My *favorite* time of year!

My FAVORITE holiday is Halloween! I am positive that I got this from my Mother, who had more Halloween decorations as we were growing up then Christmas! It must have just rubbed off. Justin's birthday is the 30th so we usually spend it touring haunted houses and watching scary movies, but this year was a little different. Since we bought our own home, we (I really mean Justin) were excited to have trick or treaters come. We have been decorating our house all month to get ready. We got home around 5 o'clock Saturday evening and the street already had a steady stream of trick or treaters! [Quick sidebar: Shilling doesn't have mailboxes. A mailman literally walks to every door and puts the mail into a little slot that is in our door.] Justin quickly figured out that he could see the trick or treaters coming up our front stairs through the mail slot. He would wait for them to ring the door bell and then yell and scare them. (Poor little tootsie rolls, Harry Potter's, ninjas and princesses) This lasted about an hour and he decided it wasn't good enough. My mother-in-law had bought him some really scary masks so he talked my brother-in-law Brandon to go out and scary the kids with him. We always knew when there were kids at the door because we could the kids screaming/bawling. I was IMPRESSED with the number of trick or treaters that we had! I opened the door once to see about 25 people crowded around our stairs trying to get to the door. A lot of kids watched Justin and Brandon scare the kids before them and decided not to venture to the "Boo" house. Needless to say, Justin had quite the birthday party scaring little children!
Here are some pictures of our outside decorations:

Justin cut out the letters for me to be able to have this on my house! It was a big hit on our street!

This is Justin's scary creation!

Here are some pictures of my trick or treaters!

Ellie (the rock star) is Justin's parents weiner dog. Roxie (the ladybug) is my yorkie!

This is Payson and Linzie's litle boy Maximus. He is Maximus the gladiator!! Linzie made the costume all by herself!! My poor kids won't have anything as fantastic as this!

Here we have Boden Shay the Skeleton. I didn't get a picture of his Superman costume! 

I had my family come in on Sunday for a little Halloween party!  A lot of my cousins  didn't get to go trick or treating because they were watching the girls volleyball team win STATE! So they got to come trick or treating at my house!

Quick run down of our summer!

Since I am such a horrible blogger I will have to give a quick over view of our summer:
May: I graduated from Utah State!! Yes I know that my diploma is upside down :) Jessica and I graduated from the same college so it was fun to be in the same ceremony with her. And our families only had to attend one!













June: We went to Hawaii with Justin's family to celebrate me and Jessica graduating from college.

I went to Nauvoo to visit my grandparents on their mission.

And on June 30th, Justin and I bought a house!! It took us three weeks to fix everything up but we absolutely love it! I will make a new post and put up all of our before and after pictures.









And in August I started Graduate school at ISU. Sorry I don't have any "1st day of school pix." It has been REALLY busy but I am really enjoying it!

Updates

I am a terrible blogger! A lot of has happened since the last time I posted so I will give a quick run down. 

My family went to Moab for Easter and we had so much fun!

I had quite the humility lesson because my little sister kicked my trash on the motorcycle this year! Sand + Kenzie = CRASH!

My Grandparents left on a 6 month mission to Nauvoo

For those of you who know my grandparents, you should know that my Grandpa is driving tourists around on a team of horses and my Grandma is giving tours of the building and teaching tourists how to make crafts. Could there be a more perfect place for them? I think not!

I got into grad school at ISU & USU.... 

ISU here I come!

I attended the National Conference on Undergraduate Research in Missoula, Montana

Justin and I have made an offer on a house!!

(Pictures will come after we have sealed the deal!)

Grad School

I thought I would catch everyone up on where we are with Graduate school. I heard from USU and I am on the waiting list to get in here. There were about 200 applications and 12-15 spots open. Luckily I am at the top of the waiting list so hopefully I will get in after this Thursday when all of the decisions are due for USU. ISU has been a completely different story! For about a week and a half now they have been dragging their feet about sending out the acceptance letters. Luckily I have made a friend in the department and she will e-mail as soon as she sees the list so atleast I don't have to wait for snail mail!

Grad School

I just finished applying to Graduate school this week and holy crap was it a PAIN in the butt. Utah State wasn't too bad. I just had to find three people to write me a letter of recommendation, write a letter of intent, take the lovely yet horrendous GRE (graduate records exam) and score in the 40th percentile on both sections. The GRE could be a whole post in and of itself but I will leave it at that. Check Check and Check.

Idaho State was a freaking joke! I actually want to go there so I made sure back in August that I knew exactly what they wanted. I started the application process and then waited a few months to get the my letters of recommendation and the scores to the GRE. Low and behold in NOVEMBER they change the entire process. So I got to do it all over again. They require that you apply to the graduate school, which makes sense because you can't get into a program without the school accepting you first. Check. Then they have you apply to a "third" party. Which was a nightmare:

• I had to send my transcripts to Maine... I guess I missed the connection between Pocatello, Idaho and Maine.
• Then write another letter
• give them all the information about the people who were writing my letters.
• I had to try to remember every single volunteer event I helped with, and/or anything I may have done that pertains to my major
• I had to type in EVERY single course I have ever taken and tell them what category I felt it fit into and the grade I received. Weird didn't I just send them my transcripts?
• One more ridiculous joke about the transcripts: once they received my official transcript from USU, they compared that to what I filled in and then gave their own recommendation for what my GPA should be.

Check.

So I am somewhat panicked at this point. But all is well I am pretty sure I have every thing completed when I realize that the department I am applying for also requires me to mail them a hard copy of another application that is just for their department! This was probably the biggest pain the butt! I had to look at the classes they have their students take and write out the classes I have taken that are similar to theirs. If this is an indication of what my grad school experience is going to be like, I may be better off staying in Utah!

February Fun!

I must not have the right ambition for this blogging business! It has been a while! November and December were filled with family and Holidays and January was grad school application time! This month has gone so fast already! It is already half over! We just had our long Holiday that coincided with Valentine's day. Justin and I went to the Valentine's movie and had few laughs and then on Sunday my mom and Raegan came down to stay with us. We got up nice and early and went up to Beaver to do some skiing:

Kinyon and Justin did some jumping:

My Mom and I stopped and hit the very convenient bathroom that is on one of the runs:

We ate some lunch:

Justin and Kinyon decided to trade skiis and board:

Jesi and I laughed at them:

Poor baby Roxie had to stay home :(