Catching Helicopter Seeds

Lion vs. Lamb

Whoever came up with the March phrase "in like a lion, out like a lamb" had one thing right. The lion and the lamb both show their faces in March. As for when in the month they come, there is no consistency. Yesterday morning we woke up to a few inches of snow. It inspired me to take pictures of it's beauty and it's springtime contradictions. After looking at the pictures I wonder if the snow is supposed to be the lion or the lamb...

Hoo Hung Woo?

Last Saturday we threw a Chinese murder mystery party. It was a lot of fun to see friends and hang out and eat Chinese food, but I was disappointed with the plot of the game. We've done these parties before, but this one was far too complicated to keep track of. Regardless, it was a fun night. It turned out Scott was the guilty one! Do you think he looks the part?

Tech-regression

Two weeks ago, while at the library, Britta mentioned a problem with our display on the laptop. All the colors would go bad, the graphics would pixelate and we got an error message. It worked fine for a while after we restarted it . . .
But . . .
Not anymore! We are computer-less now, more than ever. (If you count not having internet as being computer-less, it practically is nowadays).
The funny thing is, the day we got the error message, I wondered if we had backed up our files. Now our computer won't even turn on.
Should we fix it? I think we need to get a quote . . .

Finally...

After much grief and headache, I finally have a somewhat respectable website for advertising myself. It's BrittaMarie.com. Much thanks to Brett for hosting me and helping me work out a lot of glitches. Also, I have to thank Scott for dealing with my freak-outs when the digital and computer worlds seemed pitted against me.

p.s. The galleries don't work in Mozilla Firefox.

We made it!!!

As of today, I have been accepted to the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine. I can't tell you what a relief it is to finally have an acceptance. I am still waiting to hear back from UNR and a final decision from Touro in Las Vegas, but with this acceptance in hand, at least we have a deadline in front of us as far as transitioning into our next phase of our lives and career. Whew! What a long and anxious wait it has been.

Just a few thoughts about the school . . .
from the website, "KCOM was the first institution of osteopathic education in the world and continues to provide leadership for comprehensive medical education, research, and healthcare. Consistent with the college's mission, KCOM is consistently ranked in U.S. News & World Report as one of the best medical schools in the country for rural and family medicine training."

My impressions: This easily had the best facilities of all the schools I interviewed with and I had the best experience here. In comparision, though UNR is an MD school, the class size there was about half as big as KCOM and the interview process seemed cold and detached to me. I do still hope to be accepted there, as well, to broaden our options, but we'll see.

Tuoro University in Vegas had the worst facilities, but perhaps the most prolific and charismatic staff. I really enjoyed my time there, though I felt as though I was in a warehouse at first.

I'll keep you all up to date as to any other news in this regard.
I know many of you prayed in our behalf and we are both truly grateful. About two and a half weeks ago, when everything was still unknown, I had a great feeling of comfort and peace regarding this decision from the Spirit, which was greatly needed. I am grateful, indeed. We love you all!

Speak Impediment

I have never been one who is good at conversations. In fact, conversing on the phone is one of my all time greatest fears. I credit some of this fear to a mix-up in the wiring of my brain in the vocabulary retrievement department. Sometimes the perfect word to use in a conversation just won't come. I know it exists in my head, and it teases me by sending words that are close, but not really.

Here are some examples. I was cleaning up my house and the next thing to do was vacuum the floors. I told Scott, "I'll just be in the other room; I have to rake the carpet." Just today as we were driving down the street, the sun was glaring off the snow and the wet roads. It was bright, so I pointed to the sunglasses and said, "You can put on those headlights if you want to."

I think this vocabulary retrievement disability was inherited by my mom. One of the examples I remember from her: She was cooking chili and it needed to be stirred to keep from burning, but her hands were busy. She turned to my sister and said, "Amber, can you rub the chili?"

Cousins!

My sister from New York and my sister from Vernal came over yesterday for lunch with their kids. They look so sweet and calm in this picture, but it was wild! I don't think our apartment has ever been so alive! It was lots of fun, though, especially spending time with my sisters. We spent the afternoon at the Bean museum.
When Bryson, 3, saw this amazing display of butterflies on the wall below, he ran up to the glass and pointed to the one little photograph of a butterfly in the bottom right corner and got really excited. "Look, Bitta, look, a butterfie!" I zoomed in the picture so you could see the one butterfly he saw... It was pretty amusing.

Yummm

Scott's Cookies

Valentine Boxes

Isabah (her legal name is Alisia) came over last night to decorate her valentine box for school. Decorating those boxes was one of the highlights of my elementary school years! We liked it so much in our family we used to decorate two boxes, one for home and one for school. Then we would make our own valentines for each sibling.

The trump of all boxes was in fifth grade, my last year making a valentine box. My brother helped me install a few christmas lights that would flicker on every time someone gave me a valentine. It was pretty cool.


Ahh... makes me want to decorate one myself.

Double Dribble! (Deja Vu?)

Two games in one week! Scott's in heaven! I scored some free tickets to the BYU basketball game against UNLV today and it was awesome! I'm such a bigger fan of college sports than of pro. There's just so much more electricity in the air, the fans are more motivated and loyal. It's contagious! Scott and I both wore our "cougar blue" and we beat the #25 ranked UNLV team. No, we whooped them! For over half the game BYU was up by at least 20 points. UNLV didn't have the lead once. Ironically, our seats were at approximately the same angle and height as they were at the Jazz game.

Go Jazz!

We had some friends who hooked us up with discount Jazz tickets on Wednesday night. They played against the Spurs, who have the third best record in the NBA, and won! It was a fun, high energy game. It was also my very first pro basketball game. Pretty cool, eh?

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.