Getting Old

Do you ever have the feeling that you are starting to get old. I don't mean "old" as in white hair, rheumatism and bath slippers. I mean "old" as in you have been around a long time and you see things come around full circle.
So what is making me ask this when I am at ripe young age of 22? Well, yesterday at BYU I ran into a girl I use to Babysit! Can you believe that? I was so surprised. I asked her if she was a freshman, but she replied she was a sophomore. I couldn't believe it. I use to babysit her and now she is a sophomore in college!
Shortly after that expereice another strange thing happened. I was early for class in room number 793 SWKT (this class room has windows) and when I looked inside I saw all the professors in the Poli Sci Dept. sitting around the table being lectured, I don't know what on, but it was wierd. First off it was wierd to see them all sitting and listenign instead of lecturing and then it was even wierder when I realized how many of the professors in the dept I actually knew and have taken classes from. It made me feel like i have been around BYU way too long.

Even though there experiements were totally random I cannot stop thining about them. I am sure I am not the only person who have had those feelings being tipped upside down by life as it awakens me to the reality that everything really isn't centered around me and thigns change without my notice. So have you had any of those moments when life catches you off gaurd and makes you see things differently? What are they?

P.S this week I have only run 6 mi but the first week of school has kept me pretty busy. I hope to do better next week: )

"Only you can prevent forest fires"

So, as of right now, there is a FIRE in our oven. Not joking! about 20 minutes ago I came into the kitchen from Jeremy's frantic calls to see fire leaping out of our oven. We shut the oven door and called Karen (our everything expert) and Googled "fires in oven" to see what we should do. Karen said to just leave the door close (which is our only option b/c I put it on cleaning mode thinking it would suffocate it, but all it did was lock the oven until it cools down) and wait. Her advise didn't seem very comforting but then when the results came up on our search engine I felt a little less worried. For your FYI Hanford Fire Dept. says this about oven fires. . .

"Most of the time an oven fire is not serious. The fire is usually contained in the oven, which is designed for high heat anyway. The oven fire usually suffocates or is easily extinguished."

great news, huh. So what are we doing now? we're fire babysitting.

seriously, these pic's make the fire look really small, but it is actually quite large.

P.S I didn't run any miles last week (pitiful) and this week i have yet to run, but I did bike 7.5 mi today.

P.S.S the fire has already gone out!

Family Visit

Wow! It has been a long time since i have posted anything! We have had a really busy last couple of weeks. My brother got married in the SLC Temple and so everyone came in town and most of them stayed with Jeremy and I. We had 11 visitors in our small apt. thankfully our landlords let us rent out a larger portion of the basement, but things were still a bit more crowded than we are accustomed to. We couldn't find our nice camera so all the pic's we took when they were here were by my camera phone. Technology is so amazing!

Me, Suzanne (my sister) and Elise (niece) at the swimming park

Random pic of me

Elise and I on a walk

Andre (nephew) playing in the park sprinklers

the men of the family at Jared's wedding.

Elise at the water park. She looks like a super hero!

Elise shopping with us.

Me by the pool
Westley(nephew) making a goofy face!

Kaye (sister) at the water park.Andre and Will (brother) showing off muscle!

I had so much fun! Suzanne, JC and their kids (Andre, Westley and Elise) came early and spent 3 weeks with us! It was nice to have somone to go shopping with and to talk to besides Jeremy (even though Jeremy is so awesome he is not the best shopper). Jeremy also played a lot of tennis with JC which is great b/c I am not a tennins player.

This is Suzanne, JC and Elise at the park

I wish I had taken more pic's of the wedding or reception but I didn't. It was so fun though!

My brother Jared married
Pamela from Ecuador.
She had a lot of family and friends come into town. And let me say South American's know how to party! It was also fun b/c Cassie Clark was also able to make it. She was my best friend during the Junior High years. She brought her boyfriends/maybe fiance with her and he seemed really nice. Thanks so much for coming Cassie!

I guess that is it for now. I will try to be more up to-date on postings.

P.S. running was pretty hard to do when my family was in town. The first week I ran 25mi, but the second week I only ran 9mi : (

Gotta Run

This post is going to be a quickie because I have to head to work soon. I don't know how many of you know this, but I love to run! Not only is it a great way to work out, but it also a great stress release. If I'm overly stressed out about school, work or life I just have to put on my running gear and in about 30 minutes I'm feeling great about everything.

Many of my intimate friends know that I am a goal freak. i have goals about everything and natural I have goals about running. Currently my running goals consist of increasing my mileage up to 50 a week. I know you might think I am CrAzY, but sometimes a girl just has to be a little crazy to stay sane. 50 mi weeks are hard on the body so to ease into my goal I have been increasing my mileage by 10% each week and then every 4Th week decrease it by 20%. It might be overly cautious, but I would rather reach my goal slowly than not at all b/c of injury.

So the funny thing is even though I love to run and it makes me feel like I am on top of the world I am often a slacker and I don't always do it. run I mean. I get these weeks what I call "bumber weeks" and it kind of seems like I fall of the running wagon. Of course when I have a bumber week I get discouraged that I will never be able to make my 50miler goal. So to fix that (or help in some small way) I have decided I need someone to report my running progress to. I don't know how many people even check this blog (probably 0-5) but anyway when I make a post I think that I will do a little P.S. and let you know my mileage for the weeks or couple of weeks as it may be. Hopefully this will encourage me to keep my running up.

OK, this was way long winded and I am not even posting any pictures (sorry Cassie) so I think I will end.

P.S. my weekly mileage was 12.5 but i was sick and I haven't done my long run on sat. yet (tsk, tsk i seem to have excuses for everything)

Roughin' It

Okay, so Jeremy and I actually went camping! But before you start applauding too loudly I'll have to admit it was a ward campout, we weren't in the wilderness all by ourselves. If you know us really well you will understand that we are not campers. We love the comfort of our own mattress at night (even if we did get the mattress off the side of the road) and warm showers in the morning. We don't even own our own sleeping bags. Roughing' it for a night isn't what we typically call "exciting." BUT we were however pleasantly surprised at how much fun camping can be. I don't know if were ready to go buy a tent just yet, but I definitely see us camping in the future and, who knows, maybe we will even go out roughin' by ourselves.

I thought y'all would like to see some pictures we took. I know we don't look the best, but we were camping, what do you expect?

This was our only source of water (besides the bottled water we had in the car)

Us in our borrowed tent

I don't know what you would call this pose. It was kind of late at night when we took it ; )

Jeremy in the light of the flashlight.

Taiwan

TAIWAN
Hello Everyone! We just got back form our Taiwan trip last night (We actually got back a week ago, but I have been so busy I didn't post the blog until today). It was very exciting! We have a ton of pictures from the Taiwan trip (we took over 275). Taiwan is so amazing. The people there are so nice.

Jeremy and his brother, Brian, served their missions in Taiwan so we were able to meet a lot of really amazing people. This is Doctor Yang and the Tang Family. Brother Tang has participated in the baptism of eight of his friends who he has shared the gospel with since he was baptised.

We also got to use several modes of transportation. We used a plane, train, fast train (which is different then a regular train b/c it goes 3 times as fast), subway, taxi, regular bus, double decker bus, car, and our feet. The traffic there is crazy! They can make two lanes out of one lane and if you are in the left turning lane and decide to go right it is OK as long as you can beat the other cars of the line. It is survival of the fittest on the roads.

This is the double Decker bus we took to the airport.

All of us with President Hsu and his wife (Brian's mission president).

Jeremy and I in the Bamboo forest. It was raining that day. . . actually it rained every day. That wasn't too bad b/c I like rain, but I was happy to get home to Sunny Provo.

This Buddha statue looks even bigger in real life. We had to walk up this incredible long high trail to be able to reach this Buddha Temple.

They have very funny English translations. This was in the bathroom of our first hotel. We made sure we kept the floor very wet ; )

We absolutely loved the trip. Jeremy and I want to become world travels so I guess Taiwan was a big addition to the travel log we hope to expand.

busy month

Wow! I haven't posted anything for a long time! We have been super busy lately (my long term excuse for anything). One of the things we wanted to do this summer is organize our messy storage room. It was quite the adventure. We even took before and after pictures to show off our cleaning talents.

This is before
This is after
Do you notice a difference? We sure do.

We have also been really busy with work, our garden and having fun!

This is a random pic we took today. Jeremy didn't mean to have is eyes closed, but I think it gave it a nice affect.

Oh well this is kind of a short blog, but I figured I had to post something. I hope everyone is having a great summer!