Some news from us

Hello, everyone. Jacob and I have some big news to share. And stop thinking what you're thinking. When it's THAT news, phone calls will be in order. How big of computer geeks do you think we are to email something like that? :-)

Anyway, our news is being of the age to be graduated from college, I must now enter the workforce. And after a couple months of searching (not too long, thank goodness) I've been hired with a local Utah company called TaxHawk to be a tax specialist, or in other words, to put tax forms into logical programming format without actually having to program anything. It's cool. It's good money and health benefits, so we're really happy with it. I start on June 5th, so I've got a couple of weeks to relax and do the sorts of things that just don't happen during school, oh, like cleaning our very dirty and old carpet. That and being able to sleep in a go running a couple times a week are the things I'm looking forward to most.

Jacob's doing great. He's working his two part-time jobs to get to 40 hours a week over the summer, but he's looking for something a little bigger (ie more money, more steady hours, fewer whiny students) for the fall. So we'll keep you all updated. And not that I need to be giving an update on Nicole, but I just saw her last night and she's doing fine as well. Reading Crime and Punishment for fun. :-P Ah, Nicole.

Anyway, I hope everyone is doing well and having fun with whatever the current time-taker is. We love you all and hope to hear from you soon.

P.S. Karen, I'm a complete, complete dork. We were just in Phoenix last week and I completely spaced it and forgot to call you. :-/ Please don't hate me!!!

My New Challenge (not a recounting of a childhood experience, so you can actually read this one)

I don't really like exercise. Most of us know that. I get into something for a while and then I get bored of it. I think my problem is that I have never had any really good motivation. Problem solved.

My stake is having a large-ish Easter activity on April 15th. One of the festivities of the day includes a 5k run. Guess who's running in it.... :-) That's right: me. But here's where my motivation problem gets solved. Jacob and I have made a deal. If I can run the 5k in under 30 minutes, I get a new computer. I know that doesn't really do it for everyone, but it does it for me!!! So I started running as of yesterday, all the while chanting in my head, "1 gig of RAM, Dual core CPU, flat screen monitor, 80 gig hard-drive..."

Ok, so I'm a nerd. I think we were all aware of that.

Honestly, I don't know if I'll make it in under 30 minutes. I think I'll be a little sad if I don't, but I'm really excited to try.

Stories from my childhood and social experiment #1

I've come to a decision. I'm going to start prattling on about random stories from my childhood in an effort to get them written down, share my strangeness, and get some activity on the blog here. My apologies to those who have heard these before and to Nicole, who lived through most of them with me. So, here's story number 1.

When I was in high school, I worked at the Deseret Book in St. Louis. One of my co-workers was in an unfortunate accident that ended with her needing to stay off her leg as much as possible. So when she was tired from being on crutches, she had a wheelchair at work she would sit in to relieve the pain. Well, one day when she wasn't working, I started feeling both lazy and curious. I vowed to my co-workers to spend the rest of my six hour shift in that wheelchair, mostly just to see what would happen.

I don't think more than two people left the store that day without out the ::cough, cough:: "So..." ::concerned look:: "what happened to you?"

On the one hand, I would probably be curious too. Most of the people I know that use wheelchairs on a more permanent basis have a physical impairment that is obvious at a casual glance. The others that are temporary users usually have a cast or some other outward sign of why they are using a wheelchair at the particular moment. Finding a seemingly healthly teenage girl with no visible lower body atrophy would prompt some curiousity. Such is the fun of these social experiments.

On the other hand, who said my physical condition is any of their business?? Would you go up to someone who otherwise looked "normal" but who walked differently and ask them "What happened to you?" out of nowhere and having no relationship with him or her? What has happened to social manners and propriety?? (Ok, I just have to laugh at myself for just giving social manners and propriety any credit. Me, of all people. Hehe..)

But wait, it gets better: most the day I had let people believe whatever they wanted about my reasons for being a wheelchair occupant--accident, hereditary birth defect, whatever. Toward the end of the day, this got a little boring, so I just started telling people the truth: I've been using this wheelchair all day just to see what people would do. The reactions went anywhere from the haha, funny joke (serious), to the haha, funny joke (sarcastic), to the the I condemn you to hell for being so evil as to decieve me. That was an interesting hour of my life, let me tell you.

So why, why, pray tell, does me doing a social experiment make me a horrible, evil, insensitive person? Why don't those insults apply to my accuser, the ::cough, cough:: "What happened to you" for sticking his or her nose into places where it likely has no business being? I'm not saying that someone asking about a physical condition or disability is a bad person by any stretch of the imagination. I just don't understand what I did to wrong in this man's eyes to be such a person.


I guess that's what I really learned about my first social experiment: some people can take a joke/experiment as such, and other people just have their panties in a twist no matter what you do.

Lesson in Compassion

So one of my professors from last year resigned this weekend. He got caught with some questionable material on his computer and is under criminal investigation, so he resigned "under the pressure" the article said. I feel really bad for his wife and family. I even feel bad for him that he's made poor choices, even though he was never my favorite person in the world. It's interesting how no matter how much you dislike someone, you can still feel compassion for them, especially when the reasons I disliked him for were so petty.
I'm am grateful the Lord gives us the ability to forgive and move past the small things in life.

Yes, we're all slackers. So sue.

Ok, I have a bone to pick with no one in particular. I just want to vent and I don't want to vent on the family blog because of all the much more serious stuff being discussed there. So I went to Jacob's intramural soccer game last night to be the team cheerleader. Me a cheerleader. Funny, I know. Anyway, his smaller team was playing a very large team (number of people, not body size) of all freshmen. And honestly, I could have clobbered a few of them. They were rude and stupid and just plain obnoxious. I have been told that I don't just feel this way when the opposing team is full of freshmen, though I do think that made matters worse. I just don't have good sportsmanship and tend to have hateful feelings toward the other teams pretty much always. I know that this is bad, but I'm still not sure why I do this. Most of the time, I feel that I am a nice, kind person and pretty ok with people I meet. It's rare (I feel at least) for me to not like someone when I just met them. But for every intramural game that Jacob plays, I just can't stand the other team. I have a suspicion that my lack of control in this area comes from never playing sports myself, so I haven't had much experience with actually competitive things. Anyway, to hopefully spark a discussion, I would love input of suggestions for what I can do to stop hating everyone that plays against my husband in a sport. And I've tried singing a hymn, so don't suggest that. :-P

Katie Rose Renville

Katie died in a car accident on November 26, 2005. She and her mother were driving back from Oregon after Thanksgiving break when they hit a patch of ice and rolled off the road. Katie was helping her mom out of the car when a pickup slid on the same patch of ice and rolled into them, killing them instantly. The article in the Daily Universe can be found here:
http://newsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/57632
Someone let me know if that link ever stops working so I can update it.
I was grateful to get the news from a person instead of through the newspaper. For those of her friends that had to find out that way, I am sorry. My sister, Nicole, lives in the same ward as Katie. She got the news Sunday morning and past it on to me later that night. The only person I felt up to seeing then was Dre, so Nicole and I broke the news to her.
I've spent a good part of the past few days thinking and crying and talking to people about Katie. I wonder if she knew how wonderful she was and how much she meant to me. I wonder if my friends and know how much they mean to me. I have also spent a lot of time wondering what I am doing with the time I've been given on the earth. Am I wasting it? Probably. Am I doing what the Lord would have me to do when I'm not wasting my time? I hope so.
I kick myself for not spending more time with Katie lately. She was supposed to come over two weeks ago but something came up. I really wish now that nothing had come up. But I guess that's just part of the test--not knowing how much time you will have. Use it wisely and use it well. Love life and be happy.
I just keep thinking about all the fun times I had with Katie and all the reasons I loved her. Like the time when we were in apartment 17 talking in the corner and all the sudden, Tyson asked us if we were making out. Or when she'd come over and watch my cheesy Ewok movies with me because no one else would. :-) I also remember talking with her about life and how she had such a strong testimony that the Atonement could heal anything. Just remember her. Remember her loud, loud crazy laugh and the crazy things she would do. Remember how she told Meg and Brad they were lying when they announced their engagement and how she would start a water fight anytime, anywhere. Katie, we love you. We miss you.
Please pass the news on to all those who knew Katie.

The Day the Blog Died

I think it was the first day of school. Or it might have been the day I got married. I've suddenly had a lot less free time since that day. Or maybe it was the day that poor Sparkles (that's my laptop) decided to stop loving me by getting a short in the motherboard and being very tempermental when he turns on and when he doesn't. But one of these days or one of the other ones that have passed since summer left us, is the day our Blog died.
So, since I've been playing too much World of Warcraft (but that's not news, is it) and fully believe in instantaneous resurrection.....tada! The Blog is back.
Or at least, I'm gonna try. :-)
So for my life update, marriage is cool. Boys are weird, but I think I had that much figured out by age 6. And girls are weird too. That one took me until age 12, but that's a carved-in-stone fact for me now. And then the happy day comes that you put them together. If I was a chemist, I could give you an example of two substances that when combined make some pretty much smelly explosion and that would complete my thought train here. But I'll let you more edumacated people come up with one on your own. Marriage is fun and hard and Jacob is so good to put up with my PMS. Former roomies, I know you can feel his pain. And just think, he's stuck with me for a long, long, long, long time. Poor man.
Classes are kinda ok, overall boring and the select few are as annoying as ****. Trust me. It is that bad. But I think I'm gonna pass most of them at least. Jacob said he'll be impressed if I can muster up enough interest to pull Bs. So that's the star I'm shooting for.
Work is the same old dysfunctional lab. But we put the fun back in dysFUNctional. Hehe, I thought it was funny. I got voted one of the two employees of the month this month. It's nice to be appreciated. And it's fun to have seniority and all that jazz.
I really hate the nagging feeling I have that I'm still waiting for the rest of my life to begin. I guess I was just too caught up in the idea that all the world would be right once I got married. Don't get me wrong, I've never been so happy with life as I have been since marrying my sweetheart. I just think I'm still waiting to be out of school and done with working and having kids, like that will make me the person I've wanted to be all my life. I guess part of me is wondering if I'm the only one to feel this way. Nicole said to me the other day that she feels useless in life right now. I feel the same way a lot of the time. I don't think it's just a Knutti thing, but I suppose anything's possible. I feel like there's more I could be doing with my probationary state, but I'm just too tired and lazy to kick things up a notch. Any opinions or comments are welcome, my friends.