Little Warrior

This is Isabah. Her name is Navajo for "little warrior". She is my little six-year-old friend and has posed for me for some of my illustrations. She's got great facial expressions and is a very cute girl. I'm friends with her mom.

She and her mom and I had a sleepover last night because Scott is in Missouri interviewing for med school. We had fun. Cross your fingers for Scott!

Dumb Computers

I'm with Sarah on this one. Changing these blogs is a pain. Lately I've been trying to teach myself HTML and XHTML to see if I can create webpages and change the format of this blog. I've had some success understanding how my blog is put together, and even figuring out how to make some changes. This started when I was still signed up under the old blogger. But, it seems that anything in computerland labeled as "old" means "soon to be eliminated". So yesterday I decided to change to the new blogger.

I think by new they mean "as complicated as possible so no one can change our genius creations". So much for my knowledge of XHTML. Now they're using xml something-or-other. And what are widgets!? I'm lost, again.

What's a normal kitchen?

In the past two months I've cooked in five kitchens. It can be so disorienting to cook in someone else's kitchen! I don't know where anything is and there's never all the same seasonings and ingredients I'm used to. In a couple of the situations there were foreign ingredients I didn't even know existed. It's been interesting to see all the possible food options out there and how each family has such a different approach to eating and cooking. "Normal food" can have very broad interpretations.

Right now Scott and I are staying with Scott's cousins, the Beans, while their parents are in Malaysia. One thing I'm grateful for while we're here is a dishwasher. I love our apartment and little kitchen, but I do miss a dishwasher.

The secret artistic life of Scott

By now, most of you have learned of Scott's secret passion for poetry (well, not so secret anymore). Another passion of his which I didn't know about until two years after we were married is his passion for photography, specifially close up images of nature. We occasionally go for walks in the spring and summer and Scott always brings the camera to take pictures. Some of these pictures have been taken on vacations, but most of them have been in or around our house and neighbor's gardens. He's rather good, don't you think?

This picture of the temple reflection was taken during Brett and Sarah's wedding in Portland. It's one of Scott's favorite.

un-Idol-ized

Do any of you watch American Idol? I've been a fan for a few years, but I was disappointed with the first couple episodes. First of all, they seem to be dragging on the bad auditions more than in past years. Now you not only see the bad song, but the discust in the judges faces and body language, the awkward pleas by the clueless bad singer to sing another song, the patronizing insults from the judges, the shuffling exits where the singer always tries to escape out the locked door, the judges humorlessly calling out "other door". Not only that, but they let the bad singers sing their ear splitting song much longer than they need to to know that the singer is bad. It's tedious, almost unwatchable. It's way too contrived. I just want them to skip to the top twenty. That's when the show starts to get good, in my opinion.

Maybe I'm just a little personally offended, too, because Simon said that my dear, beautiful town of Minneapolis has no talent!

Happy Birthday to Amy

We celebrated Amy's (Scott's sister) birthday on Sunday. The festivities included dinner, ice cream cake, sparkling apple cider, a pinata, and we ended the night with a game of apples to apples (which, appropriately, Amy won). A fun time was had by all, I hope. I had fun, anyway. Here are some highlights.

Puppy Update

Our landlords posted a classified ad in the newspaper on January 1st for "Free Puppies". By January 3rd they were all gone. I already miss my daily dose of puppy. Luckily on January 1st, before any of them were taken, we snuck one up to our apartment and played with her for a few hours. We wore her out, as you can see. She zonked out on our carpet. Isn't she cute?

BYU-Class of '06

Look out America,
Look out you, too
A new Cougar product
has come burstin thru.

Semesters of physics and
labs and organic chem
physiolgy, psychology,
personality, biochem . . .

philosophy, genetics,
embryology, . . . (ahem)
(couldn't put humpty
together again?)

After a major undecided
and three little changes
A bachelor's of science
held in my phalanges

Now that's its over
whatever is next
it'll still be a while
before collecting big checks

Here's for sitting and waiting
and wishing for the best,
to see if medschools
are at all impressed.