Stupid New Year's Resolution

So, I'm not a fan of New Year's Resolutions. I've never been able to keep to them, and I don't think that anyone else really does either. Even when I decided that I was going to go a year without a boyfriend and just date around, Jon had to come around and ruin that one! (Okay, I don't mind that I didn't keep that resolution!) But the whole idea of a New Year's Resolution just always makes me cringe because I know that I'll be all gung-ho about it in the beginning and then I'll slowly just forget about it. Even so, I'm trying, yet again, to make a resolution that I can stick to.

I was going through some older pictures last night, and found some from when I met Jon. Let's just say that I was a lot thinner then. The worst part is, in some of them I was in my old bikini and I looked good. Like, really good. Then I looked in the mirror and realized that 30 pounds later, I didn't look that good anymore. The bigger problem, is that most of this weight gain has occurred in the last 6 - 9 months.Now this isn't a post so that people can leave comments saying, "Whatever you look great!" or "You don't need to lose weight!" (and p.s. Laura, you're not allowed to compare our weights because you're pregnant *wink*) because that's relative to the person looking. For me, I'm not happy with my body right now, and that's really the only opinion that matters. I really have no excuse for these extra pounds - I don't have any kids, I'm not so busy that I don't have time to work out, I really have no excuse. So, this year my "resolution" or just my goal is to lose the weight that I've gained since being married, and to look hot in my bathing suit again.

So yeah, I'm mostly just ranting and complaining in this blog, I know, but I thought that maybe if I put it in writing, then I would follow through. I may even post the picture that got me all fired up about this, just so when I look at my blog I can remember my goal. We'll see though. Anyway, if anyone would like to lose weight with me then let me know and we'll do it! :)

Finishing Up Christmas...

Okay, so I put "to be continued..." at the bottom of my last post with the hopes that I would remember to take some pictures at my in-laws house and post those on here as well, but I forgot to take pictures!! Oh well, here's what I got!

1. A mug tree! (It's so cute, it's cast-iron and has 6 really big mugs to go on it)
2. Picture Frames that actually match! (I've REALLY been needing these, and they're also super cute - a black border with brown on the inner border)
3. Some cute stuff to decorate my kitchen (it says "Cafe" and it's made out of wood, it will look awesome on my red wall once I get shelfs for it, but for now it makes a really cute center piece for my table, then there's also a cute dish for serving appetizers or breads or something that I just love)

Then Jon got...
1. A 2-burner propane heater for ice fishing (Yay! Now I'll be even more toasty warm inside our tent!)
2. A gift card to Game Crazy so he can get more videogame stuff (eh.) <---Just kidding Josh, it's awesome!

It was really fun being over there and being able to watch all of the nieces and nephews open their presents (they are just so dang cute!) and being able to see Jon's family and stuff. Anyway, that was the end of our Christmas, now for some stories that happened slightly before Christmas!

First, my neighbor made some cookies for us, and her daughter Cameron (who is 7) wanted to come and give them to us (she's my partner in killing weeds and spiders). So she came over on Christmas Eve, only she didn't quite make it to the door. I heard my dogs barking outside, and after a while decided to go get them to be quiet, only when I went outside I saw that they had Cameron cornered just inside my fence! She had her hands up by her face and was too scared to move, so I called the dogs over and put them in the house and went to go help her. That poor girl had tears just streaming down her face and I'm asking her if she's okay and if the dogs tried to bite her or anything (luckily they didn't!), and she holds out the cookies and says, "My m-mom m-m-made these f-for you...M-m-m-merry Chris-(sniffle)-tmas". It just broke my heart, I felt so bad! Especially since she usually comes over to play with them! I've never seen my dogs act like that before, I mean sure they bark, but usually it's at people who aren't scared of them so they back off. I've never seen them bark like that at a kid before. I'm sure Molly was just wanting to play and was giving in to the influence of Ricky, but I think that Ricky forgot I was home and was trying to "protect" our house. It's a good thing they're both lap dogs and couldn't really do any harm, but I still felt bad. Don't worry though, Cameron was okay and she even invited me over to see her Christmas presents a few days later. :)

The other story happened the Tuesday before Christmas. Jon and I decided to go ice-fishing so he could try out his new powered ice-auger. So we got home from work around 2AM, went to bed around 2:30-2:45AM, and then woke up at 3AM (at least that was my schedule, Jon just didn't sleep because he was too excited). Once we were driving and heading towards Scofield I started to doze off. Well, around Provo area (this is about 4:45AM) Jon is cruising along at about 65 or so with the cruise-control on, when he hits some black ice! The roads were perfectly clear before that, but suddenly there it was! So he says something (I can't remember what) and it wakes me up to our truck swerving over all three or four lanes of traffic while Jon's trying to get control of the truck! As we're sliding, I'm preparing for us to crash, especially when we were turned and facing/sliding towards the center barrier. As I'm going through my mental checklist for the impact (I had a neck pillow which was good, seatbelt, I was bracing myself by holding onto the door, but then tried to relax so that the crash wouldn't hurt as bad...) we turned again and faced oncoming traffic! We had done a complete 180 before we stopped sliding! Luckily, traffic was still clear back behind us, so Jon had time to get the truck turned around and back on track. I was still in shock while Jon starts doing one of those laughs that you get after you almost die and saying how scary that was and stuff, and we started to slide again! Don't worry though, this was a tiny slide that Jon in his amazing driving skills was able to pull out of, but I still freaked out and started crying and telling Jon that I didn't want to slide anymore (keep in mind that I had been sleeping, so my mind was all over the place!). He got me calmed down and we quickly realized that we hadn't said a prayer before leaving, so we hurried and said one right then, definitely letting our thanks be known for protecting us already! I'm just so glad that Jon is good at getting out of slides like that - if it had been me I would have just crashed! Plus it wouldn't have been as bad if we hadn't had the cruise control on, that's what got us out of control in the first place. But we're okay now. :)

So with those fun stories and the fun drive through Sardine Canyon on Christmas day (it was a white-out for a bit, but we made it!) it was a very eventfull holiday. Let's just hope that New Year's goes by without incident! :) Happy New Year everyone!

Merry Christmas!

Hooray for Christmas! So for the last few years for Christmas, Jon and I go up to my parents house for Christmas Eve (my whole family is still very kid like on Christmas morning, it's so fun!) and then we go to his parents house later on Christmas day. So, I've taken a bunch of pictures of my cute little Christmas decorations at my house, our Christmas presents, and pictures of Christmas at both parents house. Enjoy!

Here is our cute little hand-me-down Christmas tree with our cute little hand-me-down ornaments.

Here's kitty playing "Scary-Jungle-Cat-Who-Attacks-Things-Very-Ferociously" under the Christmas tree. Luckily she didn't completely destroy it this year! :)

I decided that my house still looked very non-Christmas-y, so I added some tinsel to the windows....

And some bells on the wall. It ended up looking half-way Christmas like in my house!

This is our early Christmas present from my parents - my dad loves to have excuses to get new toys, and his best excuse is giving us the old whatever so he can buy a new one! :) So they gave us their old TV so they could get a new HD. This one is huge compared to our old one! It's 37inches!

Jon is soooooo thoughtful! I've been wanting a piano since I moved out of my parents house, and since a real piano won't fit in our house (we physically can't get it into a room without tearing down a wall, which I had no objections to, but Jon didn't want to), so this year he got me a digital keyboard. It's great because it has the weighted keys and touch sensitivity and the actual pedals, so it's a lot closer to having a real piano then we were before! :)

Here's another picture of the keys...

So Christmas morning we designated 7AM to be the present opening time. If we all look super exhausted in these pictures then that's why! Anyway, here's Jon and Phillip (above), my (my beautiful morning self) and Jon in our new Utah State hoodies! (We turned him into an Aggie!) Don't worry Hunter family, I got him a BYU hoodie too. ;)

Ha ha, we're both a little crazy looking in the morning aren't we?

I didn't quite get my camera fast enough to catch all of the chaos, but basically how we decided to do presents in my family is we divide them up and then on the count of three, we all open our presents as fast as we can, yelling our thankyou's as appropriate. Then we have one person designated as the "Garbage Collector". This year it was Julie because she was sitting in the middle, so we all got to throw our wrapping paper at her. She put it in the bag as fast as she could, but still ended up getting buried under a 2 foot mound of it! But this is her trying to clean up after we got our backup garbage bag. It's fun this way. :)

Here's some of our random presents that we got. We got the popcorn bucket with candy from my Grandma Daugherty, with some money to get a movie with. Then we got some floor lamps from my Mom and a bunch of movies from randoms. Fun times!

Then possibly the best present we got (well, that Jon got!) was Jazz tickets! I gave him four tickets so that he could bring a friend, then I also gave my parents 2 tickets so that we could all go together. I can't wait!

After all of this we all went back to sleep for a bit before heading up to the in-laws....

To Be Continued...

Great News!

So, my best friend in the whole wide world Katie has just informed me that SHE IS ENGAGED!!! I'm so happy for her! I just got off of the phone with her a few minutes ago, but we're already planning stuff. :) I did a little avatar of her in her wedding dress (okay, so she hasn't picked one out yet, but hey! At least it's a picture!)



Oh, isn't she just the prettiest bride ever! :) She's getting married sometime either at the end of August or in September. It's going to be wicked awesome, and she totally deserves to have the best wedding ever.

So yeah, I just thought that I would announce it because I am so excited! Katie has been my best friend since we were in diapers (it was easy since we're cousins!) Anyway, just wanted to say cheers to Katie and Ben!

Update On My Nothingness :)

So I'm over here at the in-laws house for our Sunday dinner (every third Sunday we go to Jon's parent's for dinner and get to see the whole family, it's so fun!) and my sister-in-laws were bugging me about not writing anything in here since Thanksgiving (which as an update, we ended up leaving work shortly after 5AM!) so here is my update:

First of all, I had the last 2 weeks off from work. HALLELUJAH! It was soooo nice to just relax! The whole first week I didn't do a thing. Heck, I didn't even put on makeup! I did have to go to work on Friday for a few hours to attend a training, and it was my classes last day so I popped in to say Hi.
Other than that I just slowly cleaned my house. Then that Saturday we had a party for my co-workers that was voted to be at my house. I've never really hosted a party before. Sure I can help pull one together and can help plan, but I've never had one at my house before. Luckily, Bab's did all of the planning and entertainment (thanks Bab's!), so when everyone got there we had Rock Band to play as well as a really fun game called Partini. We also did a pot-luck dinner, so there was little stress on me. However we didn't plan as well as we could have, and ended up with three main courses that were all drenched in cheese! We had cheesy enchiladas, tator-tot casserole and lasagna! Let's just say that while the food was all delicious, we were all really sick of cheese by the end of the night. Thank goodness for Ben bringing chocolate chip cookies to save us from a cheese overdose! I just want to point out that I work with some of the coolest people ever, and that they definitely made the party as fun as it was! So yeah, we played Rock Band until almost 4AM and then my carpol tunnel was hurting too bad so we had to call it quite. Plus I was barely keeping my eyes open while watching for the drum beats! Ha ha, it was way fun.

Last week I just did Christmas shopping. Oh, and I bugged Baby Brother Jeffrey for an hour and a half to have him help me label songs that he burned for me (he gave me 8 CD's and none of them were labeled!) That was fun, my Baby Brother is the coolest. On Saturday we had our Nielsen Family Christmas Party. I love our family Christmas parties, they are so much fun! Plus since I have a handful of cousins who are just babies, I just have a blast playing with them. I spent most of the night playing with little Zane and Gracie. They are so stinking cute! I'll have to see if Jen (aunt, not sister-in-law!) will send me some pics so I can post them (wink wink).

Now for the actual exciting news - Jon applied for Pharmacy school this month! Yikes! He applied for Southern Nevada University, so if he's accepted, then we'll either be moving to Nevada (at least it's warm!) or we might stay here in the valley because they recently built a branch here in Salt Lake! I really hope we can stay, because then we can stay in our house for longer. If not, then we're sort of SOL. But yeah. He's not taking any classes this next semester, he's just going to be studying for his PCAT to take in the spring. I really feel like our lives are finally moving forward!

So yeah, that's me. Nothing really exciting, but hey! At least I'm writing something! :) I'll try to post some pictures after Christmas, (this time I'll remember to bring my camera so we can get some fun ones!)