Life in Provo

Well, I'm finally updating the blog. I've had many comments on my long hiatus. Bryan has been threatening to update with a picture of a scared pug if I didn't post something soon! I have an excuse, though. My trusty camera has met an untimely end. Yes, one day I turned it on to find the LCD display screen looking cracked. The glass was fine, it was just the inside. Luckily, Bryan had a camera at his mom's house so we brought that back. I still dragged my feet getting pictures taken and figuring out how to upload from his camera, so sorry for that.

So, we're back in Provo! We had a great summer in Boise but boy, am I glad to have furniture again! I'm also happy to have the rest of our belongings again. It makes a huge difference in the feeling of a place to be surrounded by your things. I feel a lot more homey now. We moved into Union Square Apartments-- married student housing. Despite the fact that I thought they had dissolved all special wards into family wards, we attend a Provo Married Student ward. I have never before lived in a ward that had the exact same number of men as women!

Bryan seems to be doing well in school this semester and enjoying most of his classes. A few classes he has really been enjoying are Ethics and Computers in Society, Software Engineering and Cryptography. One reason he likes the first two so much is that they share the same professor, who is excellent. In Cryptography he is breaking down ciphers, something he has done as a hobby since he was a teenager so he's really enjoying it as a class.

I am still job searching. There have been a lot of ups and downs in the process and, as yet, nothing has panned out. I had a pretty severe disappointment yesterday when my temp agency, OfficeTeam, called saying they had a job for me. I had an interview elsewhere and told them I would call afterward with a definite decision. I decided the position OfficeTeam offered was a better one for me right now but when I called back she'd given it to someone else! Oh well. I'm still waiting to hear about the actual interview, though.

Anyway, a wise friend once told me that no one wants to read full text in a blog so I thought I'd take some pictures of our apartment as introduction to our new life in Provo (I mean, these are the reason I haven't updated in so long so they better be pretty good, right?).


Here is the first thing you see when you come to our apartment (sans my lovely shadow). In late August my parents came out to visit and to see my half-sister Tammy's adorable new baby girl, Hannah Blanche. My mom brought a surprise with her! She'd had our favorite wedding picture printed on canvas and took me out to have it framed. She also decided she wanted to do something nice for me and get a wreath for our door and a welcome mat. We found this nice wreath on Etsy and the mat at a personalization store online. Unfortunately, these were lost in the mail for a couple of weeks! I realized I'd been giving the wrong street for part of our address. What a disaster! Luckily, I called the DMV in time to correct my address before they sent out my Drivers License!There is another apartment 309 in this complex so I assumed the packages had gone there but they hadn't seen it. We ended up finding a house with the address I'd been using and they had kept the packages there for us. This doorstep was well worth it! The wreath makes our apartment smell amazing.

This is what you see when you open our door. Notice the Christmas lights lining the walls-- those were absolutely free! Courtesy of our wedding decorations... I even have a LOT left over. I love hanging Christmas lights-- they bring such a warm homey feeling to our apartment.

Here is the canvas picture that my mom framed for us-- we love it. We also have an army of WiiMotes chillin' under there in the entertainment center and a brand new Blu-Ray player. We had some money left over from our wedding on our Target gift card and decided it was worth the purchase. It connects to HuluPlus, NetFlix, Pandora, Picasa, YouTube, etc. It has 3D capabilities which is nice because we one day intend to own a 3D TV.

This is an unfortunate attempt at taking a picture of the curtains I sewed for our apartment. No matter how I took it, during the day they were simply not to be seen on film. Suffice it to say that they are two panels of fabric that hang from a rod (held up by Command Hooks) on either side of a window...

Here is a better idea of what the actual fabric of the curtains is like, though. This was the only pattern in JoAnn's that I really liked for it. It's not lying flat because I kept them hanging and held it up to the camera by my hand.

The entertainment center they provided with this apartment was not going to work with our wide, flatscreen TV so I turned it into a much needed book/game shelf. I think the couches are pretty nice, actually! We got a throw pillow from IKEA for it that you can faintly see in the dark picture above. It was very difficult figuring out how to arrange the furniture. We finally decided to have the back of the couch act as a hallway into the apartment. So, in a way, I guess the couches really section it off as it's own room. The gap between the chair and couch is slightly narrow but do-able.

We call this our "office." It really just shares the living/family room but it kind of feels like it's own little place. That may or may not be Pinterest up on the screen. I've become slightly obsessed.

I just wanted to zoom in on this part because I really enjoy the decorations we have up here. Minus the fish food. Darn, I should have moved that when taking pictures. I only just noticed it now. This is Bryan's our beta fish, Gordon. No, it's not after Gordon B. Hinckley. Instead, he's named after Gordon Freeman. In his old age (1.5 years) he has gotten rather ornery! He puffs out his gills at us if we just walk by him! Poor Gordon.

Yes, uninteresting but I thought I'd post our vanity. Be happy I left out the pictures of the shower room. Bryan said, "No one wants to see our toilet." You know, I'm sure he's right. I was just taking pictures of everything.

I just like this closet because there is a lot of opportunity for storage. I don't feel at all cramped in this apartment.

Same bedspread, more decorations. Luckily, this coloring followed the same theme I had when I was single so I just used the same pillows to spruce it up. Other than this, we have a couple framed wedding photos on our dresser. The only other interesting thing is comparing our closets. Talk about polar opposites!


Bryan snapped this not-so flattering picture of me last night.You can kind of get a better idea of what the curtains look like, though they are closed in this. Oh! And there is the aforementioned IKEA pillow!

So, this is our life for the next 8ish months. In April, Bryan will graduate. We hope to be back in Boise with him working for Clearwater Analytics, where he had his internship. Come next May we will probably be moving somewhere! It's exciting for real life to really start.

The Whitneys Say Goodbye Boise

Well, it's that time. Bryan and I have packed everything up into the front room to load into the car tomorrow morning. I have mixed feelings. I am happy to go back to Utah for a year because I've really missed friends and family. Today, I was driving to a friend's house to unload all our leftover food on her and a bunch of memories of driving on that road with Bryan popped into my head of the specific places we were going and the like. That made me a little sad to go-- we've made a lot of good memories here. In the above picture we are out late watching the Perseids meteor shower a week or so ago (Bryan saw four and I saw zero, I guess I just was never looking the right way). However, life moves on. It'll be good to go back to Provo for a year and have that time to be surrounded by loved ones.
Here is a picture of probably only half the stuff we have to load into the car and car top carrier that was so graciously loaned to us by my half-sister, Stacey.

It's hard to believe that it is time to leave but I think we're ready. So, goodbye Boise! We've had a great summer here!

A Day at the Museum

I've been keeping up with the events that are going on in Boise this month so that we could take advantage of them. I saw that the Idaho Historical Museum was having a "Hands on History" even about the Golden Age of Superheroes! I thought of comic book superheros and cool displays on their evolutions and storylines. I thought it would be a fun thing that was out of our ordinary lazy Saturdays for Bryan and I to do together and it would be something we both enjoyed. Well, we didn't get quite what I expected. The museum had mask making, lassoing villians and a superhero scavenger hunt... but I wouldn't say it had much to do with the superheroes I'd thought of. Still, we had fun and we're glad to get out and do something.

Here I am figuring out one of the clues in the elevator (the rest of the clues had to do with exhibits).

Bryan lassoing a villain!

I was so close to getting him my last time!

Mostly, we just looked around the museum. That was fun. Bryan said he'd even like to go back just to look around. Next time we are back east for enough time I think we need to go to the Smithsonian!

Here is the Blacksmith Forge Bryan will have one day! :)

Ladies' Sidesaddle!

Apparently two-headed cows existed in Idaho at one point...?

This massive fish swims in rivers here in Idaho!

They had different rooms from older houses displayed. Here is my personal favorite room-- the kitchen! Luckily, I live in the 21st century.

There was a sign that said I could get in! I wasn't breaking any museum rules! The name of this kind of boat has slipped my mind for the moment but here I am traveling with Lewis or Clark and their dog, Seaman.

So, we had a nice day out and about. Later that night we went and saw Super 8, which we both really enjoyed. The night before we saw the Green Lantern, which was just sub par. It is nice to get out and do things! In less than two weeks we'll be back to Utah and we'll be able to see friends and family again. That will be nice but we have had a nice, relaxing time in this charming city.

Adventures in Making Ravioli

I have always loved to cook but since I have been married and had the chance to do it every day for dinner my array of meals has dramatically expanded! I have learned that I loved to cook even more than I thought. Right now I am a stay at home wife while we're in Boise. It gives me a lot of time to spend experimenting with different foods. I've begun straying from recipes and making things my own.

Lately, I have really enjoyed making foods from scratch. It started when I saw a tutorial on Our Best Bites for making your own flour tortillas. I was like, "I could totally do that." Well, it wasn't as easy as I thought. I hate to say I found a better recipe elsewhere when I love this site so much... but I looked it up YouTube and found a very good video for it. They turned out almost perfect! You know how tortillas are supposed to be, well, round? Well, mine weren't quite round... but they sure did taste good! I used them to make taquitos and I ate several just plain... they are way better than store bought tortillas. I am making some quesadillas this week and sadly bought store bought tortillas because I have a cup less flour than I need and I'm definitely not going to buy and whole new sack of flour for less than two weeks left in Boise! Anyway, tangent over. The next time I made something from scratch it was Pierogies filled with mashed potatoes (served with sauerkraut and kielbasa) because the store didn't sell them and I was set on the meal. I was like, "Wow, making pasta isn't as hard as it seems!" So then I decided to try my hand at ravioli.
I wanted a meat filling so, after looking around on the internet a bit, I found one using ground beef, garlic, onion and parmesan cheese. Well, I know I bought an onion but when I went to make the meal there was none to be found. I was very frustrated and had images in my head of it rolling out of a bag into the parking lot of the grocery store and me, none the wiser, walking away and leaving it there behind to be run over... So I made due with what I had. The filling was okay. Next time I think I will make half the batch with a ricotta cheese filling and half with browned Italian sausage, seasonings and fennel seed (an idea I got when we went out to a delicious and authentic pizzeria one night.

The dough is very simple. Mix flour and salt and add a whipped egg yolk.

...but then it wasn't really making a dough. The recipe said to add enough water to make it a stiff dough.

Voilà! It needed to rest for about half an hour after this.

I don't have a pasta machine yet so I had to roll it out with a rolling pin. This is hard work on your arms! I've definitely added a pasta machine and ravioli cutter to my Smith Family Times gift registry for my birthday or Christmas.
I needed to roll it out paper-thin, so that I could see my hand through it.

A lot of people will take one sheet of the rolled out dough, put dollops of filling on it, then put another sheet on and use a ravioli cutter. I don't have one yet so I used an upside jar to cut circles. This took as long or longer as the rolling out!

My meat filling dollops.

Folded over, with the edges crimped. I used an egg yolk to effectively glue the seams together.

Then they boil for 4-5 minutes.

You can freeze these for later use but, since I was just going to use them that evening, I put them in the fridge in a covered container (you don't want them drying out!). As it was, they kind of stuck together. I also wanted to make homemade sauce but couldn't find a recipe that looked good to me. So many of them called for tomato chunks in addition to paste or sauce. I do not like chunky things. Especially tomato. This is why I generally like traditional bean and ground beef chili from a can... too many people make it with chunky tomatoes. I also added some leftover ground beef and seasoning mixture from Our Best Bites.




Here is the finished product on Bryan's plate. I would say it was pretty good but not mouth-watering. It wasn't something I'd look back on and say, "That was so good. I need to make it again." I need to keep experimenting with fillings and sauces and one day maybe it will be so.

The Streets of Boise

Hello? Is this thing on?

Ahem.

I guess this is my first post on this blog (even though Alyssa created it months ago). I figured it was about time that I wrote something on here.

Boise has turned out to be a really great city to live in. My favorite thing about it (besides Alyssa) is the one way grid they have set up. It runs throughout all the city center (about 1 to 2 miles of one way streets back and forth). What I really like about it are the stop lights.

The stop lights are timed perfectly so that you never have to stop. The first light you stop at will likely be the last light you stop at (if you're just going in a straight line anyway). What I mean is: when the light you're stopped at turns green, the light on the next block is timed to turn green a few seconds later, making it so you never have to stop until you've reached the street you are trying to get to. I find it to be very efficient. Also since Boise has so little traffic it means that it almost never gets backed up. Alyssa and I have been in only one traffic jam, but that was during rush hour so it's understandable.

I ride my bike to work. We paid $35 for it used from a seller on Craigslist. We ended up paying more than the price of the bike for the helmet, lock, and tire pump. But those were costs that would have been necessary with the purchase of any bike. The one way streets are pretty nice as a cyclist. Boise is a Bicycle Friendly City, so most of the sidewalks are wide enough that I can ride my bike on them. The one way streets make it a lot easier to cross intersections safely, so that's another bonus to a one way grid.

Today Alyssa and I went on a casual bike ride. It was really great just exploring around some of the back roads behind the town. On our way home we saw a fox! It was running along about 30 feet away from us in the grass. We stopped and watched it for a little while, but it was starting to rain so we couldn't stay for too long. I wanted to take it home with us, but Alyssa wouldn't allow it. Something about a non-domesticated, potentially rabid animal just didn't sit right with her. I guess all that advice I've heard about "making a decision as a couple" really just means "if the wife doesn't want to catch a fox, you don't get to catch a fox." Oh well.

Dear, Sweet Libby

Copyright © 2011 Brian G. Rudd Photography ALL RIGHTS RESERVED (http://briangrudd.com)

Today has been a very sad day for me. Libby, my sweet cat, had to be put to sleep. She had been losing a lot of weight and wasn't eating much at all. Lindsay said that it became drastically noticeable within the last couple of weeks just how much weight she had lost. My mom took her to the vet today and he found that she had stomach cancer. He said that the tumor was about the size of a plum. I was very distraught but knew that she needed to be put to sleep because she was in a lot of pain.

When I was eleven years old I wanted a kitten of my own so badly. My parents decided that if I saved up my money I could buy one from the Humane Society. $50 was a lot for a little kid but I was able to do it through chores and odd jobs. Thirteen years ago this summer I picked out a little calico cat that I could hold in one hand. I named her Libby because that was a name of a character on a TV show I liked at the time. I was probably more rough with her when I was younger than I ought to have been. I know I must have dressed her up in doll clothes at least once. Libby endured it but remained a sweet cat. She became the friendliest, most personable cat I know.

Libby, unlike many cats, would always come when I called her. I would put down my hand and she knew exactly what that meant, for she would come and put her head right beneath it. Sometimes I would bring her into my room and put her on my bed and she'd fall asleep there with me but I had to leave my door cracked else she'd jump onto my nightstand in the middle of the night, knocking things over so I would let her out!

I've always bragged about how smart Libby was. Sometimes people might leave the basement door open and she'd saunter downstairs, only to find that someone would close the door behind her! She would just come to the top of the stairs and stick her paw up under the little gap between the floor and the bottom of the door. Then, as much as a cat can, she grasped the door and shook it until someone came and let her out.

Libby loved to be outdoors. We have a bit of a forest behind our house and she loved being out exploring or lazing about on the grass in the warm sun. If she caught site of you taking a walk you might even notice her trailing you from several feet away! She certainly loved people.

This photo was taken when I was fifteen or sixteen years old:
I went to college and had to leave Libby behind in Maryland with my parents. Apartments in Provo, for the most part, are not very keen on allowing pets. I feel so sad at having had to leave her. I feel sad that I couldn't be more a part of her life during her last days. I hope she remembers me always and knows that I love her very much.


The last time I saw Libby was during the days before and on my wedding day. I remember that every time I came home for a visit and she was out in the driveway I would scoop her up and pet her and hug her and kiss her on the head. Though preoccupied with my wedding, I am at least certain I was able to give her this love for the last time. She loved having so many people around for this event and especially brought joy to little children. A couple days before the wedding my parents invited all of Bryan's family over for a barbecue. They had just arrived that day and no one was more exhausted than poor Ella, who cried a fair amount. Her dad took her outside and she cheered right up when she saw Libby, exclaiming, "Ki-ee!" Ava also loved seeing Libby, and would crack up when she got the opportunity to pet her. Here is a picture Lindsay sent me today of Ava petting Libby:
And Ava's reaction:
Seeing these today brought peace to my heart for Libby because of how happy she made people and how many people loved her.

I had an inkling that something was going on because Lindsay texted me and told me that Libby was skinnier than ever and that my mom was going to take her to the vet. So, my mom called me this morning and told me what the vet had found and that she needed to be put to sleep. I cried on and off all day because Libby was more than just some animal to me. She'd been in my life for more than half of it! She was a part of my family and it hurts knowing I'll never be able to hold her close to me and kiss her head again. It is still hard to believe she is gone.

I asked my mom to take one last picture of her before she was put to sleep so that I could see her one last time. She sent me this:
It hurt to see how thin and sickly she had become but at least I got to see her one last time, even if it was through picture message.

Mom stayed with her while they put her to sleep and held her in her arms as she drifted off. I asked if they would bury her in the backyard so that I could go to her grave and say goodbye the next time I am in Maryland. They did so-- my dad even left work especially to come home to help with it. Here are some photos Lindsay sent me:
She is at rest, looking peaceful and much healthier than before.
My heart aches at the look on my mom's face. I think I've worn that expression many times today. I think everyone realized they were even more attached to her than they had thought.
After the burial, they said a little prayer. It seems she was laid to rest in a beautiful spot. I miss her so much now. I just wish I could have been there for her. Even though I haven't been able to be near her I knew I could see her again when I visited back home but now that is gone. My consolation is this:
Maybe this sounds corny, but Heaven seems to be smiling down on her. I know that one day I will see Libby again. I like to think that she is so happy in Heaven, much happier than she was here on earth. Maybe my grandparents are up there looking after her for me. And maybe, just maybe, she can look down on me and know how much I loved her. Libby, you are so loved.