The Beach!

We took Isaac to "Surfside Beach" If you want to know where that is, Go to Googlemaps.com and find Houston Texas. once you see the city then just follow the main freeway that heads SOUTH. There's a popular beach called "Galveston" that is SouthEast, but we went down the freeway directly south and that's where you'll find Surfside.

Here you pull up to a little booth and you pay 10 bucks for an "annual pass" They will give you a sticker to put in your car and you don't have to pay again until January! So you drive past the booth and suddenly you're on the beach!! After teasing your family that you can't see the ocean and you drive right to it, you may laugh at their screams but then you'll be in a whole lot of trouble since Sand is harder to get out of than snow.

So we drove down the beach until there was a space inbetween a few cars. We claimed our spot there and therefore the beach in front of our car is 100% claimed as OURS!!!

But did Isaac like it?

Yes he did!

The waves were so BIG!! They were just about as good as SoCal!!! That's me walking into the picture that Amy is taking, I'm holding Isaac's toy shovel for the sand. And that's another Optometry student in the backgrond catching a football.

Oh no!! Isaac's drinking on the beach!!

Great! Now we have a drunk baby on our hands!!











While Isaac was too drunk to notice, Amy and I decided to leave him with some friends and go swimming!! I had blown up this raft and we ran out over to the sand bar where the big waves first were breaking. Both Amy and I jumped into the raft and we'd ride the waves head on for some good ups and down, but usually this would cause our little raft to turn sideways in perfect timing for the next wave to come crashing down on us. It was so fun because although we'd ALMOST get tipped over, we usually would just get to ride the wave towards the shore! It was like surfing with two people on a comfy soft surfboard. We let the other optometry student couples try it out and they loved it. We are now the super cool surfing raft owners!!

We had fun that Saturday and then Church was the next day. We had every meeting in the sacrament meeting since it was the 5th sunday! Isaac is still a crazy baby and wakes up crying and expecting some grandma to have pity on him and tend to his every needs but slowly ever so slowly he's learning how to deal with himself and teach himself to stop crying and sleep.

Love you all!

Isaac is a hoot!

Ok so Amy really wanted to go to the library and get her internet cravings satisfied... So she left me and Isaac alone to play in the childrens center. Isaac and I played with crayons, small tables, puzzles etc... until finally I decided that I also wanted to go online in the kids area. So what did I do to distract the baby so I could be online and not need to watch him?

Amy walked into the library to see this scene to the left.


















I agree it looks kinda funny. But seriously Isaac is loving watching his favorite cartoon on Youtube. To make sure he would be fully entertained I even put ear phones on him so he could hear the music too!!











I love how the chairs in that room are only like 6 inches off the floor and yet he still looks tiny sitting on it!







And then today while I was at school, Amy sent me this picture. I don't know what went on at the house today but it sure looks like fun!!

This to the left shows our living room! That's our front door to the left!











Wow look at our pretty decorations in our living room! That's the entrance to the master bedroom to the left, and to the right in the picture you kinda see the entrance to Isaac's room.











Here's a beautiful picture of the lovely couch donated to us by Ty's grandmother. Ty was our drummer if ya can't remember :-)










This is our guest bathroom AKA "Isaac's bathroom"












Isaac's room!!!!! He LOVES it.






























This is Isaac making a mess in mommy and daddy's room.














The Master Bedroom














The master bathroom. Double sinks!!!


















Also, our gigantic closets are in the master bathroom shown here. Amy's is on the right, mine is on the left.










And Here's the guest bedroom. It's only visible for those who come and visit us. It's beautiful with chandileers and golden things.

Crashed!!

So I, Brad, had just finished uploading the final video and pictures all ready to post a beautiful blog and guess what happened?

The Laptop went white and then a pretty little file folder appeared with a question mark.

So we take it to the nearest mall... 10 miles away and they have an apple store. The apple guy hears about our mysterious question mark icon and he frowns and says, "umm that's bad. Do you ever back up your files?"

And so it turns out that our hard drive got busted and we need to install a new one!

So I went to the Fry's Electronics a couple days later and I bought one. But the trouble is that our screw driver's too big for the little laptop screws. So then I think, "hey, that's about as small as eye glass screws!" So now i'm at school and I rummaged through my 2 thousand dollars worth of equipment and I found this flat head tiny screw driver! So hopefully that will work!!!!

I'll go home today and try and get the new hard drive in! And then we'll just have to re-install all our programs. They're mailing us the soft ware now. So yeah. That's all fun stuff that's causing the current "no picture dilemma"

But here's a good question:

How's school Brad?

Well seeing as how the Single greatest reason for us to move to Houston was for me to attend school here I'd say yes that is a very appropriate question!

School is good. I started monday. The first day I was introduced to 3 classes and one lab. The second day I was introduced to 3 MORE classes and one more lab. And today I get introduced to 2 MORE labs.

So I'm learning about the EYE right? Here's the specific break down:

Class 1: Optics (a physics class about light)
Class 2: Neuro Anatomy (I have to learn what every piece of the brain is called and how it works)
Class 3: Optometry (I get to learn the basics about how to act around patients, and how to collect their history and start testing them)
Class 4: Vision Science (I learn about the structures of the eye ball, its anatomy and how light is absorbed, transduced into brain signals, and interpreted
Class 5: Physiology and Molecular Biology (This is hard stuff about genetics and bio chemistry YUCK)
Class 6: Anatomy (This is a physician's version of College anatomy except we don't have to learn about the limbs. YES!)

So yeah. My point is that learning to become an eye doctor is complicated. I'll take many many semesters just like this in the following years from now. I'm pretty much finding out why everyone wants the pay of a doctor but Nobody wants to do the work. Ug it's like 25 credit hours and none of it's easy!!! Completely different from the U of U for sure!!

I do like however my classmates! There's no bullies, or pot heads. No smart aleks, or air heads. Everyone's got integrity and confidence. Everyone's kind and quick to smile. Everyone's ... almost as nice as BYU students actually ha ha ;-)

There are 3 other church members in my class, they all went to BYU. I get along with those guys the best since we all sit together near the back of the class.

But anyways classes start at 9am and go till noon, and then we have labs from 1pm until either 4 or 7pm depending on the day. Wednesday is my long day, that's why I'm typing this now.

So here's the problem though... I need time to study and so it's not a good idea to study at home because of Isaac the crazy baby. So I've opted to study at school. I don't don't EVER EVERY want to drive home during rush hour. So that means if I'm here at school, I need to either leave by 4pm or wait until 7:30pm to leave. The traffic is SO BAD from school to my house that the travel time triples or worse during rush hour!!!

And what do I then do about the morning commute? Well I just come early before rush hour!!! I leave my house at 6:00am. (that's 5am in Utah) And I drive for 30 minutes. Then what do I do? Well, I'm really happy about this! I go to the AMAZING GYM that's across the street from our optometry building!! It's the university fitness center and it has tons of courts and pools and bikes, and an indoor track and weights and racket ball and pretty much everything.

I pretty much have learned that when I'm fat and lazy my brain gets tired easily. So if I keep myself healthy, exercising everyday, I'm gonna have a SUPER BRAIN!

But yeah, I'm really happy about this gym and being forced to use it in order to avoid traffic is the best motivation ever.

I do feel bad for Amy cause she's told me she's a little jealous of me getting a free gym membership, and getting to socialize and stuff. As hard as school is I do feel a little bad for her. She's stuck at home and starting to create imaginary friends cause she has no one to talk to. So the moral of the story is. Call Amy during the day and that will make her so so happy!!

love you all!
have a good week!

hello?

Hey!
Well Janet told us she read this blog, and I think my mom read it too... maybe my grandma Geddes read it... but besides that NOBODY COMMENTED or mentioned anything!

We'll keep blogging this month... but maybe we'll switch to simple emails unless people start liking the Blog.

So our dryer had tons of problems but I managed to learn how to fix them all. Now our dryer works great. And then the Washer broke last night!! HEADACHE!

So I called up the guy and long story short we managed to buy a Kenmore Washer off of him for 60 bucks more and he drove all the way to our house, diagnosed the problem with our washer and he hooked up the new one and hauled off the old broken one. It turns out that for a number of reasons the transmission broke.

But yay! we're up and running again!! We were gonna spend today getting ourselves some Texan drivers licenses but it looks like ya gotta get your car registered all Texany first! So we'll do that later I guess. Our car expires in September.

Well... I have one last orientation dinner tomorrow, then I have Saturday free. Then I have Sunday to pray, and then all heck breaks loose and school begins monday.

It looks like Amy and I decided on me leaving every morning at 6am so that I miss rush hour, and then I come home AFTER rush hour at about 8pm. Everyday. So I'll be packing breakfast lunch AND dinner! I'm really wanting to get all my studying done at school so that for the 2 hours I'm home everyday it'll not be bothered with homework.
Wish me luck in finding someone to carpool with k?

We found "our" library. It's beautiful and wonderful. Isaac's playing in the kids room now. That boy is drinking a TON. I punched holes in his bottle lids so that he isn't sucking every second of the day. With the holes he chugs and then stops to breath.. like us adults ya know? But man Isaac is totally filling up his diapers like crazy. I think I've been peed on 2 times in the last 2 days from him leaking out the sides.

Sorry no pictures. Life is just too busy still. We're almost done re organizing the house and decorating it so it looks picture worthy. Maybe next post like saturday or monday you'll get pictures!!

With Love
-Brad and Amy

Texas

Texas!!

Howdy Folks, Weall in Texas now! What a horribly busy week we’ve had. And this is our first official blog update to you Utahns.

Remember though, we expect to be receiving updates from yall too ok? Don’t just read about us without telling us about your lives too ok?

Alrighty, well believe it or not, this is Brad and I’m writing this blog post on Microsoft Word and NOT on the internet. Sadly we have no internet by our house. This means that if we want to update our status or check emails we have to drive 10 whole minutes and considering our budget and the heat outside I’m afraid we won’t be online to tell you about it immediately. It may take a few days ok.

So one week ago we went with Tracy and Valerie to their ward and after sacrament Amy and I said goodbye to our baby and drove off!

There’s a hundred ways Houston is different from Salt Lake City and it was fun to drive there because we got to see all the changes one at a time.

We drove south on I-15 until Spanish fork where we headed off more Westward to Moab. I really wanted to explore Canyonlands and show Amy all those cool Arches (cause she’s never been down there) But we didn’t, due to the fact that my Penske moving truck only got 10 miles per gallon.

Ha ha I remember thinking that it took FOREVER to get to Moab but wow, that was only half of that days drive. We kept on driving and finally got to Monticello. The temple there is kinda small but the Angel Moroni makes it look Templish enough to recognize. We left Salt Lake with gas prices around 3.09 per gallon. In southern Utah we saw gas for up to 3.19!! Once we got into New Mexico I noticed a significant drop in gas to 2.89.

New Mexico was weird. They totally have a way more “native American” culture feel going on there. We drove through Farmington and wowzers…. The 3 hours or so to Albuqueque was the longest 3 hours of my life. There was NOTHING but dirt and bushes the whole time. We stayed in Albuqueque over night. It was still a dry climate and that day the weather was pretty much identical to Salt Lake.

The next day we only had to drive 8 hours! (Except we lost an hour by moving into the Texan Time Zone) We drove through southern New Mexico past tons of Indian Reservations, and lots of “don’t drive drunk” billboards. There were lots of hitchhikers during this stretch. The Utah and Colorado mountains disappeared and turned into plateaus and mesas which eventually just turned into rolling boring hills. We drove though a couple towns looking for lunch in New Mexico but the towns were all dead and shut down. Right before the Texan border we noticed 2 new restaurants!!!! Church’s Chicken, and Long John Silver! I convinced Amy to eat at long John Silvers cause they were combined with an A&W. It was mostly fried fish and not that good. After that we crossed the border…

Texas was noticeably different because the towns along the road were not dead! All the restaurants were open and the gas stations in service. Oh and guess what? Gas went down again! This time the average price was 2.69 cents. As we kept driving through texas the prices kept going down! It started raining really bad and both Amy and I were looking around for tornados cause that’s what the drive was like…just like the movie twister! Most was flat flat flat! And you know what happens? The sky looks ten times bigger out here without the mountains and hills getting in the way. The first big Texan city we passed through was Lubbock. Amy and I got separated here though. She turned and I didn’t see her. About 10 minutes later I used our precious emergency phone and called her. We decided to just meet at the hotel and drive through Texas all alone rather than try to backtrack and find each other.

After about an hour the rainstorm stopped and I noticed Amy driving in front of a bunch of Semi’s up ahead. She was so happy to see my big yellow moving truck when I finally caught up to her! We drove many more hours and guess what was cool? The windmill fields!! There were these windmills that were HUGE. Their propellers were ginormous! All spinning slowly in the wind, wow, it reminded me of Mission Impossible 3 where those helicopters totally get taken down by the windmills. Anyways imagine like 500 of those huge windmill and what a sight!! As far as the eye can see! I loved seeing those the most. We pulled into our hotel in Abilene Texas that night.

The next day we only had to drive like 5 hours! YAY. We were pretty sick of driving. To be honest I don’t remember anything about this drive. Except for the gas prices went down to 2.46 !!!! Go Houston yay! On this last drive we had to deal with more “house closing” problems yuck but it was all eventually taken care of.

I think we pulled into our Hotel around 6pm. We ate some Wendy’s and fell asleep pretty fast, but yay, our driving was over and we had made it to HOUSTON!!

The next day we went to Close on our house at 2pm. It lasted until after 5pm. Blah blah blah, lots of signing work. Right after, we headed into our brand new house and started unloading the truck. Luckily 6 strong men from the ward came to help us and the truck was emptied in under 30 minutes. That was awesome of them! We knew we got a good ward. There was however one casualty. Amy bought a beautiful bedroom set when she was like 2 years old and we had decided to transport it… Her lovely perfect dresser got a humungous scratch dent right on the top! OH NO! oh well though, we kinda gambled on that decision to bring precious cargo. We’ll just put something over it to hide it now!

We pretty much had everything just thrown into our living room that day. That night I stayed up late and set up Amy’s big fancy bed and we had some place to sleep. The house however had 2 problems. The house smelled like stinky smoke and the garage smelled like stinky death.

The next day we dedicated to 4 things. Find a washer and Dryer, get electricity turned on, get water turned on, and find a lawn mower. After a long and hard day we did it ALL!!!!!

The next day we works our tushies off unloading boxes, filling up cupboards, yadda yadda yadda and wow what a bunch of crap we sure had! At about 8pm that night we had some very special visitors… Isaac and his Grandparents!!! They had driven to Vegas, flown to Long Beach, and then flown to Austin. Then they drove to Houston and boy let me tell you Isaac was happy to see Amy and me. He was also happy to get out of that car!!!

The next day was Saturday and Tracy took me to a home depot to shop for stuff to fix the house and Valerie took Amy to the grocery store to fill our cupboards up with the right food for Isaac and us. By noon Tracy and Valerie had to go. They were the last ones to say goodbye to us. We’re happy that Isaac likes the house. He LOVES his room. All those toys of his that we had packed away were suddenly back! His crib was back! His high chair was back! And his parents were back! And of course we let him watch his “Little Einsteins” addiction here too.

Isaac has slept very good here, he wears shorts and a light T shirt instead of wool outfits with footsies. It’s hot. This morning we woke up and went to church. It was fun meeting our ward. Our ward is about 15 minutes away. We go to the “Spring Branch Ward” in the “Cyprus Stake.” The ward’s very different from our last. Here there’s no elder’s quorum!!! So me and about 5 elders met with the 5 high priests. I’m a “group” member ha ha. There were 6 young men doing the sacrament, so that’s cook having them in the ward, and I think there was about 3-5 young women. It’s a very well rounded ward. There were about 3 babies Isaac’s age. Over all it’s just about 2/3 the size of the wards that we grew up in. Except the ward boundaries are HUGE. Even in Honduras I was never in a ward this big ha ha.

The bishop pulled us into his office and we explained how busy I was and how much time Amy has on her hands and how Amy plays the harp and stuff, so hopefully he gives me a calling in the primary and Amy becomes the boss of everything. We really like our ward. It’s small but very simple :-D. Tonight we’re going to have dinner with a couple who invited us to hamburgers!!! They’re so nice!

So yeah, we went to dinner and it was fun and YUMMY. There were 4 couples who all showed up with their kids. Isaac is so weird, he doesn't do well with children. He's an adult baby. So he freaks out when he sees kids sitting on top of each other, and if he gets run over, it's pretty much the end of the world. Isaac really entertains adults way better with his kisses and faces he pulls and such but he goes blank around other kids. But yeah the next day after playing in a room full of kids guess what? Isaac got a runny nose! Figures. He still has it today too!

Oh and I guess I learned why our ward is so oddly shaped. It turns out that the bulk of the ward is very transient, and has developed a reputation for not producing any leadership. So they have extended our neighborhood into being members of this ward so that we can keep it alive. So when the bishop found out that we lived up north, he automatically thought "leadership!" He's super happy that we're planning on staying here for another 5 years or so. (he he, did I forget to mention that I may do a residency???)

So yeah, we went to Orientation on Monday and I became the most popular kid in my class. I'm the one with the baby! Isaac blew about 20 kisses and was the attention of the meetings and speeches with his giggles and cries.

I got my optometry equipment and a bunch of other stuff today. I know my schedule now too. (Thursday is my Short Day).

But yeah. I'm scared of school, it's gonna hurt! 23 credit hours this semester of HARD HARD classes is not so cool. So pray for me k?

Another funny new thing is that last night and tonight the school is sponsoring a social activity... ha ha they had a party at a bar downtown and the school set up a bar tab. Drinks are free!!! They really want you to socialize and that's how it's done around here! One of the Administrators gave a speech today and said that ya gotta balance out all the hard work with fun! "Optometry and Beer are synonomous" she said ha ha.

Anyways it's a crazy "non-internet" week. please give us a call ok? Love yall
-Amy and Brad

Isaac blowing kisses to himself

Here's a funny little video Brad took on our camping trip :)