last day in tarrson hall

Today is my last day of work at the Geriatrics and Special Care clinic at the School of Denistry. It has been a good six weeks. I have made a decent wage whilst cruising the internet and becoming more informed on a wide variety of topics. I even got to read a couple books. Plus, I have learned about our Medicaid system a bit, made and answered many a phone call, and done some paper shuffling. I had the pleasure of working with some great people. Haven and Christine are most pleasant, helpful, and patient. And Dr. Samuelson is a true one-of-a-kind who couldn't be nicer. This morning he took Christine and me to breakfast at The Carolina Inn just to say thank you for all our work. Love the breakfast buffet! I am going to miss them and all the others here at the Dental School with whom I've worked. This job really has been perfect during this transition time.

Now it's off to Utah to be a full-time step-mom for three months! Many adventures ahead....

which jane austen heroin are you most like?

What girl can resist a quiz like this? My thanks to Suzy for posting the quiz on her blog. Enjoy!

Take the Quiz here!

a cheesy tale

Have you ever had a vision for a really great meal? You can picture it perfectly in your mind--what ingredients you'll need, how to prepare them, how it will look on the plate. My husband, Jared, often has such visions and last night was no different. We are still house-sitting and enjoying all the delectable foodstuffs in the pantry at our disposal, and the other day Jared found organic capellini pasta made in Italy. The creative culinary juices began flowing. His vision was this: fresh sauce made with tomatoes and spinach accented with fresh mozzarella.

Last night on our way home, we stopped in Whole Foods Market to get a few needed items, including the aforementioned fresh mozzarella. Jared found a 16 oz. package with a sign marked $3.99. Although, there were a few types of mozzarella in the area, there was only the one sign. But at the check-out, the cheese rang up as $7.99. Quite the difference! Jared questioned this, and the check-out lady made him go get proof of the $3.99 price. Well, it turned out that the $3.99 was for 8 oz. packages. On principle, we did not purchase the cheese. Why wasn't it properly labeled in the first place? And secondly, why did the check-out lady have to be so contrary? It seems to me that in these circumstances, they usually just change the price since there was confusing placement of the cheese and prices. We left Whole Foods, usually a place of pleasantness, with a bad taste in our mouths.

Jared's vision for his Italian dinner was steadfast, so we decided to stop at Target to pick up the cheese and a couple other things. We found the fresh mozzarella in the "gourmet" foods section and to our utter dismay it was $5.99 for 8 oz.!!! Oh, the irony! We had to laugh as we made our way to the back of the store where the regular dairy stuff is located, despite our disappointment. We really thought we'd be stuck with normal mozzarella. But then, to our utter joy, we found a different brand of fresh mozzarella for just $2.89 for 8 oz.!!! Vindication was ours! We bought two packages and enjoyed it immensely with our capellini and delicious whole wheat Italian bread.

wanted: creativity

I want a new name for my blog. When I set this up I was too excited just to get it up and didn't put much (or any effort) into choosing a name for it. So I may be trying a few things out. Don't be alarmed.

new favorite

I've been a little out of the music loop the past few months, but Saturday morning, I watched Vh1's Top 20 Countdown to see what was going on in pop these days. I was very pleasantly surprised to hear Brandi Carlile's The Story. I had heard this song awhile ago, liked it, but forgot about it. After seeing the video on Saturday, Jared and I immediately checked her out on iTunes and bought the album. It is SO good! Simple, catchy melodies, lots of guitar, and Brandi's super-cool voice make this singer-songwriter's album my current favorite. Go to her website and take a listen!

top five reasons to love whole foods market

5. The feeling of indulgence at being in a store full of healthy food, most of which is much too expensive.
4. Fresh ground peanut butter that will make you excited for a sack lunch again.
3. Delicious, whole wheat, tastes-like-it's-homemade sliced bread for only $1.99!
2. Shockingly, they have the cheapest milk around!
1. The free samples throughout the store, especially the fruit, that are so reliable you can go shopping hungry and not over-buy.

here kitty, kitty

Jared and I are house/cat sitting for Jared's professor. They have three cats and live in this really cool house near Duke University campus (more on the house later). Yesterday we had quite the scare. We came home from school/work and couldn't find Thomas the cat anywhere. He is the friendliest of the three and has greeted us each day in the kitchen. Upon conferring, we realized we hadn't seen him since Tuesday morning. We searched everywhere with no sign of him. I called his name and went through every room. I was envisioning having to drive up and down the street looking for a dead cat along the side of the road. Tom likes to escape, and the cleaning lady had been here the day before, so I was afraid he had gotten out then. But Jared came inside having talked to the neighbor who told him Tom hides in closets when the cleaning lady comes. Sure enough, that's where Jared found him. The poor thing had spent more than 24 hours in that closet and didn't make a sound. He came running down the stairs and started gobbling up his dry cat food. We decided he deserved the good canned stuff and here he is scarfing it down, poor thing. He must have been so hungry. Jared, being the wonderful guy he is, cleaned up the mess Tom made in the closet.

race to the whitehouse

I'm not a political junkie, but I do like to be informed and having once been the producer of a little political show in Salt Lake City, I'm probably an above-average follower of politics. That said, I have been excited for quite awhile about next year's presidential election. Speculations began last year on who would run and who had a shot, and now the race is in full swing--with nearly 18 months until election day! I'm not a history buff, but I'm pretty sure this is unprecedented. What makes it especially interesting is how wide-open the race for each party's nomination is and how many have lined up for a chance at the White House. This month things have heated up more with televised debates among each party's candidates and the media coverage of the race is increasing. I find it all very fascinating from a news standpoint. I'm excited to see how the next year and half play out, especially during the primaries. I don't think we've had primaries this exciting in quite some time.

As for me, I don't even know if I'm voting Republican or Democrat, but I do have a favorite on each side--two men who are gaining more momentum but are still in the under-dog position-- Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. They both have an uphill battle but they definitely each have a shot at the nomination. Obama has been a media darling for awhile now, and Romney is making headlines more and more. He recently appeared on 60 Minutes and is on the cover of this week's Time. Could a Mormon win? Could an African-American? These are exciting times in American politics!

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Here is my latest book recommendation. Jared and I have been reading it together for the past couple weeks and are almost done. The book is a memoir written by Jeannette Walls, a columnist for MSNBC. It chronicles her childhood with an alcoholic father and artist mother and her 3 siblings. She spent much of her childhood nearly homeless and rarely stayed in one place for long, moving from town to town in California, Nevada and Arizona, until her parents packed up once again and moved to Welch, West Virginia--her dad's home town. Walls lived there until moving, while still in high school, to New York City with her older sister.

Although Walls says she intended to write this as an "homage" to her parents (who now live by choice on the streets of New York City), she doesn't sugar coat much. She paints a painfully honest picture of her neglectful mom and dad, but does so without judgment. They were also loving and intelligent and taught their children to be optimistic at even the worst of times. I admit, there have been many times while reading that I have thought they should have been jailed for things they did or didn't do, but Walls is amazingly not bitter or blameful.

This book will make you count your blessings over and over. I have never been more grateful for a warm bed, good food, and working bathrooms, not to mention my amazing parents. It is shocking what the author and her siblings lived through, and yet they still grew up to be successful people. The Glass Castle is entertaining, well-written, and eye-opening. It reads like a novel but with the added impact of knowing it's all true. Check it out.

pretty picture

This pretty picture is a graph of my blog! Cool, huh? I saw this on Andrea's blog and had to have one of my own. The cool thing is, that as a website changes, so does the graph. So this is just today's version. The two below are the same. I just changed the colors on them for fun. If you want to see what your website looks like go here.

dinner

This is the result of our collaboration on dinner tonight. Tofu, brown basmati rice, carrots, onions, and red chard with Kung Pao spices, soy sauce and some other stuff to spice it up. Beautiful and delicious!

two months of wedded bliss

Two months can go by so quickly and yet feel like forever. In the two months Jared and I have been married, here a few (25) reasons I'm grateful for my husband...
1. He makes the bed every morning.
2. He carries me to bed at night when I fall asleep on the couch at 10:15 during a movie and then brings me my toothbrush and a cup so I can brush my teeth.
3. He cooks me amazing meals. (see here)
4. He scratches my back whenever asked, which is at least once a day.
5. He thinks my french toast is the best he's ever had.
6. He tells me I'm beautiful every day, even when I look like crap.
7. On the days I do make an effort, he raves about my gorgeousness and counts his blessings at having such a "hot wife".
8. He watches and thoroughly enjoys Grey's Anatomy with me.
9. He insists on carrying way more than his fair share of groceries inside, usually leaving me with only the very lightest bags. This is his idea of chivalry.
10. He drops me off and picks me up from work every day.
11. Every morning while I am doing all my girlie stuff to get ready in the morning, he packs us both a lunch.
12. He walks across campus to eat said lunch with me every day.
13. He loves my body and tells me often.
14. He likes to have me watch him do push ups and pull ups (and he always takes his shirt off for these exercises, which I don't mind at all).
15. He lets me put my cold hands and feet on him, but then won't let me return the favor.
16. He loves it when what we are wearing on a given day coordinates, like having a similar color scheme.
17. He thinks I'm artistic.
18. He loves candles.
19. He always scoots his chair as close to mine as possible at dinner.
20. He kisses me in the middle of prayers.
21. He misses me between drop-off and lunch time and lunch time and pick-up.
22. No one believes me when I say he is 29.
23. He really, really loves my red hair.
24. Each morning when the alarm goes off, he turns it off and then snuggles with me for another 30 minutes.
25. He tells me he loves me many times a day.

I love you, Jared! I am so happy to be your wife!

who I want to be (random sampler)

In no particular order and with or without set time frames I want to...

1. keep my house tidier.
2. read my scriptures more.
3. be a mother.
4. make an oil painting I would want to hang in my house.
5. sew a dress.
6. plant a garden... or at least a flower box.
7. be a better photographer.
8. sing a duet in Church with Jared.
9. own a home and paint my walls fun colors.
10. exercise more.
11. own a piano.
12. buy all organic dairy products, eggs, and produce.
13. cook more creatively.
14. bake bread.
15. do more random acts of kindness.
16. learn Spanish and/or French.
17. be a world traveler.
18. take a ballet class again.
19. write a book (and have it published).
20. be in the temple with my husband surrounded by our children.

Who do you want to be?

good reads

I have been meaning to post about Stephanie Meyer's fantastic books for some time now and am finally getting around to it. First let me thank Suzy for recommending them. Neither Jared nor I could put these books down until the last page was read. Twilight and New Moon are MUST reads!!!They are actually young adult novels as the characters are in high school. And I'll admit to being sceptical at first when Suzy told me they were about vampires and werewolves. (Of course, Jared jumped all over that!) But believe me you don't have to be into the supernatural to love these books. Meyer does an amazing job with the characterization. I love Bella and Edward--the novels star-crossed lovers--and want them to end up together, with all that means. At its heart this is a love story... with PLENTY of tension to keep you guessing. The books are pretty long, but quick and easy reads since you will not want it out of your hands until it's done. And the best part: the third book in the series, ECLIPSE, comes out August 7th! I can't wait.... and you won't be able to either!!!

no more limbo

Big news out of the Vatican... babies can go to heaven! The Pope released a 41-page report last month saying that unbaptized babies no longer have to go to limbo--a place somewhere between heaven and hell. Now they can go straight to heaven. It's only taken the Roman Catholic church 800 years to figure out that excluding innocent babies from heaven doesn’t seem to “reflect Christ’s special love for the little ones.”

This really is big news for a former Catholic school girl (I went to a Catholic school but have never been Catholic). Theologically, this is a HUGE change. It seems to call into the question the idea of Original Sin--the reason for infant baptism and limbo. Limbo being a step up from going straight to hell, as Catholics believed until the Middle Ages. I doubt it will have any practical implications. Catholics will still baptize their babies out of tradition. After all, we all need baptized, so might as well do it then, right? The Mormon notion of accountability at age eight is not in their radar.

As a Mormon, I do find it so interesting that the Catholic theology can be changed by a committee and then sanctioned by the pope. I mean, they can't believe that before this babies went to limbo and now they don't, right? So what do they believe is reality? It's not likely that this report will change any actions taken by Catholics. It is just changing the Church's official belief on the nature of God and Heaven. As Mormons, we believe in revelation that can change Church policy and practice, but not this total reversal of theology as seen here by the Catholics. Thoughts, anyone?

nothing like a new haircut

I love that fresh from the salon feeling of getting a haircut. I love the smell of the salon products. The silky-smoothness of the professional blow-out that I can never quite get at home. All this is enhanced by the fact that I always wait until I am completely desperate and absolutely despising my hair before I make an appointment. I hold out as long as I can. This time I waited longer than I have since adolescence--6 months! I didn't even get my haircut before my wedding in March!

So, Tuesday when I went to Hair Expressions in Chapel Hill to freshen up my neglected mane it felt like heaven. The stylist, Carol, was a hoot. She is several years past middle age, a single mother to two adult daughters, and a bit of a hippie. She had a picture of her "guru" framed by the mirror and spoke of taking frequent trips to Florida to learn from him. I never found out what his exact philosophy is. Carol was also full of stories from living in San Francisco and studying a type of massage therapy that is supposed to release suppressed memories from one's muscles. I have no idea how that works, but it sounded nice. As for the haircut, you can see for yourself that it turned out well. My only complaint is that it took about an hour and half. Carol was not a fast cutter, which made it a very good thing that she was so darn fun to talk to!

ode to blogs

Look at what computers used to be!!! We've come a long way, ladies, and now the blogging phenom continues to catch on as more and more of my friends are putting their stamp on the cyber world. This past week I have had no fewer than 5 friends launch new blogs (check out my links)! And it really makes me smile! I love seeing pictures of your families. I love hearing about all the exciting, boring, terrifying, or lesson-teaching events taking place in your lives. I love getting the inside scoop on all of you who live so far away, especially since I have become horrible at keeping in touch through that old contraption the telephone. Thank you blogspot for bringing us together in the digital age! Happy blogging to you all! What's your favorite thing about blogging?