Exciting Christmas Adventures to Salt Lake City, California, Catalina Island, and Arizona - And a Few Dates

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. 

One Fractured Toe, Work Adventures, One Stray Cat

The long gap between posts this time can be explained only by finals and life getting crazy busy and catching up to us.  However, we have some newsworthy points of interest that have occurred in our lives recently.  For starters, I have moved on from my job as a custodian for Wymount housing (where we live.)  There were many chemicals, fun coworkers, and a very flexible schedule which I highly enjoyed.  Here are some of the highlights of that job, which I will in many ways miss (although scrubbing endless toilets and walls in apartments I will not particularly miss.)

Often, we'd clean so much we'd wear holes daily in the green brillo pads.  That's real arm grease.

In one of the Wymount laundry bathrooms, the most impractical soap dispenser placement exists.  It's placed only inches above the faucet, making it almost impossible to actually push with your hand to dispense the soap.

This is perhaps one of the creepier things I discovered while working.  It's supposed to help secure the door or something to prop it open, but in fact it looks like a little crocodile dog or something.

One day while we were working, we noticed a distinctive musty, wet, nasty scent in one of the public laundries.  We opened it up to investigate, and there was a lot of nasty old water inside and dust.  We quickly closed it and decided to report it later.  As we debated, two men came in, hoisted the broken washer onto a trolley, and then rolled in with a giant white box.  They slotted the box in the spot where the broken washer had been.  When we looked closer, we saw the box was actually a decoy washer.  Like, they'd glued metal buttons on it and everything.  We thought it was pretty funny they used a fake one to replace the washers they were fixing.

Snowing at work!

As we walked from laundry to laundry, we decided for our 15 minute break to make a snowman during one snow day. We showed some pictures of it to our boss and she thought it was super fun.

In some of the older laundry rooms (which have probably been there since the 60's), they have these big hand painted signs hanging up with the rules for the laundries.  This looks suspiciously exactly like the way jeepney placards or other signs are painted in the Philippines.  Maybe they were imported?  Or some RM mastered the art of Filipino sign painting on his mission.

I now have a new job working for a professor in the library's Folklore department.  I'm reading through old (and new) homemaking books and compiling information from them.  I've certainly learned a lot of weird facts and practices from back in the day.  Pork slabs bound on a wound were thought to prevent shock, worms were ground up and made into "healing ointments," and there were instructions for fire-proofing dresses and more.  It's good that some of those practices have fallen out of style!  I'm enjoying the job and learning a lot of useful housekeeping tricks from it as well (plus it pays slightly better and is a desk job.)

#couplegoals - Tandem biking older couple for the win.

As Paul and I were chilling on our new couch and love seat one day, I saw a mouse run from under the couch to our room.  A great chase began, with Paul on top of the bed trying to scare it out and me attempting to build a pathway that would lead it through the open door.  The picture above was our heroic effort to make the pathway from random junk, but the mouse instead ran under a door to our water heater and we couldn't scare him out - until two days later, when we found him dead on the floor, probably poisoned by the poison my grandma had put out in her garage where the couches had previously resided.

This is the "snow chicken" that lives right by the Walmart Marketplace in Provo.  The little red spots there are the top of her head.  She actually blends in well with the snow - hence, snow chicken.  We've seen her almost every time we drive by that area, and I tried to catch it and pet it once since it's pretty cute but he's actually pretty fast and escaped my clutches.

Speaking of chickens.... this is Chicken Dog the at, a stray that was outside our door meowing and we decided to let in for the night.  We fed her some cheese and other food we had on hand and she was extremely cuddly and adorable.  Paul named her Chicken Dog for no reason I can discern, but it stuck.  She seemed to be semi-potty trained and meowed to get out, and with how friendly she was we wondered if maybe she was someone's escaped pet so we let her back out to hopefully find her real home again.

 

We've still been making delicious food, like these apple cider pork chops and mashed red potatoes.  We also love these little Louisiana fried and breaded raviolis which are time consuming to make but tasty.

Paul convinced me it was a good idea to do a Star Wars marathon over the course of 5 weeks.  We watched one or two movies just about every weekend, and managed to get through all of them starting chronologically in the story, not by release date (which helped me understand the plot a whole lot better.)  It was fun to watch it as adults since I hadn't seen many of them since I was a kid.  Star Wars is pretty serious stuff, as Paul likes to say.  We're excited to see the new one this week.

We had Thanksgiving at my brother and sister in law's house and it was delicious.  'Twas our first Thanksgiving together as a married couple!  We kind of wished we had made our own turkey and everything just because it was so good we wish we had our own leftovers!  My favorite dish was the cranberry pie which had a sweet but tangy flavor.  We contributed stuffing (made from scratch), but I over seasoned/salted it so it didn't taste as good as it could have.  Paul made a chocolate cheese pie as well which is a family favorite of his.  I personally don't like cheesecake, but it was still good.

In more unfortunate news, I probably fractured one of my toes a month or so ago.  It was dark and I was hurriedly trying to dig around in our very stuffed closet when this evil can of camp dry stuff fell on my toe and nearly severed it.  I yelled and jumped away and Paul ran out to see if I had died or not.  Fortunately I hadn't, but my toe did continue to hurt for about a month after the incident.

It's Christmas now, and we're really happy my parents have driven in from Virginia and we'll be having a happy full family Christmas this year.  We are sad that we won't be with Paul's family this year, but hopefully soon we'll get to spend a Christmas with them too.  Paul and Dad have enjoyed playing trumpet together and make a pretty good duet.  Also speaking of duets, Paul and I sang a duet for sacrament meeting today - "What Child is This" arranged by Sally Du Ford.   We're excited for our first Christmas together and for what next year may have to offer.