School is done…for now

Our Christmas tree is up, our school books are tucked away and we’re ready for a well earned break.

Now even though we did this a while ago, this is our unofficial Christmas blog (in case i actually ever get around to writing an official one) So, Here are the stockings we made. Mine is the…well I’ll let you guess who’s is who’s:

We’re sad to see friends go, but happy that they get to move on to bigger and better adventures. We’re sitting at home after a little adventure of our own.

Yesterday we climbed a mountain—ok i’m exaggerating, it was a 3-5 mile hike—and we were up there, fully intending to chop down our Christmas tree. anyway, after we got up there, i took a little nap. when i woke up Jake said he’d heard a man talking and we both got the heebie jeebies—that would be the holy ghost talking to us—and we packed up, tired, stinky and treeless and came down the mountain the same night. (We had planned to stay the night, cut down our tree in the morning and then hike down). anyway, we made it home around 8:30ish and took showers, unpacked all the gear, watched Amazing Grace and went to beddy bye.

Since we were still treeless this morning, we found ourselves at the PX on Schofield Barracks, Wal*Mart in Mililani, and then Target in Kapolei. We finally found a tree (neither of the other places had one, but luckily for us Target carries 2 ft, $8 trees.) So instead of buying a live one (the PX had trees, not Christmas trees just regular ones) for $60, we bought lights, a wooden cranberry bead chain…thing, a tree, a drink and a 2011 planner (for me) all for a grand total of $30. :) we saved half of what we’d have paid. And we visited my parents to say hello and mooch off their leftovers.

And so we’ve been out of school for two days and we’ve already had amazing and fantastic adventures!  Here are some shots of our amazing little tree. :)

 

Merry Christmas!

I’m all post-moderned out

it’s taken too much time. i can’t believe he actually gave us a longer reading AND a quiz the day our paper was due. what about the two page readings before? on Wednesday our reading was light and easy, we should have had the quiz then, but no.

I'm tired of listening to his genius about his ability to recognize other people’s genius…people who (in my opinion) are really not as fantastic as he claims.

yes. i could definitely spend this hour doing something productive, like blogging :) or writing one of my other two papers. note to self: never take a class from him again…

oh wait. he’s the only one who is teaching senior seminar next semester. whop-dee-doo. lame.

giving some thanks

so i had written a beautiful and wonderful blog about some of the things i’m grateful and then my stupid computer (which i am not grateful for at the moment) decided to cut my internet connection. good bye beautiful blog. well, i’m here to try again.

Here’s a small list of things that i’m grateful for:

My Husband

 

Family

Friends

 

my Favorite feline

these are a few of my favorite things.

and i’m very grateful for all of them :)

busy as a bee…but we aren’t even halfway through the hive…

Have you ever worked

and worked

and worked

and worked

and worked

and worked

and worked

and worked

and worked
and…

(well you get it)

then you take some time to reflect on ALL that work you did and suddenly you realize that you’ve only begun to scrape away dirt from the mountain you have to tunnel through?

well…i have.

we have.

we are doing that right now. we’re up to our eyeballs in books and articles; i would not be surprised to see tomorrow’s headline read “WONDERFUL COUPLE HORRIBIBLY MUTILATED BY MASS INFLICTION OF DEEP PAPERCUTS”

granted that whoever wrote that will probably lose their job because the title is so long there will be no room for the picture, but you get the idea.

i’ve decided i’m going to order Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in French. i’ll read it out loud, that way i can practice my pronunciation as well as gain a better grasp on the language.

time to get back to the masses of paper.

wish us luck…

i feel dumb

ever say something in class that YOU felt was really relevant and everyone just stares at you like “Why is she still talking?”

just had that experience.

luckily i have a wonderful husband who understands my comments and sees their relevance. i’m not crazy! :)

DAMN DAMN DAMN!

i cannot find ONE online french 201 class without fully enrolling (as in taking a whole new bachelor's worth of classes) in an online school. the only french online classes Byu provo offers are PSYCHO hard. We're talking my Renaissance class all over but IN FRENCH! I can barely understand half of it and IT IS IN ENGLISH!

To top it off Jake didn't do so hot in his Korean test so it looks like we might be stuck here a lot longer than either of us planned. I love reading and learning, but I'm so tired of jumping through impossible hoops. i thought High school was all about jumping through hoops and college would be learning for the sake of learning. Nope. Now the hoops are on fire and there's a vat of boiling lava underneath it in case you don't jump far enough.

i don't know what to do. i need magic to *poof* me some solutions.

help...

happy happy halloween

Here's a video of a bunch of pictures. We had a fun little party in our closet we call a home and we loved every second of it. we watched "Arsenic and Old Lace" and "Practical Magic" :) we had swamp juice, kidneys stones of trolls (the round ones are from mountain trolls, the flat ones are from cave trolls...or maybe it was the other way around...) we had dried swamp worms, baby dragon scales and plenty eye of newt to go around :)
needless to say we had lots of fun oh and i still want to be a witch *poof* back to the real world where we have homework to do and papers to write. halloween we'll visit you as often as we can. Here we come Thanksgiving!! =)

still feeling restless

there’s something i should be doing…

no i don’t mean homework

there’s a story inside me, a tale to be told and i can’t put my finger on it. there’s a bit of my military brat that’s saying “it’s time to move on to bigger and better things.”

Seniorites!? i hope not. i still have wayy too much school to deal with that plague. bring on the rats and locusts; all i need is a cat and some pesticide.

maybe all the talk of halloween. i’m eager to get into the full spirit of things.

i miss pretending. i miss mixing potions with my mom’s cookware in our back yard. i miss smelling the flowers mix with the bugs and dirt and create the most noxious and disgusting smells (yeah, i’m a weirdo. i admit it)

ok, enough me me me. this is Danica And Jake’s many adventures, not Danica’s daily crises. hmmm.

jake and i are having a halloween shindig on saturday. we’ll be eating spiders and mud, and downing it with a chilled glass of swamp juice. I’m so stoked!

jakey is going to be WOlverine. we got him some tight white shirts (dress-code at BYUH won’t let him wear a wife-beater like logan actually does…then again would i really want him wearing one, i’m the wife!!) ;) my mom even picked up some dog-tags on post for him. i found some genuine plastic wolverine claws, so he’s all set.

i’m going as (surprise surprise) a witch! ok i’ve actually got 2 costumes. i’ll be attending the English circle halloween party as charlie brown dressed up as a ghost. basically i’ll be wearing a sheet with a lot of holes cut out and carrying around a bag of rocks. for our party i’ll be a witch. i’ve got a fantastic costume. like i said, i’m pretty stoked. =) ok. last post for the day. i promise

Witch! Witch! She’s a Witch!

me, me! pick me!! :) I finished watching Practical Magic and…

I want Magic

 

How is it that I have this feeling that somehow me and magic are supposed to be together. There’s probably a million other people that think that…..but I’ve felt like this since i was a little kid. i saw Matilda and i was like ‘hey, that’s supposed to be me! what’s the deal?’

maybe i have issues…i dunno, do i have readers? readers, are you out there? if you are, please tell me, AM I NUTS?

is it possible to feel like there’s something bigger, like we’re capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for?

Am I denying God? no way! I’m not talking black magic, let’s-summon-the-devil magic, I’m talking honest good magic. like charmed, practical magic, hogwarts magic. fun magic. magic that keeps my spoon stirring after i move my hand, magic that allows me to stay where i am and still get that book from across the room. that’s what i’m talking about. that’s what i feel like i’m missing…

hmmm. i need a good book.

something with witches… =)

A second to breath

between midterms, french tests, papers and work, writing has had to come to a screeching halt (papers don't count). it's amazing how good it feels to just sit and write. i feel my characters slipping away from me, i feel the man who recites his story to me will soon find someone else to listen-someone who will write down what he says. i need to dedicate "writing-time" where i put away work, school and anything else that I'm working on or that needs working on and just emerge myself in writing. i miss writing.

restrictions hurt. it's like being so hungry you feel sick, and you just need to eat, Need to or, you don't want to think about or. this is what i feel. this unease is what makes my knees bounce in class, what drums my fingers, what watches the clock. i need a second to breath and a millennium to write.

Happy 26th Jakey

“Today is your birthday (dun nuh nuh nuh nee nuh) it’s my birthday too, YEAH!” Ok well it’s really not, but that’s the way the song goes. :) So Tuesday, September 28th was Jake’s 26th birthday, but we both work and go to school like all day (i start with a 7:30 french class and we both don’t get off work til 11pm) so we did his birthday on monday instead after family home evening. the candles are two different ones because i couldn’t find 2 of the same type. besides, we’re weird so i figured it would work well.

So his birthday cake had frosting that was really just whipped cream (he doesn’t like frosting anyway so it’s cool.) and the cake was a white cake that we baked and then poked holes in with his chopsticks and then we poured strawberry-banana jell-o in it and let it set. i though he was nuts, but apparently in Idaho (and probably utah) it’s a pretty common thing. well, i’ll give them this one, it was pretty good. :)

 

   Any way, so here jake is blowing out his candles. When i told him I was going to get  26 candles he really thought i meant to buy twenty-six candles. i think not; first of all, i would have needed a blow torch to light the cake and second of all we’d have needed to keep a fire extinguisher near by just in case one of our heads caught fire. :) i’m only teasing of course, i know that when i’m 26, i’ll received the same brutality… hahaha.

                                

Yummy! It turned out pleasantly pink and was rather delicious. we still have about half of it in the fridge and it’s only wednesday…i wonder if that means we eat cake rather quickly or quite slowly. hmmm. :)

 

Well, jake liked my card to say the least. :) i’m always happy to see that i can pick an envelope that encourages such happy and kinda of manic stares in people. it always makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, it really does.

And here he is singing along with the card, i guess it got him “all shook up mmm hmmm mmm yay-yeah” He has a healthy appreciation for Elvis.

 

Here we have him opening his first present. He told me afterwards that as he was opening it he saw some of the back and thought (in horror) that i’d bought him one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (i say “in horror” because he already owns all of them) however, he was pleased to discover (once he looked at the front) that it was not a pirate move, but was-in fact-

THE PRINCE OF PERSIA

He was pretty excited as you can tell by his “crazy-person” stare

 

So excited, that he sunk his teeth (literally) into unwrapping his second and final (so he thought) present! once he had successfully removed the piece of string that i had, with painstaking effort, tied on, he choose to display his dominance over the piece of string by wearing it around his forehead as a warning to all other string that he is the master of string and none of it may hold the contents of its package without fear of being ripped to shreds by Jake the String-Slayer. :)

So, although i’m sure you were expecting a fearsome picture, you must remember that the ceremony involving tying the slain string around the forehead is an incredibly sacred ritual only performed by those who wear glasses and have very curly hair. 

 

 

 

And Here he unveiled his last present. and he was satisfied with the result of his labors. the fruit he had reaped was worthy of the effort he had sown. that is to say that…

 

 

 

He got what he asked for; received his just rewards; felt the consequences of his actions take place…

He got a Star Wars Lego Set :)

 

All in all, I’d say he had a pretty Happy Birthday….especially since i surprised him with some Lego people on Tuesday morning. i felt that he had to get at least one birthday present on his actual birthday. :)

Do you Remember where you were?

September 11, 2001

I was eleven.

I was in sixth grade.

I was waiting for my ride; Nikki, do you remember? I came in the living room and my mom was watching the news, crying. I was only eleven, but I understood what was going on.

i don’t know if you’d believe me, but i had dreaded something like 9/11 my entire life. As an army brat, i knew my dad would only be home if things were safe…things like 9/11 change that.

i went to school like any other day; that day was different. That day, my classmates laughed and i cried. i watched people choose a death by impact over a death by fire, and i understood that nothing would be the same.

when i went home, every base, every post, every military facility had gone from a simple Alpha to a red alert Delta. Every person got out of every car so every thing could be checked.

i remember…do you?

Happy Honeymooners :) no we haven’t mooned anyone

We started our journey on Friday, August 27 in Honolulu, Hawaii. We decided since out of all the fabulous gifts we received we didn’t get a single Barbie or Lego set, we needed to reward our good behavior with those selected goodies! so we sat in a park in Waikiki playing with our toys while simultaneously killing time before our flight.

 

We did a bunch of other stuff around Waikiki….like cashing in our free chocolates. (Sign up to be a member at Godiva, it’s free and you get one free chocolate truffle a month!!) Then we went to the airport. This is us sitting down at the airport…waiting for the plane

We flew over to Portland, OR, arriving at 6:15 AM….yeah you read that right, AM as in MORNING. i was so cold. Jake and I were freezing (nearly to death….but as I am still here, able to write to you, you can clearly see we survived). Good thing I stole the blanket from the plane. we rode a shuttle over to where Jake’s dad’s hotel was. We slept for a couple hours and then got on the road to Pendleton, OR, where I walked in to see this upon entering the house. Behold, Cody’s Bear

 

Wo unto those who do not deal justly with the bear, for they will feel the wrath of Craig’s African Animal!

I actually really like the house. :) It was a little “Lions, and Tigers, and Bears. Oh my!” in the beginning, but the longer I was there, the more I loved it. I’m funny that way. Anyway, so we stayed there a couple days. I learned to play a marvelous game called Wizard and I ate some amazing salmon. So we woke up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (around 8) on Tuesday.   Here’s Jakey driving.

 

Here he is telling me it’s not a good idea to put a camera in front of him while he’s driving…I concur.

And after three and a half (to four) grueling hours (just kidding, we actually had a lot of fun) we arrived in Post Falls, ID. Poor jakey. hahaha. :)

 

Hello Antelope with whom I am very well acquainted. Yes, this is how I knew Grandpa P and Jakey would get along quite nicely.

 

Jake found the old Nintendo, he loves DuckHunt…

He did very well…

He got a picture of me looking outside. Right out our window, you could see the horses; my grandpa lets the horses out into the backyard when ever he feels like mowing the lawn. haha…

 

While we were in Pendleton, we went to this old toy/fudge shop. we bought some peanut butter and some mint chocolate fudge….it’s pretty fantastic stuff, anyway so we were eating some while were doing a Star Wars puzzle. Here we’ve finished the puzzle and Jake is getting some fudge.

The second day with Grandpa Palmer, we drove out to some place. anyway, it was really cool. It was a memorial for all the Native Americans from the area who had given their lives in WWI, and WWII and Vietnam and I think there was one other war or battle, and anyway this was made in memory of them. it says “Warriors and Veterans of the Coeur D’Alene Tribe”

 

Then we got back on the road, we headed to Jake’s Grandma Hibbert’s house. It was a ‘buggy’ drive. :) (that is to say our windshield was pretty nasty after the drive)

 

But it is very beautiful drive.

We had to get some gas on the drive…pretty crazy huh?

 

Here’s our travel necessities, Mediator, Camera, Porkchop, and snacks! (Porkchop is my bear)

Some pretty flowers…

  

Meet Jack the Cat …and

 

…and Jake, the Cat

And this is what happens when you put two cats and my lovely husband who doesn’t want to step on them, in the same room. poor kid

 

We spent some driving time blotting blood.

Big Strong Man. :)

some fun shots