Well, I decided it was time that I start to blog again. I decided to put family updates here. So we just had Valentines. Riley and I cut out hearts and wrote valentines to Michael. I also made Michael a Brisket for Valentines Day it was really really good!! Here is the recipe. It was a Paula Dean recipe that I tweaked



Make sure your brisket is completely thawed.
Then make a dry rub:

2 tablespoons chili powder
2 teaspoons salt
1 tablespoon garlic powder
1 tablespoon onion powder
1 tablespoon black pepper
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons dry mustard
1 crushed bay leaf

Rub it all over both sides of the brisket and throw it in the oven. Cook it at 350 for one hour. After that hour throw in a cup and a half of beef broth then add enough water to cover it 1/2 an inch. Cover the pan tight either with a lid or foil. Put it back in the oven at 275 for 9 or so more hours. All of the fat will combine and drench that meat in flavor.

Make some buttery potatoes and you will go to bed with an exploding tummy.

Lately we also picked up a new horse named Freckles Michael is really excited to have her.


We also moved the girls into new beds Riley is now sleeping in a toddler bed. She had a few really bad days then she pulled through and is mostly sleeping through the night. She always wants me to climb in with her. I have to admit it is nice to snuggle with her but after about 10 minutes I remember that I am 5'8" and I don't fit too comfortably in a toddler bed.  Ellie has been moved to Riley's crib. She sleeps awesome. I put up Riley's old mobile and Ellie loves to lay and watch it spin and play.   We also bought a new puppy that we named Twix, he is a ball of energy and spirit. We brought him home from Fallon when we went to be with our family after Rachel passed away.

Rachel's funeral was beautiful and terribly sad. She will be thought of often and dearly loved.  Rachel was so beautiful inside and out. During Christmas her and Riley shared a bedroom. Riley stuggled sleeping so Rachel woke up on Christmas Day and played with her at 4 am until Michael woke up and took over at 7 am.  She never complained once about watching Riley for me or cleaning up Riley's mess while we made sugar cookies.  I don't think ill ever look at sugar cookies again without thinking about Rachel.


I'll add pics soon!

June!

The summer is finally here!! The puppies are getting huge and biting cows, getting piled, and then getting in there again. I started working at Alpine Cleaning and Restoration as an Administrative Assistant. It is so great. It is so nice to be able to go to work and come home everyday feeling like I am really appreciated and that I am working hard. I love how structured work is yet at the same time I am given complete freedom. I think it is hilarious that today I helped the owner with his cell phone. I always seem to be doing that. Next, I get to figure out how to work my supervisors scanner. :0) computers, computers, and more computers. Michael also started a new job with the forest service. He comes home so tired and worn out but he loves being outside and he loves being able to spend time with horses.

This last weekend was crazy. We left Friday night at 8:00pm and at 9:00pm we were broken down in Layton, Utah. Luckily, Clay was around and we gave him a call. After trying to tow our truck to my parents house we realized that we didn't have any functioning brakes so we made it about half a block and ended up calling AAA. We ended dropping off our truck at Big O Tires at about 12:00am and Clay and Erin Dropped us off at my parents house at 1:00-ish. We then woke up and was at the airport at 5:00 am for our 6:00 am flight to be at Traci's wedding.

Traci had a wonderful beautiful wedding. She was married in the Reno Temple and had a fun reception at Annette and Clay's house. It was really cool that they were able to have a ring ceremony there and the family that couldn't be in the temple was able to have a closer with the wedding. They had the most amazing fruit and desserts. Michael was really happy with the reception especially when he was able to spend the last two hours roping in their arena. It was a fun birthday for him to be able to see his whole family and have fun on the horses.

A few weeks ago Jenni and David were able to come down from North Dakota and we had a BBQ at Layne's house. He set up a water slide on his hill and the kids and a few adults were able to play on it. Michael had tons of fun playing with Brynlee on the slide and taking each of our puppies down it. Unfortunately I was feeling rather sick so I declined the offer to go down the slide so Erin and I hung out together in the shade.

SPRING!!

It has been forever since I posted last mostly because I haven't had internet until lately. Michael and I have moved in front of Hoffman AI. So we now officially live in a barn. Which is fun, we have also acquired some new animals to play with and take care of. However, unfortunately we lost one as well. Dice was hit on the highway, her leg was broken severely along with a fractured hip. With a lot of prayer and heartache we had the vet put her down and she is now buried in a field behind Hoffmans. I think I've cried at least once a week since we put her down, so here is hoping our dogs are waiting for us in heaven. Who knows she might be able to listen to us there.


We welcomed two new additions into the family since Stella and Rocky. Michael has claimed Stella as his dog and I've claimed Rocky. (Rocky is the lighter dog in the bathtub and Stella is darker and also the one on the bed). They love drinking out of the bathtub and will jump in even while we are showering to lick up what they can. Rocky is the bigger cuddle bug he loves to get in bed with me and lay with me until I wake up.

I've also claimed a cat that lives in the barn outside our back door. I've decided to call her Princess Buttercup, she only response to Kitty. She had four kittens three weeks ago already two of the kittens have been claimed by girls. However Buttercup has moved the kittens into the wall of the barn. So I can't see them until they decide to come out and explore the world. This is one of the cutest kittens. She usually waits for me outside of the back door, as long as I don't come out with a dog she'll rub up against my legs until I pick her up.

Life has been good Michael is hired by the Forest Service to watch over Logan Canyon and also the Wellsvilles so he will get to ride around in the mountains again this summer. I'm working at Wholesale Flooring and growing my garden again. I already have some flowers, spinach, Onions, and peas planted. The weather hasn't been very nice so only the onions are up and flourishing.

I have also of course been doing some crafting. The above picture of dice I was making drapes for Cora's room. Dice loved to lay on any fabric I was working on. Here are a few of the things I made for Cora. I can't wait to finally meet her.

I have started my own etsy shop, however time has had me limited on putting up my projects so once it is more full I'll announce where to find it:)

Michael and I have also received the calling to teach CTR 5 in the ward we have 12 kids in our class.. yep! We are learning rather quickly how to stay entertaining to them. We have also learned that the coloring activity at the end of the lesson is very important and we will not omit that in the future.
About 4 minutes before this picture was taken all three dogs had only one bone. If you can't tell Lilly is Queen.

Disneyland and 50th Year Celebrations..

Michael and I decided that we really wanted to be in California this month and we made two trips! The first trip we dropped into Disneyland with Michael's family. It was awesome because only Annette knew that we were coming!! We jumped out at them when they were coming out of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride :0).

The trip went pretty smoothly except southwest lost our only bag that we checked. So we had to hang out at the airport for an extra hour and get a claim submitted that our bag was lost. Luckily it showed back up and they delivered it to our hotel room by the time we got there.

Later that night we went to one of the best restaurants McCormick and Schimdts!! It was amazing I had a steak, but Michael let me eat some of his stuffed samon, we also had a appetizer of some amazing ahi tuna.. yummy. I stuffed myself that night!

That morning we had a bit of a rough wake up. Annette, Michael's mom, was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. We woke up to the kids banging on our door yelling that Clay is calling 911. We ran out of the room and Annette was having abdominal pain and trouble breathing. It ended up that she needs to get her gall bladder removed, but all is well. Michael and I ended up taking the kids back to Disneyland for most of the day before we jumped in a cab and headed back to the airport. Our first connection went smoothly but when we hit Vegas airport at 9:00pm we found out our two hour layover was actually going to be a three hour layover. So Michael fell asleep by our gate and I stayed up and watched our things for a few hours. We finally pulled into Logan early in the morning and went to work the next day.

Our next trip we did we stopped in on Michael's grandparents 50th wedding anniversary. We flew out on Saturday morning and went to Uncle Mark's house. The started off that night were I got to know more of Michael's family and see how happy his grandparents are. Michael spanked me at pool that weekend too! I was excited to be able to see Tracy's engagement ring too!!On Sunday we took the time to go visit Huntington Beach we spend the afternoon there and I had a great discussion with Michael's Aunt Jennette. It was the first time Tracy's fiance Brian had ever seen the ocean.

After we hit up the beach we watched the Golden Globes back at the house and tried to sleep until 2am. Then we jumped in a car with Mike and headed back to Vegas to catch our 6am flight. We finally landed sleep deprived in Salt Lake at around 9am. We got back to Logan, I was planning on going into work for at least half of the day but the lack of sleep got to me and we ended up sleeping most of the day trying to recover from the lack of sleep.

Michael and I are going to try to stay on land for a while. We are done flying, at least for a little while. :0)

Christmas Is almost here!!

It has been forever since I posted on this blog so I thought I would spend a little bit of time and update everyone. Michael and I are doing really well. I'm working at Wholesale Flooring still and Michael has inherited a few new jobs for over the winter break. Doug at Hoffman AI has been wonderful and let him come back and work for him. On top of that he is still training a horse for a lady in Paradise and I found him a side job at a mattress store doing deliveries. I started taking a Zumba Class that I absolutely adore I have it every Tuesday and Thursday night with a wonderful lady named Arian. She is the cutest person I have ever met. I am sure that she will always be a close friend. It is actually her husband that owns the mattress store Michael delivers for. We were blessed enough to go down this last weekend and see Tangled with most of my side of the family!! It was amazing and I recommend it to all.

We are spending this year with my side of the family, I'm estactic that I will get to see Troy and Kadee they are flying in to Vegas in a few days then they will drive up to see us! I really miss them in the family parties.

We have a new refurbishing project we bought an old roll-top desk that we are going to sand-down and refinish. From my 3 history of furniture classes I would guess that it was built in the early 1920's. It is rather large for that time period but it has a lot of Victorian embellishments that make me feel like it was built right after the popularity of huge over the top-ness; the sheer size and the handles make me think it was just after that time period. It is a solid hard wood though. Looking at life I think I was really meant to sell furniture.. not flooring however. I know more about flooring than I ever thought I would. I'll post pictures of it before we strip it down.

Well, that is about it for now hope everyone is well!

We Decided it Was Time To Celebrate and Humiliate Ourselves..

Fall is coming and so are my allergies. I never had allergies until I moved to beautiful Logan, Utah. I my freshman year I remember freaking out because my eyes were nearly swollen shut when I woke up one morning. Alas, a constant supply of Claritin and I am pretty good for the day. Michael has his fall passion underway. He just finished his Hunting License and he is underway with killing all sorts of birds. He loves it, and can't wait to tell everyone and anyone about it. I like his stories he puts his heart into telling me about it. So far if my count is right he has seven Rough Grouse under his belt and twelve Doves.

Today Dice and Lilly decided that they wanted to help him out a bit and killed a chicken. They are growing up so fast. Dice has started to play with sheep and lilly is growing back all the hair I shaved off of her at the beginning of summer. I think in another three weeks she will be nice and fluffy again. Their training has been going really well, Lilly has down, down to an art. Dice on the other hand has a new habit of jumping up on the counter and stealing food.

Our humiliation was at the Demolition Derby
Michael and I first met at the Demolition Derby here in Logan, so we decided to celebrate and dress up for the occasion. So we attended Red-Neck style. We were laughed at and pointed at so many times. I can't wait to get more pictures from Justin and Krista.

Work for Michael has been really great lately the Lord has blessed us to have clients for him. I have become the only full-time sales person for Wholesale so life has been really hard lately. But we are blessed to have work.

School is Starting!!!

So it has been a crazy couple of months! We spent a good week at Lake Shasta with the Hendrix side of our family. I was so excited when Annette decided that we should go explore this cave; so we jumped on a bus and went through this cave with some crazy formations.We were lucky enough to have two Tag-Alongs with us Scott and Kelsie!

Michael and I spent a lot of time ridding in the canyon this summer. We were lucky enough to have my mom come up and ride with us for one day and she took some really cute pictures :). We are so happy that we could spend some time with her!
For those of you thinking that we are favoring Lilly, Dice had just been Spayed the day before we went ridding so she was in a tender condition.. Alas, Lilly did awesome! She swam for the first time across a little creek that we crossed over and kept us together during the ride. I was ridding in the back and she seemed to be paranoid that I would get lost so she would run all the way to the front to see Michael then run back to me to make sure I was coming. My mom did awesome on the ride! She was hit in the head once by a branch but she stayed on like a trooper.Our next bragging right has to be our garden!! we have had such a great first experience with gardening. This is what we picked one night for dinner :) Everything we ate that night was from our garden, except the roast. We had Krista and Justin over for dinner we were so excited to see them back from South Korea!

Hey Everyone!!

Update about us. I am still working at Wholesale Flooring, I just finished a quick rendering of a new sign that will be going up in north logan for Carpets of America. They are renovating their large sign so I used my good friend photoshop and made it happen.


Michael just started cowboying again, so he is spending the week camping up at the Hardware Ranch. Unfortunately, it has rain quite fervently everyday, so he is getting drenched. He has our horse Tuition up there with him, along with three other horses that he is working with for people.



I wanted everyone to get to see Lilly-Bell!! She is adorable and kinda crazy at the same time. She has learned how to take down Dice, even though she is less than half Dice's size! They are getting really good at running as a team lately. I take them down to a park by my house and let them chase me around. Sometime I'll have some one go with me so they can take pictures but dice will take one side of me and Lilly will take the other. They are learning so fast!

Took my Dad a little bit but he warmed right up to Dice, with Lilly it only took seconds. Might not have helped that Dice ran up his lap and licked him across his face...




This is Lilly and Dice's corner it is in our dinning area. there is a shelf in there with all their yummy snacks, brushes, and leashes. Dice's color is bright pink, and Lilly's is lavender.

Hey I just wanted everyone to get an update on Dice!! She is growing super fast! She looks kinda mean in the picture on the right. We've gotten sit and lay down.. now if we could just get her to respond correctly to her vibrating collar.

Almost at the Ending!!

Next week is dead week and then we are at the end of another semester! Michael and I have had so much change in the past two months.. it is enough to make your head spin. We first moved out of our little hole in the wall and moved into a two bedroom apartment. Then, I quit my job at the computer labs and moved on to a job working for Jason Ward. He has two business in town but most of my time is spent at Wholesale Flooring. It is going fabulously! I am trying to learn the ropes as quickly as I can; I am taking the place of a very prego girl (Cheri) who could pop at anytime, so I hope I can fill her shoes!!! The girls I work with are a blast. They work amazingly hard and surprisingly are still way chill. We laugh and joke and talk about kids, dogs, and flooring.

I finally feel like my house is getting to the cute stage! I have drapes up in the kitchen and in our bedroom, we have a new dining room table, and Michael is happy because I have bridles and cowboy hats hung up in our living room :)

The next biggest step we took was our new addition to the family! Our blue-eyed white puppy her name is Dice. Michael and I joke that she is our first child. She is an Australian Shepherd and Heeler cross. However to kind of a sad note we learned that she is deaf, adorable, and deaf. So to all those who someday try to call her.. you might want to make sure she is facing you and you gesture a lot :) She is super cow-y though, she has already turned her first bull at 9 weeks old and has herded my niece Sabrina and nephew Trevor multiple times. This weekend we started to build her, her dog house! It is huge my four year old niece could stand up inside of it! Luckily not all that space is going to go to waste due to that Dice is going to get an Australian Shepherd sister in May from Michael's sister.

Below are a few pictures from Spring Break that we spent in Fallon and at the Northstar Resort :)Above is a picture of Mya, Carrara, and Junior chillin in the sun on the edge of the horse pasture.

Michael is posing in front of our sign above our bed at the Northstar Resort :)

This is Roo! She is the mommy to our soon to be newest puppy.. she is a mini and the dad is a full sized aussie. Pictures of the new puppy will come as soon as we pick her out.

Valentines Time

Well, Time has come and gone. We are approaching Valentines Day!! Michael and I went out with our friends Scott and Jessica Crozier to see "When in Rome" it was a lot better than I had anticipated! Michael was fighting to say awake for the last 10 mins of the movie but he made it! We already exchanged presents for V-day. I gave Michael a Royal Blue wild rag, it is 44 inches. He gave me an "I love you" Bear and a bag of Dove chocolates.

Lately every Friday night we have gone roping at the arena in Treemonton. Michael has been loving it I've gone three times so far and most nights are really fun. I get to ride Tuition a three year old quarter horse, me and him watch Michael ride around on Cowabunga. Lately I have been bringing our camera and recording him roping so he can work on his skills and also for the purpose of selling Cowabunga. I love ridding Tuition and every day Michael tells me he is going to be a nice horse. Tuition is about to turn 3 in a few months, so he just a colt.


Michael has also been on three other colts in the past two months; two, two-year old palominos, and one quarter horse. One of the Palos caught him in a pickle and bucked him off, he was stepped on twice but no major harm was done and all is well. That horse might be sold into a bucking string or at least given a few years to cool down.

Below is a picture of Michael getting ready in the shoot.

Round 2

The wedding reception in Fallon was a blast. I was able to give Annette a picture I painted for her birthday and gave Michael's youngest brother Calob a pair of USU workout shorts.

We rode horses in the morning and I got a horribly red sunburn that went excellently with my dress :). But it was really fun to ride a good horse. I rode Tazer and Michael rode Chrome. It is always fun watching his family get out and rope together they did breakaway roping. It was my little job to make sure that the cows get back in the gate after they are roped. I also got to learn how to turn properly on a horse and practice a bunch.

Later that day my side of the family showed up and ate lunch with Michael's side. It turned out really well it all went pretty smooth and happily. One of my favorite parts of the day was went My mom Eileen came in and helped me with my hair for the day with my Grandma Johnson. Grandma called my mom a fuss budget. It was hilarious and fun to have both of them primping me and talking. I wished there were more moments like that one.

I had the chance to finally meet a lot of the family that I had been told so much about. Annette made the evening beautiful. Hopefully I will be able to get internet at home so i can upload pictures from the evening.

The First Blog

Michael and I are doing wonderfully. We moved into our new apartment and spent what seems like forever setting everything up. Actually it isn't all the way done yet. Annette, Michael's mom, said that we could take a piece of furniture from them that they were getting rid of. It will be really nice to have another piece of furniture in our apartment. We only have three matching chairs in our dining room so we call the other one "the throne". It is a high backed wooden chair and the other three are upholstered metal chairs.

The two of us have a little bit of conflicting schedules we see one another at night and first thing in the morning occasionally we bump into one another on campus, or end up getting out of class at the same time. However, they are usually interrupted by one of us going to work or to another class.

The honeymoon was a blast with just enough adventure! Unfortunately the wife forgot to check the battery in the camera and we have no pictures from it. But we spent four days in the Wind River Range in Wyoming. It was beautiful, green, and covered with Lakes and waterfalls. We borrowed three horses that Michael had been riding Lady, Paint Horse, and Dodger. They would come into camp while we tried to sleep at night with bells around their necks. All night I had jingle bells stuck in my head. We had one wake up call when a rock that we tied to a horse's foot came flying at our tent, right were our heads were. luckily it only put a 3 inch slit in our tent and no other damage was done. We were also lucky to have Annette give me a wonderful 2 person bedroll for a shower gift. I love it, it kept us nice and warm all night.

Michael had fun fishing and I had fun exploring around. We ate one 20" fish that Michael caught I have to admit it was pretty good with tons of seasoning salt and lemon pepper. We got caught in a little thunder and lighting storm, but not much rain came down the weather was pretty much perfect!

Well, that is all for now!