A Vivint Summer.

This job is crazy. It's satisfying work for the most part but very involved and intense. It's not a huge exaggeration to say we sleep, drive and work. 

This is what my day looks like: 

11:00 am-ish: wake up. Lay in bed contemplating quitting or faking sick. Decide the money is worth getting out of bed. 

Noon: Get out of bed and get ready for the day. I have black and grey shirts and black and grey pants so getting dressed is easy yet boring. Because getting dressed is so boring I have been playing around with make-up a little more. My hair is pretty wavy in the Texas humidity so I've just been air drying it and washing it like twice a week. 

1:00 pm: Meeting time. Prep equipment and talk about the day before. 

2:00 pm: pack a cooler full of food and drinks and hit the road. We've been driving pretty far all summer. The last month has been an hour commute every day. It's killing me. 

3:30 ish pm: Sit around in a car waiting for jobs. Hopefully you get one within an hour of being there or else you get really tired and talk yourself out of caring. 

Midnight (at the earliest): arrive home. Make some food. Watch some TV. 

2:00 am: Go to sleep vowing to try to get to bed earlier the next day. 

Texas ramblings.

Here I am sitting in a hotel room in Waco, Texas with Castle hogging the bed beside me and Gab one floor down hanging with the guys. This is summertime working for Vivint.

When Gab got laid off from Vivint Wireless in December it was a pretty big bummer. We were doing really well for newly weds and I guess the world wanted us to experience our first bump in the road. This lead us to deciding to install security systems for the summer! I've been out here for 24 days and Gab and Castle just joined me yesterday. It was not ideal to be apart for that long but Gab was finishing up with school and I was ready to get out here and start making some money!

The plan is to make a good chunk of money and be able to get 100% out of debt besides the house and then be able to put about $20,000-$25,000 towards the house so we can refinance and stop paying mortgage insurance.

Gab could have a new opportunity lined up when we get back in August but if that doesn't pan out we definitely plan to do this gig for a couple more years and pay off our house and live our lives debt free.

All that to say we live in Texas! It's very green which I did not expect. We'll be in Waco for another two weeks and then we're off to Austin which I'm very excited to live in and explore but so not looking forward to driving in every day.

Here we are at the coolest Waco hang, Common Grounds. Amazing coffee and amazing outside hang out space. I'll miss it when we head to Austin but feeling pretty confident Austin will have an alternative for me. P.S. I look exhausted in this picture because five was the number of hours of sleep I got haha.

So there's the summary update of our life right now!

Hellhole Trail

Castle has been on meds for sprained back legs for the last two weeks (we're pretty sure he did the splits on the kitchen floor). So today when it was 55 and sunny and only one day away from his clearance to hike to his hearts content, we went for it. We drove out to Hellhole trail in Kayenta, which I did once back in high school and randomly remembered about.

These color combinations, I mean, who knew? I'll never not be in awe of this corner of the world we live in.

Plural

It's official! We're plural! As in we've been together for years. Two of them today!

When I used to ask my parents how long they've been married my dad would always say "20 married, 21 together," and I always thought that was weird that he included the last part. But I get it now! I'm totally claiming that first year and a half of dating Gab.

So in honor of our pluralism here's a look at just a few highlights:

The "before" days when I had a huge crush on Gab and he claims he didn't know at all. Yet he would stay up into the early morning hours with me talking about books and music and preferences and experiences and a slew of other uninteresting things that felt so significant to me. Talk about frustrating. One of these days  I'll write down the "before" story.

An extremely grainy, horrible picture of us at Disneyland where Gab had a revelation that I was rad and we were meant to be together, something I had known for a good year at least. He moved to St. George to date me a month after this picture was taken and asked me to be his girlfriend a month after that (January 15th, 2013).

After we were official it was smooth sailing from there (ha- not) but we did go to Hawaii!

And the East Coast (a couple times).

We went on a cruise!

And road tripped to Washington.

Honeymooned in Florida.

And you know, fought a lot, made up a lot, learned a lot, yada yada.

Anyways this recapping is making me think that Gab and I need to take this shiz international, would you agree?!

Spring 2015 Goals

 There I was, just cruising through the year, ten days in, when my goal writing appetite kicked in. My sister-in-law, Cassie gave me the A Beautiful Mess planner and I love that they have pages for Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter goals. I filled the Spring page in a matter of minutes and figured a page worth was good enough for now. I'm going to write them here because one of them is -gasp- to write more (I hate the word blog). No one saw that coming right?

So alright here's the line up in the order that my brain thought of them which might be insightful (?):

Run a 10K. 
Gab said a crazy sentence the other day. It was this: "We're going to work out when you get home".
So we took Castle on the hike that we take him on every day but here's a crazy concept, we put tennis shoes on and jogged and did lunges and other random exercises while we were there. We might have looked silly doing calf raises on a bench overlooking the city of St. George but we were exercising. So anyways, it felt really nice and I was sore for the first time in months.

Then last night (no i'm not done talking about this subject and no I don't know if each goal is going to get explained this much) we were watching Friends and it was the episode where they were all laying around in the living room after Thanksgiving dinner and everyone is moaning about how stuffed they are and then Joey said, "I need something sweet" and I was like that's me. And Gab's eyes got very wide as he nodded his head. So the moral of the story is: exercising felt good and I like to eat sweet things so I need to balance is out. I enjoy running once I get to the point of being able to run three miles comfortably. 10K it is. 

Organize and decorate the kitchen.
As Gab and I are about to go back into the category of starving students we cook at home pretty much every night of the week so I really want to make an effort to make my kitchen super functional. Bonus for making it look pretty because we hang out in there for a good chunk of the evening.


Compile a list of at least 30 recipes that Gab and I both love and can make easily. 
This obviously ties in with the last goal, but it can be so difficult to think of what to eat every night and Gab is zero help on this. In an effort to make things easier on myself I'm working on making a Pinterest board that is recipes we have tried, loved, and want to make over and over.


Learn QuickBooks. 
This is just something I'm interested in knowing for other future goals and to up my resume game.
DXATC has a class starting February 4th and I will be there!

Read. My list is the following: 
#GIRLBOSS by Sophia Amoruso. This one is done but I am all about adding things to a list just to check them off. I devoured this book in a period of 24 hours.


Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham. This one is halfway done. I'm really enjoying it. I don't know much about Lena Dunham but my brother got this book for me for Christmas (along with #GIRLBOSS). I really wanted to love the show Girls but I just didn't. The sex was too much for me and to prove I'm not a total prude I'll tell you I watch Orange is the New Black.

Zero to one by Peter Thiel & Blake Masters. This one is  "notes on start ups and how to build the future" and it is very very good. It's the kind of book you want to sit down with with a highlighter and read parts out loud to someone who will listen. Not the kind of book to fall asleep to.

7 Day Start up by Dan Norris. Haven't even opened it yet, but I've heard good things and am dying to. Gab got it for me for Christmas along with Zero to One. He is a superb gift giver.

Put more effort into Airbnb.
Gab and I rent out our basement on Airbnb which is a vacation rental site. I want to make the basement a more exciting place to stay by making it look better and adding functional things like a door at the bottom of the stairs to separate the living spaces more.

Experiment with natural remedies for anxiety and chill out. 
Teas? Diet? Exercise? I know these things work but I need to find my own routine that will help me be my best self.

Make my blog look better in an effort to encourage me to spend more time writing. 
I love reading my old blogs. Therefore I know that I definitely won't regret spending more time and effort to document my wonderfully simple life.


Go "real camping", in other words spend two nights. 
Gab and I are always saying, "let's go camping" and never doing it and it's really starting to bug me. The goal is to go camping in Beaver for a weekend at this place that my family did a reunion at one year. It has a small pond with canoes, and horse shoe pits and what else do you really need?

Go to church for heavens sake, pun intended. 
We have a million excuses as to why we haven't been going to church consistently and most are valid but we need to prioritize this.

Overhaul my closet ruthlessly. Make that all closets. 
I just bought quite a few new pieces of clothing while I had my December discount at work so I'm ready to purge everything I don't love and wear often. Then there's the office closet that is chuck full of who even knows what. I honestly don't know what's in there and why we have so. much. stuff.

A Timely Thanksgiving Post

We hosted Thanksgiving at our place this year! It was great because I was forced to put something on the walls to make it look somewhat homey in here. We actually even painted the wall a different shade of blue! 

I even managed to make a pretty cute centerpiece. I bought the scented pine cones which I later learned Gab loathes so I had to spray them with febreze and hang them outside to try to get the scent gone. A labor of love, I tell ya. 

Gab's siblings and mom came down for most of the week and I was so so very very happy to have a house full of people. It was a mess! I love big messy houses full of people. The house looked "lived in" and it was truly the best. 

We managed to get everyone dressed in the midst of cooking on Thanksgiving and headed over to Snow Canyon Overlook for some family pictures. 

Notice Gab's hand grabbing me like I'm going to fall off that cliff. Ever so awkward in front of a camera, that boy. 

We've started this little tradition where we take pictures with Castle on our shoulders like this. He usually plays along pretty well but he was clearly terrified at being up there on this cliff side. Poor guy. 

The only thing left to do is the  obligatory list of things I'm thankful for. 

1. Our home that fits plenty of family for times like this. 

2. Castle. And our early morning walks on the mountain. He got lost for 40 minutes on the mountain the day before Thanksgiving and I about lost it. 

3. Technology so that I could Facetime with my fam for a few minutes on Thanksgiving. This is the second year in a row I haven't spent Thanksgiving with them which is super weird and is another clue to the fact that I'm "growing up" I guess. 

4. Game nights with Gab's side of the family. They're pretty epic. 

5. Having adorable little nephews running around. 

6. Gab. Because he is just my favorite person. 

7. And Gab's hair because come on, he has awesome hair. 

Head in the Clouds

A couple of months ago Castle and I have gave up leashed walks in lieu of making the mile drive to the old airport to do the temple quarry hike every day. It's a win win. He gets to run around the mountain hunting birds and getting all his crazy morning energy out and I don't have to get my arm ripped off.

The trail is also a lot prettier than our neighborhood streets. Especially on rainy, gorgeous days like this one when the clouds come down for a visit and you get to walk through them and admire the saturated blacks, greens and reds that are surrounding you.

December is looking quite lovely so far.