Labor Day, Schlabor Day!

Labor day is such a strange holiday to me, mainly because I didn't know why it was called labor day and why everyone gets a day free of work when logically you would think it was a day dedicated to working even harder. I do appreciate the day off, though, and after a little research I found that labor day is a holiday we copied from (don't tell buddy)--the Canadians. No wonder it's so weird :)Regardless, I love having a day off for labor day, and because it's one of the few days I have off from work, buddy and I decided to take our last summer trip...to the beach! And we didn't go to just any beach---we went to Florida! Can you believe it's only an 8 hour (6.5-7 hr for us) drive to Pensacola Beach, FL? And you'll never guess what we did when we first got there, but here's a little hint:

PARASAILING! It didn't actually cost as much as I thought it would, and I was so proud of buddy for actually being brave enough to come with me this time (not like the catapult ride on our honeymoon--I had to ride it by myself next to a 13-year old boy...):

The beach there was beautiful with snow-white sand and greenish-blue water. The water was warm, too, and though the waves weren't very big we still bought some boogie boards to play around with.

Buddy really wanted to find a whole sand dollar at the beach, but after searching for a couple of hours (it seemed :) ) he could only find half of one. So we built a "sand estate" instead. I dubbed it the Beazer estate, because I wasn't clever

enough to come up with anything else.

True to being in the South, everything can be fried, but this fried bologna sandwich was nothing like I'd seen in Memphis--gross!

We really enjoyed our time in

Pensacola, and I would have more cool pics of buddy to share if he hadn't deleted them all. :(

Nauvoo the Beautiful!

Last weekend we had the chance to meet up in Nauvoo with Dad and Mom Hulet who were on their way back home from Utah.  It was great seeing them again and Nauvoo was as beautiful as advertised!  We were able to attend a session at the temple  which was gorgeous on the inside and out.  Here's a picture of us in front of the temple.  It was great being able to see many homes and places where the early saints lived and spent much of their time.  It was also neat to hear the stories and testimonies that were shared by the wonderful Senior missionaries serving there.

The Hulets in front of the Joseph and Hyrum monument.  As they were being escorted to Carthage jail, Joseph told Hyrum that, "this is the loveliest place and the best people under the heavens; little do they know the trials that await them."

Resting place of Joseph and Emma. 

Another picture of the temple

The Mississippi River was beautiful up in Nauvoo-not brown and muddy like our view of it in Memphis.  On our drive coming right up on Nauvoo we were thinking that living right next to the river would be a very pretty place to be...until we heard what sounded like a thousand rain droplets on our car windshield.  We soon realized that they were little hordes of mosquitos and other bugs.   It was so gross!  It might not be worth the view to have to deal with all those mosquitos...

Something smells fishy!

     Kendall, one of my friends in our church ward, has been bugging me to go fishing with him practically since the day we met.  I hadn't been fishing since I was a boy scout which was quite a few years ago and had only been fishing a couple of times in my life.  As far as I could remember I never found fishing to be very much fun.  Finally, I caved into the peer pressure and decided to give it a whirl.  

     One of the counselors in our Bishropic took us out to his in-law's lake and it turned out to be a really fun morning.  The bass must have been hungry because they were biting like crazy!  I was there for about 45 min-1hr before I caught anything, but then after that I caught four more fairly quickly.  I had a great time and was glad Kendall never stopped prodding me to go with him. 

Kendall with one of the many bass he caught on the day!

Brother Law caught 4 or 5 bass in about an hour, and then went home...I guess it must be boring being such a good fisherman.

Kissing this fish's boo-boo better before putting him back in the lake.  Thanks for the fishing lessons/trip Kendall!

Guess who went somewhere fun?...

So, we went to Atlanta for the Fourth of July! It was great! We successfully saved money by buying six flags tickets on craigslist, shopping for our food at a grocery store (with one exception) and staying at my very gracious cousin's house (that I hadn't met before)--while they were out of town! We really appreciated their hospitality, and they were located just 15 minutes from pretty much everywhere we wanted to go down there. As an intro to our trip, I thought I'd show you one of the more entertaining street signs we saw in the neighborhood where we stayed:

Don't worry, they were really just speed bumps...

So, anyway, while we were there we had four main things to do on our agenda: Six Flags, The World of Coca-Cola, The Aquarium, and of course, the fireworks. All of them were fun, for instance, Coke world had a room where you could taste Coke flavors from all over the world (I think there were 89 or something?). These are the artistic coke bottles from around the world:

Here I am with one of the secrets of Coke: little furry kissing things that give coke a little kiss of flavor. or something. I must not have paid attention to the secret movie very well (surprise!):
After the Coke museum, we were super hungry and didn't bring our grocery food, so we went to an awesome restaurant nearby--Johnny Rocket's! It was a little 50's-ish diner with dancing waiters and juke boxes, and smiley-face ketchup (catsup?)! It was great. I even enjoyed having horseradish sauce on my burger, and buddy (of course) got a bacon cheddar burger. :)
When we were done eating, we went to, by far, the highlight of our trip! The aquarium! Who knew we'd like looking at silly little swimming fish so much? Apparently it's the biggest aquarium in the US, and it definitely was worth the money. But I didn't love it half as much as buddy did. He probably took at least 70 photos (of fish? I know--what a waste!) and you can even see how much he loves it by the look on his face in this picture. This is probably one of my favorite pics of buddy. he's just so happy :). I want to go back next year when they will have some dolphins, but the whale sharks and beluga whales were pretty sweet, too. If you'd like to see a ton of pictures of the fishes, just ask buddy :)
Six flags was fun, too, but we don't have any pictures of that, and the fireworks were awesome in the Olympic park in Atlanta, but maybe not worth waiting outside for 5 hours for. One thing I thought was pretty coincidental was that we were tract-ed out by the Jehovah's Witnesses while were were staying at my cousin's house. I told her I didn't really live in Atlanta so I couldn't make it to their end-of-the-world seminar, but I thought it was interesting to talk to her nonetheless. Maybe I liked it 'cause she kept complimenting my smile. but she probably did that just so I'd talk to her :) Ah, well. We had a good time in Atlanta, if you can't tell! I hope we can go again sometime before we leave the South for good!

I was planning to post this a little bit ago, especially since it's definitely my turn to post.  Anyway, this is an email I received from a friend of ours in the ward here.  We babysat her kids for a few hours one day, and apparently we've made some sort of impression on her daughter jayden:

Becky and Buddy,

    Tonight as I was putting Jayden to bed and asking her about her day she was very excited to tell me something.

 

J: Mom! Buddy was in primary today!

M: He was? That was pretty fun to see him there I bet huh?

J: Yeah! Mom, did you know that Buddy is my best friend?

M: Really?

J: yea, and did you know that Becky and buddy are twins?
M: Twins huh?

J: Yeah, he is the brother and she is the sister and so they are twins!

M: (thinking...what?) Actually they are husband and wife, like a mommy and a daddy.

J: Oh, Well.... can they come to my movie party?

M: (thinking... that was a weird transition) I guess we could ask them.

J: K! Send them an e-mail and invite them to my movie party!

M: You are a silly kid,  but ok.

Apparently we appear to be twins to a four year old.  Maybe because both of our names start with B?  We don't really look alike....We got a pretty good laugh from it, though. :)

This is one of my all time favorite photographs that I've come across on the web.  I can't help but laugh every time I see it (For those that aren't familiar, those sunglasses are Bono's from the band U2)!  This is just a fun little post and for my own personal amusement, family/friends who read this feel free to add a link to a favorite picture that makes you laugh in the comments section.  Can't wait to see 'em!

Our first big storm

Sorry to our friends in Memphis but this post will be old news to you.  Some of you will notice your pictures on here too as I once again had to turn to my wicked ways of blog theft(Actually I asked for permission this time). Our camera battery was dead and since the storm left us without power we couldn't recharge it.  We have some pictures that we took on our phone but I couldn't find the cord to transfer them.  I'll add those pictures later when/if I ever find the cord.   Anyways, so we had a big storm system sweep through our area a couple of weeks ago that was exciting/scary to see.  Most of the greater Memphis area was left with broken branches, uprooted trees and no power.  Our suburb seemed to have been hit particularly hard and we later found out that an F1 tornado had touched down briefly.   Becky and I however weren't able to see the full brunt of the storm because we weren't home when it happened.  I had just finished up work at the school and was waiting for Becky to finish work.  I had heard from someone that a big storm was moving in to the area so I decided that it would be a good idea to watch from the 3rd floor balcony of the school tower.  I was enjoying the wind and rain until I saw leaves and little branches flying around in the air and then I saw the metal lid of the garbage can 5 feet away from me get sucked out by the wind.  That's when I decided to go inside and watch from one of the windows.  The tornado sirens came on and they made all of the students and faculty that were still at the school at the time go to the bottom floor in an area away from all windows and doors so needless to say I didn't get to see anymore of the storm.  When we got home we realized that the power was out.  It was kind of exciting at first and we lit some candles and carried flashlights around but that wore off after about 15 minutes.  I really wanted to watch the Stanley Cup final which was being played that night.   We actually didn't get power for another 48hrs which wasn't very fun but it was a good learning experience at the same time.  We realized that we weren't really prepared for that type of emergency.  Although we had food, we had nothing to warm it up with and because of that we ate out for almost every meal except for Sunday when some of our friends with power invited us over to dinner.   So now a little propane stove is on our must have list.     
This is a tree in our apartment parking lot.  That back end of the truck that you can barely see belongs to a member of our ward who had just bought it a week earlier.  I bet he was feeling pretty lucky!

I guess the storm was just as angry as I am about the rising gas prices

This was a pretty common sight for several days after the storm