not a big fan of this particular food (it tastes ok, not great, but I can't get past all the gross stuff it's made of). Matt enjoys it and we were given some for Christmas, so I made some for him this morning. I believe we are going to spend the entire weekend holed up here in the house not doing anything, and I'm very excited about it!

Maybe?!

So My boss is insisting that I take vacation time even though I technically haven't been with the company long enough to acrue vacation time. whatever. The upside to this is that Matt and I might be visiting Shelley April 5th thru the 10th. Keep your fingers crossed she doesn't deny me that week like she did my first 2 requests. 3rd time's the charm right?! I am really excited about the idea of visiting home. I haven't been there since Christmas 2006. And lucky Matt has never gotten to see where I grew up! He's actually never been west at all. He'll get to see the spud cellar shaped high school and all the splendor that is Idaho! If we do get to come, I want to see everyone! Everyone hope and pray for us that this trip works out!

good news!

Matt got a raise! Yay! He deserves every penny of it, he has been working his butt off there without a day off for months really. So congratulations baby!!! I love you!

4 Months!

In honor of our 4 month wedding anniversary, I decided to repost some pics from the wedding. As soon as we get the disk with all the photos on it you all will get to see some of the professional ones that were taken. Hopefully soon! And if I can swing it, maybe some clips of the video. The ceremony itself is pretty funny cause the best man holding the rings lost one of them. Hilarious! I can't wait to see it myself.

This was one of my favorites that my friend Stephanie took. Don't ask me how she got such a good shot, but I love it.

Happy 4 Months baby!! I love you!!

Happy New Year

We spent New Years Eve at home together :0) I was supposed to have the day off from work, but ended up going in all day when our store manager was sick and throwing up. So not a super relaxing day for me or Matt cause he was busting his butt all day at work too. So by the time we both got home from work we were ready to just sit back and ring the new year in quietly and go to bed, haha! The picture above is of us toasting the New Year with our sparkling wine in our Toasting glasses from the wedding. If you look closely his says Mr. and mine says Mrs. we like to bust out those glasses anytime we're feeling festive.

We spent a lot of time talking about all the differences between this New Year and last new year. Last year we were both working at Outback still and went to the bar after work and I won $500 in a raffle (awesome, I know). We had just moved in together a month before and we were still 3 months away from being engaged. And now we've been married for 4 months and both have much better jobs! It's just so crazy how fast everything changes. I know that our posts are slightly boring since we don't have kids yet, but I just keep thinking that this is the only way we are going to remember everything! I want to spend more time enjoying what is going on instead of desperately trying to remember what happened....so bear with me on the boring posts! lol!


Nothing much exciting going on in daily life. Matt is hopefully getting a raise at work, so we are super excited about that! Lord knows he's been working enough hours and busting his butt enough he should be getting a very substantial raise in my opinion! haha! We are also very excited about health insurance starting Feb. 1st. Definitely looking forward to that.

Oh, and the new blog pic is one of Matt and I's engagement photo's. We just got the prints, finally, but now the disk yet with everything on them, so I took a picture of the picture, lol.

Christmas and Stuff

Awww, Christmas is over! It kind of makes me sad to take down all the decorations. But at the same time I'm glad Christmas is over because it means work will go back to normal! All the crazy people that come out to shop will stay home and people will stop yelling at me for things I can't control!! Lol! I've had more people yet at me in the past couple of weeks than I have my entire life, I think. Our company has the stupidest policy that anything on a mannequin CANNOT be sold until they tell us we can take it off the mannequin. So there is this one piece in particular that everybody seems to want this year and it's a multi-colored chunky knit scarf. We sold out of them just a couple of days after we got them in but we still had 2 of them on mannequins and at least 5 people every day would ask for the scarf off the mannequin and get sooo freaking mad at me when I told them I couldn't do it. There were a couple of times that people actually took it off the mannequin themselves and tried to buy it. People are crabby this time of year and it took all the fun out of the christmas season. So I'm sad to see it go, but at the same time I'm not, hahaha!

Matt is the sweetest guy, I swear. I was joking with him one day and pulled up a picture of a necklace on the Zales website that I said I wanted. So a couple days later he tells me that he went into Zales to get it, but it was already gone. I tell him, no big deal, I don't need it (and I really didn't, I just thought it was pretty). I get home from work monday night (the night we were exchanging gifts so we didn't have to do it in front of 30 people at his parents house) and he has this box. He got me the necklace! He lied to me about it so I would still be surprised, hahah! And the coolest part is that the guy who sold us our wedding rings was there when Matt bought it and hooked us up so Matt got the necklace for about 65% off, WOO!

This is a fuzzy picture of me wearing the necklace.

Here is a better picture of the necklace itself.

Of course, then I had to give him my gift, which was not nearly as romantic as the gift he gave me. I registered him to take the GRE test so he can get into grad school and bought him a GRE Prep book. He's not thrilled that he has to take the GRE to begin with and hates tests like that, but he knows he has to do it. He is too smart not to do it. Love you baby!!

So I had to close the night before Christmas Eve, so Christmas Eve Eve, lol. The mall didn't close until midnight, so I got out of work about 12:30am. The weather was kind of crappy and we had planned on driving to Cincinnati that night but we weren't sure how safe it was going to be. So we checked the weather channel and all the roads we were going to take and talked to his parents up there to see what it was like where they were. We decided to go ahead and go. We figured that driving 40 mph all the way there this late at night would be better than trying to go the next morning with a whole lot more traffic and worrying about everyone else instead of just us. It ended up not being too bad. It rained pretty much the whole way and we had to go the long way around because the AA highway was closed due to ice. We got to his parents house at 6am and then went straight to sleep, lol.
Christmas Eve at their house is always fun. The family all comes over to their house and we just have a huge party. Everyone brings food (and alcohol lol) and we just hang out, play card games, and generally just hang out. And he has a lot of family. His step-dad has 2 brothers and 1 sister and they are all married and have kids and then Ma-Ma and Pa-Pa's brothers and sisters and their kids... It's a lot of people, haha. Everyone is so great though! We always have a lot of fun and hopefully soon we can move there so he can be closer to them.

I wish I could have seen my family this Christmas, it always sucks to be so far away. My parents still live in Idaho, one brother and his wife in Arizona, the other brother and wife and kids living in North Carolina and other random family members spread out all over the country. I wish we could all move closer together and see each other on a regular basis!! We're all married now so there aren't anymore reasons for everyone to get together, haha. I miss you guys!!

This is Christmas morning at Matt's parents house. The family got Rockband and Matt couldn't wait to open it up and play with it so here he is playing with the drums looking absolutely thrilled that I am taking his picture, hahaha!

Matt's step-dad trying to ignore me while I'm taking his picture, lol.

Matt's mom was also thrilled that I had the camera out.




Matt's sister was hoping I wouldn't post this picture if she made a goofy face, but she was wrong!!

Everyone was just soooo happy when I busted out the camera, that's why I didn't take any more photos, lol. If everyone had been more cooperative I could have had better pictures, oh well.

So yesterday I'm at work, and in the bathroom washing my hands I'm looking at my hair in the mirror. All of a sudden I decide that I'm going to cut my hair. So I called down to one of the salons in the mall and make an appointment for when I get off work. So I get down there and the lady gets started on my hair. Right away I get the feeling she has no idea what she's doing. She keeps asking me if I'm sure I want to cut it and she's trying to comb it and just has no confidence in whats she's doing. The other stylist had to step in about 3 times to help the lady. I was so nervous that it was going to end up awful.

This pic is of me just a few days ago so you can see what my hair looked like. It went half way down my back.

This is how long my hair was right before the last time I got it cut, which was right before the wedding. Almost 4 months ago. Down to my lower back. Holy Cow!

This is my new haircut!!! This is the shortest my hair has been since my junior year of high school. I like it though! It has a lot more style to it and is easier to wash, and brush and style ing eneral, hahaha. This is before I curled it or did anything to it.

This is after I curled it. I'm still playing with it trying to get it to look right, but I think it looks alot better.

I didn't tell Matt I was cutting it so he got a surprise when he got home from work:) He likes it though :)

Sorry about the super long post guys!! I hope everyone had a great Christmas!