Well...I have been stuck in Salt Lake (somewhat against my will), for some time now and although I was skeptical at first, there are actually a lot of things I have grown to love. I love that I have 4 sisters within an hours drive. I love that you can stand on one hill and see three temples. I love that I have 3 of my very favorite roommates from college within 15 minutes of my house. I love that there is a black horse statue down the road whose butt I slap every time I run past in the morning (or night considering I sometimes run at 11 when I get off work...bad idea, I know). I love that there are free concerts in the park every Thursday (how they get bands like modest mouse to come play for thousands of crazy hippies in Utah, we will never know).
But-one of the things I love the most, are the mountains. I cannot get enough of the hiking and have been on several over the course of the summer. Granted, these are completely amateur hikes and if I had to do a strenuous one I would probably die...but they are beautiful regardless. This weekend, Shelly and I took Gavin on a little birthday outing to Timpanogos Caves and although his goal was to ruin every single picture he was in with me, and he is much to cool to admit it, I think he had a blast. If not at least he enjoyed the huge vat of cotton candy ice cream with butterfinger (sick) that we got him afterwards...
Off to a great start...
Okay, he did smile in this one...but only because if was with Shelly.
Charming.
He may ruin my pictures, but not without consequences
I don't know what's going on in this one...oh wait...he was probably falling asleep because he had heard enough about stalagmites and stalagtites....zzzzz I though it was cool :)
I don't know if he's crying because I'm forcing him to take another picture, or because we made him wear Shelly's baby blue sweater.
Finally. Got him to smile only because we were stealing the sing-in book.
Peeking out of what Gavin called the "Alice in Wonderland Tree"
All pooped out...until of course he woke up to insist we get ice cream.
It's been almost 4 months since I graduated from nursing school and although I have filled out a gazillion (I was a nursing major, not a math major) applications, the only job I have landed is working as a government official. I know, it sounds pretty cool, but you have no idea. It's AMAZING. There are a few things I especially love about working for the census-I mean, government.
1. Oddly enough, the strangest people you talk to are NOT the maniacs on the phone, but your co-workers. Today a short girl on break (whom I have never met before), informed me that girls who are 5' tall are smarter than those who are 5' 8" (thank heavens I'm only 5' 7" and 1/2-fooled her). She then proceeded to tell me that if she hadn't failed out of biology, English, and Shakespeare (whom she loathes), she would have had a 3.0 gpa in high school. I had no idea what to say to that, so I said, "hm..." and walked away.
2. During my first week of work, I found 2 long lost cousins. Now this IS Utah, so it's not incredibly surprising, but of the hundreds of people who work in the building I ended up sitting right by my mom's first cousin, Curtis, and a man named Mark, who happens to share a last name and a great, great, grandpa with me, on my dad's side...weird.
3. It's nearing the end of the project and we are now recycling calls where the respondents have already refused to take the survey. And because there's nothing we census interviewers love more than furious people whom we've already succeeded in ticking off-we made a game out of it. It's called Census Refusal Bingo (invented so brilliantly by my aforementioned cousin, Mark).
4. My cell phone has not been shredded-yet. It's a rule working with Title 13 secure information that cell phones are not permitted in the building. This rule is VERY heavily enforced and if you are caught with the dreaded cell phone, you will be fired and your cell phone "shredded" on the spot. Now, I don't know how exactly they manage to shred cell phones but I picture it being somewhat like a heavy duty paper shredder with a similar limit like "no more than 10 cell phones at a time". (I don't know how many times working in my dad's office I got paper jammed in that thing by going way over the limit...)
5. Lastly, I am serving my country. Contrary to popular belief, I do NOT work for Obama (as assumed by the hostile respondents who ask if they can speak to Obama as if he were upstairs...oh, and by Max). I feel like this is just my little way of paying back a country which has been so good to me. Ha. Okay, maybe it's not so glamorous, but it was worth a shot.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
A wise friend once said, "first entries in anything are always awkward." So...awkward or not, here goes...
I try about 15 times a year to start a journal. If I'm lucky, it will last a week. That same wise friend (previously mentioned) started a blog and insisted I start one as well so we would at least have each other to follow it. Since I am not one to pass up perfectly sane advice, I agreed. What better way to document my life than with an online scrapbook? Ergo, my lovely, little, life.
