Haircut

I finally got a much needed haircut. I just felt like it was time. Here are some pictures of the process. I got my haircut at our friends Dan and Jenny's house. Jenny and Michelle cut it (Jenny actually taught Michelle how to cut hair while doing it). I think it turned out great! One of the best haircuts I have ever had I would say.

some more bizarre pictures

I once had a roommate (before I got married) who told me he had never known anyone who could have a completely different hair style every moth if he wanted to. I think that that is attributed to the fact that my hair grows very abnormally fast. I am ging to cut it soon very short, but it will be long again befre ou know iy. These are a couple pictures of my hair when it was blonde and when it was black. I think it looked good both ways. Michelle likes it more just regular. I will never change the color again, i am too old for that now. But it is fun to look at the pictures.

Some random mysterious pictures

So i was going to put a different picture on our blog, but then I stumbled upon some mission pictures that Michelle has on her laptop. Neither of us have any idea how these pictures got on her computer. There is not really any explanation, most of them were not even taken with a digital camera ( I did not have a digital camera on my mission). In addition to that, I have never scanned in any pictures from my mission. Maybe my parents scanned them onto a computer and some point in time and they somehow wound up on Michelle's computer. This is a newer computer though...I can't think of how they got here. I am stumped, they are the most recent picture download to her computer. We are both totally confused how these pictures exist on her laptop. Someone must have hacked on to her computer and given us these pictures. Everyone can enjoy them now though. My favorite is the one with the monkey. I wanted a pet monkey after I met the lady in Cuzco who had that monkey as a pet. The picture of me just standing up against a wall in a room is the picture i used to send in the First Presidency to get my mission call. Neat, huh?

We Finished All the Harry Potter Books

Michelle and I read the final Harry Potter book for about 10 hours yesterday and finished at around 1:00 am (so i guess that means we actually finished it today). Obviously, as evidenced by reading it all day yesterday, we enjoyed it a lot. We read all 7 books in about 2 months. I would say that's pretty quick since they get pretty long after the third book. I feel weird now that there is nothing left to read in the series. There will never be a new HP book...Its an odd feeling. I had a feeling that Snape was either not bad or would become good again. I believed whole-heartedly that Dudley would turn out to be a wizard. I was surprised and disappointed that the final book did not address that. Dudley was nice to Harry at the begining of this book and I was sure the book would say something about that. Just like everyone always reccomended them to us, we recomend the books to anybody. Really, we think that anybody would enjoy reading them. The last 3 are excellent, the first 4 are so so. You've got to read them all though in order. Its worth reading them all to get to the last ones. Before I had finished the series, I thought maybe there would be someway that the possibility for another book could remain open. I realize now though that that is not possible. JK Rowling wraps up the series really well. There is really nothing left to write about, well, not another entire book at least.

The Best Husband!

I have the best husband ever! Yesterday morning he got up early with me before I had to go to work to make me a homemade egg, bacon, and cheese mcmuffin. He had stayed up late the night before and didn't have school until the afternoon so he could have slept in late and was probably really tired. But instead of sleeping, he got up and made me a very yummy breakfast! He is constantly sacrificing of himself to do nice things for me and let me know that he loves me. It's just one of the many many reasons I love him so much. Thanks Chad!

Been a while...

It has been a couple weeks since the last time I wrote. Since we got home from Texas, Michelle and I have accomplished a lot. I recently finished a week long class on Skillful Group Development. It was 6 hours a day for 6 days straight. I got as whole classes out of the way though and now that the real semester has started I only have to take 3 classes. I am planning on focusing on the job-search with my free time. I have also applied to two city management fellowships (its like a rotational internship for one or two years) since we got back. Meanwhile, Michelle has been working hard day in and day out at her job at the doctor's office. We are on the last Harry Potter book. The sixth book was really good. Michelle and I are really into the series. It will be weird when we finish the last book. When we first started it seemed like there were so many books and they were all so long it didn't seem like we would ever actually finish. That's all i can think of writing right now.

24 hours to TX and 24 hours back

Michelle and I are back at home in Syracuse. We drove all the way from Houston, TX in one straight shot and got home a couple hours ago. We left yesterday i think at like 10 and got home today at a little after 1. We lost an hour coming home but gained an hour going there. Of course, we drove out there too. We drove out there also in one straight shot, we left on Dec 23 at 4:30 and got to my family's house on Christmas Eve and 6 or something. It was totally worth it. We got to be there for a week and a half and the drive was cheap. Once we got to states like Alabama, Kentucky, etc. gas was under $1.50. Often times it was only $15.00 to fill up my gas tank. My car is little and gets great gas mileage. The entire round trip (there and back) probably only cost about 150 or 160 dollars. That is for two people of course. That is about a third of the cost it would have been for one of us to fly there. It was a tough road trip though. It certainly wasn't easy though. Luckily I have some weird ability to drive for extremely long amounts of time without getting tired or anything. One the way down when we left i drove for something like 12 or 13 hours straight before Michelle drove and i napped a little. We switched off after that, one of us sleeping while the other drove. That is more or less the pattern we took driving back up as well. Each trip was about 24 hours of driving time, i probably drove three quarters of the time. That is not to say that Michelle wasn't willing to drive more, it is just that I am for some reason really good at driving at night and for long amounts of time. Listening to Harry Potter helped too. We have all the books unabridged on my ipod which is connected to my car stereo. We listened to about half of book number 5 (which is an unbelievable 900 pages long....that book just would not end, it ended up being our favorite so far though) and a good chunk of number 6 (which thankfully is only 600 pages or so and is also very good). I think we are making excellent time on getting through the entire HP series. I think we started the first one only a month ago or so, there is a post on here that talks about it. We had a blast in Texas. The weather was SOOOO nice. As we were driving down South the ice and snow melted off our car and i thought that was so cool. It was in the 70's there. Sunny, warm, very enjoyable. We had a great time staying up late with my fmaily and then sleeping in as we had no responsibilites! It was so fun to be with my family. Andrew is leaving on his mission in a month or so so this was really important to spend time with him. We watched the Bowl Games with my family (way to go Utah, that was amazing) and went to the movies and went out to eat. It was great to be able to wake up on Christmas morning and be with my family and open up presents with all of them. Michelle and I got some nice presents on Christmas and we had already received some nice presents from Michelle's family as well in the mail here at Syracuse. We feel very fortunate to have such amazing families! One interesting thing was one the way back for probably around 100 miles in Ohio we hit the craziest rain storm I have ever driven in. It was coming down so hard it sounded like golf balls hitting the car. Near zero visibility and there was no way Michelle could sleep through it. We had to yell just to be able to hear each other. Obviously that slowed us down for a while. It was so weird when we got out of the sotrm though, it was not gradual at all it was just pouring one second and the next second it was completely gone, no rain whatosever. That surprised me. I had to pause Harry Potter becuase I couldn't hear it. Anyways, it is back to reality now. Michelle has to got to work tomorrow and I have a class that starts tomorrow and is 6 hours a day for 6 days (Monday through Saturday). I know that sounds horrible but it is well worth getting an entire class out of the way before the real semester starts next week. I will only have three classes in the Spring semester due to having taken 5 classes last semester and taking this compressed class over the break that starts tomorrow. After driving for 24 hours straight Michlle and I could so easilly drive for 5 or 10 hours now. I can't beleive I used to divide a road trip from CA to UT by staying the night in Vegas. I could do that whole trip without even thinking twice. I could drive from UT to CA just to eat at In N Out and then turn around and drive back, JK, I wouldn't do that, but ten hours from UT to CA seems like so little after what we just did. We feel like we could easilly take some mini road trips to Massachusets or Canada or eve do those things as just a day trip. Anyways, Michelle and I had a great holiday break and we are sad it is over but we are grateful we got to do it.