First Wedding Anniversary

Earlier this month, Jeff and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary. We spent the Friday before (July 31st) at Johnson's Mill, the bed and breakfast in Midway where we spent our honeymoon. We were planning on going hiking on Saturday, but it turned out to be a pretty hot afternoon, so we just came back and relaxed at home.
This is the Mount Timpanogos room, where we stayed last year and this year.

Here's a side shot of Johnson Mill.

You can walk around on the grounds and see sights like this. There are also deer on the grounds, but I didn't get a good picture.

This is the porch where they serve you breakfast in the morning.

As gifts, Jeff and I gave each other pictures. Jeff painted a picture of the Bountiful Temple. It is pictured below - I apologize that my computer chose to rotate it. Isn't he amazingly talented?

I hired Jill Buckmiller, the art teacher at La Europa, to draw the picture below. It is based on a photograph (also below) taken at our wedding that Jeff and I both love. But, as you can see in the photograph, there were several things in the background that detracted from the picture. So I thought it would be cool to have the picture drawn of just us. It turned out really well.

All in all, it was a wonderful first anniversary, just like it's been a wonderful first year.

Catch-Up

Well, the official summer is coming to a close, and I realized that we haven't really blogged about what we've been up to lately. So this will be a hodgepodge catch-up post.

The summer term at La Europa went pretty well for me. I got to teach my NUMB3RS class again, which was my favorite. The Da Vinci Code class that I team taught with the English teacher Kelli also went well. It was fun teaching the girls about different kinds of codes. For their final project, we sent them on a scavenger hunt throughout the school. My favorite clue that I came up with read (after it was decoded): You seek the median on the left side of the place where you can find what it means to be disliked, disgusting and dismal. Think about it for a few minutes - I'll post the solution in a comment.

For Jeff, the second half of the summer came with unique challenges at work. This was due to the fact that about 6 weeks ago he developed an odd bump on his right wrist. In addition to a sore wrist, the pain sometimes traveled up to his elbow and down to his fingertips. He went to see a physical therapist. While it helped to relieve some of the pain, the bump remained. At first, we thought that it might have been caused by over-using his mouse at work. In an attempt to relieve the pain and avoid problems in the future, he went through several different mice, tried out three new desk chairs, changed his desk, got a wrist pad, and got a new keyboard. After all that, his bump still wasn't going away, so he went to go see a doctor. He found out that he had a ganglion cyst (cause unknown - possibly an old injury from volleyball or playing the piano that was aggravated by work). So last week the doctor drained the cyst and he's wearing a splint for a few weeks to help it heal and avoid injuring it further. If it ends up coming back, he'll need to have surgery.

My brother Kenneth came home from his mission last month! I was really excited for him to meet Jeff. He was home for a few days, then went to Virginia to visit with friends for a week or two. He got back in town this past week. He'll be going to BYU this fall, and I look forward to having him close by.

In addition to my brother being back, my sister Marie is also in town this week with her two kids Evelyn and Edison. On Wednesday I went to the airport when they flew in. On Thursday Jeff and I drove down to Provo and went to a few classes at Education Week (which were awesome!) with Marie and Suzanne. On Friday we went with my mom, Marie and her kids, and my sister Suzanne and her kids to the Children's Museum (I think it's called Discovery Gateway) downtown. I had a ton of fun, and so did the kids. Then yesterday we got together for family pictures, lunch, and an afternoon session in the Provo temple. It was the first time our entire family was able to go through the temple together. And then tonight we're getting together for a dinner.

News Article about La Europa

Here is a copy of a news article that was printed in the Salt Lake Tribune about La Europa Academy, the place where I work. It doesn't talk much about the school, but I thought you guys would enjoy reading about where I work. And if you haven't checked out La Europa's website, I highly recommend it (the link is at the bottom).

Live-in school in Murray helps girls deal with issues

By Jennifer W. Sanchez
The Salt Lake Tribune
Updated: 07/22/2009 05:49:45 PM MDT

Patti tried everything -- school counselors, psychologists and hospital programs -- to help her teenage daughter, Shannon, with drug addiction and emotional problems.

Nothing worked. A counselor suggested Patti put Shannon into a long-term residential treatment center. After much research, Patti enrolled Shannon last summer in La Europa Academy in Murray -- about 400 miles from their hometown of Las Vegas.

Now, after seeing the improvements in Shannon, Patti is glad she sent Shannon to La Europa when she did.

"I can sleep at night," said Patti, who declined to use her last name. "It's wonderful; they contributed to saving my daughter's life."

La Europa administrative offices sit along a main road in Murray and the school and a residential campus are both secretly tucked among a nearby residential neighborhood.

The residential treatment and education center opened more than four years ago for girls ages 14 to 17 who deal with issues, such as depression, eating disorders and substance abuse, said Richard Long, the academy's program director.

The maximum number of students at the academy is 32; it currently has 21 -- none is a Utah resident. The average stay for treatment is about nine months. And it costs some $10,000 a month per student, Long said.

Shannon, who also declined to use her last name, said she "was totally taken [to the academy] against my will," but is now thankful her mom helped get her the needed help.

Shannon -- who started experimenting with prescription pills in the ninth grade and later used heroin and cocaine -- said she started giving the academy a chance when she noticed the counselors and staffers were a different sort from those she had dealt with in the past.

"Everyone really reaches out to you and doesn't judge you for your problems," she said. "They really try to help you live your life again."

Shannon, who graduated last month from the program, said its best parts were the supportive staff and residents; the art and recreational therapy; and volunteering in the community. She determined issues that played into her addiction and how to deal with them.

"We're in connection with the world," she said. "We're not in a lock-down facility."

The treatment program uses fine arts and recreation, from painting to yoga, to help the girls control their emotional issues, Long said. Each week, he said the girls undergo 11 hours of therapy, including individual and group.

At most, there are six students per counselor, he said.

"Everything we do has a therapeutic purpose," Long said. "We want them to learn to live life in a new way -- something they've been doing hasn't worked."

For Patti, the roughly $100,000 she paid La Europa was worth every cent.

She liked the academy's location in a metro area versus a rural community, its "beautiful campus" and the people. Patti said she's elated with Shannon's new look on life and the 24-hour care she received at the academy.

So far, Shannon said she's been clean for 14 months. She's living in the Salt Lake City area, volunteering with teens, looking for a job and plans to enroll in college next month.

"[La Europa] helped our family a lot," Patti said.

Web site » www.laeuropaacademy.com

Mixing Work With Pleasure

Recently at work, the yard surrounding the schoolhouse was becoming very overgrown and unkempt. We thought that this reflected poorly on our school and on La Europa in general, so we decided to dedicate one class period to pulling weeds.
We had the girls form into teams and compete with each other to pull the most weeds. We offered a pass to get out of P.E. (which means the girls could sleep in for one morning) and another pass to get out of 5th period as incentives. Both the girls and the teachers joined in on th weeding. Unfortunately, about half of the girls gave up halfway through and just sat around talking. It was sad, but I guess not unexpected.
What they didn't know was that we had other surprises in store for them. Did they really expect us to make them weed out in the hot sun and only reward a few?
While we were weeding, the staff was in the house next door filling 500 water balloons. The weeding ended in a huge water fight, complete with balloons, a hose, and buckets of water. It was a ton of fun. At first I stayed around the edges of the fight and just threw a few balloons. But then one of the students smashed a balloon on my head, so I chased her around and made sure I nailed her with a few balloons. I thought that was the end of it, and I started going around picking up the rubber remains of the balloons. But then this student came back with some friends and they dumped two buckets of water on my head!
Then it was war. I ran after her, determined to get her back. Almost all of the balloons were used up, so I wrestled the hose away from another girl and chased down my prey, returning the favor and getting her drenched from head to toe. It was great. The other girls were laughing and screaming and egging us on.
We also gave them popsicles after lunch, after they cleaned up the bits of rubber that were scattered all over the lawn. I think we all had a good time, and the yard looks a lot better than it did. It's fun mixing work with pleasure!

Geneology, I am Doing It!

Yes, I know that they changed the words in the Children's Hymnbook to "Family history, I am doing it," but I still like the original words.
So, I've been thinking lately about how blessed I am right now in my life. I have a great job, a wonderful husband, a lovely home, and great friends and family. I'm also blessed with a lot of free time in the evenings and on weekends. So I decided that I wanted to give something back, to find a way to serve.
One thing that came to mind was family history. I felt compelled to be more active in helping with family history. I want to combine the training I received from the Family History class I took at BYU with the time that I've been blessed with. So this past week I started indexing records on-line.
You go to FamilySearch.org (there's a link to it from the lds.org website) and there's a tab at the top of the page for Indexing Records. If you've never done it before, they have some tutorials on-line, as well as help tabs while you're doing it.
I've done this off and on in the past, and I'll warn you that it can be addicting. But that's a good thing! As I was picking it up again, I found that I was a little worried that I might index something incorrectly. Some of the handwriting is hard to read, and it can be difficult to make out what the record is saying. But you just do your best and type it as you see it - they actually have two people index every record. Then, if there are any discrepencies, a third person checks both transcriptions and the original record and determines what it should say. This relieved my worries that I would type in a name incorrectly and make it difficult for someone who is trying to find their ancestor.
After the indexing has been cross-checked and corrected (if necessary), they post the information for free on FamilySearch.org so that anyone can have access to it.
I highly encourage everyone to give indexing a try. It's very user friendly. It doesn't take a lot of time- it usally takes me about 20-30 minutes to do one record. And you don't have to sit down and do a batch all at once - you can download it to your computer and work on it when you have time.

Finishing Touches

As an addition to my previous post, I wanted to mention another small improvement that we made to our living room.

Those who lived in our condo before us had a large couch that covered the A/C unit that is sticking out of the wall. So when they painted the walls of the living room green, they didn't take much care in painting around the A/C unit (since it didn't show). This is what it looked like:

Well, when we were looking at redecorating the living room, we decided to move the piano in front of the A/C unit, because it hid it more effectively than the bookcase we were using (and it looks nicer on the center of the wall rather than in the corner). However, with the white trim around the edge of the unit, it was still noticeable.

Our solution was to paint the trim green, so that the part you could see sticking out behind the piano would blend in better with the wall and be less noticable. Fortunately, when Jeff bought our condo he asked the owners to leave behind a can paint for each wall color, so we didn't have to go out and buy any paint. Unfortunately, the original paint color doesn't match what's on the wall exactly (as you can see below), but it's close enough that it doesn't really matter.

Before (lovely paint job, huh?)

After (not quite the same color, but close enough)

Here you can see how it blends into the wall much nicer, and I can also use it as a hidden shelf for flower vases.

Living Room Facelift

Jeff and I decided that our living room was too cluttered. In addition to our couch, two ottomans, and entertainment center, we also had two video rocker chairs with nowhere to go and two bookcases taking up wall space. One bookcase was full of piano music, magazines, and games, and the second bookcase was full of DVDs. And our old entertainment center was too small to hold the subwoofer and digital audio control system (for the surround sound), so they were just sitting on the floor. Later in my post, you'll see some Before and After pictures. Unfortunately, I never did get a picture of when we had two bookcases, but they sat side by side next to the piano with the plant stand in between. And the video rocker chairs would sit in front of our porch door (unfortunately, we don't really use our porch, because our neighbors smoke).

So we decided to go shopping for a new entertainment center. We wanted something that wasn't too big - it had to fit on our 7-foot wall space between the fireplace and sliding door leading to the porch. But it needed to be big enough to fit our 40-inch TV, all of our equipment, and we also wanted to fit all of the DVDs, games, piano music, and magazines as well so that we could de-clutter.

We shopped around a bit, and finally found a solution at IKEA! It is my new favorite store. They have a wide selection, and they're quite affordable, too. We found a 6x6 foot black/brown Expedit entertainment center. The space for the TV was barely big enough, but it worked (yay!). Surrounding the space for the TV and equipment underneath are 16 boxes that are each 13x13 inches large. We customized ours by adding in a set of drawers on each side, where we put remotes, chords, manuals, and some of our smaller card games. And everything fit with room to spare!

These two pictures show how it was a tight fit getting the boxes in our car. I'm really grateful our back seat folds down to extend our trunk!

The chaos: before assembly (here you can see both of our bookshelves, but that's not where they went).

It took us about five hours to put everything together. We did it on Monday night for our Family Night. We decided to stay up and finish it all in one shot, so we were up 'til midnight. About 30 minutes of the 5 hours was spent trying to remove the base from our TV. We didn't have the right screwdriver, and it took FOREVER. And then it took a while at the end to connect all of the cables. But we got it all done! (Well, actually, I ended up assembling the drawers the next day, which took me a couple of hours.)

Here's a picture of the finished product.

(Note of interest: these square shelves really aren't made with DVD storage in mind. Our solution, which you can see on the second set of shelves, was to have a second row of DVDs behind the first that were elevated so you could still read the titles. We set the second row of DVDs up on foam blocks that we got from Jeff's work.)

These next pictures show the before and after shots of our living room, so you can see how the whole room changed.

Before: entertainment center too small, with equipment sitting on the floor.

After: everything fits!

Before: was even more cluttered with the video rockers in front of the porch door.

And this entertainment center jutted out further into the room than our new one.

After: nice and clean and organized.

Before: was even more cluttered with a second bookcase in front of the old A/C unit.

After: the piano is now the focus of this end of the room, instead of just being stuck in the corner.

The A/C unit is more effectively hidden, and the video rockers have a place to go.

All in all, we're very pleased with our new living room. And while I'm in a mood to redecorate, does anyone have any ideas on curtains for this window (color, style)?

Now our only concern is... how the heck are we going to move this piece of furniture? I REALLY don't want to take it apart and have to assemble it again... but I guess that's a worry for another day.