Great Time to Be in Provo

I’ve been in Provo, Utah off and on since August 2006, and I feel like with everything that’s going on this year, there has never been a better time to live in Provo. Google Fiber is coming, the new state of the art Recreation Center opened its doors last week, and new trails and park features are opening up as well! Provo is so amazing!

(Granted, I’m not a fan of the climate… but Provo has a lot of great things going for it.)

Google street view of our old place, with my car out front!

I’m so excited about the new Recreation Center (here's a KSL article about it with some pictures)! Way back when Ezra and I first heard about the new Recreation Center and where it was going to be located, we were stoked. We lived about two blocks away! Then we moved from our amazingly cheap and perfectly located 4-plex (with out of control mold and landlords who didn’t care about the property), to a little cottage on the outskirts of Provo (with absolutely lovely landlords who make sure everything is perfect and who give us free eggs). Nevertheless, we’re still in Provo and thus will reap the benefits of Google Fiber and easy access to the Recreation Center (which we would get regardless because we’re city employees, another reason I love Provo!).

A photo I took just now of our current place! Sooo much nicer.

On Monday while Ezra was at work, I took a walk down to the Recreation Center and registered my employee badge. I wasn’t dressed to work out so I wandered around and checked everything out. Best. Place. Ever! It’s huge, and gorgeous, with brand new state of the art equipment. I’m a fan of the Biggest Loser, and our new Recreation Center could seriously give the Biggest Loser gym a run for its money. It’s that awesome.

Thursday after work Ezra and I ran in and activated his card, and then I showed him around. Friday morning we actually went to work out. It was great. I had a lot of fun, and really feel like it lives up to all the hype. This morning I spent a few hours there while Ezra was working and just had a grand old time.

 Even if we didn’t get in for free (city employee perk), I honestly think it would be worth the membership. I try to be pretty frugal, but oh my goodness, that is the best work out facility I have ever seen. We will be there often!

Exciting Week

Ezra finished classes this week and totally rocked his finals! On Friday (the first day of finals) he went to take his New Testament final. Our agreement was that if he got an A, we could rent a movie with one of our Red
Box promo codes. 95%!! Woohoo! So we got Life of Pi and watched that. It was one of the most visually beautiful movies I’ve ever seen. It’s definitely one that we’ll add to our collection when we get the chance.

I’ve still got classes until midway through May. Then I get a short break before I start my summer class. Final projects/research papers have started for me so I’ve been busy getting that done. I’ve randomly had a handful of people ask me this past week what I actually do/learn in library school. What’s the point? So this week you get a double blog post. For information about what I’m learning in library school, go to this post.

I finally got the first part of my garden planted this past Monday. It seems like every time I’ve planned on planting either it’s snowed or we’ve had to take a trip up to Salt Lake City. I planted something like eight pea seeds and ten spinach seeds. I’m hoping that as the peas come up they’ll shade the spinach since I got it planted so late. We’ll see how it goes.

Wednesday there was an “epic announcement” from Provo’s Mayor, John Curtis. Provo, Utah will be the third city nationwide to get Google Fiber! If you don’t know what that is, it’s super fast internet through fiber optic cables. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this! Basic broadband with 5mbs will be free for at least the first seven years with a onetime installation fee of $30 (I sound like an ad). They’re planning on starting to put it in homes before the end of the current year. I’m sooo happy we’re still living in Provo!

As Ezra mentioned last week, we’ve started using MyFitnessPal (I’m about to sound like an ad again). There is a phone app that we use, but it’s also available online. I hate calorie counting. I hate it hate it hate it, but this app makes it super easy. You give the app some information about yourself and your goals, and then it gives you a daily calorie budget. Food you eat takes calories out of the budget, and exercise is like a deposit, putting calories back into your budget. Yes, this is calorie counting, but the app makes it super easy. For packaged foods you just scan the barcode and tell the app how many servings you had, and then it adjusts your budget for you. For homemade foods you enter in the ingredients, tell the app how many servings are in the final product, and it does all of the math for you. Oh, did I mention that it also calculates nutritional information? Yeah, it’s a pretty awesome app and it’s made us a lot more aware of what we eat.

What my summary looked like at the end of the day on Thursday.

The only thing I've entered so far today is my breakfast.

My nutritional information summary at the end of the day Friday.

It’s also given us motivation to work out a bit more often. There is a trail right next to our house that we’ve been hiking on, and the other day we took a walk through our neighborhood, just so we could burn a few extra calories so that we could have a bit of extra chocolate.

We were excited to pass an intersection of streets with the names of our home states.

To end this past week, we finally got a calling in our new church ward! We will be Primary teachers, teaching the four-year-olds at church. In our church, Primary is where children go after Sacrament Meeting. They have gospel lessons and activities appropriate to their age group. I’ve never attended Primary because I joined the LDS church when I was eighteen, and Ezra’s family wasn’t very active in the church when he was younger, so Primary will be new to both of us. We’re really excited and have already started planning out how we will present next week’s lesson. It’s going to be great!

Breathing Room?

Well, I am now done with my portfolio submission to Nickelodeon Animation Studios' Nick Artist Program.  It is a summer internship that I am excited about.  I don't think that I will get it this year, but I loved the challenge of getting a portfolio ready.  I also have entered finals and have been busy with those, but I am not stressing out about them this time around I just have one more on Friday.

We have been up to Salt Lake 3 weeks in a row now and may end up there sooner than later. The Grandparents came into town on a trip through Utah, sightseeing, and on through to California.  It was unexpected, but welcomed.  I enjoyed seeing them since I usually only see them on holidays maybe twice a year.

Allison is still doing amazing in her classes and we are both super excited about a new app we have started using, MyFitnessPal, you can enter in what you are eating and it shows how many calories you are eating, plus other nutritional facts as well as your workouts and how many (presumably) you are burning. We'll keep you posted on how well it works. 

We were sorry to hear about the tragedy that occurred at the Boston Marathon on Monday.  Our prayers go out to those effected in the aftermath of this sad event.  We have some friends that run marathons and they were our first thought, luckily they are training for another event that they are going to next week in Virginia.  Hopefully they will figure out the exact reason and who did this soon.

Healty and back to busy.

We’re both feeling a lot better this week. Woohoo! Good thing too because it’s been a busy week, though not overwhelming.

On Monday we had our All-Staff Training at the library. In other words, the library was closed to patrons but we still had to come in. We really enjoyed it though, especially since Café Rio catered our lunch. We learned some great things, heard from Provo’s mayor, and had a police presentation about active shooters in the workplace. We watched this video which was pretty powerful. This was the second time I’ve seen it and I got pretty emotional both times. It’s not gory or anything, but it’s powerful in such a way that reminds you this could happen anywhere. It’s scary to think that you could go to work one day and because of one person you might not make it home to your family, or your family might not make it home to you. That’s why I get emotional.

On Wednesday we went to another taping of Studio C. So far we’ve made it to every 9:30pm taping that they’ve had, and we’re signed up for another one this coming Saturday. I always get super excited; Studio C is such a blast! A recurring character they have this season is Ann the librarian… as a librarian I find it hilarious because no one at Provo Library is like Ann. Thank goodness otherwise we might scare all of our patrons away!

I took my car in to get fixed on Thursday. They installed the part and when I left it still didn’t feel quite right. I tested it using the ramps for the library’s underground parking and the break doesn’t hold, so I’m taking it in again tomorrow. He said he has another idea of why it might be having problems, so hopefully we’ll get it fixed and working this time.

Ezra had another quiz this week and got over 100% again. So proud! I had an article critique essay to write which I drug my feet about, but I got it done and turned in with time to spare. I was pretty happy with it so I hope my professor feels the same.

Where I usually sit and do homework at the library. It's pretty quiet first thing in the morning.

The week of continual sick, ugh

This week has been mostly about rest and relaxation.  We have remained sick and possibly got each other sick again. Allison is on the mend which hopefully means that I shortly will be too.

On the plus side Allison finished her first sewing project, an apron. Se is very excited about it and can't wait to use it.  I think she did a really great job on it. She is enjoying sewing, there were a few cases of frustration that arose but it was the sewing machines fault, mostly.

Ezra modeling the almost finished apron.

All done!

My mom spoke in Church today and that took us up to Salt Lake.  We had a great dinner and I got some of my birthday presents early since I might not see them again before my birthday. Doctor Who Yahtzee.  Hehe, the cup IS the TARDIS.  We have yet to play it, but I am sure we will enjoy it.

I'm also working on a personal project, An animation based on the Russian fairy tale the Snow Maiden. Not to be confused with Disney's upcoming adaptation of the Snow Queen, Frozen. I'll start posting images and progress on my art blog.

I'm still not very good at knowing what to say in these blog posts.

NaNoWriMo

This week I’ve been sick and hacking up a lung most of the time. On Monday I woke up with a fever and felt miserable most of the day. By midafternoon I couldn’t really move from the couch, not even enough to lift my laptop up and type for NaNoWriMo. How much energy does it take to sit at a computer and type? I mean really? But I couldn’t do it. I just curled up in a ball with some chicken noodle soup.

Ezra took great care of me and made sure I had everything I needed. My fever finally broke in the early evening and I started feeling better. I ended up writing over 5,000 words that night for my NaNo and caught back up to where I should have been. I’d stopped writing regularly when we didn’t know where we were going to be living. Since my fever broke on Monday I’ve had a lingering cough and occasional stuffy nose, but that’s about it.

Along with writing news, I finished my NaNoWriMo this week! I can officially say I’m a novelist. It’s only a first draft and I know it needs a LOT of work, but it’s a novel draft and I was super excited that I accomplished that. How many people can say they’ve written a +50,000 word novel?

You can tell when the stress of finding a place to live hit, and then my word count jumped up on the day I had a fever.

Our move-in date keeps changing but as of right now we can start moving in to our new place this coming Saturday, the 8th. We have until the 19th to move out and clean this place, so there’s no major rush to get everything done in one day. Everyone keeps asking if we need anything, and the only thing we really need that we can’t take care of ourselves is a truck. Some of our furniture simply won’t fit in my car. At church yesterday we had a lot of people mention that they have connections to someone with a truck, so I think we may have that problem solved. We’re so grateful to everyone who is so willing to help!

Thanksgiving and a new home

This week, as opposed to others as of late has been rather eventful.  We found out that one of the other apartments in out building has black mold and a mushroom growing off of the wall... yes a MUSHROOM!!  needles to say, we want to move.  We spent a few days looking for a new place and finally found one.  We call it our greatest Black Friday deal.  2 bedrooms, washer and dryer, covered parking, a landlord that has chickens which means we get eggs, she also owns a horse, oh and it comes with a microwave... Allison is happy.  the only downside is the distance, but I think I'm going to love being able to ride my bike more and more often.  I just need to fix it up a bit.  Oh and did we mention 2 (two) bedrooms?

We were also able to spend Thanksgiving with my sister and her family up in Salt Lake. It was great, but my nephew was sick , and now Allison isn't feeling great at all. I am okay-ish. We didn't really get much shopping in, but maybe we'll try our hand at Cyber Monday this year.