Great News about France

I'm just so excited about this I had to share it! Reed and I have just been given a grant which will cover our plane tickets entirely plus some extra! WAHOO!! This is really big news because we already had a scholarship covering my tuition...then the OECD said they will pay me enough to cover all my train transportation to Paris AND we do not have to pay for rent or food. So basically, the only the we will be paying for over there is anything we WANT to pay for. We are so excited and we feel really grateful to know the Lord is looking out for us. Money was really our biggest concern about going to Paris but now everything has worked out for the best, it's even cheaper than living in Provo! :-). We are getting all packed up now and almost ready to go! Our next post will be from Paris! A bientot tout le monde!

Life changing discovery

Now why on Earth am I taking time out of my super busy finals week to blog about tortillas? They are THAT good. No seriously. Who even knew tortillas could taste like this? I have compared them to Cafe Rio and Rancheritos but frankly I think they are even better. You can find them at Costco. They are not pre-cooked but it really only takes a matter of seconds to cook them. My brother taught me the key to cooking them JUST right: impatience. Yes, that's right. Turn the heat on way high, let the pan heat a little and then, no matter what your premonitions tell you, flip the tortilla every 5 seconds (or 3 even) until it gets a couple dark brown spots on it. Pull it off the pan and enjoy. Oh Tortilla Land company, you are inspired. I know people always say that things are like the best invention since sliced bread...but these tortillas really are. In fact, you probably won't be eating anymore sliced bread at your house once you give these a try. Well, I would go on about this but I can't...I just can't keep talking about these tortillas, it's killing me, I need to go make another.

P.S. you can find them at Costco for sure...but I also heard they are sometimes available at Walmart

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!