Birthday Boy

Ten things you may not know about this Birthday Boy1. He is turning 26 today. That’s right…he is closer to 30 than 20 and it is a BIG deal!
2. He’s the smartest man in the world. Whenever we play a trivia game he always pulls random facts out of nowhere. Honestly I don’t know how he remembers everything he has ever heard or read. And he has passed all of his CPA tests so far (we are still waiting for the results of the last one but I know he passed)!
3. He loves the Discovery Channel and Man vs Wild. I think him and his dad could sit in front of the TV with a Dr. Pepper and the season of Planet Earth and be perfectly content with life.
4. He has an eye for home décor. When we moved to Redmond with nothing but a couple of old camp chairs I was surprised at the furniture and decorations he picked out. He’s even talking about finding drapes for our windows…I haven’t even thought of that.
5. Even though he claims to hate dancing he really loves it. And he loves to do it in public. When we are walking around a department store Brandon will spontaneously start to do his dance. I think he thinks it embarrasses me but I absolutely love it. He makes me laugh so hard.
6. He is an accountant at heart. When we were registering for our wedding Brandon made a spreadsheet of everything we needed to register for. We printed out the sheet and checked off the items as we scanned them into our registry. Talk about detail oriented!!
7. He went through a phase where he grew out his hair. And no this wasn’t when he was a teenager; it was last year when I met him. He had just got home from an internship at Ernst and Young in Seattle where he had let his hair grow for 3 or 4 months without cutting it. Sometimes he talks about growing it back…we’ll see.
8. Kids adore him. I think every toddler at church is in love with him. They always stare at him, make faces with him, and laugh whenever he raises his eyebrows or gives them a funny look. There was this one little red head girl in our Provo ward that particularly took a liking to Brandon…we still talk about her today.
9. He is a perfect gentleman. He always opens the door for me every time we get in the car.
10. He loves music. As a kid Brandon played the trumpet in his junior high marching band. Now he just serenades me with his guitar and ukulele.

These are just TEN of the HUNDREDS of reasons I love this Birthday Boy.

I love you Brandon!!! Happy Birthday!

Obsession

Brandon and I have a new obsession. We are addicted to the game Twirl on Facebook. We play this game almost every day together. The game is simple. They give you six letters and you need to create three, four, five, and six letter words out of those letters. To qualify for the next round you must get the six letter word before the two minute timer runs out. It doesn't sound like much but it is so addicting! If you want to give Twirl a whirl you can go to either mine or Brandon's facebook page. If you look at our mini feed you will see that we probably played Twirl today. Just click on the link and have fun. But watch out...it's addicting!

General Conference

I've been meaning to make this post for over a week now. This was my first General Conference away from Utah and it was a little different than most. In my family, General Conference is like another holiday...almost as big as Christmas or Thanksgiving. Our tradition is to have a huge breakfast of crepes, breakfast casserole, fruit, and juice....ALL YOU CAN EAT (and believe me we all eat a little too much)!! We eat as we watch Music and the Spoken Word and then watch conference all together as a family. This year Brandon and I were in Seattle but of course we tried to keep the traditional alive. I made crepes and we watched Conference with just the two of us. Thankfully we were able to see it from home and did not have to go to a Stake Center. It wasn't the same without everyone there but I absolutely loved Conference. I was able to listen to the talks instead of reading them later (kids can be very distracting on conference day.) My favorite talk was Elder Wirthlin's--his are always my favorite. I love hearing all of the apostles and our prophet speak. They always seem to know exactly what I need to hear or think about. Here is a link to the conference talks if you missed any of it.

Also a side note from my previous post about the electric can open. I fixed it...well sort of. It wasn't really broken. The day after I posted I tried to use the toaster and it wasn't working either. The electric can opener and toaster are plugged into the same outlet. I just pushed the reset button and voila they both worked. Silly me!!!

A good thing to have...just in case

Tuesday night I was making dinner for Brandon. I was even testing out a new recipe for spaghetti. In this recipe there are a lot of canned goods--stewed tomatoes, tomatoe sauce, etc. We got an awesome electric can opener for our wedding in June and have been using it without any problems ever since. I was using the can opener and successfully opened everything I needed except for one important ingredient. Before I could open the 2 cans of tomate sauce our electric can opener broke. I don't know what happened. I thought I was using the can opener correctly but apparently not because when I placed the can under the cutter nothing happened. At first I thought I didn't have it in the right place because you know how picky they are and how the can has to be exactly in the right spot to work. But nothing happened, it wouldn't even make a sound like it was trying to open it. Brandon, my own personal in house fix it guy, even tried to get it operational but couldn't. Here's where the important lesson comes in: Always have a manual can opener as a backup just in case your electric one brakes. I know, I know! We really should have one. What would we do if there was an emergency and had to live off our 'food storage.' But we just haven't gotten around to buying one yet. So Brandon carefully stabbed the cans with a pocket knife and I spent some time trying to shake out all the contents from a tiny puncture site. The spaghetti turned out great and it is so delicious. (Thanks Lindsey) But this little incident just goes to show you that everyone needs a manual can opener hidden somewhere in their kitchen drawers...just in case.

A Two Man Tent

We finally went camping! Brandon and I have been talking about going camping ever since we got married but there always seemed to be some excuse: I am working this weekend, or we are going up to Salt Lake that weekend, or we better do that before we move and this is the weekend to do it. But we finally did it and it was a blast. We went to Twin Harbor State Park along the coast. When we arrived at the park we went straight to the beaches. We walked along the beautiful sand beach for miles and became professional beachcombers. I think we collected over 2 dozen whole sanddollars.

The best part of the trip was our tent. As you can imagine we do not have a lot of camping gear but believe me if Brandon has anything to say about it we will be collecting camping stuff over our entire life. We did have one vital piece of equipment: a two man tent. Brandon bought this tent for a boys only campout he went on with all his guy friends the summer before we got married. They called it Man-richment or Man Games 2007. Now you can only imagine the exciting activities they had planned to prove their manhood: fishing, shooting guns, playing King of the Raft in the freezing cold lake, 4-wheeling, throwing large logs, seeing who could lift the heaviest rock above their head...all of which they did with their shirts off to be more manly. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall during that campout; I think I would understand boys a lot better. The two of us barely fit inside this tent. But it was a cold misty night by the water and we were grateful for our little home away from home.

Whidbey Island

While we were still living the good life of unemployement, Brandon and I took a day trip up to Whidbey Island. I guess Whidbey Island is the largest island in the continental US (50 miles in length). The early explorers thought it was another peninsula in the Sound which is why it is called Deception Pass. The only way to drive onto the island is over one bridge otherwise you take a ferry. We spent the day hiking around Deception Pass State Park and ate lunch along the beach.

We then drove down to Fort Casey to explore and watched the sunset on the beach. It was gorgeous! I have fallen in love with the sunsets here. Brandon always would tell me how Washington sunsets couldn't be beat. I think he might be right.