August, Elena's back

So Elena left to Utah for the last two weeks of July, extending a half a week into August. She was able to go visit family, and worked a bit for her old boss. I hung out here, and played a lot of basketball, which was nice. I also got a 1 week trial at the local 24 hour fitness and tried that out. It was nice, but much too expensive at this time for us. Maybe I'll be able to get a membership at the Student rec center in a little bit. In the meantime I'll just work out at home

The house is nice to come home to, but Beast (our cat) is really needy when I come home after he's been alone all day.

We also got new couches... and a kitchen table and chairs. Elena's excited.

Painting the Sauna

Well, in the interim before the truck arrived, Elena wanted to accomplish a couple of things. Clean the house, and paint the sauna, I mean, garage.

The cleaning the house was simple enough.

We picked a paint color for the garage and bought our supplies. We decided to go with rollers instead of renting a sprayer. We did it one night, and the ceiling (which we left for last) was murder. Looking at it the next day, we could tell it needed another coat in many places.

Working in the evening was still very hot, and I was thoroughly soaked. We also had run out of good lighting, which was the reasong we needed to add extra coats.

But it looks nice, now we'll have to get rid of some stuff in the garage and put up some shelves in our nook. We had debated doing epoxy coating on the floor, but it's too hot right now, but maybe that will be an option in the future.

Moving (Part II - The Drive)

Friday

So we began the trek to Texas. Elena left Friday afternoon/evening, while I waited until after work to leave (didn't leave until 9 O'clock that night).
We drove to our first stop in El Paso. My car broke down twice on the drive to El Paso, it would lose all power and I'd pull to the side, wait a while, and it would start again.

In El Paso we slept in since I got in so late. On my way out I only broke down 3 times, and managed to keep my car going by not using the air conditioner, and by keeping my speed at 65mph. It's a very painful drive across Texas, in June, with no AC, and being limited to 65mph even though the limit is 75.

Saturday

We were making progress in our 1000 mile journey and Elena needed a rest. I suggested that she take her rest and I continue ahead at my tortoise-like pace for her to catch up. Well, in her stop, she temporarily lost track of Beast and enlisted help of a state trooper until he was finally found under some of the stuff in her car. He suggested that she not go any further tonight, so we ate some good beef at a restaraunt and stayed in a seedy little motel in Ozona.

Sunday

We woke up early to get the keys to our house from Evan, who was so nice to meet us in a Target parking lot in downtown Houston. We drove to our new house, took showers and got ready for our first visit to our new ward.

All in all an eventful trip, with many memories. Not one I'd like to replicate exactly, though.

Moving (Part I - Arizona)

We packed up and moved. It was still a lot of work, even though we've kept a lot of things in boxes, and kept the boxes from our prior moves.

We had great help from our ward from Joseph and David, Joseph even recruited a few more ward members after our championship softball game to finish loading the truck since we had less than expected turn-out earlier.

We used ABF U-pack again. It's nice not to have to worry about driving the big truck and the expense of gas, it was a little worrisome trying to make sure we would get the parking spots we needed to fit a semi trailer in our apartment complex, but it actually worked out great. Now to drive the 1000+ miles to Houston...

Softball Championship

We played our Stake softball championship tonight, it was a lot of fun. We played one of the two teams we lost to in the regular season. We won them earlier in the playoffs to be the winner's bracket (double elimination). They killed us in the regular season, we killed them in the first playoff game. It was a good game this time, and we won mainly from playing more conservatively. We got a few of their better players out 'cause they were swinging for the fences.

Through the season I played alright. I'm pretty good at getting on base by hitting it not too hard into right field.

It was fun to win the championship.

Closing

Well, we closed on our house yesterday. Lots of paperwork, and now we own our house! (well, sort-of, we still have to pay for it :) )

Las Vegas Trip

I made a recent 3 day 2 night trip to Las Vegas/ St. George. My brother Spencer has been wanting to see the plasticized corpse exhibits (Body Worlds, and Bodies... The Exhibition) so my family planned a trip down and wanted me to meet them. I managed to get two days off in a row, and drove up to St. George post-call. I took the extra trip to St. George because I lost my drivers licence, and needed to apply in person for the renewal. I was especially grateful to stay at the "Hilton", in St. George.

We had a good time seeing the show, it was sort-of like review of some basic anatomy and brought back memories of undergraduate anatomy and medical school anatomy. We also did some shopping (I actually bought myself a couple pairs of shorts), and we watched the fountain show at the Bellagio. We also enjoyed ouselves just talking and hanging out at the pool for a bit.

PS2 Sadness

We've been arranging boxes since we've moved into our apartment in January. We've moved them to room to room, gone through and gotten rid of boxes, raised our bed with bed raisers from Home Depot, and stored boxes in our closets.

We finally have enough room in the extra bedroom (our TV room) that we can use Maya, the virtual personal trainer for PS2 in the game Yourself!Fitness. Well, I went to do a workout and I had the dreaded disc read error. It's been showing up more frequently lately.

Try as I might, I couldn't get the disc to work, so I turned to google for a little tune-up advice. I'd opened the PS2 up before to fix it, with positive results, so I wasn't that worried.

I found the site I used before, and couldn't get it to work. Then I saw that there was reference to a cable that needed to be disconnected for it to work on my machine. Well I disconnected a cable, no luck. After much trial, right now, my PS2 will not even power up.

Needless to say, I'm rather discouraged.

Houston House Trip

Elena and I flew to Houston last weekend to look for houses. It was very exciting. We had a bunch of houses on our list, and we were flying through them on Saturday. Well, at the end of the day we found a couple of nice houses, but we didn't really care for the neighborhoods (my favorite house had a large complex of condemned apartment buildings behind it, other houses we looked at that were really close to work, half the houses in the neighborhood were condemned, mostly for being half-fallen down). [That was quite a long sentence!]

We drove down and attended two of the wards in the areas that we were looking and felt that helped us to narrow our area down. Monday we spent frantically searching for houses in the area, and found a nice new development, but many of the salespeople for the building companies weren't there.

Well, I had to fly back (3 days off in a row is a minor miracle during my intern year) that night, but Elena had a couple of days there, so she went back and picked out our house.

We put an offer in, and they accepted it on Friday.
(picture to follow).

We had a great time in Houston with Evan, Angie, Eli, Brigham, Marissa, and Derek. We are really looking forward to moving there. I'm excited to be done with my internship and get on to radiology.

Surprise

Well, again I'm terrible at updating the blog, So I'm going to serially update it, not all at once.

We found out our cat is a boy. His name was Belle, because he liked to play with bells. We figured that was too girly a name for a male, so we settled on what was already our nickname for him when he was mischevious or misbehaving... Beast.