Happy Turkey Day

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. We hope everyone had a great day. Samuel and I were not able to pay for another trip to the mainland, so we had Thanksgiving in Hawaii. Luckily, there were about 10 other young married couples, plus several extra people, including four missionaries, who also needed a place to have Thanksgiving. So at 3:00 we all got together and had a big traditional meal. I was assigned the mashed potatoes, and they would have made Krystal proud (she's a real lover of creamy mashed potatoes, as well as the famous quote, "These mashed potatoes are so creamy! Mary mashed them.") I used a cube of real butter and a pint of whipping cream. Yum. Here's a couple pictures of the group- we forgot to take one of the whole group at once. We had the dinner at a little banquet room at the apartment building of our neighbors. This is me looking very full....Samuel took the pictures... and not everyone was looking, but that's okay! It was a big group.Then, at 6:00 we had another dinner invitation. We have a friend in our ward named Creagan. It happened to be his birthday, and we were all happy to celebrate it with him. He is terminally ill with cancer, and we weren't sure he'd even make it to his next birthday. He treated us to a great feast with his mother, sister, aunt, and another couple from our ward. We went to a private club on the beach where they served the fanciest Thanksgiving dinner (buffet style) that I'd ever seen. Not only was there turkey, stuffing, and all the usual things, but there was prime rib, lamb medallions, braised beef, caviar, sushi, well, you name it, it was probably there. Too bad I had just eaten a few hours earlier. The desserts were amazing too! I had to go back for seconds on the Tiramisu.Here's a picture of us with Creagan, and then the beautiful sunset we enjoyed from our table.So, I hope everyone had a fun happy day and found lots to be grateful for.

Blonde or Brunette?

Lately I've been getting a little tired of the "maintenance" it takes to be a blonde. But to go dark...will I ever be perceived as bubbly again? Or on a positive note, will people start to take me a little more seriously?

So I happen to have this dark curly wig, and tonight's experiment is to take a vote...you all know what I look like now, blonde, which is what I've been my whole life.

So other than the fact that it's a pretty big Texas hairstyle (no offense to all the Texans out there...) Which do you think looks better?

Happy Birthday to Krystal!

Well, isn't this fun, to send Happy Birthday wishes to my sister! She's the one who got me started on blogging, and just look at all the fun we're having. For those of you who don't know, Krystal is my older sister, older as in "13 months and 2 days" older. Because we are so close in age, we shared just about everything when we were growing up. Rooms, clothes, bathrooms, sports teams. We DID manage to make it without sharing any boyfriends, hee hee.

Krystal is the kind of sister that everyone would be lucky to have. Some great memories I have are:
1. When I missed the game winning shot at the state tournament. It was her senior year, SHE was the star of the team, and she probably wouldn't have missed. I didn't even think I could face her. But she grabbed my arm and gave me the biggest hug. That was amazing.
2. We used to go "exploring" and hiking up the hill by our house, and we pretended we had houses up there.
3. For awhile we had Tara (the third sister) sharing a room with us, and we had three beds that had wheels and could all fit underneath each other, you know, trundle beds. One night we had a babysitter, but instead of going to bed we layered the beds like a cascading waterfall and then we all held onto each other and rolled from one bed to the next, down to the floor. How many times did we do that? Probably like, 12 times.
4. We were able to take a trip to all the church history sights, back in high school, with our Uncle Tom and Aunt Gaylynn. That was such a memorable trip, too many things to mention. But I know Krystal is smiling just thinking about it. Our uncle even taught us to read a little Hebrew during the many hours spent driving.
5. We both love to read- this started when we were little. I have a faint memory of her helping me learn to read. Later on one of our favorite activities was to stick our feet in the sink with hot water, and read for hours. We'd have to keep adding hot water of course.
6. Our trip to Hawaii was a blast- it was us three sisters and our parents.
7. When we were about 11-12 years old, we made an infamous home movie where we did a cooking show, and we called ourselves 'The Kitchenettes." We taught our audience how to make "Choc-Oat-Chip Cookies." It's a real gut-buster.
8. We sang many a duet in our days. We still sing "Innkeeper" at Christmas.
9. About the same time we were doing cooking shows, we were also Wilson Phillops Wannabes. We made "music videos" of us pretending to sing all their songs. And I mean all of them.
10. I had a good one to put here...now it's slipped my mind. I'll add it in later I guess!

Krystal is the best! What can I say? She's easy to get along with, she's solid and avoids drama, unlike me, and she just has her head on straight. She's been very supportive of me, even when others haven't been, and she has been someone who's example I am always trying to catch up with. Thanks, Krystal, for always being there and for playing such a huge role in my life. LOVE YA!! Happy Birthday!

I'm still here

Hi everybody. I haven't had anything happening around here, and I can't think of anything to write about! Samuel has been in Las Vegas at a Real Estate Investment class over the weekend, so I just went shopping and out to dinner with some friends, and hung out at the apt.

Oh, and Samuel went to visit my family in St. George. That was his own choice. And it was supposed to go well, he's just trying to reach out to my family, but for those of you who know my mom, well, I don't know if we can say it ended well. I'm definitely not putting all those drama-filled details on the web!

Let me just say that it's kind of a disappointment sometimes to grow up and realize that your parents aren't as perfect as you thought. I'm not claiming to be perfect, by ANY means, nor am I claiming to have a perfect husband. But as Puumba says in the Lion King, "You gotta put your behind in the past!" :) He probably meant you gotta put the past behind you. But I wish everyone could just do that.

I Work in a Funky Building

So, let me tell you a little bit about it. My boss is in his 60's. He's Hawaiian and Japanese, and he started this company, Metropolitan Maintenance & Construction, about 30 years ago. We provide janitors to banks, doctors offices, shopping centers, and universities. And the construction part is mostly remodeling. Oh, and you should know that I work on the first (ground) floor, all by myself; my boss and the controller have an office on the second floor; He lives on the third floor, and the fourth floor could be another apartment, but right now it just stores a bunch of furniture. It's kind of San Francisco-ish, isn't it? There's even an elevator in it. So, it's pretty funny, but people randomly stop in and say, "Um...what IS this place? There is a sign on the window advertising the artwork for sale, it says "Inquire Within" so it's no surprise that people stop in. My boss is also funny about ordering "knick knacks" from catalogs. Some of them are quite expensive. He has them on display on the first floor. Let me show you the interior.This is what you see when you first walk in. Except I'm sitting in the chair. Then if you keep walking ahead, you enter "The Museum" as I like to call it. Random things everywhere.
I guess I should have turned the lights on for this picture, but oh well. You can see a couple paintings, a few masks hanging to the right, and don't miss the things hanging from the ceiling. Ha ha. I love having the whole first floor to myself. (That also explains why I get away with blogging all the time!)

Happy Halloween

Okay, so it's a few days late. But I hope everybody had a fun Halloween. I've decided that Halloween is most fun IF... 1. You're a kid 2. You have kids 3. There's a haunted house around somewhere 4. There's leftover trick-or-treat candy (or in our case, you get to eat ALL of it, since no one came! Apartment buildings...you just can't trust 'em.)
I've loved all your pictures of your kids in costume. I don't have a kid of my own, and I barely had a costume, but here's my Halloween picture. The little boy is Isaac, our neighbor. I teach him piano lessons. He came to our Halloween carnival at the church, where Samuel and I were doing a Cake Walk!