Settling in...

Patrick and I are trying to get used to our new routine. It basically consists of us not seeing each other very much compared to what we're used to. Patrick's keeping really busy with school and looking for an internship for the summer. So our goal during the week is to spend two hours together each day including dinnertime. Most of the time we're able to. When we have a little more time on the weekend after Patrick's done with homework for the day we try to get out of the apartment. So here are some things that we've done recently:

 

 -Ate at one of Patrick's favorite places. He's been talking about it for a while so it was nice to finally eat the best sandwich ever. We also bought little chocolates from the store to try. When we left the shop there happened to be a farmers market across the street that we wondered around in.

- We hiked the "Y"! We split a breakfast burrito before we went on Labor Day.  Tons of people were out hiking since it was the holiday. Some people hiked in their normal clothes and looked like they were just walking. We were in our athletic gear and I has red and sweating the whole time. It was fun and we hope to hike the "Y" a few more times before winter comes.

-Went to the nickel arcade. Patrick and I had a lot of fun playing the games. My favorite involved throwing balls trying to hit little kids in a winter paintball type scene. Patrick liked the deal or no deal game. After we had our fill of games we traded in all of our tickets for candy!

-I got a nursing job!  I was and am still so excited to be working as a nurse. This week was busy and I got in some overtime hours, quite a few overtime hours. I started orientation on the floor Sunday. I quickly learned that a perk to living in Utah is that some YM come to visit and bring the sacrament each Sunday!

-I took Patrick on a date to see Men in Black 3 at the dollar theater. We started off the night by having dinner at our ward BBQ in the quad.

 -We tried a few new recipes for lunch today after church. Shrimp enchiladas and refried beans. We decided the enchiladas were okay but the beans on the otherhand turned out great. We used a recipe I repinned from Sunny on pinterest where you cook the beans in the crockpot. We plan on making ours like this from now on. Patrick threw them in the food processor and it made them smooth and even more delicious.

Our first visitors...

Danielle and Chad came up the week we moved to Utah to spend the weekend with us. Because they have a super fancy camera I was not able to view the pictures taken over the weekend but now I can. So here is what we did with the Lewis Family.

We started our visit with dinner. It took us a little while to decide what we wanted but after some driving around we all decided on Mexican food. We stopped at Patrick's favorite place in town. Maybe Patrick and I have been there a handful of times since moving here.

After dinner and we decided that Crispy Cream sounded good. We were talking about how cool it would be if someone made a app that told you if the hot and ready sign was on for your phone. Turns out there is an app. So we each got donuts, energy drinks, and headed to campus.

The energy drinks were for the "Rockstar Challenge". Patrick had long been wanting us to do this so it was our chance. But we used Monster drinks instead. The goal of the game is to see who can drink their energy drink first without burping. Chad barely beat Patrick and was the winner. All of us finished without burping. I thought we did pretty good considering we all just ate two donuts. I did feel like I was going to throw up so I walked over by the trash cans just in case. Thankfully I didn't.

On Saturday we went to Kneader's for brunch. It was my first experience there and I now understand what all of the french toast hype is about. Danielle and Chad also shared the secret that Saturday evening all of the baked goods sold in the case are sold for half price! So of course we returned in the evening to buy some.

We hiked Bridal Veil Falls in the afternoon. It was a super short hike to the actual falls and easy to do. We got to walk around in the falls and look at the awesome view. I am loving the mountains here. Patrick and I are excited to do more hiking.

We had a GREAT time with Danielle and Chad here! We had a great time and hope to visit them in St. George sometime!

Dinner with Hernan...

Last Thursday night we picked up Hernan and had dinner in Salt Lake. We went to one of Patrick's favorite restaurants and got a meat-lovers pizza and it was extra cheesy and good. Then we went to temple square to see a project that Hernan worked on when he was an intern for the church. He helped to take pictures inside the temple that were used to create a model so visitors would know what it looks like. It was pretty cool. We also walked around the new mega mall.

 

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Apartment Tour...

I tried to include this on my last post but I couldn't get it to work right. But thanks to Hernan I learned how to post a video to the blog!

This is a tour of our new apartment before we moved all of our things inside.

More apartment...

We've settled in quite nicely and are enjoying our new place. There have only been a couple of things that we didn't really care for, but we've fixed both of them.

The shower curtain bar is oddly placed. In the shower one of your shoulders will touch the tile or the lovely safety bar and the other will be against the curtain liner. This is kinda gross and made us feel like we didn't have enough room. The bar is also placed low so the liner would pool at the bottom of the tub. We thought this could be manageable now since we have a new curtain liner, but after a little while when the liner starts to get a little dirty it could be really bad. So a trip to Home Depot fixed that. I bought a new rod, the kind that you twist, and it has made showering so much better! Who would've thought that shower curtain rod placement is so important.

The other thing that is a little different is that the carpet gets dirty super fast. The carpet is low and blue, and also found in some church buildings. I found that I'd vacuum it and later that day it'd look dirty again. In this apartment our front door is outside and we're used to it being enclosed in the building. We already had a rug inside the door so we bought a new outside rug. This fixed the dirty carpet issue and adds color to our front door area.

We made it!

 After driving 1,700 miles through Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming we made it to Utah on Sunday night! We were so excited to have finished the drive. We originally planned on arriving around noontime on Monday but changed our minds. We realized we might want a little time to relax on Monday after unpacking the truck before the week really started. So we spent Sunday night in a hotel, because we could not check into the apartment, and grabbed some Mexican food before calling it a night.

Unloading the moving truck on Monday went well. Patrick and I unpacked about half of the truck when a couple of neighbors started helping us. This made things go much faster and was awesome since that half of the truck was packed pretty densely. We quickly realized that all of our things would not fit and so our desk and white dresser from our old kitchen are currently residing on our balcony.We hope to sell them soon.

We finished unpacking and putting things away on Wednesday night and are pretty happy with how things are. We still have too much for the size apartment we have but are learning to deal with it. In the old apartment there was a large closet we put a lot in and this time we are using the study or second bedroom as a closet room. It's really packed but there's a built in desk that Patrick will use which is nice.

Patrick's been busy this week with orientation which will carry over into next week. I've spent the week organizing our apartment and job hunting. Later today Danielle and Chad will visit us for the weekend!

This is our new apartment building. We are on the ground floor second from the left. The shade from the large tree is helping us get through the hot days without air conditioning.

This building is one of my favorite things about living in this apartment complex so far. It's right next to us. The first good thing about it is it houses the mailboxes. Getting the mail is one of my favorite things to do everyday. The second is that it's the laundry building. Earlier this week I was able to do five loads of laundry all at once!

This cupboard in the kitchen is another one of my favorite things about living in this apartment. There's enough space to lay the spices down so now we are super organized.

We are so excited to be in Utah and for Patrick to start MBA school later in the month! 

Day two of driving...

Last night we drove a little past Lincoln, Nebraska. We planned on stopping for the night in Lincoln but all of the hotels in our price range looked runned down, kinda unsafe, and like we might get bed bugs. So we drove on and stopped at a Super 8 a few miles off of the highway. It was very clean, quiet, and had a soft mattress.

Today's drive been going well. We left the hotel at 5:30. I've had a few naps and Patrick's been driving the whole time. We've seen lots of cows and some llamas. At one of our last stops we saw an interesting looking restaurant. Here's a picture of it. Patrick's not the only Mexican Irish man out there. Apparently blending the two styles of food is working here in Nebraska.

We calculated how many miles per gallon we're getting and it's a whopping 9 ! We plan on making it to Provo tonight. Just ten hours to go!