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After we got Loo back from being spayed at the Humane Society, she was having a hard time not licking her wound. They said normally the puppies can't reach it, but Loo's a little bit older and bigger so she could. They told us if she had problems licking it then we should just put a T-shirt on her. We threw one on her and she totally rocked it 80's style; we had to put a ponytail holder around the bottom of the shirt to make it a little tighter around her body:

Sad little pupAll better!

A clear example of why NOT to procrastinate

Today I went to the dentist expecting the worst. Remember that cavity I thought I would need a root canal on last...oh, November? Well, I am the queen of procrastination and never got that little cavity taken care of. It never bothered me when I ate, wasn't sensitive to hot/cold, so I kind just forgot about it altogether.

Last night I was minding my own business, eating tortilla chips, when I felt something sharp with my tongue. I thought it was just a sharp chip so I swallowed, got all the food out of my mouth, and felt around for the sharp object again. It was still there! I hurried upstairs to look in the mirror and was horrified to see that part of my tooth had fallen off! Yes, that same tooth that had the "little" cavity last year. (OK, so it wasn't that little - the dentist actually said I should take care of it soon....but I didn't.) So Jared called and made an appointment for me at his uncle's dental practice to see what kind of damage was done.

I was so nervous to go in because just like last year I was almost certain I would need a root canal. But even though a good portion of my tooth was gone it still wasn't sensitive to anything so I took that as a good sign. They took an x-ray and it didn't look very promising. I told the assistant that I was really hoping I didn't need a root canal and she said, "Ummmm.... (small snicker) I'll let the dentist come take a look and he can make the call." Oh great. Root canal city here I come. Jared's cousin John was the dentist and he came in, looked at the x-ray and said it looked like a definite possibility that I'd need a root canal but he wouldn't know for sure until he started drilling out the cavity. As they were preparing to tear my tooth up, they asked me if I wanted the laughing gas and I said, "sure" so they put the mask thing on me and discovered that the tank was empty. The hygienist said she'd be right back with a different one but never came back. Bummer! I really wanted that gas. Oh well, next time. I just sat back and watched "The Prestige" on the TV mounted in the ceiling trying to ignore the drill vibrations rattling my brain. He drilled out the cavity and filled the tooth. Turns out it actually hadn't gotten to the nerve - another week or so and it would've been toast. It's probably a good thing my tooth disintegrated when it did. After they finished, I went back to work with half my face numb and had a really hard time saying my "p's" and "m's". I probably looked like I had had a stroke whenever I tried to talk or drink out of my water bottle.

In other news, Loo is getting spayed today at the Humane Society. Jared took her in this morning and he said the second they walked into the waiting room, she had her tail between her legs and kept jumping on him as if to say, "Don't leave me here!" She got all of her shots there, so I don't think she's very fond of that place. We get to pick her up later this afternoon and pump her full of pain meds. Poor little Louie. Get well soon.

Too bad I didn't have my nifty tool pouch on me

When I was at BYU I worked in the I.T. department for a little over two years, from my sophomore year until I graduated. Our department ran all of the cables for internet and phone all over campus and did all of the installation, upkeep, repair, etc. It was a job that I really liked even though I had to be at work at 7:30 AM (I am NOT a morning person) and crawl in dirty ceilings all day. Everyone was always surprised that girls could do what we did; we got comments about that all the time. In fact in my first interview, my boss made a comment about how the department was predominantly male and asked how I felt about it, like would I be OK in that kind of environment. I said, "I grew up with three older brothers. I think I can handle it."

It was a great place to work and we were always involved in all sorts of shenanigans and hijinks around campus. We also did work on the side, too. Here are a few of my favorite memories:

• Climbing into the manholes around campus to pump out gross, stinky, standing water that was getting close to our cables. That was not a very fun project. We had to wear thigh-high rubber boots.
• Setting off the fire alarms in the library with the dust we made from drilling, causing the whole building to evacuate.
• One of or work vans had a faulty passenger side window. Whenever you'd try to roll it down, it would make a really loud machine gun sounds. So we'd drive around campus and the dorms, holding the button down, and yelling, scaring all of the nearby pedestrians. Maybe you had to be there for this to be funny, but believe me, it was hilarious.
• Doing cut-overs at 2 in the morning to switch out old equipment for new equipment. It was really fun wandering the empty buildings late at night.
• Getting up on the library roof and seeing all of campus from way up high.
• Being the I.T. support at the football and basketball games. One time I was walking with my co-worker around the bottom floor of the Marriott Center where the locker rooms are, and we passed an older man in a nice suit. He smiled at us and exchanged "hello's" with my co-worker. I thought he looked really familiar but couldn't put my finger on who he was. It was Cecil Samuelson.
• Going to the Malt Shoppe on our breaks for buy one, get one free shakes.
• Crashing two work vehicles. People only knew about one of them...hehe. I'm a terrific driver.

Despite all the fun we had, I really learned a lot while working there. And last night, I got to put my old techie skills to good use. We're turning all of the phone jacks in our house to internet jacks so we can have a hardwired connection in each room instead of relyin gon the wireless router that can barely spit out a signal and cuts our internet speed in half. We bought all of the parts and got to work re-terminating the jacks and putting some RJ45 connectors on the other end of the cables in the basement to plug into the router. (like all those technical words?) It brought back a lot of good memories. It was actually really fun trying to remember how to do everything and showing Jared how to do it. It's not very often that I get to actually teach him stuff.

Halloween '09

This year we spent Halloween up in Island Park, Idaho at our friend Marcus' family cabin. It was such a relaxing weekend and just what we needed: lots of hot chocolate, doing puzzles, playing Halo, scary movies, and lounging in our PJ's all weekend. No work, no unpacking, no interruptions. And of course there was lots of cuddling by the fire.
As we were driving up there, it was snowing pretty hard so it took us about an hour longer than it should have. We didn't get there until about 2:00am Friday morning. It was pretty hard to see where we were driving because there's no street lamps and when we'd put our brights on, the snow made it look like we were going warp speed. Kinda nerve racking, but we made it in one piece.

Loo absolutely loved playing in the snow and went crazy trying sniff every tree, pine cone, rock, anything she could get her nose on.

Tasmanian Devil

A couple days ago we bought Loo a Halloween chew toy from Walmart. I didn't get a 'before' picture, but it looked basically like this guy here:Although except for wings, her toy had a rope loop on each side. Within 20 minutes - no exaggeration - this is what it looked like:
Best $5 we've ever spent. That's stuffing all around her and she completely unraveled one of the ropes. Sturdy manufacturing! We've gotten her a chew toy from Walmart before and it lasted a good 2 months before she got to the stuffing. Luckily she's only destructo-dog when it comes to her toys. For the most part she leaves our stuff alone...except for a sock every now and then.

Here are a couple more pictures to showcase what she does most while she's not demolishing her toys.

Searching for food:
And cuddling:

Hopefully the last move for a while

Once again, I've been too lazy/busy to post anything on our poor neglected blog. But we have big news to share that's finally blog worthy.....we bought a townhouse! On October 13 (the day before Jared's birthday) we closed on a townhouse on 7200 South near Fort Union. We had to be out of our apartment by the end of September and we weren't quite through the buying process so we moved in with Jared's parents for a couple weeks until we could move into the new place.

We're still in the process of unpacking & decorating so I'll only put up a few pictures for now. Over the weekend we did some painting; we painted our master and started to paint one of the guest rooms but we're not quite done with that one yet. Here are some before and after pictures of the master:
And here's our front room/kitchen/dining area:Jared stayed up until 4:30 in the morning yesterday installing under-cabinet lighting in the kitchen. Once he gets into a rhythm, he won't stop until he's done, even if that means only getting 3 hours of sleep.

We've got quite a few more projects and decorating ideas milling around in my head. Hopefully I can get around to posting more pictures once everything is put together. I might need some more gentle nudging from my mom :)

We've been M.I.A. from the blogging world for a while now, and it's high time that I start up again. So...here I am! Here is a long list of the things we've been doing since the last time I posted:

• Went on a family vacation to Lava Hot Springs, ID with Jared's family. This was the weekend after we found little Loo. We rented a house near Lava and went swimming at the Olympic-sized pool with lots of water slides, made smores in the backyard, played volleyball, sat in the hot springs, and went on a mini-family history tour around that area.
• Went to the driving range with Nate & Eryn
• Bought mountain bikes and broke them in with lots of rides in the mountains

• Watched the 4th of July fireworks up near the Draper temple. We could see about 10 groups of fireworks...it was awesome
• Went 4-wheeling in American Fork canyon with Wray, Chloe, and Loo.
• Went to the Walker Family Reunion (my mom's side of the family) in Denver, CO. It was fun to see my family again without the stress of a wedding!
• Went to a couple REAL Salt Lake soccer games
• Went boating on Utah Lake and got eaten alive by those pesky mosquitoes

• Gave Loo Loo peanut butter for the first time...so entertaining. She had some digestive issues the next day so maybe we'll limit it to a little at a time.

• Oh! and last but not least, a trip to the E.R. this morning (see the next post)
  

I'm going to try to keep up on this posting thing...

Who Doesn't Love a Trip to the E.R.?

So Jared had a bit of a rough day today. He was playing soccer this morning and went up for a header at the same time as a guy on the other team. They collided heads; Jared hit the other guy's head with his face right above his left eye and split the skin open. He didn't get knocked out, which was a good sign that he didn't have a concussion but the cut was about an inch long and was bleeding a lot. Jared said he was on the verge of passing out when he put his hand up to his head, pulled it down, and saw that it was covered with blood. His friends acted quickly and put an extra soccer sock around his head and wrapped it tightly with sports tape to keep pressure on the wound. They drove him over to the E.R. to get it looked at and called me to tell me what happened. Luckily I wasn't at the game, otherwise I would have made matters worse by freaking out about how bad it was bleeding. I met them over at the E.R. and this is what I saw:

(Nice blood-stained clothes...)I have pictures of the cut before they stitched him up, but I won't post them because they're gross.

I thought that I'd be fine watching the nurses and doctors work on him, but as I was watching the nurse numb his face I started feeling dizzy so I sat down. She said my face was really pale and told me to put my head between my legs while the other nurse went to get me some juice. The cut wasn't deep enough to see the bone, but seeing the fatty tissue was icky enough for me.

He ended up getting 7 bright blue stitches:

And is now relaxing on the couch with the TV remote:

The swelling has gone done quite a bit from what it was a couple hours ago. They said he'll need to keep the stitches in for 4-5 days. And in the meantime, he has another soccer game on Tuesday - oh joy!

Little Loo Loo

After only two months of marriage, we’ve decided to expand our little family. Not with a baby (no pregnancy announcements on this blog…no sir), but with a PUPPY!

Meet the newest Horton:

Loo Loo (or just Loo)

She’s actually the one that found us late last Thursday night. Jared was going out to run to his office around 11:30 pm to pick up something he left there. Right before he was going to leave, we heard some scratching at the front door. We didn’t think anything of it since we couldn’t see anything out the peephole in the door. About a minute after Jared left, he opened the door and was backing in, crouched, with his hand out like he was trying to lure something inside. Then I saw little Loo, sitting outside, shaking and scared with her tail between her legs. We brought her inside and gave her some water and a little piece of bread.

The night we found her

She didn’t have a tag on her collar saying what her name was or who she belonged to so we weren’t sure where she came from. We decided to post a couple flyers around the neighboring apartment buildings saying we found a puppy and to call us to claim her. We were going to Idaho for the weekend, so Jared’s friend Brandon agreed to be the puppysitter.

All weekend, and no calls for little Loo.

We decided that if no one claimed her, we were going to keep her instead of taking her to the humane society. I’ve wanted a dog my entire life, so how perfect was this that she just fell into our laps?

Well, Monday afternoon I was taking her for a little walk over to the mailboxes during lunch. All of a sudden I hear:

“Hey! Did you find that dog?”

My heart sank. I had grown attached to our little Loo and figured if no one had claimed her after 4 days, she was going to be ours.

“Yeah, we did. She was outside our apartment on Thursday night. We posted up flyers, but no one called…”

“Oh my gosh, that’s our dog. I’m so glad somebody found her!”

I was getting ready to just hand over the leash and walk away. But, this lady was so happy that someone had found her and given her a home, that she said we could keep her! She said she looked really happy and healthy and she insisted that we keep little Loo (which her real name was ‘Tila’…as in ‘Tila Tequila’…hmmm we’ll stick with Loo). We also found out that she’s half hound, half boxer and she’s about 9-10 weeks old. She hasn’t gotten her shots yet, so we’re going to go do that this Saturday.

She is such a sweet, well-behaved puppy and she loves to cuddle and sit in our laps to take naps. She also gets the hiccups a lot which is just adorable. And, as an added bonus to all of this, she’s almost housebroken! She has only had a couple accidents in our house (none of them have been number two, thank goodness) but she’s learning very quickly where it’s OK and not OK to go potty.

We love our little Loo Loo!