The Count of Monte Cristo

I've been listening to the Count of Monte Cristo on audio tape for the past three months. (long time... long book!) I wanted to read it after watching the movie; it's probably one of the best movies out there. It's a classic. However, if you're looking for anything that has to do with the book, don't watch the movie. The movie is about plotting, murder and revenge. The book is about the complete opposite: forgiveness, redemption and mercy. The last two words of the book are wait and hope. That sums up the entire book.

In the movie, the Count only retaliates against one person; in the book, he goes after everyone. He goes from a know-nothing sailor, put in charge of a ship, to a prisoner. While in prison, he becomes a man of education, learning mathematics, physics, chemistry, physics,language, culture and more. Once he escapes, he becomes one of the richest men in the world, rivaling that of princes'. He uses this new-found wealth and knowledge to execute his plan of revenge on the three men who put him in prison, along with any and all who got in his way of them.

Along the way, though, his heart begins to soften again. The first man shoots himself, the second becomes insane. The third and last, Monte Cristo forgives and pays off his enormous debt. This last man is also the main villain, the main reason that he spent more than a decade in a dungeon.

Pretty different outcome from the movie. While both are awesome and amazing, not only are they different, but they have completely different plot lines. Watch the movie if you haven't in a while; if you have the stomach to listen to it for about 20-30 minutes a day, download it on audio. Diffidently worth the read.

Love is in the Air....

For Valentine's my sweetest husband made me a super yummy breakfast and then left to go get me a surprise! He came home with all the groceries that I had to go get that day and with a bouquet of red roses! :) Later that night he had made reservations for dinner at our favorite Italian Restaurant down in center street called Little Gloria's! The restaurant was not taking any walk-ins that night it was sad to see a few couples come in and they had to leave because they didn't have reservations! I felt so lucky that my sweet husband had planned in advance! We ate a super delicious meal and they even gave us unlimited Italian Soda thanks to our super awesome server Curtis (who was our same server a year ago when Jon proposed to me)! This month on the 19th was our 1 year mark of our engagement and tomorrow 21st will be 6 months since we got married, WOW time flies by too fast! :)

New Year, New beginnings, New problems!

Why do all vacations must come to an end? Can't there be an endless vacation? So we got back from the warmth to come freezing cold! :( There had been a huge snow storm the day before and so we came to find a ton of snow! I really hate winters in Utah! So a lot has happened this month with the house! We decided to put up a wall and a proper door downstairs instead of the ugly sliding door that didn't lock properly with the ugly green wooden door keeping the light from coming in! Jon's cousin Mark came over to do the wall and install the door! I think Jon is learning rather quickly how to do a lot of house repairs! He has acquired a few more tools along the way to do random jobs around the house. It's kind of sad that I have been to Lowes' and home depot way too many times this past month that I'm already familiar where things are located throughout the store! I think we should just end up getting a credit card with them!  Our basement flooded as well! We still don't know what exactly caused the flood, but it happened through one of the two bathrooms downstairs and it continued unto the kitchen and down the hallway! :( Gratefully the h0me insurance covered the expenses to have the repairs made, it still wasn't fun having to deal with it for about 2 weeks! I had to find people to come redo the flooring in both the kitchen and bathroom (we decided to put in tile instead of the ugly vinyl flooring that it had), the carpet down the hallway and we got a little crazy and tore up all of the ugly paneling in the living room as well and decided to just put a nice texture to the walls... This took us an entire week of running around like crazy trying to find people to come do the work and also cleaning up/painting walls and cleaning up the entire mess! endless hours were spent in between classes and work! In the end it looks way nicer now! :) finally is over!!!

This month we celebrated Jon's birthday! He turned a quarter of century old! We decided to throw him a party at the house! (the first party since we moved into the house back in November).  We decided to have a sumo-wrestling theme to the party since he loves wrestling! Rachel made an awesome looking sumo cake! I decided to be a bit adventurous and made him a sumo pinata! It was fun making it, even though in the end i think it ended up looking more oval rather than circular, maybe the next one will turn out better! :) We had a blast with having everyone over. It was a pretty good turnout! Thanks to everyone that came to the party! His birthday landed on a Monday so we decided to do the party the Friday night before his birthday! Jon took the day off from work and even school for his actual birthday! We went out to Tucano's and ate lots and lots of food! We then headed over to the Museum of Art at BYU to go see the Carl Bloch exhibit! It was really amazing! If you still haven't gone and you are in the area you should go before it ends this May!

Our First Christmas Together

We had the opportunity to get tickets to go see the Christmas devotional at the conference center! :) thanks to David Archuletta's tickets and the fact that  I was scheduled to take the practical test for my EMT test that day,  I traded those tickets for Christmas Devotional tickets.

We decided to go down to California for Christmas break. It was nice to get out of the cold and nasty snow for a week and half! :) While there we eat lots of good food, Went for the first to the famous San Diego Zoo! Yes it is HUGE... So many different areas to see, but we got to ride around the tram that takes you around the park! It was a lot of fun and Jon had a blast taking a TON of pictures with his newly acquired lens. I think my favorite animal that I got to see were the panda bears!

We had a wonderful dinner at my Aunt's on the 24th, and I got to see my cousin Jennifer who came to visit from Guatemala for the first time.  Jon got to open most of his presents early (we celebrated Christmas by opening our presents once the clock hits midnight).  It was great spending time with my family and just relaxing not having to do school stuff and or work! :) We also celebrated my wonderful and beautiful mother's birthday! On the 31st we went to six flags, it was fun riding the roller-coasters! We were planning on going dancing afterwards but we got back home late and we were super tired and then Jon wasn't feeling great so we decided to skip it.

Thanksgiving Photoshoot!

This is just a quick one... We went up into the mountains to get some pictures of the girls for Leslie. Being the photographer, I want to post some of the pictures that I took.

Thanksgiving!!

Kim's family came!!! And their timing couldn't have been better!! They showed up right after we dropped off the moving van Wednesday from un-packing. They had driven through a crazy storm (that didn't hit Provo/Orem thankfully) to make it here.

While Kim's dad and I put up gutters and fixed the toilet, the girls were plenty busy organizing the house and un-packing. On Thursday, everyone took a break, for the most part. There was plenty of food! We had an entire turkey, made by Rudi. There was stuffing, potatoes, rolls, asperagus, corn, salad and sooo much more!

New House!

K so it's not quite new for us... It was built in 1949 and we moved in two days before Thanksgiving, so we've been in it for a while. It was such a looooong stressful process, but we love it, despite all the adventures that we've had (and I'm sure will continue to have) (keep reading the blog for those adventures). It really came down to the wire at one point and we almost didn't get the house; we were scared that we wouldn't be able to get it or any other house! In fact, on the night that we signed on it, there was supposed to be a huge blizzard. I've lived in Utah since 2004 and I've never seen people like this; they shut down businesses, schools and everyone was encouraged to stay home as much as possible. On top of that, the loan officer let us know 20 minutes before we were supposed to sign that he hadn't gotten the paperwork and it wouldn't be ready until the next business day, which was after the break. Our real estate agent was awesome; she was talking to him on the phone and let him know in no kind words that it was unacceptable and we were getting tired of his push off dates (he had kept re-scheduling a bunch of times). He showed up about 20 minutes late after he emailed us the contract.

We put the offer in on the house in September. Two months on a short sale seemed like an eternity to us, and we seriously had doubts that we would end up getting it. Everyone that we've told, though, has said that it is an incredibly fast turnover time for a short sale.

We walked out of the office and it was already dark, the temperature was dropping and the wind was starting to blow. I dropped Kim off, picked up a friend and went to rent a U Haul. Kim called her dad and sisters and told them that we had gotten the house and to come out. They weren't going to come unless we had gotten the house, so we were more than relieved to have them out. I got home with the U Haul truck and started loading it up, but it started snowing as soon as we started putting things into it. Since we thought this was going to be the storm of the century (literally) we stopped and my friend went home. 10 min later, it stopped snowing... Some storm right? And awesome timing haha.

The next day, Wednesday, we woke up early and started putting everything into the truck. We got it loaded up and went over to the new place without a problem. The glorious thing about being newly married and in a one bedroom apartment is that we don't have that much stuff, so we were able to do the entire move in just one and a half moves. Made it soooo nice on us. Thanks a TON to my bro Paul and buddy Matt for helping us get moved.

Right after we got the truck returned, Kim's family showed up. It was awesome to have them out for Thanksgiving! (More on that to come!) Here are a couple pictures. And yes, we've been working on it, so it looks TONS different and TONS better already.

Halloween

This year we actually didn't go out; we spent the night with Paul & Ang and their kids. It was super rainy and we didn't think that the kids would be able to go out, but they were able to go out in the end. A couple days before Halloween, we had Matt & Annicka over and carved some pumpkins. We had NO idea what we wanted to carve before they showed up. Kim found some cool ideas online though. Here they are:

Next year will be tons more exciting. Promise.