Link to buggy pics Picasa album

Buggy Build 2.0

Above is a link to the Buggy Build 2.0 picasa album. Yesterday Sam and I put in a record 13 hours and basically finished the front end. All it needs now is the steering components to be put it. It looks really awesome now and gives a perspective of how large it actually is.

Jeremy

I know what I'm doing this summer!

I found out yesterday that I got the internship at Otto and Sons in West Jordan, Utah. I am very excited. I applied for four internships and interviewed for three (the other company turned not to be able to hire an intern). After being turned down twice and having Jeremy come home to me devastated, I decided that I was much better at getting interviews than jobs and tried not to get my hopes up too high. But it worked out! I start May 4th. It is a quality assurance position, and should be a good experience this summer and hopefully help me get a "real" job someday in the future.

Family and Friends

Jeremy's birthday was last week. I got him a free gourmet burger at Red Robin and we went out to dinner, then we went to Sears where he was able to pick out some tools he wanted before coming home to eat the amazingly rich chocolate cake I made him. The balloons are Reeses Pieces eggs and the dots are M&Ms. His present from me was a new pair of Saucony running shoes :)

On Sunday my family came into town. They actually met us at church. My mom called me to find me and said they were in the building. Everyone was dressed up except for Andrew; he said he didn't believe the family would really go to church so he didn't bring clothes. He showed up in sweat pants and bright green shoes with his typical Andrew hair. The visit was really quite a fun one. My grandma drove up from St. George with three of my cousins, and my cousin Allison who goes to BYU met up with us. I was able to feed my family for lunch and EVERYONE for dinner. It was a LOT of food. Andrew, in particular, eats a lot :) I mean a LOT. We made pasta and salad for lunch and beef tostadas for dinner. Andrew ate about 8 peanut butter sandwiches, two donuts, some cake, and I'm sure more in addition to that. I was amazed that we were able to fit 12 people into our apartment and have enough seating and food for everyone, especially with four teenage boys. Below are some pictures of the experience, including one in particular of Andrew's crazy hair.

During the trip, Austin was able to get all of the clothes he needed for his mission. He goes into the MTC on Tuesday the 25th to learn Spanish and eventually end up in the Leon, Mexico mission. Andrew bought a long board from a pawn shop. We were all able to go out to dinner for Jeremy and my birthday, and we were able to spend quite a bit of time together. I spent a lot of time trying to get ahead on homework so that I actually could spend time with my family, and I think I did a pretty good job. Now I have some grading to catch up on.

I applied for three internships this week. Hopefully I'll be able to get one of them. Two are at Welfare Square in Salt Lake, and one is an internship for Nestle Stouffers in Springville. I would prefer Springville simply to avoid having to drive to Salt Lake. Also, there is a deal in my public speaking class where if we write an editorial and get it published in the Daily Universe, we don't have to take the final for the course. I submitted one on Wednesday evening and it showed up in the paper Friday. Yay!!! On Thursday I went to a gathering where my old roommate opened her mission call. It's still kind of strange to me that I'm turning 21 and definitely not going on a mission. Sometimes I still wonder to myself whether or not I want to go before I realize that I already made that decision. I was able to meet up with all of my roommates from last year except for one, which was really fun. She's going to New York, New York South. Bermuda is part of her mission, which is really quite neat.

Today was a beautiful day. We hiked the Y with our friends Zac and Jessica Weist. I posted some pictures for your enjoyment. Right now I am trying to make homemade Girl Scout Samoas. It is quite the process. Jeremy just finished fixing the tail light on our car. It was burned out and therefore our right blinker was going double time. Quite annoying. I guess that's about it. Look for another post in a few months ;)

Valentines Day

Tulips for me from Jeremy

Roses from Jeremy's Mom

Cookies from my Mom

Three bouquets on our kitchen table (and our 100-year-old fern)

Jeremy and my gifts to him

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!!!

Winter Break

It's officially winter break for me. I went a little crazy and took all four of my finals yesterday. Actually, I had finished three of them by 10:30 in the morning and then took the last one at 6:00 at night. They all went well despite the rush, though, so that's good. Jeremy won't finish until Thursday night. Friday we'll hopefully leave for Moscow!!! We're planning on driving almost halfway there and staying the night in Mountain Home with my friend Suzanne Burnett, then arriving at our destination on Saturday. I wish we could leave now. I spent my first day with nothing to do being utterly lonely and bored while Jeremy went to work. I work tomorrow and Thursday (and possibly Friday morning) but didn't sign up to work today because I didn't think I'd be done with my finals.

It snowed like crazy this morning and then began to melt off about halfway through the day. I drove to the BYU gym to work out and the roads were SO slick! I was going about 15 mph and was still sliding all over the place.

We had a beautiful sunset not too long ago. I took a picture (as you can see), but as I am not much of a photographer you'll have to believe me that it looked way better in real life. Anyway, that's about all we have going on. I cleaned a lot today which makes me feel better about the house. The only thing I didn't do was organize the bookshelf we threw all of our school stuff on this semester. That corner of the room is getting quite crowded as buggy parts come in for Jeremy. We have seatbelts, random metal objects and two very large plastic seats sitting over there in the corner of our SUPER huge apartment.

I'm super excited to go home for Christmas though. Jeremy gets to be with me too this year, which also makes me very happy. Happy Holidays!

Its getting dark and cold.

It has been a while since our last post. Alexandria tells me that its my turn. Its been pretty busy here. School is going well despite several projects and assignments. It feels like we have life pretty well managed right now. In the chronological order of events, lets review the past few weeks. On the weekend of the 25 of October we went to California for my sister's wedding. The weather was nice and it felt good to run in shorts and t-shirts. It was a quick but enjoyable trip and the wedding went very well. I am assuming that Rebecca is very happy as I have not heard otherwise as well as the fact that she seemed very happy about the entire process. Quite giddy frankly, which honestly is expected because being married is wonderful. Even with all the pressures of school and work being married now is even better than it was a few months ago. On Sunday it will have been six months that we have been married.

One very exciting thing is that our Grandpa, much thanks to him, brought the broken buggy back to Utah. Sam and I also harvested our tools and brought those back as well. Unfortunately for my parents, most of the good tools were ours. Since then I've been taking measurements and starting on what I can. The front hubs and rotor are set up now after working them on the lathe at work a bit. This also allowed me to get more CAD drawings done. Hopefully soon we can pickup the steel we need and start on the meat of the project. We still have some parts to order but we have almost everything we need to get started.

Next in the order of events was Halloween. We went to a party thrown by some neighbors in our ward. It was really fun and we had a good time. We also went to a not-so-haunted house (I'm not making that up, that is actually what they called it) on campus sponsored by the Civil Engineering department. It was lame in a way only civil engineers can imagine. Afterward, we dropped in on a party by one of Alexandria's coworkers. It was a fun weekend. During the day at school I just wore my work clothes, not really as a costume, but just because I was going to meet Alexandria for lunch at her work and then go straight to mine. For the party I dressed up as a can of tomatoes. Alexandria dressed up as a very cute consistometer, an instrument she uses at work to test the consistency of viscous liquids and suspensions in food products. Her coworkers found it hilariously, while the lay person didn't quite understand, but we won a prize for originality anyway.

Next, came election day. I had already voted two weeks prior by permanent CA voter-by-mail. Obama won and Prop 8 passed by a narrow margin. The protests are still going on. Hopefully, it remains in effect.

It snowed for the first time last week. Not much though. I took a color test online and got a perfect score. Austin, Alexandria's brother is coming to stay with us for a week on thursday. An older lady from Moscow is coming to Utah for a wedding and wanted a second driver. As he is not in school and Moscow's landscaping business has closed its doors for the winter, Austin became the best candidate for the adventure. Its been fun thinking of ways to entertain him while we're at school and work. It should be nice to have him visit. In just a week or two Thanksgiving is here. My parents are coming out. We are all going to go to Coldplay's Viva la Vida concert tour in Salt Lake the saturday before. I am looking forward to having a few days off school and work.

Work is going very well. I like it a lot. I wouldn't choose to do it as a career, but I wouldn't want to do anything else to put myself through school. Its also nice to have a skill that I can fall back on. For this reason Ross is trying to find someone who can certify me. That way, when I apply for a job later in life I can say, I have a B.S. in this, an M.D. from here, and oh yeah...I'm also 4G (all positions, unlimited thickness) certified on E7018 rod. Not that this means anything to a prospective employer, but I think its cool.

And because pictures never look right while I am typing this here they all are.

Crabs

Today Jeremy and I got to try fresh raw King Crab for the first time. It tasted like drinking the ocean. Not fishy, but literally like eating a salt-water flavored slug. I didn't like it at all, but that could be because I hate seafood. Jeremy thought it was okay. However, with the product being valued at $75/pound neither of us thought we would be willing to buy it. Why did we eat it then?

I am taking a class called Food Microbiology this semester where we are required to do a project with our lab partners--conducting a literature search, carrying out original research, documenting it, and writing a report on it. There is a company based out of New Orleans (but having facilities throughout the United States) which became the first company in America to use high pressure processing on fresh raw seafood products. The high pressure kills the oysters (or other seafood products) without adding any heat, and therefore they are raw rather than cooked. Typically oysters are kept alive until they are cooked and eaten to ensure that they are fresh. Apparently you can tell that an oyster has gone bad if its shell begins to open. When they first did the process on the oysters they thought they might have ruined them all because all of the shells opened. However, they found that this was not the case; the pressure had merely released all of the oysters so that they slid right out of their shells--reducing the trouble it took to shuck them. They can be kept on ice or refrigerated for a shelf life of 2 weeks or longer.

Last year a group did a project testing the shelf life of the same processing method using lobster. It was successful. My lab partner, Mike, and I are testing how well it works with King Crab. They are expecting a shelf life of 21-30 days. If they can get a shelf life that long it really is a big deal. Typically king crab is caught, cooked, frozen and then cooked again before finally being served at the restaurant. After this much mutilation its taste hardly resembles the real product. Think of doing that to a steak...you wouldn't. The crab actually comes from ships featured on "The Deadliest Catch" if you are familiar with that show.

Our plan is to plate the samples on various media using various dilutions every other day for 16 days to test how long the product lasts. We will also do sensory tests such as smell, flavor and texture. We are using Petrifilms to test for coliforms (with a special indicator for e. coli) and to do an aerobic plate count, and have made up special differential agar to test for lactic acid producing bacteria...in case any of you happen to know/care what all of that means.

The man in charge of the company flew from New Orleans to Seattle yesterday. They processed the crab, and he flew in this morning to bring it to us, meet us, and take us out to lunch. It was really quite fun. He is a wonderfully nice guy. He talked about what the project meant to the company and let us smell and try the crab to show us what it was supposed to taste like. Jeremy came with us, and he took us to a place he had been going to eat since he first came to college at BYU in 1993. It was a sushi bar in downtown Provo. He brought about a pound of crab to the owner of the restaurant, who was very good friends with him and told him that the 100 oysters he sent her last year were the best oyster she'd ever tasted in her life. Neither Jeremy nor I had ever had sushi before. He loved it; I didn't, but the non-seafoody food was good. We really enjoyed the whole experience.

I had to rush home after plating the samples because my English group is doing a set-of-instructions project on how to make a Pumpkin Cake for Halloween. I thought I would share a picture. It's really quite neat. Also, I cut my hair, as you can see in the picture at the beginning of the blog.