Our Catch-Up Post

Today we both mourn the loss of our beloved Prophet, President Hinckley, but we also rejoice in his reunion in heaven with his wife.

We have been really bad at posting this month so this post is an attempt to catch up on what we have missed.

Between Christmas and New Years we drove down to New York and spent three days in the city. It was a blast. We walked so much our feet ached, but it was worth it for all the things we did and saw. Below are some pictures of our trip. I do have to mention that we ate the best pulled pork sandwiches ever at a BBQ restaurant near Times Square. It was so good, the meat was so flavorful, and the BBQ sauce was heavenly. That meal alone made the trip worth it.

January has been crazy. The weather cannot make up its mind, one week the temperatures were in the 60s and all the snow melted then the next week we got 12 inches dumped on us in 12 hours and temperatures dropped to daytime highs in the low teens.

Suzy has been busy with work, and I have been busy with my internship, a consulting project with some classmates and applying for summer internships. I think that pretty much sums up our month of January. School starts again for me tomorrow, I look forward to it with trepidation as a 19 credit semester awaits me. Needless to say I will be busy.

So here are highlights of our NYC trip.

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Early Morning Wake-Up

So at about 5 this morning our sleep was abruptly ended by the loud piercing wail of smoke detectors in the apartments below us and to the side of us. Feeling quite disoriented and not realizing what was going on we laid in bed annoyed for several minutes. Finally, I decided to get up and see what was going on. I looked out the window and saw several of our neighbors just standing around outside the door to our building. I opened the front door and could smell a foul smoke-like odor, but saw no smoke or anything. Since there was no smoke and the people outside did not seem particularly worried, we decided to go back to bed, the piercing wails of the smoke detectors had mostly abated.

A few minutes later, more shrieking alarms and I heard a truck pulling up out front. I looked out the window and a fireman fully decked out was jumping out of his pickup and running into the building. This got me a little more worried. Then I looked up and a fire-truck and ambulance were pulling into the parking lot. I decided it was time to put on some clothes and go find out what the deal was.



Getting dressed I wandered down the stairs and ran into our neighbor and asked what was up. She told me that there was a fire or something in the boiler room and that several of the apartments are full of smoke. I told Suzy, and we were like, "great no heat for a while" (good thing it is unseasonably warm around here lately). I determined that there was no threat so we went back up and I was so tired I just got into bed in my jeans.

Then there was a knock at the door and upon opening we found two firemen they explained that there were issues with the boiler and they wanted to make sure our apartment had safe CO levels. Fortunately it did, so they said just open the windows and turn on a fan and air the place out. They left and we climbed back into bed hoping to get a little more sleep before our day had to start. Ten minutes later another knock, I opened the door and two other firemen proceeded to tell us the same thing.



Finally, they got the building aired out and the boiler to stop producing the foul smoke, and they left and we were able to cram a little more sleep in before we had to get up.

Suzy and I had a great Christmas and we promise to post about it sometime soon, so keep checking back and we will post our pictures and stories from our post-Christmas trip to NYC.

New Pictures!

During our two huge snow storms I decided that it was a great time to go out and take pictures. So here are a few that I took during the last week.



This is one of the homes at Historic Deerfield where I have been working for the past three weeks. I am doing a 6-week internship with the marketing department. So far I am learning a lot and am enjoying my time there. Deerfield is a cool place and there is tons of old Colonial American history, if you want to know more check out the website at http://www.historic-deerfield.org.



This is the building where the offices are at Historic Deerfield.



I wanted to measure how deep the snow was after 2 1/2 hours of snowing last Thursday, so this is how much had fallen, about 4 inches. It was coming down quickly!



This is the front door of our apartment complex, and the 12 inches deep snow you have to plow through to get to the front door.



This is one of the cars in our parking lot after the two storms.

I will post more pictures soon, for some reason the other pictures are not loading.

Snow Day!

Today church was canceled because the roads were too icy and snowy to travel on. We were just recovering from a storm on Thursday where we got almost a foot of snow. Today we got another 5 or 6 inches. It also "snowed" freezing rain which I'm sure isn't helping the roads. Snow out here seems a lot different from Utah. It’s much icier and seems to coat the car with a layer of ice before the powder stuff. Also, the first time it snowed, we noticed that it initially stuck to the roads and not the grass. That seems very bizarre to me. I don't have any pictures, so maybe I'll get Casey to post some later. Casey comments that the snow is up to his knees behind our apartment. Remind me why we moved here?

Gone With the Wind

With all the free time I've been having, I've gotten a chance to read a lot of good books. I just finished Gone With the Wind and although it was a big time investment, it was well worth it. It comes in at over 1000 pages, but is an amazing novel that gives you an interesting historical perspective with characters and themes that are timeless. I just rented the movie at the library, so now I have another 4 hour commitment to see it! If anybody needs a good book recommendation and you have some spare time, or your patient enough to read it slowly over time, I highly suggest trying Gone With the Wind.