Wow. The ACS is Cool.

The last two weeks have been crazy.
Science Fact: #1 You have more bacteria living in your small intestine than the total number of cells in your whole body.

We haven't been up to anything special, just a lot of little things.

The mini burritos.

For those who have been dying to know we got our car back out of the shop. The "Rear Main Seal" is a $35 part which cost us $650. You have got to love an industry with very little competition in it. The company that did the work did a good job and ended up sucking up the cost of buying a broken part first, and allowing us to borrow a car from them for the week. They did a good job.

The other exciting thing was that I failed the FA100 class for this semester. You have to attend 7 events throughout the semester and we lost our tickets on Saturday, plus I was beyond exhausted from staying up all night and then working that day so we didn't go. It was the last choir event of the semester so I missed it and that means. . . I'll be repeating the class next semester. Grrrrrr. Oh well, Band was a blast and I enjoyed the play too.

The coolest part of this week happened Friday night starting at 6:00. I headed over to the local high school and spent that night until the next morning counting money. Oh it was nice. I brought a bunch of homework with me hoping to be able to do a bunch of it. I got nothing done.

Instead I watched as a little tiny town like Rexburg with a total population (including surrounding areas) of about 30,000 raised over $35,000 in the fight against Cancer. It was pretty darn awesome.

The best part of the day was the rainfall. It downpoured at about 4:00 for 20 minutes and then stopped suddenly. The grey and nasty clouds overhead were really high and I had great hopes that we wouldn't see anymore.

At 5:30 I got to the high school for the team meeting and again it started to pour. At this point quite a few of the teams were disheartened because they had put a lot of work into decorations and what-not and it was all ruined. A few even went home. Those who stayed were in for a miracle. It stopped raining at 5:50 (remember it started at 6:00) and then at almost 6:00 exactly the sun broke through and lit up the entire track and field and it remained sunny and nice throughout the rest of the day. The evening and night were only slightly freezing and the next day dawned bright and early and beautiful.

The best parts of the night happened during the first lap, when the survivors walked and I was so amazed and overwhelmed watching grandma down to a little girl walk that first round, some with crutches, some riding in the golf cart. The most amazing was a woman who was quite bowed with years. A young man, probably her grandson walked beside her with a wheelchair in case she needed it, but she made it the whole way and even went the second lap with all of her caregivers and family around her. I was quite literally crying as I watched the strength of these people who have gone through a hell I can only imagine.

The second most amazing part was watching them light the luminaria bags. One bag for each family member or friend that was being celebrated and remembered. On the bleachers they spelled out the word HOPE and then with a few minor changes it became CURE. The rest of the bags lined the track and provided a ring of illumination for those who were walking.

The night was full of activities from tennis ball in a pair of hose tournaments to giant twister games it was fun. I think I would have recommended a guitar hero stage area... Everyone knows that I would have spent quite a lot had there been one, so it is probably for the best. I am so grateful that I was able to be a part of it. We raked in over $13,000 that night alone because of the generosity of the people. Checks were flying and cash was just as prevelent. Hearts were generous and I am excited to get involved with the Tucson group for next year. I was definitely touched.

This post is dedicated to Michelle :p

So I had to wait an extra day because I wanted to include the garden photos. . .

potato

zuccini and squash

A larger shot of our little square, the big plants are tomato and green pepper.

strawberries

This was a general shot of the area. The girl with red sleeves is our neighbor who is also planting out here and she's on the corner of our square, the rest belongs to the home's owners. They've got a lot of stuff planted!!
This garden is because of the generosity of this family in letting us use their ground and tools. It's pretty awesome if you ask me.

The week was fun and long!! I actually finished most of this week's homework last week which was really nice because I wouldn't have had time to do anything this weekend. First we had our weekly D&D adventure where we were attacked by 3 dire lions and had to fight for our lives against creatures as tall as an RV. Then we finally made it to the safety of Stone City and were finally able to rest and prepare for the final leg of our journey toward the capital city where the prince will hopefully help us to find out more about who was sending zombies through a portal to our small town. :)
Then Saturday morning at 6:45 I sat outside of Walmart and took people's money until 2:00. I collected about $1,900 in all. It was nice. Unfortunately I was forced to deposit it at about 3:45 when we finished counting it and verifying it against our totals. It was for a yard sale for the American Cancer Society. We also had to take a few minutes to get over the heart attack that happened.
On Thursday I threw together a program for microsoft excel that would allow us to enter the totals and would tally everything up for each of the teams that were there selling stuff. We used it throughout the day and about half-way through I realized that there was a slight glitch and that the team names weren't quite lining up with the amounts that were being recognized. No big deal I just had to make a note of which teams were off and then reassign the numbers. Other than that it seemed to be working perfectly. So we go to count all the money and my spreadsheet has a total of 1700. When Mitch finished counting the cash and had a total of 1900 I just about pooped in my pants thinking that for sure I hadn't screwed up the program enough that it would actually LOSE money, but here we were about 200 off and I was dying. Finally I realized that we had actually received a cash deposit from one of the groups before the yardsale had started and I had simply put the cash in with everything else and wrote a note to myself about it, but I had completely forgotten that about 8 hours later. Shoot, when we realized that we were perfectly fine and our totals were withing .14% of the spreadsheet total we were so relieved. So that was our last big event before the actual relay in two weeks. I'm excited but now I'm also nervous because I want to make sure we can handle it. There are only 3 of us!! We are supposed to be collecting money all night long!! This is going to be interesting. We'll probably just have the people collect for their own team and then run it to us every 1/2 hour or so as they collect enough to make it worth the trip.
Sunday was a nice restful day. Our neighbors had us over for dinner and Rose made the best (literally) meal I have ever tasted. It was mexican with tortillas on the bottom, sweet roast beef in the middle, lettuce, salsa, guacamole, a ranch/cilantro dip and black beans. Holy cow I stuffed myself like a pig and then the other couple that was there pulled out an apple crisp and some butterscotch chip cookies and I just about split my pants. It was a good night.

School is going well for us both. All the cool facts that I've learned in Biology scored me a 59% on my bio midterm, but all in all that dropped my grade to a C so I'm not too worried. (since it's not really part of my major anyway and I've got senioritis like nothing else).
Speaking of Biology, I missed last week's fact and I already had one picked out so here it is: "There are more bacteria living in your large intestine than total cells in your body."
(Don't worry, they're the good kind. One intestinal bacteria has a bi-product of Potassium.)
So this week's cool fact is: Stomach acid doesn't do much for digestion. It's main purpose is as part of the first barrier of defense against pathogens. Pathogens (viruses and bacteria) don't usually like acidic places and some don't like heat so the stomach is the best place to kill incoming stuff from the food/air.

Jason also learned a pretty interesting physics fact from his test: If a carpet and tile were at the same temperature, why would carpet feel warmer than the tile? Answer: Because tile is a better conductor of heat/cold than carpet is, so it takes in the outside temperature easily and releases it easily while carpet doesn't do that as well.

I think that's pretty much all of the excitement we've had this week. I'm enjoying my last accounting classes and I'm enjoying Alisabeth as she grows and learns SO MUCH STUFF!!!!

Here's one for you mom. . . One month and two weeks until we head out for Tucson!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's incredible

We have received more rain in this last week than I remember in our entire first two years of living here. I am extremely grateful for it, don’t get me wrong, it’s just weird.
The week was fairly uneventful. I have a few pictures to add. We just took all of these today, so they’re nothing amazing, but Alisabeth is so cute I just had to put them up.

Isn't she just the cutest little toddler you've ever seen. She's wearing mommy's earings. This is one of her favorite pass times.

She loves to feel them dangling, and then she shakes her head as hard as she can to see if they'll fall off. If they do she says "uh-oh" picks them up and has me put them back on for her.

Jason finally got his way.

This is Alisa with her friend Paige. They're about 8 months apart, but they have a blast together. . . when Alisa isn't pushing or stealing toys or being annoying to the poor thing :) Don't worry, as you can see Paige is about the same size so she holds her own pretty well.

Jason had classes this week and had a fun project where he had to draw out a scale model of the classroom. He was missing a few important measurements, but overall he really enjoyed it. He was forced to print off a paper ruler though because we couldn't find ours.

My classes were fairly uniform this week. I took one test and one mid-term. I got a B on the test and we'll have to see how I did on the mid-term. It's for BIO so I'm really not worried about it because as long as I pass it I graduate and I really doubt that my employers twenty years from now are going to be worried about a BIO class when I got A's and B's in all of my accounting classes. Basically all of that is preview for me saying I don't think I did very well.

The test was on memorization and though I do fairly well on his class tests (over the chapter concepts), the memorization tests (which are seperate) are very difficult for me. We'll just have to see. I felt very confident on 75% of the questions, however there was 10% that I answered uncertainly and a definite 15% that I missed completely. (I only wrote something in the blanks so as not to leave empty space).

Tonight was a fun night. We talked a lot about building relationships with the people around us and getting to know one another at church and Jason and I followed that by inviting over 6 other families to eat and chat. We had a good time. There were two women out of all of us who had not served missions, so I think they felt a little out of place when the mission stories started to fly, but as soon as the subject changed to motherhood both of them joined in with avengence. Overall I think it went well. One of the couples stayed and played RISK with us. That was interesting.

Other than that. . . Well, we were forced to attend a live play through the school's drama department yesterday. I say forced because it was for my class, but it was actually a good night. It was called SMASH which comes from a Bernard Shaw play called The unsocialist socialist.

I laughed my head off for most of it. The actors and actresses were fairly good for students, and it took me about 5 minutes to realize that one of the actresses was a leader from the women's organization of the church who is also going to school here. She's a good friend of mine so it was neat to see her.

I hope you're having a great time in your own experiences. Keep me posted.

Just some video.

It is always amazing to me what she finds fun.

I wish I had been able to get dinner-time on tape. She finished eating her omelet (almost 2 eggs plus toppings) and then she proceeded to open up the huge cans of dried food that are on the shelves and snack of dried refried beans.
Once that was taken away she opened up the freeze dried green beans and started in on them.
After that she headed for the flour container. I of course was looking away at that moment taking care of the green-beans. When I turned around she was a ghost.
Thus the above video.