Christmas Shopping

I think this picture says it all, but just incase your wondering this is how I feel when I try to go anywhere during the Christmas season. Normally I enjoy shopping but the herd is just a bit to crowded for me around Christmas time.

Gingerbread Mansions

The Howell tradition of Gingerbread construction was alive and vibrant this year! for those that aren't aware Rusty's family has a tradition every year of making gingerbread houses from scratch. This year Mom and Dad Howell did all the hard labor and made the pieces, the rest of us joined them for the candy fest and decorating. We literally had over 20 different types of candy, it was heaven for a candy-o-holic. We all ate way to much sugar but had a blast doing it. We may not be artists but at the end of the night I was really proud of our creations.

Back in the work force

So after a month of unemployment, job searching, interviewing and negotiating, I finally accepted an offer at Applied Signal Technology. I'm excited to get back to work. I must say, paychecks are really nice to have.

I'm really excited about this position. I'll be moving back into software development. I've been in QA (testing) for the last two years and I've realized that it's just not for me. I was rather bored with my job. Prior to my layoff, I had even told Mary that I was bored and that I wanted to start looking around. The big problem, however, is that searching for a new job is often times a full time job. It takes a lot of time. And since I was working and doing grad school, I didn't really get too far.

So with the adequate time to devote to job searching, I was able to find a better job. I have several friends who work at AST who have said nothing but great stuff about it. So I'm way excited to move onward and upward.

Black Friday the Howell way....

Although we love shopping (by we I mean I) we chose to avoid the insane crowds this black Friday buy going to one of the greatest places on earth, no not Disney Land, Southern Utah. We took a day trip to Arches National Park, about 3 hours south of provo, with Andy, Shawn and Evan. We hiked about 5 miles worth of very short trails, one of which was the picturesque delicate arch Utah is famous for. The trip was well worth missing the black friday sales.

Rusty's Little Red Head

No Rusty does not have a mistress..... just an adventurous wife. The day before Thanksgiving I finally did it, I died my hair red, cinaberry to be exact. This is something I have wanted to do for a long time but never had the guts to do. Even as I sat with box in hand at the store and at home I was still slightly hesitant. When I mixed it up and put the first few lines of color in and saw them get more and more purple I got kinda worried. Rusty reminded me that it was too late to go back now so I finished the job and voila, red hair. It is a little lighter than I expected and yes it is a drastic change but I love it!

I am thankful for a supportive husband who also likes change, he loves it too. But most of all I am grateful it washes out in 28 washes ;)

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was awesome this year! We joined Rusty's family at Andy & Shawn's beautiful home for a very yummy assortment of traditional dishes. Everyone brought something to contribute, the turkey, made by Shawn, was fabulous! The house was decorated perfectly with hand made decor, also made by Shawn.

She is a very talented woman! The seven of us spent seven hours celebrating each others company and the bounty Heavenly Father has blessed us with. It truly was a perfect Thanksgiving!

I'm an author!

Or at least an official blogger.... Rusty added me to his blog! Hopefully it will get updated more frequently now.

Tech Support Cheat Sheet

From http://xkcd.com/627/

My cat is a flirt

Really, she is. She prances around and visits all the neighbors. They all love her. They all love petting her and playing with her. Sammy's even been known to wander in a open doors just say hi. One neighbor across the street left her door open one day and later found Sammy just chillin' on her bed. I think we actually make more friends through our cat than by our own means.

So the other day, that same neighbor was hosting a yard sale for her father. We went over there to see what they had. We looked around and we found few things. But we did not have any cash on hand. So I ask the father if he would accept a check. He looked very hesitant.

Him: "Are you from around here?"
Me (pointing at our apartment): "Oh yeah. We live right there. We're Sammy's owners."
Him: "Oh you're Sammy's owners! Oh she's a sweet cat. We just love her to death."
Me(smiling): "Yeah, she's ours."

With that connection made, we made small talk a bit longer. Needless to say, he had no problem accepting my check. That's probably the first time in history an animal has been accepted as a credit reference.

Home improvement

For the last few months, Mary and I have been doing some major renovations on our duplex. We've done a lot to the duplex, both upstairs and down, and it's taken us quite a long time to do it. It seems like practically every evening we've been over there working on something. Danny has been harassing me for a while about updating my blog. I'm going to blame my lack of blogger-tivity (copyright me) to this project.

The main improvement on the upstairs apartment was the bathroom. It started with a layer of linoleum. Beneath that was an older layer of linoleum. Beneath that was some rotted sub-flooring in the form of particle board, that had some serious water damage. I was hesitant to dig any deeper, but I decided to risk it. And what did I find? Perfectly good original wood flooring! I was very shocked, cause it seems like whenever I go poking around in this house, I open up a can o' worms that adds to my plate of things to do.


Mary had a great time painting, or we may have been delusional. I think this picture was taken in the wee hours of Sunday morning. We were trying to finish painting the bathroom before we went home, which happened to be at 3 am :) You can kinda see the good-condition hard wood flooring, too.


We enlisted a lot of slave labor over the past few months.


Katie was excited to come help Aunt Mary and Uncle Rusty. Or she was just excited to get away from her brothers for a few hours :) She helped us do lots of sanding and painting in the bathroom. Not pictured is Jaden, Katie's brother, and my Mom. Jaden came to help us a different day, and honestly probably got the more fun job of demolition when we were tearing up the bathroom floor and the walls. After all the painting and whatnot in the bathroom, Mom did a superb job in putting in ceramic tile.


No, I'm not spelunking. I'm playing with pipes in the attic. There was this one rogue pipe that came through the bathroom ceiling and hung down about two feet and then was capped! It had no purpose whatsoever. I crawled up in the attic and looked around. I found a second water pipe that (sort of) ran along side the first one but was capped in the attic. So I got a cut-off saw from Andy, the Power Tool Sugar Daddy, and hacked that thing up in the ceiling and put a new cap on it. So now I don't have this utterly ridiculous pipe hanging down in the bathroom.

This was a lovely task. The floor in this bedroom was a nightmare. It was squishy and sagging in the middle by a good three inches. Placing a level on the floor was a joke. We decided it was time to replace it. We tore up the carpet and and carpet padding. Beneath the carpet was a layer of plywood, two layers of linoleum, particle board, 1940's linoleum, and then the original (and completely rotted) wood flooring. In the picture above, you can see the flooring is a joke. The wood flooring was supported by 2x4s, which were also rotted.

Dad helped me clear out the old flooring, which wasn't hard to do, just a lot of work.



The end result: dirt. No kidding. The basement floor is not cement, at least not in the front half. The back two bedrooms have cement floors.



So this is what that bedroom looked like after we were done ripping the old flooring out. It kind of reminds of this cabin up in the mountains that had a door to a non-existent porch (anyone in the family knows what cabin I'm talking about). We decided the best long term solution was to pour cement in that room and give it a proper floor.


So we did. Andy, Dad, and Hans came down for the morning and helped me get the cement poured. Andy and his quick thinking devised a make shift chute to assist in getting the cement through the window. The chute on the cement trailer didn't quite have the angle.


If you can see, it was a very tight fit getting that cement trailer in between the house and the bushes. But we got it done.



Once that bedroom floor was finished and the framing/sheet rock was done, we had tons and tons of painting to do. We found two more slaves in the forms of Katie (above right) and Chris (below).

Chris and Katie came over and helped us a couple of times with the painting the basement apartment.


Papa Bear has been a huge huge help throughout this entire process. He's been there nearly every day I was and helped me with some of the most ugly and tedious tasks we've encountered. He even showed up a couple of times unannounced and worked on stuff alone while I was at work.

So the end product?

Yes this is the same bedroom. It looks livable doesn't it! After the cement, we redid the sheet rock on the walls and got new carpet, and of course, painted.

Another shot of the bedroom. It's hard to imagine that we were pouring cement through that little window a few weeks ago.

We are so thrilled that this project is over. We really want to thank all the people who helped us with this project. Hans, Jaden, Katie (the younger), Chris, Katie (the elder). A big thanks to Andy, my aforementioned Power Tool Sugar Daddy. Andy went through all of this (though on a much much larger scale) a year ago. Also a super big thanks to Dad, who offered a ton of help and sacrificed a number of weeks his golden years to help out a son. And also a big thanks to Mom, for lending Dad to me for so many hours.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you April 15th

Keep in mind that two days ago, Mary did her homework outside on the lawn beneath the warm spring sun.

Something is not right with this picture...

My first speeding ticket

It's true. I got my first speeding ticket last week. And there are witnesses (Mary, Andy, Shawn) that are more than willing to tell the tale.

Maybe I should ask Danny how traffic school works :)

Ye olde married couple

So I've seriously neglected my blog much to Danny's disappointment. He chastised me about it a month ago, and I still haven't done anything about it since. So here is this hasty post :)

Mary and I are living happily, albeit crammed, in our little apartment. We have a lot of stuff and no where to put it all. Two adults, an iguana with a very large terrarium and a kitty all crammed in to this little two bedroom apartment is wearing on us. We're very much looking forward to getting our first house sometime soon where we can finally stretch out and feel at home. But until then, we're happy where we are.

Mary has started school again full time at UVU. She hopes to get into the nursing program there and be able to work again in medicine in a few years.

In the mean time, Mary worked extra hard at work last year which qualified her (and me) for a trip to Mexico next month! President's Club is Novell's annual retreat for its top sales people and executives. This year its in Mexico and Mary was invited to go. We're super excited about it. We hope to have lots of time for the beach, scuba diving, and seeing the sites of Playa del Carmen. We are also looking forward to seeing Chichen Itza or some other Mayan ruins.

Ahh... Mexico in February, we can't wait. :)

We miss being single...

So, much to Mary's and my dismay, we had a rude awakening today. We thought we were forever leaving the awkward environment of the BYU singles ward. Not so. Today we attended our new BYU married ward for the first time. And we've both come to the same conclusion.

BYU married wards are just as strange as the singles ward.

No kidding. Literally, half the ward is pregnant, and other half have newborns. And, according the Mary, the Relief Society lesson was all about babies. "Multiply and Replenish" was the theme of the lesson today. Mary's wondering if we could get our old Bishop to let us back into his ward. At least that strangeness we're used to.

One of the oddities is that I sort of expected or imagined a married ward to have a lot more spiritual maturity. Again, not so. The people in our singles ward are just as 'spiritually mature' if not more than the members of our new ward. They just don't have spouses. Or babies.

So, in short, we miss being single. Or at least our singles ward. But sex is frickin' awesome. :)

One more day...

Tomorrow I will leave the realm of single-hood forever, hopefully :)

It's been quite a crazy adventure thus far. Mary and I have been super busy with all the planning and such. We've basically done all the planning ourselves, with some great help from Mindy. Mary has lamented at times about being frustrated with my lack of opinion when it comes to various wedding details. All I can say is, "Honey, I'm a guy. We don't care about this stuff. In fact, you'd be worried if I did care." So I've offered help where I can, but Mary has done most of the work. We have barely had anytime to really enjoy being engaged. We have often commented on how we can't wait till the wedding is over and things will quiet down again.

So... one more day. Sometimes we think we should have eloped. We hear that's much less stressful. But we're sure we'll have a great time tomorrow. Until then, lots of things still to do.

*sigh*

One more day...

She said Yes!

That's right folks. Somehow I have managed to convince Mary to marry me. After much begging and pleading and downright groveling, she finally agreed to let me marry her :)

So Mary and I have been talking about marriage for a few weeks now. And it's probably a good thing. I'm not an impulsive person and the idea of getting married has always been in the hypothetical future. "Someday I would like to be married..." But when in a serious relationship, the possibility of that hypothetical future becoming a reality scares me. So it's taken some time for me to warm up to the idea.

But once I made the decision, I knew I had made the right choice. I wanted the evening to be really special. Mary and I had plans with Mary's sister, Mindy, to organize wedding stuff. (Funny that we're doing stuff like that without having actually proposed and accepted.) So I got Mindy to occupy Mary until about 6:30 or so, when they would come back to Mary's apartment to plan. When Mary got home, her apartment was clean and there was a rose and a card waiting for her. The card said some romantic things and let her know I would pick her up for dinner 7:45.

When I went over there, Mindy was just leaving. Mary had asked Mindy to stay and help her get ready. Mindy left and Mary looked amazing. I told her I had something for her. I pulled out a small wrapped box. She thought it was the ring. It was actually a pair of pearl earrings. She put them on and we went out to dinner at her favorite restaurant, Tucanos.

Dinner was excellent. We played our little game of favorites. Basically, one of us asks the other one about a favorite. Then that person answers the question, and the asker also has to answer. And it just goes back and forth. We did that all through dinner. It's probably a sign that we know a lot about each other when it's hard to think of favorites that we don't already know. Before leaving I "had to go to the bathroom" and I called Andy.

After dinner, I took her to the Provo Temple. We walked a bit in the gardens and sat down on a bench and talked some more. It was a very pleasant evening. There was a slight breeze and the stars were out.

Meanwhile, my phone call to Andy was his cue execute his mission, which was to go over to Mary's and put down a bunch of rose petals, light some candles, and turn on the music. So he, Shawn, and Mom went to do that and to put the ring box on top of the entertainment center.

After some more favorites talk with Mary, Andy called me back and asked me a random question, which was my cue that they were done. So I told Mary I was getting the chills (yeah ... right), and went back to the car and we drove home. Mary was still very happy, but I could tell she was trying to figure out what was going on. As I opened up the door, her eyes lit up.

The candles were glowing, one of our favorite songs was playing, and there were rose petals everywhere. Mary was smiling from ear to ear. We danced and kissed for a while (our first dance actually) and I said some more romantic things to her. Then I reached up on top of the entertainment center to grab the box. I got down on one knee and asked her to marry me.

And she said yes.

We danced and kissed some more. Then she called her dad to tell him to good news (he already knew).

That's pretty much it. She absolutely loved the whole evening. She's been bragging about it all morning to everyone. So our wedding date is probably going to be on the weekend of October 17th. That's the best we can to do with family member's schedules. So it will be a hectic 7 weeks but it will be worth it.

Jib Jab video "Time for Some Campaignin' "

I know this came out a few weeks ago, but I think it's really funny and creative! Enjoy

Time for Some Campaignin' | Funny Jokes at JibJab

Where the Hell is Matt?

I've been aware of this guy Matt and his world travel videos. I particularly liked this one he just recently released. It made me smile.


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Please don't be a lemming...

Tis the season for the U.S. Presidential elections! And we all know what that means. Tons of erroneous and fabricated emails passed mindlessly through the tubes.

Please don't forward them to other people, especially to me. Those emails are always crap; blatant fabricated lies or half-truths about one candidate or the other. I don't want to hear about Barack Obama being a closet terrorist or that John McCain ate the head off a baby kitten. I really don't want to hear it. Cause it's just not true.

If you believe crap in these emails, you're probably the ones that also believe the cousin of the deposed king of Nigeria needs your help. If you want to know the truth about a candidate, believing email threads is hardly the way to go.

Instead, put forth some effort and spend time learning about each candidate and what their views are by watching the debates, reading their websites, etc.

But please don't forward propagandistic emails. You're just perpetuating the problem.

My baseball cards are starting to pay off.

Back in elementary school, I collected a lot of baseball cards with my brothers. One of the coolest (ie most expensive cards) I got was a 1989 Fleer Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card. It was worth about $10 as I recall. So I bought a nice case for it, and stored it away.

So I was being bored today and I ran across an article about Ken Griffey Jr and how he's approaching his 600th home run. That got me to thinking about that rookie card of his. I looked it up online and one site has the card listed for $49.95! Sweet!

As kids, we loved collecting baseball, basketball, and football cards. But mostly just baseball cards. I have no idea how much money we sank into those cards, either. It seemed like that's all I bought for a while. There was a sweet sports card store right in Alpine. "The card shop" as we called it, although I doubt that was the real name. We'd ride down there on our bikes or rollerblades and buy a few packs of cards and a soda.

The card shop owner was cool too. He'd shoot the breeze with us, give us deals on candy or cards. We'd trade for specific cards, or just plain sell them. We'd check out the latest Becketts (monthly price magazine for sports cards) and see if our cards had gone up in value. We knew most of our valuable cards numbers by heart, so looking them up in the Beckett was easy.

Ah... good times. Many hours were spent hanging out at the card shop.

Mom really didn't have anything against it either. She was just glad we were outside, instead of playing video games or watching TV.

We have boxes of cards somewhere, probably in a dark closet at my parents house. I wonder what they are all are worth.