Where's the SNOW?

Don't get me wrong. I am not winter's biggest fan. I was talking to Carl the other day and I told him it feels weird that it's not snowing yet. By snowing, I meant snow-covered sidewalks and very very cold wind. Since we've moved to Utah, I've gotten used to the season's changing. In fact, that's how I realize that time is passing. This year it feels like the snow is LATE. I am not asking for a lot of it, i guess i just want it be the normal kind of winter.

It sort of snowed early in October, but it never touched ground around Provo. The mountains are now snow-capped, and some places in the valley has gotten their fair share of snow.

The view from our porch. This was on a Sunday morning (I think second Sunday
of November) - it snowed a lot over night. All the snow melted though before lunch time.

I'm sort of hoping for more snow. Not that I'm falling in love with it - I hate walking on slippery and icy pavements. It just seems off to me that its not like last year yet! Plus, I'm excited for Carl to get on the snowboard again. He hates the cold winter, but when he's up on the mountains playing, he sort of forgets the frozen state of things!

We're declaring Christmas EARLY!

During the Holidays, nothings screams more OFFICIAL than having a CHRISTMAS TREE!

In Filipino standards, I put up our tree late. Our first Christmas as a married couple, we put up our tree in September and everybody else thought we were weird, way over excited. Of course in America, I have to remember that the Holiday season sort of kicks off in October with Halloween, but then again there's still Thanksgiving in November and so Christmas trees usually don't get put up until then. So I tried to balance the Filipino tradition and the American holiday schedule. We decided to wait patiently for Halloween to be over, and then we put up the tree. In the future, we might even have to do that after Thanksgiving because Carl wants a real tree and usually real trees don't go on sale until after Thanksgiving.

During our first year, we decided we'll have a different color theme for our tree and then accumulate tree ornaments from there. But with moves almost every year, it was difficult to keep all of our stuff. We have not moved in the last two years, and so we were able to keep our Christmas ornaments from last year - and so we just bought another set of balls to add to our tree. I think this is going to be the plan for the next couple of years. Also, this year, we decided to start our ornament collection. We've been wanting to do this since the first year but never gotten around it. We bought three special ornaments this year, all them have a special meaning to our family. 

This is our family ornament for this year - Forever Family: Tied together with Love.

Carl's ornament is this train set. He could watch it go around the tree for hours!

This is my ornament. Carl bought it so we will always remember
the first time I taught college.

...and then it was October

As opposed to September, October felt like it was passing by too fast. Particularly for a student like me, October meant MIDTERMS - which I figured really meant "GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER OR ELSE". The overwhelming feeling of the need to get things done has never been so strong until I was both a student and a teacher. In a lot of ways, I was in my students' shoes and I know how terrible it feels to have half of the semester go by and you still do not have a clear picture of how things are going to turn out. So anyway, I felt like October was chasing me day in and day out.

Carl is one amazing fan. He surprises me sometimes. If you know Carl, you already know how easy it is for him to fall asleep. But what you probably didn't know is that Carl can not sleep soundly if he is in bed by himself. So when I needed to pull a couple of all-nighters to finally wrap up my first working draft for my thesis, it really meant a lot to me when he didn't even bother to convince me to sleep already. He also made sure that on those nights, I have my dose of caffeine in the form of a glass of Coke Zero. If you knew how I worked around my writing projects, you probably already know that I need my coke to stay up. Back in college, a 2-liter bottle would keep me up till 2 or 3 in the morning. That's how much I needed! But now, only a glass is enough to keep me writing until 10am the following morning. I guess I am all set for the long sleepless nights of parenthood hahahah!

Anyway, aside from the craziness of school and work, a couple of nice things happened in October... and we were able to spend some time with the most amazing friends that we have.

GENERAL CONFERENCE

1st weekend of October was General Conference. Like last year, Liz and Mhar and Aprilon visited us from California and Washington. A good friend from BYUH who now works in Thailand, Ernest, was with them this year. Jackie, from Liz and Mhar's SA ward was with them too. Kei and her husband Jerryl visited us too, all the way from Hawai'i. Zingeber was also visiting for General Conference with his whole family - they drove to Utah all the way from Vancouver! 

On Saturday, we met with most of our BYUH friends and had dinner and talked stories. To burn all the calories, we played Kinect Dance Central - and Zing would not bat an eye if that meant victory! Meeting and catching up with friends was amazing. It felt like nothing changed, just that now we didn't live so close to each other, or for some of us - with each other. Liz and I used to live in the same apartment. Carl and Zing were mission companions. Mhar and Ernest were almost housemates. Kei used to always hang out at our apartment in TVA. Friends make life interesting, to say the least.

Just like old times - except now, Kei is married :)

We love having people over!

Waiting in line, hoping for tickets to get in to the
Sunday Morning Session of General Conference

We didn't have tickets toall of the sessions and only some of us had tickets for a couple of sessions. We tried to wait in line for tickets, but we weren't very lucky. On Sunday morning, we listened to General Conference at the Tabernacle, and then at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building in the afternoon. It was an edifying day, and we felt inspired and rejuvenated. General conference is spiritual therapy at its best.

FALL

When we moved to Utah, Fall was no longer just a semester. It was, in every color of the word - a BEAUTIFUL season. The colors are wonderful, I wish I had more pictures. I know, I am lame. 

Disclaimer: i did not take this photo - but this is
exactly how it looks like around these parts :)

Carl and I were having this conversation one time, and I said something like how my body has now been accustomed to the seasons - like I was excited for the changing of seasons and how that makes me feel that time is passing. The colors of fall are gorgeous. It has its own beauty, different from that of Spring when flowers are in bloom (and Spring is still my favorite). When the leaves start to fall on the ground, I get excited about many things, one of those being the holidays... which, here in the States, sort of kicks off with the costumes and sugar overdrive of Halloween!

HALLOWEEN

Growing up in the Philippines, Halloween was not really about costumes and candy corns and pumpkins. I kind of felt bad that I wasn't as enthusiastic as Carl about being in costumes. This year, we decided to dress up as rival NBA teams Celtics and Lakers (of course I was wearing my golden yellow Kobe shirt). 

On a higher note though, we carved our first pumpkin, EVER!

BEFORE

AFTER

Wake me up when September ends...

September felt like it would never end

The first two weeks, Carl was staying with me at the lab from 7pm til around 10. When he comes home from work, he'd pick me up from school and we'll have dinner (lucky if I'd already prepared dinner ahead of time, but usually I still had to cook). We figured we were both productive if we weren't tempted to watch TV or Netflix (or go to bed after dinner - LOL) and if we knew we only had limited resources (i.e., we set a time frame for ourselves to get our stuff done for the day). It worked out for a while, but then we would come home really exhausted after a very long day and it became a struggle to spend quality family time during weekdays. We also started missing the gym, which was not a good idea. Carl was playing frisbee twice a week with people from work during thier lunch break and he would also use their on-site gym facilities so he wasn't missing a lot. But me, my only dose of exercise was walking to school everyday. Then I sit on my chair and work on my data set, run analyses, create lectures, teach class, attend class. If only mental exercise can burn as much calories as running on the treadmill or 45 minutes of Zumba, I'd be in perfect shape.

Anyway, we reworked our routine and decided we'll make it a point to go to the gym at least once a week, work over time on campus three times a week instead of everyday, and made sure that 3 nights worth of dinners would be pre-made/frozen so cooking wouldn't take up much of my time. It was a little bit better, but I still did not meet some of my self-imposed deadlines - and one of those being a WORKING DRAFT of my THESIS PROSPECTUS. I need to defend it during the fall semester if I wanted to graduate in April, and that's the goal...and by the way things turned out by the end of September, I might be in slight trouble...

Carl works non-stop, thanks to his data service enabled phone which decreases the stress of not being able to respond to job requests and project needs right away. Some of the things that Carl puts his hands into are time sensitive, and depending on who sends him the request - the response time could be a matter of thirty short minutes. Making sure that mormon.org works, aside from other things, occupies a relatively large portion of Carl's day (and night, sometimes). The stresses of work gets to him sometimes, and sometimes I feel like I don't understand - the same way that the stresses of work and school bring out the worst in me, and I feel like he doesn't understand why I have to run my data over and over again. One time, we watched this video of Paora Winitana from whom we learned a very valuable lesson.

We realized how important it is to come home after a long day and still give your 100% percent to your family. Our loved ones do not deserve left overs - they deserve the WHOLE of us. It is our responsibility to put them on the top of our list, to prioritize them. This applies to a lot of things in our family life. I always tell my students that we are free agents, and by virtue of agency we can choose to make things work or we can give up because life is just darn hard. We can choose to become a SPOUSE first, and everything else can come after that.

So every waking day, even when what's ahead is dreadful and exhausting -  we are assured that at the end of it all, we are not alone in the journey. And that makes it all better...

I can just write a summary... but i will not

Without my tweets here and there and our Facebook status updates, you would probably think that Carl and I have drowned under our respective piles of things to do... Like I said on my last post (which was, unfortunately, almost FOUR MONTHS AGO), we would be under the radar for a while...with school and work and other stuff, it was indeed a very busy last quarter of the year...

But with fall semester winding down now (though I have yet to defend my prospectus - HOPEFULLY before the last day of finals) and the reorganization over at Carl's department getting more settled as the year comes to a close -  AND THE THANKSGIVING BREAK that we are always grateful for... I finally found the time to update the family blog... 

I have thought of just writing a summary of the last four months in one post... but I realized there is so much to share and I do not want to drag anyone into a novela... so please bear with me, the next couple of posts will cover each month that we've missed sharing...

so - let the stories begin!