We have had quite an amazing time the past few months, and I have some pictures and commentary to show it. Quick rundown: Christmas concert in Salt Lake, Christmas with my family and getting snowed in, an awesome trip to California, then to Arizona, and back home.
For starters, before Christmas, we went to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert with some famous opera singers who also performed. It's always fun to go see the lights at temple square.
We visited this awesome tree in Draper, UT. They completely light it up with a toon of strands of lights.
Us in front of the tree.
Paul made chocolate cheese pie, which is apparently a family favorite of his. It's pretty good!
A cute picture of Grandma Larsen and the newest addition to the Larsen family, Elliott. We went to my brother Gerrit's house on Christmas eve to spend the night because we had a very white Christmas and were afraid we wouldn't have made it over for Christmas morning had we not slept over.
Christmas eve, with the snow falling beautifully outside.
Paul went outside in the snow - in shorts.
The snow on Christmas morning!
A beautiful shot of individual snowflakes on a railing.
So, we went through Las Vegas on our way out to California, and we saw that they had a really cheap buffet inside one of the casinos. So we went in, and ate some delicious food, and marveled that people would actually waste money to gamble on these. At one point, Paul was standing kind of near one of the machines waiting for me to get out of the bathroom, and a security guard approached him and said, "I'm sorry, but you're only allowed to be on the floor where the machines are if you're over 21." and Paul was like, "Oh yeah, I wasn't even planning on gambling. I'm here waiting for my wife. I'm 22, though." and the guard was like, "Oh, I'm sorry man, you just look like you're 16..." and he awkwardly walked away, probably trying to figure out how Paul was also already married.
Once we got to California, we stayed at the very nice house of some members of the Church who Paul knew while he was serving his church mission there. They were super nice, and this was the view off their back porch.
This was a pier at night in San Clemente which Paul and I took a walk on.
Ghostin'.
My favorite part of the trip was our time on Catalina island, off the coast of Long Beach. This is the ferry we took to get over there, it was about an hour ride over the open ocean to get over there. We saw dolphins in the open water swimming and jumping alongside our boat, which was super fun - I'd never seen dolphins in the wild before!
The wake from our boat, leaving the city behind us.
Catalina island! There are a lot of little boats there and fishing boats.
It's truly a beautiful island.
My aunt, uncle, and one of my cousins went with us. We ate at the Lobster Trap, an interesting restaurant for our first meal there.
Although Christmas was over, they still had fun lights up around the palm trees.
As we walked along the beach, we noticed something - intriguing on the sand. There were THOUSANDS of these just washed up on the beach, dried out and mostly dead on the sand. In the morning, the seagulls had a feast.
This is a shot from the roof of the hotel we stayed at. All the pretty lights belong to a church just down the way from us.
They offered tours around the island on these big jeep things, and we were pretty happy that they looked like the ones from Jurassic Park. It was worrying at the same time though, because we were on a touristy island that had these jeeps - I started to expect dinosaurs to jump out at me at any second.
A very beautiful golf course and mountains.
This is a view from a monument we hiked up to. The monument was for the founder of Wrigley gum, who had a lot to do in the 20's and 30's with the development of the island as both a nature preserve and tourist attraction.
The monument.
A cool door on the monument.
We hiked to the top of this mountain, and the view was incredible of the ocean! Really, it was a dream.
Seriously. I can't get over how pretty it was. Made me miss the Philippines a lot.
The "Casino" is on the right, which doesn't have any gambling inside but is just a fancy building where they held social gatherings back in the day, and they still have fancy events there today.
This is the inside of the Casino's movie theater, and it was truly spectacular. The inside was all hand painted in art-deco 1920's/30's style, with real gold painted on the walls.
The view in the evening from the top of our hotel of the ocean and cute town.
Paul let me borrow his sweater (the grey one) for most of the trip since I stupidly assumed that it was California and everything should have been warm, right? It was certainly warmer than Utah, that's for sure!
This is our little bird friend, a black crowned night heron. We watched him catch fish after fish in the ocean as he diligently perched and observed the dark waters.
We sure miss Catalina Island! Paul took this cool panoramic shot. We'd like to go back there someday and enjoy it even more thoroughly.
This was back on mainland California, in San Diego where my aunt and uncle live.
The view outside our window at my aunt and uncle's house! We left California shortly after this picture was taken, and boy do I miss it. I would not be sad if Paul and I ended up back there, and he super enjoyed the trip and being able to see so many nice people that he taught on his mission. I must say that I was blown away with how excited they were to see him again, and how appreciative they were of the work he did while he was there as a missionary and how hard working he was. That's what every young wife likes to hear about her husband :)
After California, we went to Arizona to stay a couple of days with Paul's maternal grandma and meet some of his extended family. I found some photo albums, and the adorable photos were so cute! That's Paul on the right and his sister Becca on the left. They were completely adorable.
Paul's grandma lives in Tuscon, and I've never seen so many cacti in my life! I was a super big fan of the saguaro cacti. I've always said to Paul that I might not want to live in Arizona because of how hot and dry it is, but after going to Tuscon I think I could live there and be happy. There's a lot of cool scenery and it's just a super interesting place that just feels like the essence of "the West." I was expecting cowboys to ride by me on horses from around every hillside.
So we went to a wildlife museum/zoo there in Tucson, and there were a lot of exciting things we saw. There were a LOT of snakes which are indigenous to Arizona.
We found some coyotes in one enclosure - they're pretty cute, and we heard some good racket from wild packs of them at Paul's grandma's house while we were there.
Look at this handsome man - back in his element, since he lived for a while in Nevada and Arizona as a kid.
They're just so cool! We had a ton of fun in Tuscon and Paul's family really is a blast - they sure know how to play a great game of "Mormon bridge" and a game that made my own dad have fun (which pretty much never happens) which was a game where you'd blow a ping pong ball around on the table and try to not let it go off your side. We had a great time there and Paul's grandma is extremely nice.
An impressive mountain.
If you're easily bored by scenery, feel free to skim this, but we really found the trip interesting because of all the strange rock formations there were to look at.
We drove through the Navajo Indian reservation on the way home to Utah, which is where my dad served his mission. He speaks very little Navajo now, but he was pretty excited. The large piles of sand below were a very strange geological formation we saw on our drive.
So that's been our excitement from Christmas. This semester has both of us on our toes, and on campus or at work from 9 to 5 most days (and sometimes from 9 to 8 on some days.) I can't remember if I mentioned my new job, but I'm enjoying working at the library as a research assistant studying homemaking books from today and previous eras and writing up a directory on them, and Paul's doing well at his IT job. I also picked up some extra hours as a teacher's assistant for a journalism class I took last semester as well, so currently we're working three jobs between us!
I'm currently taking a journalism class that has me doing many interviews and writing multiple articles each week for BYU's newspaper which has me extraordinarily busy, and Paul is doing an awesome internship which counts as a class where he's helping develop a business plan for a non-profit organization that is working to stop human trafficking, especially in the sex trade.
Paul turned 23, and we got a really good coupon from Texas Roadhouse and went there to celebrate. They were super nice and gave us free chili and free ice cream on top of the free ribs we already got. They made Paul get on a "birthday saddle" they rolled over and ride on it while they sang to him which was pretty hilarious.
Paul also got free cheesecake at Chili's and I got him a new wedding ring for his birthday because his old one is too big for his hand when it's not summer - his hand apparently shrinks a lot in the winter cold, but he'll probably switch back to the old one once it gets warm again.
We went to BYU's Y Ball for married couples! I really enjoyed it, since the last dance we went to was homecoming and it was a little bit of a bust in some ways. At this one, they gave us free fancy dinner before the dance. It was fun to get all dressed up, and Paul looks super nice in a tux.
We went to an awesome event at the Shoppes at the Riverwoods on a double date with friends to an event they hosted. We didn't know this, but turns out it was Star Wars themed! They had a guy there who was carving the ice into various characters from star wars, and we were pretty impressed with the end results. They also had fireworks, and my favorite part, a bunch of cute dogs just there at the event which their owners kindly let me pet :)
I thought it looked like Darth Vader was holding a GIANT otter pop for a lightsaber.
Note the matching pants and pool noodle lightsabers.
Yoda ice.
And the awesome Millennium Falcon being carved by the artist himself!
It's been good to go on dates with Paul each week, which has been our goal this semester since we took a marriage survey which encouraged us to do so (which we also got paid for, which was nice.)
We've been enjoying ourselves and married life, even with the busy-ness that comes along with it all. We're looking forward to continuing to slog through this semester with everything we've got, even through the last week of constant snow. Looking forward to the summer, but to much to get done first! I'll try to not write about 3 months of events next time I write.
Fun! Great photos too!
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