YOU WIN SOME, YOU LOSE SOME...OH WAIT YOU JUST LOSE!

After the beard I made Matt try a goatee for awhile, and I liked it better. Anyway, being the great BYU fans that we are Matt and I got tickets with some friends to go to the BYU v. TCU game here last Thursday. It would be one of only two chances we had to watch Cougar Football. So although Matt had an anatomy test the next day, and I had school bright and early the next day as true blue Cougar fans we really wanted to go. Unfortunately the Cougars decided not to show up at the game and we watched a pitiful and embarrassing loss, and couldn't help but think, "We paid money and time to watch this? Come on Cougars!" It was a sad day in Cougar Football, goodbye BCS...

This is us before the game... (note how happy Matt is)

Our friends, Edward and Tracy Haws
This is during the game.... (note the fake, me telling Matt he has to smile in the picture face)
Sorry Edward but this is the only I have of the four of us.

YEAR OF THE BEARD II

In our rebellious after BYU stages of life Matt decided to grow a beard (and I wanted to see what it would look like).

Here we are at a Texas Rangers game a few weeks back. We went with a bunch of other married couples from the med school, and it was a lot of fun. The Rangers lost to the Angels but it didn't really matter to me because I don't really care for either team.

Because my new calling is CTR 5 teacher in the Primary I got to help out with the Primary Quarterly Activity a few Saturday ago as well. Hurricane Ike hit Houston, not too far from here, so for our Primary Activity the kids made candy necklaces to send to the Primary kids in Houston. It was really cute, and I was surprised that the kids managed to make all the necklaces without eating all the candy.

Here's a few pictures of Matt's beard. It's not a very full beard because Matt's not really a man yet, maybe when he stops acting 5 sometimes it'll grow thicker but I don't think that's ever going to happen :)

MED SCHOOL/HIGH SCHOOL

I realize that time must be going by pretty quick because I haven't posted in over a month. So here is a run down of what we've been up to. Matt is kept busy every night for Med School, studying away. We are now in what the med students like to call Death-tober because they have a number of hard tests this month. We've had 3 BYU students come and stay with us while they were here interviewing at the school for next year. So we're hoping that there will be more LDS students coming in next year.

Matt is currently taking Anatomy and gets to completely dissect a human body, which when he tells me about it I'm definitely glad its not me doing it. He held a human brain in his hand just the other day. Because the Anatomy Lab smells so bad they wear scrubs, but I can still smell it on him a little bit when he comes home.

While Matt is studying away each day I am trying to teach U.S. History to a bunch of high schoolers. School in Texas is a lot different then Utah or Oregon, but I am getting used to it and the good days still out weigh the bad ones. I really love teaching and most of the time my students are really great. And I love the other teachers, they're all really nice and we have a good time teaching together. Even though I get paid more here in Texas, they definitely require more of my time so I'm not quite sure if it was a fair trade off. But Matt and I are both happy and doing great. Besides school I teach CTR 5 on Sundays and have the cutest little group of kids, poor Matt doesn't have a calling still and is feeling a little left out I think. Other than that now that it's not so hot (only in the 80s each day) and I haven't seen a cockroach in weeks I'm liking Texas a little more each day!

HOME SWEET HOME

Well I've been meaning to put pictures up of our new little home in Texas for some time now, so here we go. Here is our living room, with the tree I really wanted, so it traveled on the outside of the Penske truck all the way from Utah.

This is our dining area. My parents graciously gave us the table and chairs, which coincidentally fit perfectly in this amount of space. I also really like the mirror on the wall. (It actually reminds me of my Grandma Stevens house).

This is our kitchen (obviously) with Murray the Moose cookie jar on the counter. Unfortunately he's empty at the moment. But if anyone wants to come visit I promise I'll fill him up for you.

This is one of my favourite parts of the house. Last year I hated not having a washer and dryer, so this year it was mandatory that we have them.

Here's the hallway, I really like the built in shelf on the side of the wall too.

This is our den, or study, or whatever you want to call it. Matt does a lot of studying in here...well maybe not A LOT, but he does study in here.

Bathroom, nothing fancy.

Last year our bedroom basically was just our bed, but now we have a little more room to move around in which is really nice. Matt and I put up the curtains by ourselves too.

So we live just a few miles from DFW Airport. Most days the planes are taking off over our house and its not as loud, I really don't even notice them anymore. But every once in awhile they switch directions and the planes land over our house, like in this picture, and its significantly louder, but still not too bad.

Overall we really like our new little home. It's much bigger than before, and if only someone could promise that I would never have a cockroach in it ever, it would be perfect!

I AM THE LUCKIEST!

Well Matt and I had our one year anniversary a couple weeks ago and I'm just now getting to it. Since we've been so busy I told myself that Labor Day weekend I would blog what I've been wanting to. So August 11th was our one year anniversary and Matt was super sweet. First I woke up to a bouquet of roses and then Matt opened a few gifts from me.

Matt and I had decided to go to Six Flags Over Texas for the day (it's only about twenty minutes from our apt.) We got there right before it opened to make sure we could get on all the biggest best rollercoasters before the lines started getting longer later in the day. Unfortunatley for us Six Flags was not doing very well that day. 4 of their biggest rollercoasters were shut down when the park opened, we were so mad. So we went on some of the other rides and waited for all the big rollercoasters to start running. By the end of the day almost all of the big coasters opened, so that was good, but we did end up having to wait in longer lines by the time they did. So even though Six Flags was kind of let down, and I realized that it was definitley no Disneyland, Matt and I had a lot of fun together.

This is us in the front row of one of the smaller rollercoasters.

No where close to the Dark Knight Joker but we thought we'd get our picture with him anyway.
This is Matt and I celebrating the start of the Olympics!


After the festivities of Six Flags we went home to get all cleaned up because we had gone on a few water rides, it had rained a little and it's Texas so you're always sweaty outside in the summer. While I was showering and cleaning up Matt made my most favourite dinner in the whole world, Thanksgiving Dinner. He had made turkey, stuffing, garlic mashed potatoes, gravy and rolls. We even ate it on our nice China! I love that Matt can cook, and is really good at it too. It was so sweet of him to prepare my favourite dinner, and even better to get to sit and eat it with him.


And of course Matt had to play with the melted wax from the candles.
Overall it was a wonderful day to celebrate a whole year of being married and being in love!

LOOONG ROAD TRIP

Matt and I took a very long road trip to visit friends and family before we headed off to Texas. I apologize for the extremely long post this time, but I couldn't cut out anymore pictures than I already did!

We started off the trip in EDH. Matt did an Open Water Swimming Race at Folsom Lake one morning. As you can see it was quite smokey because of all the fires (and this was on a good day).

Matt came in 3rd in his division!

We were able to see the Ricks' who came up for a visit. We went wake boarding with them, and then played a little croquet. I was the winner, but Dave came in a close second!

I had to put this one up because I finally got in and out of the wake!

We spent some time in San Francisco, and visited our good friends the Robarge's. Here's a couple of pictures of us on top of a 24 story roof, where Jensen and Erika live. They were nice enough to let us spend the night with them.

You can tell Matt and Jensen missed each other.

Erika took us on a lovely tour of San Francisco the next morning. We went to the Golden Gate Bridge (hence the picture), Golden Gate Park, Ocean Beach, Alamo Square, saw the Painted Ladies, Haight and Ashbury, and Union Square. It was quite the fun filled morning!

That afternoon we met up with the rest of the Harrison Clan and went to Alcatraz and a Giants game. (Also, I celebrated Canada Day by wearing my "Canadian Hockey Rocks!" T-shirt).

The Giants won, so it was a good end to a great day!

Fourth of July in Whitehawk, CA (Grandparents house). I went horseback riding that morning with some of the girls. This is my horse Raven.

Then Matt went golfing that afternoon with the boys. Only after Ken had been helicoptered to the hospital for breaking both the bones in his lower right leg. (It wasn't the best fourth of July ever).

We proceeded from Whitehawk to Salem, OR to visit my family this time. One morning Matt, Jeff and I went to the driving range, and apparently I needed a little help :)

My family along with my cousins family went to my favourite beach, Pacific City. We all climbed the sand dune and then the boys decided to jump off the top.

Us on top of the dune.

He was trying to be funny, but I don't think my aunt and little cousins thought he was very funny at all.

One fine day we traveled down to Eugene, OR to spend a day with the Smiths and their adorable little boy Spencer. We had a lot of fun visiting them and are sad we won't see them again for a long time. We went miniature golfing, ate lots of good food, and spent a lot of time playing with Spencer. He was my favourite, sorry Steve and Marissa.

We pretended Spencer was ours for this picture.

The Smiths and the Harrisons!

We ended the long trip back in Utah, where my family had traveled out to to take Jeff into the MTC. He is going to Samoa. Again we went miniature golfing (Matt really likes it). My mom killed us all.

Well, that's the end of our long road trip, and now we're in Texas so I'll try my best to keep everyone updated on med school and teaching and life in general!

Summer Freedom

Since I finished up at school the end of May Matt and I have done a lot of playing! First, for Memorial weekend we went camping with a couple in our ward to Flaming Gorge, Utah. It was a little cold at night but at least it didn't rain on us. We had a lot of fun biking around and cooking in the Dutch Oven. Then we took about a day to rest before we headed to Arizona with another set of friends to backpack into Havasupai. Havasupai is an Indian Reservation in the middle of nowhere. It's a 10 mile, one way, backpack trip to the campground (which was definitely harder than I liked), but once we got there we got to play in turqouise pools, and waterfalls, and rope swings and had a good time. We got back from Arizona on a Sunday evening and promptly left at 5am the next morning to Dallas, Texas to find an apartment. Which we did! We spent a couple of days looking at dozens of apartment buildings (at least it felt like dozens) but we found the one we liked best and we're really excited to actually have a place to live when we move out there. Since we've been back from Dallas Matt has been training for his triathlon, which is in a week, and I've been trying to enjoy my time off.