6 Months!

Happy half anniversary to us! We made it six months and still love each other - so that's good. Yesterday was officially six months but we were baby sitting and marathon training so we celebrated on Friday. We had a picnic at Manito Park and walked through the rose gardens and Japanese gardens. It was so fun. Then we used our wedding present gift card to Applebees for dessert (not a great selection of desserts there - I don't recommend the place at all, actually.) And we rented a movie from RedBox - Ironman. It was just a good day. And in the morning my sweet husband got up before I did and was back from the store with roses and donuts before I got out of bed for our real half anniversary day. I have pictures, but currently the camera is somewhere upstairs and I don't want to go get it. This is the lazy man's post today.

Grape or Cherry? Both Favorites

The past few days have been pretty awesome. Last night was our celebratory graduation dinner with the Miller family and we all enjoyed. Momma Miller, Jessi, and Jessi's brother Conrad are have all/are going to all graduate this spring, so we decided to celebrate in a big way. We all piled into the Suburban and headed out to Wolf Lodge Inn in CDA and for any of you who have never had the chance to eat there, I highly recommend it. I'm actually salivating as I relive the experience... The food was amazing, the atmosphere was very laid back and cool, the area was very pretty, and the food was amazing. I can't say that I've ever eaten a better steak, or better halibut, or better shrimp, or a better baked potato, or have ever had a bigger stomach ache. It was a great time for all and congrats again to a family of graduates! YAY FOR MY WIFE! With tummies full of yummy food, we went to bed to prepare for a long day of marathon training and garage saling at the annual LIBERTY LAKE GARAGE SALE!

Turns out that sleeping with multiple pounds of beef in your stomach is not very, well, possible. We both woke up miserable and were late for the sale. Once we got ourselves out of bed and out to Liberty Lake, the streets were already lined with crowds of people and cars. I didn't even realize that LL had that many people in it! There are tons of houses, but I rarely see people out in the neighborhoods when we're visiting the in laws. We walked around and found a few deals of our own, making our first furniture purchases as a married couple ever. It was really funny to see the different styles people tried to use while selling their merchandise. Some people had their stuff marked super high and wanted to bargain on everything while others had everything dirt cheap and were basically asking us to take stuff. We found an entertainment center that we like that was mark at $200.00 dollars, which was way too high for our frugal budget, so Jessi bravely offered him $100.00 for it. He sized us up, talked to his wife and countered with $120.00. We just walked away and as we were leaving after finding something better and cooler than that for only $35.00, we saw that hadn't sold yet and had been remarked to $90.00. Should've taken our $100... I hope that it sits in his garage till next year and no one buys it then either...

So this was probably the hottest morning of the entire year up to this point. I don't know if this is actually true because I'm usually in class or at work in the morning hours, but it was the hottest morning of MY year so far. I'm not much of a shopper to begin with; I have a phobia of spending money. However, when I'm shopping AND it's super hot out, I don't last for long. After about an hour I was shot and ready to call it a day, so after checking a few more places for tennis rackets (which we never found, bummer) we headed back to home base. Upon arriving, we discovered a snow cone oasis! One of the Miller's family friends had set up shop at the bottom of the driveway and were selling little bits of grape, strawberry, bubble gum, black cherry, and pineapple heaven. Considering the circumstances, my black cherry snow cone may have rivaled my steak from the night before for the title of most satisfying things that I've consumed in the past 24 hours. With my new found energy we loaded up and headed home to take a nap. It wasn't all that much of a boost I guess. And marathon training didn't happen today. Not only does a gut full of steak keep you from sleeping, but it also keeps you from running. But lets look on the bright side, we got some cheap, used furniture that we actually own AND a free snow cone. All in all, a delicious day.

India

Hello all. Sorry we take forever to update. First of all - good news! I'm going to graduate! I passed my scary orals exam last Thursday and just went to my last class. Now I just get to wait in the mail for my diploma and I'll be the real deal.

Second of all - we want to go to India! One of Danny's mission companions is starting a charity over there called LDS Charities to help Indian RMs start their own businesses - a mini business school, if you will. The missions in India are English speaking, so the returned missionaries come home with excellent English and people skills. They then go out and get jobs in call centers where they work 80 hours a week and therefore have very little time to serve in church leadership or to raise families in the church. So the idea is that with new business skills and micro crediting they will have the opportunity to be lucritive as well as serve and help with the growth of the church in India. We have volunteered our time to do some fundraising and then to spend a week or two doing interviewing of potential candidates for the program in August or September. In order to go over to help we need to raise between four and five thousand dollars by the end of the summer. We're very excited and we also need some good ideas of how to raise money and who to talk to. We'll keep you posted if we come up with any big events that you can come to.

Oh! And in other news: we moved. Not far - we still live in the low-income housing complex that I work at, but no longer in a studio. We now have two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room, and a kitchen. It's a huge step up from the one room we were living in.

This is called putting off homework...

I have no pictures. I have no exciting news. Just a great need to not be working on my presentation that I have to give tomorrow and have not yet started.

We had a great weekend. I intended to paint the office for work and we were both going to do homework but none of that got done. Danny and I don't get to see each other too much during the week because of school, work, internships, etc. so we bailed on almost all responsibility and just played.

Friday afternoon we went to the temple as usual and then A&W for root beer floats. And then to a fantastic pizza place downtown called Rocky Rococco's. And then we went to play lazer tag. It sounds like an expensive night, but we had coupons. And a blast. It was someone's birthday in our ward and they invited us to play lazer tag with them - we got 1st and 2nd out of the 31 players in our game and 3rd and 5th high scores for the whole day. We rock. Our code names were Samson and Delilah. And then I think it was that night we went home and watched The Secret Life of Bees and I just sobbed and sobbed. It's a great movie, but definitely a tear jerker.

Saturday morning is our long run day. I think I wrote in an earlier post that we are "in training" for a half maraton so on normal Saturday mornings we go run, and we like to go on the Centennial trail downtown instead of in the scary neighborhood where we live. However, when we do run in our scary neighborhood we have to take both our building key and our apartment key to get back in the building so we just take those two off of the keyring so we don't have to carry them all. This particular day we had driven downtown to the trail and therefore needed the car keys and not the apartment keys. We didn't realize until we had finished our run that we had the wrong keys. So we ran all the way back home and Danny got the car keys and ran back again to get the car while I took a shower. Our total mileage: Jessi 3.5 miles and Danny 5.5 miles. Turns out we're not training that hard yet.

We spent Saturday afternoon doing laundry and homework and then we went out to eat yet again. We were going out with my parents and met them at the Indian restaraunt that we were really excited to try. Danny and I got there before them and walked out after about 2 minutes. There was a terrible belly dancing show being performed by over-weight, middle aged white women. It was terrible. We tried to call my parents off to meet us somewhere else but they were determined to see the show for themselves. Once they got there it didn't take long to convince them that we go out for Mexican instead.

Sunday was great as well. Danny and I work in the nursery at church and get to play with about 20 toddlers for two hours a week. We have a blast. However, one of the leaders got released last week abandoning the two of us keep the battle front on our own. We'll be fine. Pray for us. That evening we had an ice cream party with some people from our ward and finally started making some friends from church. We mostly only know their babies.

Thanks for reading this far. I think I can start my homework now.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everyone. This is really great for us. Two posts in one week. We spent the day before Easter at Mom and Dad Olson's house having a monster egg hunt and potluck dinner with all of the family and some friends. These are some of the eggs - they're full of confetti. I've never seen a hunt like this before, you find the eggs and slam them on people's heads. It was great.
This is Danny. I write in blue. Easter at my parent's house is pretty much chaos. This year it was really toned down, only about 10 kids. As for these confetti eggs, they're what make the hunt interesting/fun for the adults. They're the only ones that the adults were allowed to pick up and with about 15 dozen of them spread throughout the yard, that means plenty of ammo.

If you look carefully, you can see about 3 pieces of confetti in Jessi's hair. This picture didn't convey the effect we'd hoped it would. But look close... really close. And use your imagination if you need to...

Easter was also my Dad's birthday and two days before Danny's birthday. So we spent Easter day at Mom and Dad Miller's house. Here is Danny with his birthday/Easter strawberry shortcake.
This was just a great moment in time for me. I was getting sung to with cake in front of me AND I'd just found the SPECIAL EASTER EGG! I had a chocolate bunny waiting for me in the other room. Wow, what an evening, and it's not even my real birthday for two more days!

What to say in a blog...

So, Danny and I started taking pictures of things we do to post on this blog...and then we stopped. And I haven't posted the ones that we've taken. So, here's an update on somethings we've been up to.

We took my little brother Conrad and his cute date, Ellen, to a Plain White T's concert at the Knitting Factory and made him a dinner (my first pot roast ever - it was massive).

Danny helped me to make Easter decorations for our apartment to replace the St. Patrick's Day ones. He wasn't thrilled but didn't hate it too much once he found out how simple they were - he even came up with his own ideas. Maybe I will post pictures of those, they're cute.

We both started a new quarter at school. I have only two more classes until my MSW! Yay! Danny started at SCC with a plan to transfer to EWU in the Fall to take any prereqs he needs for the nursing program. It's interesting with me going to school in Cheney and working downtown, and Danny going to school in Spokane Valley and working on the South Hill and only one car. I'm becomming a master of the bus system around here.

We've started training for a half marathon that we want to put together for this summer. Anyone who would like to run it with us is invited, it's going to be on the Centennial Trail...somewhere...on some day in the summer....but it's going to be great. And we're ordering t-shirts.

I won the Miller family March Madness bracket tournament! The only one in my family who didn't have a clue about any of the teams playing and the only one who scored any points in the last three rounds of the tournament. Go me! I got some of the new premium M&Ms, a can of almond roca, and a Whitman's Sampler. Mmmm. I love March Madness now.

Danny and I got called to be nursery leaders. I'm pretty sure I never posted anything about that. We have about 17 toddlers split into two rooms. It's a blast. We play with play dough, rice, sing songs, and eat snacks. Absolutely the fastest church has ever gone in my life.

Well folks, I think that's about all I've got. Pictures will be posted of something at some later date. Promise.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Here it is. Your first insight to how the Olsons live. I decided to make all green food and put up some very ugly shamrocks I cut out of construction paper. Danny was a great sport and ate all of my green food, despite being nauseated to begin with. Flu season. Poor guy.

We had green kool aid, green blueberry muffins, green scrambled eggs and not ham, but sausage and olives and cheese, and pistacio pudding for desert. I made him a fruit smoothie later on but was merciful and let it be pink.

We also listened to Irish drinking songs, courtesy of Flogging Molly, and wore fun green clothes. We also watched 'Invincible' in which Danny pointed out that the team wore green uniforms. A perfect movie for the day. He's a good sport to play along with me.