Belated Christmas Gift

I posted before about how our Christmas was really great and we were so blessed. But we did have one not-so-fun thing happen on Christmas Day.

This:
A 16 year old girl ran into our parked Jeep in front of Brian's parent's house. She then proceeded to swerve and end up in their yard. Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt. She was fine, and we weren't even in the car. No, it wasn't snowing, it wasn't icy, and the road was straight. She had just received an Ipod adapter for her car and was trying to learn how to use it, while driving! So stupid.

This is my Jeep:

The left wheel and rim are totally crunched and the axle got pushed forward. You can't see but she pushed the front of our car up onto the curb.

But this is her car:

Not so good. I would say we got the better deal as there seemed to be less damage at first sight, but my Jeep was a 1994. Not worth enough to repair. But it was the most reliable of our vehicles. I've had it for 6 years and had hardly any problems. Sure the air conditioning didn't work anymore, but it's 15 years old! I drove it to and from work every day and it made multiple trips to and from Logan with no problems. I loved my Jeep.

Funny thing is, we didn't even hear anything. The girl's brother came up to the door to let us know what had happened. Then we got to have the fun experience of calling the police and dealing with this girl's half-drunk father (at 2:00 in the afternoon). But we finally got it sorted out and the policeman was very nice and helpful, at least to us. (They almost had to arrest the father because he was arguing with the officer.)

We continued on with our Christmas activities but it was weird to just clean out the Jeep and walk away.

Fortunately, the insurance company we worked with (GEICO) was extremely efficient and helpful. They offered us a little bit more than I thought we would get so that was nice. And last week when we got back from St. George, we were able to go car shopping and find my new car!

A 2004 Subaru Outback:

Brian had put the idea for this car in my head a few months ago, and we were thinking of buying on in a year or two when Brian's done with school, but this even pushed everything up. Because of the insurance money and a nice bonus from my work, we were able to get this wonderful car. I totally love it! Brian loves it too and keeps trying to think of excuses so he can drive it. :)

So this was my late Christmas present this year. Not what I had asked for or expected, but much appreciated nonetheless.

Our Long Weekend

Well we started off the weekend going to dinner with my parents and brother Friday night. My mom also informed me that Nat and her husband got 5 tickets to the Draper Temple Open House for Feb. 20th, so they're coming up from St. George that weekend, and we get to go with them. And Phil. :) I'm excited.

Saturday we had the fun opportunity to take our car into the shop once again. Yes, the very same car that we had to get a whole new engine for this last summer. The "check engine" light came on about a week before but he doesn't drive the car that much and didn't have time to take it in until this weekend. So we drove out to the mechanic that replaced the engine (on 27th S. & 27th W.) and he did a couple tests. I had also driven because we didn't know if we'd need to leave the car there. He finally reset the light and said it was the Catalytic Converter, and that the whole problem may be that it's just too cold, so it doesn't think it's working properly. I don't understand completely, but owell. He said drive it a few more days, if it turns on again we need to bring it back in for some more tests.

Shortly after getting home and then leaving again to go to the store, it turned on again.

The mechanic said it should be OK to drive as long as the light is not flashing. If it starts flashing we are to pull over immediately and get out of the car. How reassuring. I'm getting kind of sick of all the problems we've had with this car. My Jeep is older and sounds like it's falling apart and the only problem we've had with this is something to do with a belt and we fixed that ourselves. (Well my father-in-law did, for which I'm eternally grateful.) But I don't want to sell it because we still have a lot to pay off on it and I don't know if we'd get any profit on it. We'll figure it out though.

The one good thing on Saturday though was that Brian got a call from work saying he didn't have to come in. It's a bike shop. It's winter. They have 1 customer per 2 hours. So that was nice for us.

After taking the car in we went to help our friends Matt & Val move into their new/first home. Well, the car stuff took so long that we missed the moving part, but we did get a tour of their new house and then went to lunch with them at Zupa's. If you haven't been there, you should go. I love it!

Then we went home and did some grocery shopping and then Brian had to go into school to do Bishopric stuff and I did laundry. Exciting I know.

Sunday was my first time teaching for this year. I was pretty excited all week long because the lesson was about Joseph Smith and the First Vision. But then of course, come Sacrament Meeting, I was a nervous wreck. But I think the lesson went well. I had lots of comments from people and I love that! Then I know that I'm at least getting through to someone.

After church we went over to some friends' apartment and played games with them and another couple. We had a blast! I love to just get out of our apartment, and especially to hang out with other couples. I always want to invite people over, but I feel like our place isn't big enough for more than one other couple. I guess no one's is. :) But it was fun nonetheless.

Oh, I also got a book recommendation for Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. I've already reserved it at the library & I'm going to get it tonight. Anyone else read this? Any thoughts?

Yesterday, even though it was a day off from school and work, Brian still had to go into school for most of the day. I thought it would only be a few hours, but I forget how much they have to do sometimes, & Brian likes to stay ahead of things so he doesn't get more stressed later. So I spent most of the day folding laundry and watching Gilmore Girls, and cross-stitching. I know, I'm lazy. But I enjoyed my day off from work.

When Brian got home we did our Wii Fit workout. We haven't been perfect at it, but we've done pretty good. I'm not as sore afterwards as I used to be, so I count that as progress. :) I've also been able to up the reps on certain exercises so I think that counts for something too.

Then we went to Training Table for dinner. I know, all that hard work down the drain because of Ranch Burgers and Cheese Fries. They're too hard to resist though. :)

Then we came home, watched one TV show & went to bed. Ahh, the exciting life of the Glads.

This morning, Brian didn't have his first class, because the teacher believes that Inauguration Day should be a holiday as well. I happen to agree. Especially because I had to come into work and I can't get the speech to come up on my computer so I missed it. :( I'll have to watch it later.

That's all that's going on with us. Hope everyone had a fabulous holiday weekend!

It's Alive!!!

Some of you may remember when Brian's car died last year. It was a huge stress and a really big cost to try and fix it, and then it ended up being that we needed a whole new engine. And with Brian not working because of the Architecture program, that wasn't happening any time soon. So it has been sitting in his parent's garage for a year. We knew that this summer we would have the money to fix it but it probably wouldn't be until the end because we needed to save up once Brian started working again. But then Brian's parents were nice enough to give us an interest free loan to fix it. :) We were so excited!

So we had it towed in a week or so before Bear Lake, but the mechanic said he would still need to order an engine and I thought that would take at least a week or so to get here and then a week or so to fix it. So I wasn't planning on having it for Bear Lake. The Wednesday before Bear Lake, Brian asked me if I thought the car would be done. I said I doubted it. On Thursday, Brian picked me up from school, IN THE HONDA!! It was very exciting. I guess the guy got it all done in 3 days. Amazing! And then Brian had the day off on Thursday so he went and got it all registered and inspected. So now we have our car back and it's wonderful because it uses much less gas and has AC. I love it. And we were able to drive it up to Bear Lake and take our bike with us because that's the car the bike rack fits on. Yay!!

"That Point"

I have officially reached "that point" of the semester. I don't know if any one else reaches this point, but I do. Every semester. I don't know what it is. We have just about 2 weeks left, and I have no more motivation to do anything. I don't want to read, I don't want to write papers, I don't want to study, and I don't want to go to class. I'm just done. It's really bad actually. And I don't know what exactly to do to get out of this rut. I'm just ready to have the semester be over. And I'm ready to have the summer semester start, which is weird, but I am excited. My schedule is set, so I'll only be doing school Tuesdays and Thursdays and work the other days, but it'll be nice. I hate the running back and forth to school.

The other rut I'm in is food. I just haven't had the time or energy to cook at 8:00 at night, so we're eating a lot of spaghetti and frozen pizzas, etc. And I'm really tired of it all. I'm craving chicken stir fry, which is weird, because I usually don't like all the different veggies, but I really want them. And I just want the time to cook good meals and to eat healthy. (Speaking of which, if anyone has any good recipes or sites to find good recipes, send them my way.) The other night we needed to get a few essentials at the grocery store, but I just could not go and do it, so Brian went by himself. On the list I had a few sour creams, because they were on sale and we use it a lot. He came home with low fat, and non-fat sour cream, which I never ever buy. He said he just wanted to try it out because it's healthier. I love sour cream, on baked potatoes and potato casserole, etc. It's used in a lot of recipes I have, and I know it's not the most healthy but it makes things taste so good. So it just made me realize that I'm lucky right now because our metabolism is still in high gear and we're both pretty healthy, but it's not guaranteed to stay that way. So I need to start now to try and be more healthy.

On that same subject, we're finally going to go get my bike this weekend. We've left it with the rest of our stuff, because I don't ride in the cold, and right now just having Brian's bike in the kitchen takes up most of the space. But the weather's getting nicer and I really want to ride with him on Saturdays, so we're going to get it, and take more room in the kitchen until we can get a new stand. I'll have to post pictures of how much room we don't have. :)

Oh, another note, we had to give back the Honda to my dad, because my brother Brad got his driver's license. Ahhh! Scary. Just kidding. We were borrowing it because it got better gas mileage than my Jeep, and they needed somewhere to store the car because at the time they had 3 other cars in the driveway. So it worked out when Brian's engine exploded and we needed that car. But now we've given it back and I'm driving the Jeep. But gas prices are killing me, so I did something I'm very proud of. I looked up the bus schedules around our house that will get me to my office. So that's what I'm going to do in the summer, because Brian will have a job, we don't know where yet, and it'll just save money to not have us both driving. And it's really convenient because the stop by our house is about a block away, and then it drops me off right in front of my building. Literally. And it'll give me time to just relax and even get some more reading done while I'm riding. Who knows? Maybe I'll keep doing this even in the fall.

Life as we know it...

Always changing. Never predictable. Sometimes boring, but never for long.

So here's an update from the Glad family.

As for Brian's car, it ended up costing over $900 to fix, and then as he drove it away was still broken. He took it to someone else, who charged us only $340 for more work than the other place had done and we thought it was all fixed. Not so. The mechanic told us our best choice would be to sell it. But how do you sell a car that you know is going to break down on the buyer? I don't know.

Luckily, we had been surviving driving only one car for the week it was in the shop, so we know we can still do that. It'd probably be smarter anyway, to save on gas. And, in some of the best news recently, we won't have to worry about even that much longer either.

A couple days ago, we received an email saying our name had been reached on the waiting list for the student apartments, and if we chose, we could have an apartment to move into November 6th. We immediately replied yes, and it is now official. We are moving!! Woohoo! This takes a major stress off of both of us, because we were wondering how much notice they would give us or if we'd have to go find somewhere else come the end of October. It's been really nice living in my grandparent's home, just because it's free, and comfortable and very nice. But it's also been hard just because it's far from school and work and family. We were always having to evaluate whether we could go visit on Sundays because we already were driving down every day of the week and using up our gas. Our new apartment is right next to campus, close enough for Brian to ride his bike, or take the shuttle, and it's by the freeway, which means 10 minutes to work for me. :) I'm so excited. It will also be nice just to have a place of our own. We can decorate and put up pictures and buy DI furniture. The whole shebang! :) I'll post pictures when we move in.

School is sort of calming down. Or at least we're almost getting the hang of it. Brian's still very very busy. He was at school from 9 to 5 on Saturday, and I was home, trying to get things done around the house while at the same time, trying to read two whole books and a bunch of excerpts from other readings. We'll get there. It's almost a good thing he has to stay late at school most night, because that forces me to read all my stuff instead of distracting myself with cleaning or laundry.

This last weekend, Brian's family went camping at their property again and invited us. We couldn't go the whole weekend though, because Brian had to work on a group project on Saturday and then Jason & Brooke blessed Lily on Sunday, which we also went to. That was a lot of fun to see everyone. Sunday night though, we drove down to Fairview to camp over night with them. We got down there around 6:30 and after dinner, Brian's brother Nathan wanted to go biking with Brian and his cousin Jason. So they hopped on their bikes and went off. It's a long story as to why, but I didn't feel all that great about Brian going biking when it was starting to get dark, but they said it was a short ride and their dad was picking them up at the bottom anyway. So they left. About 30 minutes later, their dad came squealing into camp and jumped out of the car yelling for their mom. Nathan had been zooming down the trail at 30 mph and a deer had jumped out in front of him. So he slammed on his brakes and dropped on his side and skid for about 20 feet. His arms and legs were all torn up and his side that he skid on had a big hole in it about the size of a quarter. It wasn't bleeding profusely or swollen, but he was shaking pretty bad from the shock. The boys gave him a blessing and his parents took him to the nearest ER.

It was pretty scary for all of us, and Brian's brothers were especially shook up. We all went to bed expecting that they would take Nathan home and come back for us in the morning. But at 2 AM they came back and we all had to wake up and rearrange sleeping because Nathan could not be bumped. They said by the time they got to the main road he'd stopped shaking and was talking and making jokes, and by the time they got to the hospital he was dead asleep. They cleaned out the wounds and put some glue & medicine in them, but they couldn't stitch them up because the skin was completely gone. Not just torn, but gone. So they put him on Lortab and he'll have a pretty good scar.

Needless to say, we were very tired when we got home. I'm still not a big fan of camping. Brian says it makes me grumpy. Yet he keeps insisting that we go. Go figure.

Start of School Stresses

Brian and I started school this Monday. This is always a very stressful time for me, but it has become doubly so for some other reasons this year.


1. Last week, Brian's car died. Well, just the clutch. So he took it to a car place to fix it. We borrowed his parents car for a few days and got by fine. The price of fixing it was supposed to be $890, which was stressing me, but I figured we could get by.


2. Tuition. Always a big stresser, but this year it is more so, because we're trying to get financial aid, and the stupid school is taking forever deciding whether or not they want to give it to us. I wish they would just tell us one way or the other, so I can either stop stressing or try and find a different way to pay for school.


3. Brian has started the Architecture program and is very stressed out. This is stressing to me, not because he's hard to be around when he's stressed, because he's not, but because he never gets stressed and the fact that he is stressed is stressing. (Can you feel the stress yet? I think I need a different word to describe how we're feeling right now.)


4. We finally get the car back last night, and they've fixed the clutch, charging us $960 to do it. But as Brian is driving back to school, he finds that his car has no power. It died on him multiple times trying to get to and from school, and he has no power to get up hills or get going or anything. It's like they forgot to reconnect something. It really bugs to begin with, but the fact that the shop is all the way out in Draper makes it worse. So we've got to take the car back down to them on Saturday and hope they can fix it in one day. So we're once again back down to one car.


(Side note: My dad is letting us borrow his old Honda because it gets better gas mileage, so my Jeep has just been sitting in the driveway. Last Thursday, my dad asked to borrow the Jeep for a friend. No big deal. Then Friday hit and Brian's car broke down. What timing!)


5. Then there's just my regular stresses of trying to get back into the flow of school and work at the same time. Always a juggle. I'm taking three English classes, and while I knew this was crazy, I was hoping I could take it. I know I'll get there, it's just a little daunting right now.


6. To top it all off, we were in the process of trying to buy a computer for Brian's program. The one we were looking at was $1600+ and that was also a big stress at the beginning of the week. Luckily, Brian's dad was nice enough to let him use a computer he received for Christmas that had never been out of the box. So that's one less stress. We might need to get him a bigger screen and we bought him a desk chair, but those expenses are minor compared to a brand new super duper computer.



Wow. Sorry to just dump all that out. Last night Brian had to work on a group project and since we only had one car, I just went and hung out and read all of my readings for my classes. We didn't get home until 11:30. At this moment (9:00 pm) we are still sitting in the Architecture building, while Brian works on more projects. We talked to a 2nd year student and he said the first semester is the toughest because they're trying to weed out the ones that won't last. I want Brian to last and I know he will, so I'm trying to be as supportive as possible. It'll be nice though when we can get into a regular rhythm and know what we're doing again. It'll also be nice when we live closer to campus.


Here's a picture of us in the Architecture building: