O Tannenbaum

So Melody and I decided to save some money this Christmas by buying our Christmas tree at an after-Christmas sale. We hear those are pretty good but we'll see about that when the time comes. But since we decided to wait, that means that our apartment is Christmas Tree-less for the holidays. So, with all my free time while Melody is at work, I printed off a picture of a tree from the Internet and blew it up. We don't have a color printer, so it took me the better part of a day to color it in with Melody's crayons, colored pencils, and markers. This is the final product, hung up on our wall, complete with presents. It's about 4 feet tall, if you want to put the picture into perspective.

In other news, Melody and I went ice skating last Friday with Brittnea and Eric. It has been about 3 years since we went ice skating last, so we were a little clumsy on our feet for a while. As a little flash back in time, some of you might remember the last time we went ice skating (it happened to be the first time we went ice skating as well). It was Feb 10th, 2006 and it was Melody and my 4th official date. That was the first time I held Melody's hand. Awww. Sweet memories. That was a good date.

Right now we're looking forward to time off of work, a quick trip to St. Louis this weekend to see the city there and visit the temple, a few fantastic Christmas meals, and talking to family during the next few days. Merry Christmas everyone.

Quick

Here's a quick shot we took the other day of the first snowfall of the season.

While we have your attention here's a brief update. We've been diverting ourselves lately by watching Lost over the Internet which has been delightful. We just finished the fourth season in anticipation of the new season coming out in January, in case you follow those kinds of things.

Brandon's finals will be over next week on Wednesday the 17th. Melody also has a few days off around Christmas and the New Year so we'll be relaxing heavily on those days.

In other news, we updated our website, brandonandmelody.com, over the Thanksgiving holiday with a new, hip look to it. The content didn't change too much, however a few of the addresses did change so if you had any of those bookmarked you might want to go back and see if they still exist. Just a thought.

Happy holidays everyone.

Happiness

Two dollars. A mere 3 months and 1093 miles ago it wouldn't have been enough for even a half of a gallon.

This is the gas station just outside our apartment. Happiness. That's all.

Melody

In case some of you weren't aware, Melody is the most wonderful person. It's too bad that she doesn't have a birthday every day so we can tell her that more often.

Do you remember, the 21st night of September

Actually, we weren't really doing anything the 21^st night of September, but here's what we did the rest of the month.


Melody doesn't want me to spend four hours writing this, so let me sum up...

We decided to journey out into the far reaches of Kansas City to get an idea of what the lay of the land was like. We did manage to find a few interesting places. First, we visited Liberty Jail on Labor Day. In between school sections we found a free weekend to visit the Winter Quarters temple again and we ran into a few relatives (some alive, some dead). Last weekend we visited a local trail just outside of the city called Cave Springs. We didn't find the springs but we did find a giant black rat snake. We spend the rest of the hike jumping at every leaf that fell. That's why we don't have any pictures of that outing. This weekend we visited a another local park, called Kauffman Park. Once again we were fortunate enough to stumble upon some local wildlife. See the pictures for more details. And yesterday we visited the Smithsonian WWI museum (thanks Paul for the heads-up on free admissions for Museum Day).

Well, that just about sums it up. Outside of the extremely eventful outings, I managed to avoid failing my first class in medical school and Melody is just bursting with joy at all of the free time that she has to herself (note heavy sarcasm) since the job hunt has been less than successful so far. We are hopeful that things will get better these next few weeks.

Survival of the Ignorant

This is a picture one of the locals took of a tornado that touched down on Friday.

We successfully survived our first tornado this week. The only thing we know about tornadoes we learned from the movie Twister, and that didn't help us at all.

So the story goes like this: Friday night we are in the kitchen preparing dinner and decided to turn on the news, as we sometimes do. The meteorologist comes on to tell us that a

The official warning.

tornado watch had been issued for the entire Kansas City metropolitan area, and a tornado warning had been issued in a few counties, including Jackson county where we live. For those of you who may not be familiar with the difference, a watch means that conditions are favorable for a tornado and a warning means that a tornado is imminent.

The view of the storm out our window.

We weren't sure if we needed to panic or not, so we decided to be calm for a bit. Our composure lasted for a little while until the community tornado sirens sounded. The funny thing about all this is that we looked out the window and we couldn't even tell that anything was going on because it wasn't raining and the wind wasn't blowing. 15 minutes later we finally saw something exciting when an ominous wall of low-flying clouds covered the city.

After a few inches of rain and absolutely zero tornado sightings, we realized that there was really nothing to worry about. Later we learned that a few tornadoes did form and touched down south and east of us. One was only a few miles away, but they didn't do much damage and, as far as we know, no one was hurt.

Making up for lost time...

July 4^th, 2008

The Rest of July

Cruise, July 21^st - 25^th

August 2008

We've managed to successfully drown ourselves in a wealth of unique experiences this last month. Fortunately we have an equally large collection of pictures documenting each fiasco.

To quickly get everyone back up to speed, here are some of the highlights:

Jared, Mikail, and William were able to come up from Texas to spend some time with us around the Forth of July.

Shortly after that, Melody and I made a quick trip to Boise to throw away most of my old junk, play miniature golf, and drive go carts.

With Julie and Jason's wedding, we were able to spend lots and lots of time with Melody's family including several informal meals together, park outings, late nights with Neal and Katrina getting creamed at every game we played with them, a family home evening the night before the wedding, strenuous sod laying at Keith and Kim's house, and a quick trip to visit a Park City with Mark, Kristilyn, James and Grant, among other things. See the pictures for more details. Oh yeah, and the wedding was great as well.

Somewhere in the middle of all that excitement, Melody and I took off for a much needed vacation/cruise from Los Angeles to San Diego, Catalina Island, and Ensenada. If any of you haven't yet asked us why we decided to go on a cruise, let me give you the answer that we have given to everyone else: "We decided to spend our money before it was taken from us." There.

The day before we left for Missouri, we were able to spend an evening with Kelsey, Ben, Brittney, and Seth going skeet shooting. Excellent.

Half way along our trip cross country expedition, we stopped in Denver to visit Mike, Desi, Emily, and Mordecai. We went for a morning hike into the mountains, went swimming, and ate enough food to last us until we pay off our student loans.

This last week, after getting settled in our new apartment, Melody set out to rejoin the workforce. Hopefully she'll have a few introductory interviews this next week.

I began orientation for school last Monday. Monday and Tuesday were packed with boring, logistical speeches. Wednesday, after a few community service projects, the school threw all the students and families a picnic and then gave complementary tickets to the Kansas City Royals baseball game that evening. The Royals were creamed 8 to 2 by the Red Sox. Finally Thursday, after registration in the morning, the school held the annual white coating ceremony.

Finally, on Friday Melody and I took a day trip up to Omaha to attend a temple session at the Winter Quarters temple. With a little extra time on our hands, we were also able to take a quick look at the Visitor's Center just across the road.

Well, that's just about everything. Good night and good luck.

The Good News and Bad News of Kansas City

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The good news is that we made it to Missouri.
The bad news is that there is more construction here than there is in Utah (if you can believe that).

The good news is that it is possible to cool down indoors and in cars.
The bad news is that my glasses fog up when I step outside.

The good news is that our apartment doesn't smell bad.
The bad news is that it still smells.

The good news is that we have a bigger apartment.
The bad news is that we still have pipes.

The good news is that we no longer have whitewashed walls.
The bad news is that now have to deal with a mustard yellow bathroom, olive drab closets, and hot pink hallways.

The good news is that ceilings are now much higher than our old apartment's six foot ceilings.
The bad news is that we had to buy an expensive foot stool to reach the top cupboards.

The bad news is that our kitchen is half the size of our old one.
The good news is that the closet is as big as our old apartment. :)

The bad news is that we ended up moving all of our stuff five separate times.
The good news is that we have extra storage on our floor to put it all.

The good news is that we sweat off all the weight we gained on our cruise.
There is no bad news for this.

The bad news is that we are disabled after moving our things so many times.
The good news is that the toilet and bathroom are handicapped equipped.

The bad news is that there are no groceries stores within 10 miles.
The good news (for Brandon) is that there are three KFCs within 10 miles.

The bad news is that the milk is a dollar more expensive than in Utah.
The good news is that we filled up our gas tanks at $3.59 per gallon (In Kansas, but the price is still close to that here in the city).

The bad news is that our church meetings are translated into both Spanish and English.
The good news is that we understand the people that speak Spanish better than those who speak English.

The best news of all, five second year students helped unload our U-Haul and get our things up to our apartment.

For Rebecca

Rebecca has asked to see my wedding pictures many times. I finally gave in
and tried to blog. From the format you can see it didn't go over very well but hey here are a few pictures. My wedding colors were eggplant and silver.

No, it's not just a whim

So I told Melody this week that I want to buy a pet tiger. She wasn't enthusiastic.

No, seriously... this is not as obtuse as you might think. A few facts from Wikipedia:

"The Association of Zoos and Aquariums estimates that up to 12,000 tigers are being kept as private pets in the USA."

"Only nineteen states have banned private ownership of tigers, fifteen require only a license, and sixteen states have no regulations at all."

Doing a little bit of research, it looks like Utah (as one might expect) prohibits private ownership of tigers. However Idaho and Missouri, among other states of interest, only require the proper habitat and care, along with a federal license. And who better to hold such as license than yours truly, with a Bachelor's Degree in Biology? 'Nuff said.

So, with the logistics down, I found an interesting Website: buytigers.com. Sounds reputable. A female, 5-month old tiger is only $13,400. That might be a little pricey, but to make the deal a little sweeter they include an ivory collar, some tiger toys, and the original "Hello Tiger" guide.

I think I'm sold.

Pictures

This is deceptive because you might think that you are going to see new pictures, when we actually have nothing new to show. I was just so excited about some new things that I learned (computer/geek like things) and so I put them on our Website. Since most people don't look at that very often anyway, I figured that a few more people might appreciate all my hard work if I brought it to your attention here. Anyway, enjoy looking at some old pictures in kind of a new way. See them here.

Every last inch of 254 square feet

We moved around our apartment this week to fit in the newest addition to our family: the graduation piano. Melody has mixed feelings about the piano because I've been playing it often and she isn't getting enough attention. I've been trying to figure everything out, and I'll still play it often but it'll be more reasonable after I've had some time to get a handle on my new toy.

So, to make it fit we had to do an entire "renovation" of our current apartment setup. Melody took the opportunity to clean the place from top to bottom while we could vacuum underneath moved furniture, and I didn't mind because I was just excited to have a piano at my disposal at any time that I wish. So here are some pictures out how it turned out. It's too bad that we didn't take a before picture to compare, but that's okay. We lost a little space in the room, but mostly it worked out pretty well. Hopefully you can see well enough how it all came out.

In other news, I started my racquetball class for the first time this week. Two hours of aerobic sport was a little bit of a shock for me compared to the past months of lethargic library studying. I'm a little sore now, but hopefully that won't last long. Melody has worked hard to help me get in shape by dragging me along on some of her runs for the past month or so.

As a kick off to the summer months, we went to Park City yesterday. Mostly we just wanted to get out of Provo, but we took the chance to visit the outlet malls there a found a good deal or two, which we are pretty proud of. If you haven't ever been out there, then we highly recommend it. Anyway, that is about the gist of our week.

Graduation

So school is finally over, sort of. Graduation was excellent, since most of my family was in town. Melody's parents came for commencement on Friday. We spent the rest of the weekend taking as many pictures as our memory cards could hold, and then moving any piece of furniture or spare box that we could find including beds, dressers, pianos, and Ben's 7 ton safe.

Now that Spring has officially started, Melody and I are looking forward to reading more books, going on picnics and hikes, and shooting guns whenever possible. I'll still have one final class this spring to keep me in shape, a racquetball class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Other than that and work, it looks like we'll have a party every evening and eat lots of ice cream.

Graduation Barbeque

Brandon took his last undergraduate final on Saturday. Since it was his last he was still happy despite getting a 45%... (He hopes that the written portion of the test will bring that up a bit, and the class average is usually pretty low anyway). So to celebrate we got together with some old friends and had our first barbecue of the season. The weather was nice enough that we could eat outside, though there was a think blanket of dust in the air, so our drinks were contaminated if we left them out for too long. After dinner they guys played "baseball," or rather hit tennis balls with tree branches. It was nice to see everyone again at least for a little bit because it won't be too long now before we all part ways.

So, now that school is done, we have graduation coming up this week. We expect to have both of our parents here along with most of rest of Brandon's family, so it will be an exciting celebration. We aren't planning to attend commencement on Thursday with Elder Bednar, but we'll definitely go to Friday's convocation. After that, we're looking forward to a relaxing, low stress summer without late homework nights or stressful test weeks. We love summer.

Kansas City, here we come

So we've heard back now from just about every medical school that Brandon applied to. As expected most of them said no, but that's their own problem. We still have yet to hear back from two or three schools (none of which were ever extremely promising) so we're now begining preparations to move to Kansas City, Mo. Here's a fantastic picture of the campus.

The school's name is Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences (KCUMB), and it's located on the Missouri side of Kansas City. Brandon really enjoyed the students and teachers he met while there for his interview, the facilities looked new, and, most importantly, he's extremely excited to have been accepted to at least one school and to finally move from undergraduate studies to medical school. Finally. It would have been nice to be a little closer to family, but at least we were accepted somewhere, so we're grateful. Orientation starts on August 4th, so we'll probably move from Provo around the end of July. We'll keep you all posted on any new developments as they arise.