Soooo Excited!!!!

I'm so excited, for so many things right now. And the least of which is the fact that I'm finishing my last semester of my undergrad in like a week. I'm really dying to go to France with Reed. We leave in 23 days! AHHH! And I just can't contain my excitement so I had to write a quick blog about it. In fact, I'm so excited, I'm about to burst into another list blog. Oh boy.

I'm sooo excited to...

1. See the eiffel tower sparkle at night in my husband's arms
2. Jog to the local boulangerie in the morning for baguettes and pain du chocolat
3. Hear and speak the world's most beautiful language for 3 months!
4. See Christine, Thomas, Audrey, Clemence, Ines and Julien!
5. Eat cheese! (And watch Reed's face when he smells french cheeses for the first time haha)
6. Show my parents around Paris and prove to my dad that the french are not snobs and France really is as romantic as people think
7. Walk down the cobblestone roads with my nose in a book like Belle
8. See Reed have to wear a speedo and swim cap to the pool ;-)! (the french are paranoid about germs and think that's the best way to prevent them in public pools)
   
9. Work at the biggest global economics organization in the world
10. Ride bikes around Barcelona
    

Okay...I could go on forever but I won't. The point is, I can't wipe this darn smile off my face and I can't focus on any of my schoolwork because I can't stop thinking about France! Wahoo!!

A list blog. I love lists. Lists make me happy, speaking of happy...

10 things that make Reed happy (By Natali)
1. Clean houses—that weren’t cleaned by him
2. Sunday back tickles...But only as long as it doesn't actually "tickle", being tickled is not happy-making for Reed
3. Making people laugh
4. Sports—all things sportish

5. Being asked for advice
6. Religious books---especially about Joseph Smith (and with this category, I’m going to just include all things Gospel-related because that really makes him happy but could fill up all ten spots)
7. Eating all the cereal out of his Lucky Charms first and then eating all the marshmallows
8. The successes of others, especially his family. Reed rejoices in the happiness of others.
9. Sweets: ice cream, cookies, brownies, soda etc.
10. Playing games with his family


10 things that make Natali happy. And when Natali is happy, she is really happy! (by Reed)
1. France. Anything and everything about it. She daydreams about France all the time. As most of you know she was a nanny over there for a summer and she can't wait to be back there. Hopefully everything works out this summer for us to go back!

2. Flowers. Natali loves nice, pretty flowers on the kitchen table. Sorry we can't afford them more baby :(
3. Romance movies, romantic stories, just anything romantic.
4. Her Country. Natali is very passionate about her country. She teaches American heritage and loves teaching about the divine help this Nation has received through the years.
5. Making a difference for the better. She does this through American Heritage and anything else she can around BYU. She has high goals on things that she would like to see changed in the world and hopes to do this on a bigger scale in the future.
6. Warm weather! Yeah, what the heck is she doing in Utah?
7. Massages, especially foot massages.
8. Music. Nothing can affect Natali's emotions like music.
9. Dancing. This could go with music but it deserves a number all of its own. I've never seen someone dance with so much passion and she is great!

10. Food!!! I call Natali food high maitanence. She loves food. Today we got shrimp tacos from del taco and her whole day brightened. What does not make her happy is when her favorite menu item suddenly gets taken off the menu (and this has happened more than you would think!). Natali would eat out every meal if we could... but we can't so she is stuck with my baked potatoes and bbq chicken :)

Valentines Day

Reed and I had a wonderful Valentines Day. Reed is quite the romantic of course and he did not disappoint this Valentines Day (well we celebrated it on the 13th but same thing). Upon waking up in the morning and going into the bathroom I found a beautiful rose with this cute poem written by my husband attached :-).

Good Morning my love, it’s a wonderful day. It’s not the 14th but that’s okay. You’re up this morning and I’m not there But that doesn’t mean that I don’t care. To start the day off, here is a rose Because I love you from your head to your toes. A scavenger hunt? Your probably thinking “What the heck has Reed been drinking?” I’ll give you hints and show you the way. To reach the end don’t go astray. Don’t worry you won’t travel too far But maybe just once you’ll get in your car. Now the first hint, I open and close, It’s too cold in here for a rose! (The fridge)

Anyways...the scavenger hunt continued throughout the house until I had found all of the 12 long stemmed roses. Some of my favorite short poems attached were:

The”3rd member” of our family lives here. If you don’t get her out she’ll scream off your ear. (Our bird smoochie)

You put this on when you feel a little frisky. Hanging this up was very, very risky. (Haha oh yes...he bought me lingerie)

A year ago we came here to eat, To fill up our bellies with something sweet. (We went again to the french bakery for breakfast)



After a lovely french breakfast, Reed took me shopping for some new pants and new perfume :). But I made him promise to hide the pants from me until my birthday. My honey sometimes spoils me a little more than we can afford to :) haha. So for dinner, Reed decided that instead of going to one of our favorite restaurants (Melting Pot) and spending all our money he would just use our fondue pot to cook our own melting pot meal. He looked up the recipes all on his own and went shopping for everything he needed. He started us off with a cheese fondue course with veggies and french bread. Then for the main course he cooked up a really fancy broth in which we cooked some shrimp, steak and chicken. He planned to do a raspberry chocolate fondue with strawberries, shortcake and bananas but we wanted to go see a movie so we saved the chocolate fondue for Sunday's dessert.


After dinner we went to see "When in Rome" which was really cute :). Then we came home and went to sleep...well went to bed at least ;-).

Okay, Well here I begin my huge blog about my San Francisco trip and the Seismic Design Competition. First off, it was a fun trip. I didn't want to leave Natali all alone but luckily her parents were in town that weekend for at least a day so that was one night she didn't have to stay alone in the house. She was a good sport though and let me go have little fun.
So we went to San Francisco. While there we went and toured some of the sights. One day we went to the exploratorium. This is just pretty much a huge, interactive science museum.

While at the exploratorium I got stuck in a giant bubble...

... got turned into little pixels...

... saw that i have pretty much no heat in my fingers (Natali could have told you that, I'm in the middle)...

... And got a little education. (The heart looking one is like a hamster or something like that)

We also visited the Golden Gate Bridge. It was awesome to see it. It is pretty darn impressive. The whole time I was looking at the trusses and the cables thinking which ones had more tension and stuff like that. Yeah that's what Engineering has done to my brain. I get out there and I come back and half of my pictures are of the hinges and the bolts and stuff like that. Anyway, it was cool to see it.

This is one of the main cables. This thing is huge as you can see. It's interesting because it is really just a bunch of smaller wires in a casing. Hmmm, sounds like a family night lesson... everyone working together to become stronger... Anyway, again way interesting (at least I thought so).

Oh yeah, and on the side we decided to do the competition too :) Here is our Tower. We had a name for him... Mr. T and our motto was "I pitty the fool..." but that didn't really stick. Anyway, here it is with the poster. Pretty sweet eh.

Here is the team. Eight of us went. Jeremy, the guy in the red shirt did it last year all by himself and he took 2nd. He did a coupld things that most schools didn't do so this year they all did those things like testing the wood (The stiffness of balsa wood varies a LOT between pieces) so the competition stepped up their game.

Here are a few pics of the finished project. Turned out pretty well i would say so myself.

And here is a little video of us putting the whole thing together in about a minute and 30 seconds. It actually took a lot longer than that to build...

There were 22 schools there including Missouri, Nebraska, USC, UC Davis, Oregon St, and many others. There was even one from Canada! Here are a few pictures of other towers.
Missouri

Nebraska


Can't remember.

And now a video of the tower shaking. They attached an accelerometer (it measures the acceleration and how much the top moves) and from the reading we got a certain score. If a building is too stiff it will create a huge acceleration (some were getting over 4 times that of gravity) but if the building is too flexible you will get the top moving too much which is also bad the the goal was to find a good balance. So, It was ran through 3 earthquakes, 2 that were modeled after real earthquakes and the 3rd one that you can see below which was invented by some geologists just for this competition and was made to destroy everything. After the first big shake a lot of the bracing broke off. Our vertical columns were still in place so it became really flexible. You can see the bottom moving after a while but the top pretty much stays still. It was pretty funny, we didn't plan on this working like that but it worked pretty well. The only bad things is that some of our weights fell down (at the bottom).

And here is another school's Tower. I just wanted to show how fast some of the other's broke :)

So after all of this we ended up taking 6th place. Not too bad but we got docked for those weights falling (that wasn't in the rules). We were in the top 3 before they penalized us for that. Anyway, it was a great experience, I learned a lot, and it was fun. Sorry this is so long and if you got through this in one sitting I am very impressed!

Seismic Design Competition

Natali briefly mentioned that I was going to be leaving her for a few days for an engineering competition. I thought I would give everyone a little update on how that's going. We leave Wednesday evening for San Francisco. We got a couple of sponsors to donate money so we could fly out and compete in a seismic design competition. Even our 5 foot tower got a handicapped spot on the plane. Here is the gist of the competition: There are a whole bunch of rules but in a nutshell, what we are trying to do is build the best tower out of balsa wood that has the best use of floor space and best design against earthquakes. Scoring is based on design, floor space (square inches), presentation and performance against earthquakes. So we will take the tower, and they will put weights on it and put it on top of a shake table and see how it does. Here are just a few pictures of the building process and I will be sure to post pics of the competition this week. Wish us luck!

The Holidays (including Halloween ;)

I know everyone has been checking this site daily to see if the big update was up yet... and at long last I give you... Reed and Natali picture extravaganza! We have a few more that I might post that aren't here but I didn't want to wait any longer to post so here we go.

We will start with Halloween. Yes, October 31st 2009. We need to work on our blogging priorities, I know. Well we dressed up twice, once for a little get together with some friends where we were ourselves on vacation for our 30th wedding anniversary. Yes we both put on a few pounds.

Then for Halloween night Natali's sister Jaimee helped us out a little for our costumes. Since Natali and I are opposites, we thought that we would dress up as opposites. And we all know that opposites attract so we were really attractive that night ;) I was Hot/Cold and Natali was Good/Evil.

I didn't know evil could look this good!


Then after Halloween we went on our Honeymoon for Thanksgiving so you can see the previous blog for details about that.

Natali's favorite time of the year is Christmas. She started getting into the Christmas mood right after Halloween. She started playing Christmas music November 1st and she HAD to have a tree. So one day I surprised her with a tree. We actually put colored lights and bulbs on it later but here is our little tree after we set it up.


For date night we also made gingerbread houses. Being the Future Civil Engineer that I am am I planned it all out... and Natali and I went to work.

And here is the final product!

Haha, not really. That was actually a gingerbread house at the Festival of Trees that we went to. They had hundreds of donated trees, gingerbread houses, and everything else you could think of to sell as a fundraiser for the Primary Children's Hospital. It was amazing.


Here is our "Gingerbread house." It is technically a Graham Cracker house but we were porud of it and it is still standing to this day due to my structural analysis of the foundational grahams. Check out the river with the bridge!

Natali had to take pictures at the Holdman's house in Linden, Utah for the Newspaper. This house is amazing. Tons of lights all synchronized to songs. You tune in to the radio and just sit and watch this amazing light show. Check out this video as a sample. It was awesome.

Music Box Dancer 2008 - Holdman Christmas Display from Richard Holdman on Vimeo.

We traveled down to St George this year for Christmas. Natali and I just kinda bummed around for about 10 days. We would wake up late, sit around, watch a movie, eat some of Launa's great cooking, play some games, repeat. It was great. But after about ten days, they got sick of us and we came back to Provo. We did have a lovely Christmas with them and they made us very comfortable. I couldn't ask for better in-laws. For Christmas Eve we all had their traditional Christmas Eve dinner; chicken and dumb little things (dumplings as Natali called them and the name stuck). We then acted out the Christmas story and I got to play a king, a chicken, and a shepherd. Then we went to bed.

My whole life growing up I was probably the first one to wake up to go downstairs to see what Santa Claus had brought me. Even though Natali has 4 younger siblings, the youngest one being 9, I think I was still the first one up. But this year it was fun because instead of waiting to see what Santa Claus got me, I was wondering what Miss Claus had brought me. But more than that, I got to do a little Santa Clausing myself and I surprised Natali with this popcorn machine. It is great. We use it almost every day!

Well there you have it. A little update on us and hopefully the next one not too far away. It takes way too long to catch up.

Ya lots of words and no pictures...I'm a bad blogger

Journal writing and blogging both share one unfortunate problem. If you fall behind at all, your next entry has to cover so much that you don't have the time to write it, so you don't. And then you fall even farther behind and the probability that you will ever find time to catch up becomes less and less. So I'm going to try not to let this stop me from posting. I'm going to leave the catching up to Reed haha. He would like to do a big blogpost about the holidays going all the way back to Halloween so I'm gonna let him take the reigns on that one and I will stick to writing updates.

Right now, Reed and I are just getting settled into our new school schedule. I wish I could say that my last semester at BYU was going to be an easy one but unfortunately it is not looking that way. The good news is though that I no longer have to take a math class! As you know, I took French 101 here at BYU before I left to France as a nanny. Since then I haven't really been involved with the French classes. This semester I needed some credits so I signed up for French 102. I went in to speak with the professor in french to make sure he thought I could still handle the class even though it has been so long since I took 101. He said he actually thought I should be in a much upper level class so he asked me to take the placement exam. I did reluctantly even though I thought I was really going to embarrass myself. Well there are 4 levels in the placement exam: 101, 102, 201 and above 300. In order to test into the 300 level, one has to score a 403...and I scored a 636! The French department was blown away. Especially since I didn't really even do very well in French 101 haha. They said they have never had that happen. So they obviously wanted to move me up into the 300 level classes but I found out that if I took french 202 it would count as a math credit so they let me take that :). Yahoo! Reed is probably actually happier than I am about this as he was dreading living with the high-stressed miserable person I become when having to deal with numbers :)

Reed is keeping himself really busy as well. He is on this engineering team competing in some kind of tower-building competition in February. He will be leaving me for 4 days! Wah :(. I guess that sounds like a pretty pathetic complaint to people like Reed's sister who is losing her honey to the marines for a matter of months. But I'm still really dreading it. After living all summer without him I resigned myself to never having to drop him off at the airport without me ever again. Even if only for 4 days, it doesn't bring back pleasant feelings :(. But I'm proud of him and all the hard work he is putting into this and his schoolwork. He is really trying to build up his resume and it's becoming quite impressive!

We do have a little time for some hobbies though. We are having a great time with our new popcorn machine! Haha just trying to figure out the perfect recipe. We also have gotten really into cooking. Fondues, hot wings, hawaiian pork, beef brisket, new pastas etc. It's a lot of fun to make and eat but no fun to clean up...opposition in all things I suppose. However, I did get really cute apron from Reed's mom for Christmas so that at least makes me feel cute and flirty while doing the less fun work in the kitchen :).

Well I have no pictures with this post so that makes it lame but Reed will be putting up TONS of photos pretty soon to make up for my follies.