Apartment Hunting

Dear landlords of Utah County,

As I have been dilligently searching the ads on KSL and craigslist for apartments to rent, I have noticed several things: the pricing seems fairly competitive, the descriptions sound appealing, many of you have various types of "move in specials," and...oh yeah, most of you are pet haters (and smoking haters, but that's a totally different conversation). In this not so great economy, it seems like you would want to have a leg up on the competition, therefore I am baffled by the repeated "NO PETS" policy most of you mandate. If you need to rent your apartment out so badly, why not increase the demographic of potential tenants? Seems to me like that's a pretty simple business tactic.

Now, before you jump in and tell me horror stories about how much damage pets can cause, let me say if you are genuinely concerned about that, there's this little thing called a non-refundable pet deposit (which is, of course, separate from the regular security deposit). That way, after your tenants move out you can clean the carpets and all that good stuff if by chance there is damage. Not to mention you could charge an extra $50 a month in the form of a "pet fee," which gives you double coverage should something get damaged. Speaking as a pet owner, as long as the rent is reasonable, I can assure you we will pay your pet deposit and fee. Honestly, we will.

So seriously, it would be a stellar idea to change your minds regarding this no pets thing...after all, you're losing money right now with your investment properties sitting vacant. Just saying...if you open your hearts to the animal lovers of the world, it will profit you.

Thank you,
Discouraged Pet Owner


Seriously though people, we need a new place to live. I'm tired of living in a complex where the police are frequent visitors, I'm woken up in the middle of the night because someone is screaming, I'm prevented from falling asleep by the drunken tenants fighting in the courtyard, etc. We can pay up to $675 base rent and would preferably like to live anywhere besides Orem/Provo (but at this point I'm getting less and less picky). And of course, we have our 2 cats...who are extremely well-behaved and don't pee anywhere other than their litter box. So if you know of anything, PLEASE let me know and I will reward you w/cookies or brownies or potstickers (yes, I make some darn good ones...) or some form of edible delight. And we won't even ask you to help us move (um, unless you're related to us, in which case please ignore that last part). :-)

Beyonce Baby

Ok, most of you have probably seen this already, but I thought it was pretty funny...

Model of Shame

My poor, incredibly neglected blog...how I wish I was more motivated to post stuff. Anyway, thought I should probably let everyone know that I'm still alive...somewhat...so here we go.

First off, I would like to report that not much has happened in our lives lately, which can be good or bad depending on how you look at it. One exciting feat is my amazingly talented pilot hubby has successfully passed all his tests for his instrument rating (such tests include flying w/blinders on so he can't see anything other than his instruments...scary) and can now begin working on his commercial rating. There's a light at the end of the tunnel...it's very, very small but it's there. As for me, I'm still working all the days of my life and getting yelled at on each and every one of them. Fortunately, my soul has become sufficiently numb so it doesn't bother me much.

Anyway, that's about it for updates. Boring, huh? Well, I don't want my blog to be boring. A friend of mine recently showed me a book of ideas to make one's blog super awesome, and one of them was not being afraid to share humiliating stories from your past...so in an attempt to make my blog super awesome, here is my story.

So, my senior year of high school I took a bunch of science classes w/a medical emphasis. My original endeavor in my life was to become a Paramedic or an ER nurse (this was before I realized I don't like being partially responsible for whether someone lives or dies), so I was preparing myself for a future of blood and guts and the like. It was going to be glorious. Anyway, one of these classes was medical anatomy. For the most part I enjoyed it (who didn't want to take a field trip to poke around in a bunch of cadavers?), but every once in a while we were given projects which I considered to be extremely lame.

Something you also should know is that I am the queen of procrastination. I think I averaged 3-4 hrs of sleep a night throughout my high school career...and I pulled a lot of all-nighters.

Anyway, back to medical anatomy. When we were learning about muscles, my teacher assigned a homework project which definitely fell into my lame category: we were to make a model of a muscle. We could pick whatever muscle we wanted and use pretty much any material we wanted, but the main thing was that the model had to show the function of the muscle. In other words, it had to actually move.

I'm fairly certain we were given at least 2-3 weeks to complete the assignment. It was due on a Monday...and as I recall, I started working on it the Saturday before. Uh, yeah. I scavenged around the house not really knowing what I was looking for. I ended up down in the basement by my Dad's work bench, and I picked up a small board I thought looked like a suitable base. Mind you I still had no idea which muscle I was going to do. I continued searching...not finding anything. The minutes ticked on, and soon I had to leave for work...I closed that night (I worked at Arby's) and I had church the next morning, so by the time I got back to working on it, it was Sunday afternoon. Finally in desperation, I found some red fabric. I cut out the shape of a bicep...stuffed it w/some fluffy stuff I found in my mom's material scraps, and sewed that sucker together. I then mounted it on the board with thumbtacks (remember that the assignment was to build a muscle that actually moved? Yeah, I threw that out the window...). For your viewing pleasure, here is a rough drawing of what it looked like...the black square is the board, and the red blob in the middle is the bicep. And of course, the black dots are the thumbtacks.

It was utterly and completely pathetic, but I put my name on it regardless and hoped for the best.

I went to school the next morning ready for it to be all over with. I walked into class praying no one would notice my poor excuse for a muscle...and then I saw the models my classmates had created...all of which looked better than mine. Oh yeah, and they all moved too. I sat next to one of the smartest people in school, and he told me how his grandma is an engineer so she helped him with his. He made a model of the eye. The freaking human eye (and yeah, it moved)! He asked to see mine, and I responded by glaring at him and shaking my head. Fortunately, when it came time to hand them in and I actually had to take it out of my backpack, he was kind enough to not say anything. I thought that would be the end of it...

UNFORTUNATELY...my teacher decided we should each take a turn to present our models to the entire class. So while everyone else got up there with elbows and knees and human eyes, all of which looked amazing and demonstrated how the muscle works, I had to get up with my piece of fluff on a board and say, "This is a bicep. It moves. Except mine doesn't move." I literally wanted to die.

Anyway, this is why you shouldn't procrastinate, kids. You will end up coming to school with a stupid-looking muscle model and people will laugh at you.

The end.

Explanation

Dear friends,

Sorry for writing cryptic posts and vague facebook status updates (for those of you who are friends w/me on facebook...ahem, KAJ...j/k, I know you will never get a facebook page...). My mood has been rapidly shifting from devastated, to pissed as hell, to optimistic, then back to pissed, then devastated, then refocused to optimistic, and so on...and quite frankly, I haven't been able to muster the will to do much of anything other than what I've absolutely had to.

Most of you probably know this by now, but all this is because last week my doctor called and said that there's nothing more he can do AKA it's in vitro time. This was quite a blow; when I first started seeing this doctor in March he assured me he had an entire arsenal of things he would try to assist me in getting pregnant...or that's what I thought he said. What he actually said is that he had an entire arsenal of things to assist me in ovulating, which my body refuses to do on its own. Big difference. But you see, according to my blood tests I am ovulating when I take the fertility drugs, so he's done his job. So while I initially felt completely abandoned by the news, I now at least understand why I'm once again being shipped off to the in vitro man.

There are several things I struggle with regarding this whole thing, such as how is it that I somehow got pregnant before while taking the lowest dose of the fertility drugs, but now I'm on the highest dose and nothing? What could be wrong, since both my husband and I were tested for the obvious problems and came out with perfectly normal results? And mainly, WHY???? Why is is that the one thing I want more than anything in the entire world is the one thing I cannot seem to have?

What I've come to accept, however, is that there are not answers to any of those questions. There's speculation and theories, but there are no answers. It is what it is and I'm out of options. So we're going to try the in vitro...I told Jacob I want to try it once and if it doesn't work, so be it. We can try to adopt in a few years perhaps.

Having said that, if anyone has any information regarding in vitro they could share with me, I'd greatly appreciate it. And for those of you who already have, thank you so much. I promise that while my correspondence as of late has been really bleak and depressing, I am fine. Or rather, I'm determined to be fine and will do what it takes to get there. It just might take a while. I'd also like to say that I am sincerely grateful for all of your support and kind words, because that's what's getting me through this.

Love,
Julie

Abandoned

I should probably be more private about how I feel about the things going on in my life right now. Eh, screw it.

My New Fav

You should all watch this TV show. It is, as the British would say, absolutely brilliant. I LOVE it, and I'm not typically a sci-fi kind of person...

Jacob looks good in a wetsuit

This past weekend Jacob planned to compete in a 1.7 mile swim in a lake up in Sandpoint, Idaho. Instead of making the very long drive, he decided to take one of his flight buddies with him and fly up, cutting the travel time in half and giving him an excuse to get in a plane, since he loves it so much. They made it halfway, stopped to refuel and once they got in the air again they realized the flaps on their plane were frozen, which I guess isn't a huge deal but is not a good idea if one is flying mountainous terrain with which they are unfamiliar.

I'd like to interject here that I am so incredibly grateful Jacob's careful about this stuff, it makes me feel much better to know he's as safe as he can be.

So they landed in Boise and called the director of aviation at UVU to see what they should do. At this point, it was 9:00pm and Sandpoint was still 3 hours away. Finally it was decided that they shouldn't continue their flight and would need to stay in Boise and fly back to Provo the next day. Unfortunately, this meant that despite all the training and preparation he did (including buying a new wetsuit), there would be no swimming competition for Jacob. Bummer, right? Fortunately, my husband has a way of making the best of things, and instead he put on his wetsuit and swam in the pool at the hotel. Cute, right? Yeah, I sure do like him.

Anyway, here are some pics...doesn't he look good in the wetsuit? I think he's hot.