3 Days Away!

Well now that the wedding is three days away I figure I should update this so that after the wedding I won't have a million pictures to post! Dan and I took our engagements, which turned out really cute. My cousin Loren's wife, Erika Reid took our engagements, my bridals, and she will be taking all the pictures at the wedding and reception. This one is on the front of our announcements.

They all turned out absolutely beautiful! We were very happy with them. The only problem was trying to choose which ones we wanted to use in the announcement.

My friend Brittany Bacon helped us design our announcements. Dan and I had a particular design in mind and decided to design them ourselves. Brittany helped us put everything together and we made the final edits before it went to the printers. They turned out great and we love how original they are!


Almost everything is done to get ready for the reception. We spent most of this morning over at Diane's house (she offered for us to have our reception on her beautiful backyard) setting up chairs, cleaning off tables, and power-washing everything in sight. The place is going to look great! We will finish the last decorations on Monday and last minute touches on Tuesday. My mom's friends have been a big help in setting up, cleaning, and decorating. Good thing too since my mom has been going nonstop like a crazy woman helping me get everything done! She's had less meltdowns now that Lisa is in town and Dan and I don't need to drive up and back from Logan two to three times a week.

Last night I went through the temple for the first time to receive my endowments. Thanks to all the family who came and supported me. It was a very special experience and I was glad to have family there. Now that it's past, Dan and I can focus on Tuesday when we will be sealed together in the Bountiful Temple! I love him so much and I'm very excited to spend my life with him!

I'm finally engaged!

So I've decided that this whole catching up business is a pain so I'm just going to start off new. Unfortunately, I still need to back up just a little bit, but only to the 4th of July.

My family has this tradition of going up to our cabin in Oakley, UT every year for the 4th of July. We usually hang out at the cabin and have a big BBQ before heading down the canyon to the Annual Oakley Independence Day Rodeo. This year was a little more memorable then past years--because this year I was engaged!



Dan proposed to me on top of the mountain behind our cabin. We had ridden up there on horseback and once at the top, where we had the most beautiful view of the surrounding mountain ranges, the canyon, and the valley--he proposed!

I'll have to admit that I was very surprised! I had been under the impression (with a little help from Dan) that the ring was still being resized, but nope! So we came down the mountain and showed it off to the rest of the family!

My grandpa, several of my cousins, and my aunt and uncle were also at the cabin to celebrate the 4th with us, so they all got to see it as soon as we got off the mountain. What a great 4th of July! We spent the rest of the day riding horses, driving around my grandpa's old tractor and John Deere Gator, and going to the Oakley rodeo.

The rodeo was a blast and my nieces and nephews loved sitting on Dan's lap to watch the rodeo. I think my nephew Parker made a new buddy out of "Uncle Dan."

Spring Break and Easter

These are all kind of old, but I never posted them for some odd reason, so I'm just trying to catch up!


Well, first off my friend Ciara left on her mission and is currently in the MTC. I can't believe its almost been two months since she left for her mission. I hope the time goes by fast, but she and I keep in touch and she's doing great! These pictures are from when I went down to her farewell in Feb. It was the week after we got from St. George and Vegas.

Ciara and Me

Heather Thompson, Ciara, and I--I knew Heather at school last year and we all lived in Jackson over the summer. Heather and I hang out a lot now!

So skip ahead a few months were nothing really happened but school and work. I did get a job as a copywriter/copyeditor for a local marketing company, Advent Creative. I really like working there and having the opportunity to explore a more creative side to technical writing, which is marketing and multimedia. Technical writing tends to be a little dry sometimes and it has been a challenge to break out of that trend and learn to be a little more creative in my writing. It's becoming something I really enjoy.

I also attended an Open House for the Professional Communications Master's Program at Westminster in SLC. I am considering applying for Fall 2009 and getting my masters in a marketing and multimedia emphasis. I've discovered that I like working with the more creative side of technical writing a lot better then the dry instruction manual/working with engineers (sorry Kevin) side of technical writing. I still enjoy the writing portion of all of it but the subject matter doesn't interest me.

This is a picture from Easter. My roommates and I all got sidewalk chalk and chalked the sidewalk in front of our apartment. In the end, we had chalk wars and everyone who walked past our apartment could see the chalk for days.

St. George and Las Vegas Girls Weekend

My friend Ciara is leaving on her mission to Argentina next week, so for our last weekend together we went down to St. George and Las Vegas. We stayed at Ciara's house in St. George on Friday and hung out with some of her friends, then on Saturday morning we drove down to Vegas with her parents. Her family had friends that had recently moved there, so we went and saw their new house and then made plans to meet up with them on the Strip. We went to eat at In-N-Out Burger and had lunch, then headed downtown.

Megan, Me, and Ciara

Since all three of us has been to the Strip before, we decided to go shopping at the Las Vegas Outlet Malls on the south end of the Strip. We were only able to visit maybe a 1/15th of the outlets, but we still had fun and found some cute clothes.

We met up with Ciara's families' friends at the New York, New York because they wanted to go on the roller coaster. We didn't want to pay $14 to go on one ride, so we hung out in the Arcade and took pictures. We actually took some really cute pictures of the three of us in one of those outrageously priced photobooths. I will scan those in later.

After the New York, New York, we went over to the M&M factory and went to town with the wall of M&M's. We all got bags of candy--peanut and peanut butter for me! After that we went over to the Coca-Cola Factory and got some Coke.

Good times in the Coke Factory! These pictures are for the Foster side of the family!

I'm a dark-drink drinker! My dad trained me well!

After that we left the Strip and went to The Cheesecake Factory for dinner and it was amazing. I still have leftovers and they are still good! Overall, we had a blast spending time together before Ciara left, and now Megan and I are good friend too. She was one of Ciara's best friends from Alpine and now we are friends too. We are planning a farewell party for Ciara this weekend with all of her friends. It will give everyone a change to hang out and party with her one more time before she leaves.

Other than my eventful weekend, things are going good! School is not bad this semester--surprising since it is my last--and I am currently looking for another internship. My love life is a work-in-progress but no news on that front. I'll put the other Vegas pictures up when I get them from Ciara and Megan.

Long-Awaited Christmas Break

This has been the first chance I have had to update this blog. Ever since Halloween, I have been extremely busy with school. It seems my professors tried to make all of my final projects coincide with one another and keep my as busy as possible, but somehow I managed and finished yet another semester.

I'll give you a quick update of the projects I have been working on. The first, Synopsis, is self-imposed. I published the last two monthly issues of my newsletter, Synopsis, and I have been getting ready to send it into the national STC competition. Synopsis has won national and international awards in the past and I hope to keep up the tradition. With Synopsis done with for the semester, I focused the rest of my time on final projects, which included, a complete visual redesign of a Customer Care training packet for ICON Health & Fitness. This was before..

This is after...I also worked on editing the ICON Training Manual (this is available to all their employees through a company intranet--I only edited the first ten out of one hundred pages and it took me about 10-15 hours or more.) I also redesigned the training manual for visual design.

Before...

And after...

Other projects included redesigning 15 pages of my own previous work, writing a recommendation report for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and creating a electronic portfolio.

Between all of this, my normal daily homework, and my peer tutoring job, I didn't have much time for anything except homework and dance. I think most of my friends thought I had dropped off the face of the planet, but in reality, I just became a hermit in the library. The week before Thanksgiving and the two weeks after were the worst. On average, I was working from 9:30 am until whenever they kicked me out of the library, which was usually around 12 am. It was a good thing I bought the new Adobe CS3 or else I would never have been able to get through this semester. I did, however, manage to avoid a complete meltdown during my finals. I finished Friday and I am so glad to be done with this semester. One more down, one more to go!! So close to finishing!

I was lucky because I finished on the 7th and the rest of the school doesn't finish until the 14th. English majors don't have finals, so I had a whole week to catch up on sleep, exercising, eating, and having a normal social life again before coming home for the holidays.

Halloween

I saw everyone else's Halloween pictures up and decided to put up mine as well. Can you guess what I am?? haha probably not.

I went as a box elder bug! I made my costume--cause I am poor college student--and it turned out great!

It was actually a really funny costume because box elder bugs infest Logan every year, and everyone hates them...with a passion. The majority of the reactions I got all night were about how people hated me because I was everywhere in their apartments, cars, and classes. It was hilarious!

This is a real Box Elder bug. I hate them so bad! They infest the English building on campus in the thousands. It is the worst to be working on a computer and to look up and see bugs crawling on the walls and windos above your computer or crawling over the edge of your monitors. It freaks me out everytime! I can't wait for snow, so that they all disappear.

My friend Ciara and I went to the Institutes Halloween dance but it ended at 11pm so we went party-hopping for the rest of the night. We had a blast! I met Ciara up in Jackson over the summer and we have become really good friends. We hang out all the time!

These guys are some of my friends that we ran into at one of the parties. As always, I am the center of attention!

I know, I know, I am really bad at keeping this updated...

I think I am probably shocking some of my family by actually updating this, so sit on the edge of your seat and pay attention because I put in a ton of pictures!

Okay, so summer was awesome!! Jackson Hole was absolutely amazing! I loved it there and can't wait to go back and visit! My singles branch was so much fun. There was always something fun going on everyday of the week. So even if I didn't get to do everything I was hoping to after I got mono, I still got to do a lot of fun stuff. I never got to hike the Grand but I did hike Sleeping Indian. It was a beautiful hike and I loved it.
We got to see the most amazing sunset while we were up there.

We also went up into the mountains and played in the mud, by the end of the night, we were all caked in mud and freezing, but we had a good time!

We had a "Worse Mistake Ever" dance and had to dress in the worst thing we could find.

We also had a watermelon eating contest, where yours truly came in a close second! I beat all the girls and all but one guy, it was great, but I haven't had the stomache to eat watermelon since then.

But all good things come to an end, and I moved back down to Utah State. Of course, the fun didn't stop there. I went up to the cabn with some friends before school started and we went horseback riding and rode the Gator.

I went wakeboarding with some friends the first weekend I was home. It was a blast, even though I ate hard a couple of times.

Then its just been school, homework and dance since school started. The Synopsis is going well, we had a few problems with corrupted files but are working through them. Being an editor is a lot of work, but I am really enjoying myself. I really love it.

Then last weekend I went up to the cabin with my roommate Shawna and we watched conference and relaxed all weekend long. It was great! She is a senior too and we didn't know each other before this semester but we have become really good friends.