Happy Easter

One of my favorite holidays is Easter. I love this time of year when everything starts blooming again and you have an excuse to wear excessive amounts of pastel colors. Ryan and I didn't have any good, recent pictures of ourselves so we went out before church to take pictures in our cute Easter clothes. I got a new dress for the occasion.


After church we had my siblings over to decorate Easter eggs and have dinner. Here I am finishing up with dinner. My mom gave me this apron. Isn't it so cute?


Here is Ryan getting everything ready for dying Easter eggs. We only bought one box of egg dying stuff and it came with 12 different colors. We didn't even know what to do with it all.


I usually only get white eggs but I heard that brown eggs are better for coloring so we decided to try it out.



Here we all are dying the eggs.



And here are some of the finished eggs. The top two are white eggs and the bottom two are brown. The brown eggs mostly just still looked brown when they were done. If you picked a dark color and then left the egg in there for a long time, then I guess the brown ones would look better, but other than that we liked the white ones better.


It was still a blast and we had fun spending time with family. It's also really important for us, amidst all the festivities, to remember what the holiday is all about. I'm so grateful for the atonement and for the gospel in my life. I hope you all had a chance to spend time with your families and think about Jesus Christ and His sacrifice for us.

Happy Pi Day

So as all good engineers and nerds do, we celebrated Pi day yesterday. It was March 14! 3/14. I'm seriously the biggest nerd in the world, because at work we have this part numbering system that includes the date and I tried so hard to design as many parts as I could so that I would get to put 3-14 in the part number. I was asking my coworkers if they were going to have pie that night to celebrate and they had no idea what I was talking about.

This got me to thinking about the origins of Pi day and when people started celebrating it. There is a whole lot more to this Pi day than I first thought. It's a newer holiday. I think we make up more and more holidays as we go on, like Talk Like a Pirate Day and Snowplow Mailbox Hockey Day. I promise I'm not making that up. Anyway, Pi day was first celebrated, as far as we know, in San Fransisco in 1988 at the San Fransisco Exploratorium. The staff and a bunch of other people that came just marched around in a circle and ate lots of fruit pie. Not only is there Pi day (3/14), but there is Pi minute (3/14 at 1:59), and Pi second (3/14 at 1:59:26). And there is Pi approximation day, July 22, because European date format is 22/7, and 22 divided by 7 is a common approximation for Pi. Also, something you may not have known, Albert Einstein's birthday is March 14.

In honor of Pi day, I invited my nerd friends over and we ate pie. I've just got to say that I am really good at making pie. Especially apple pie. I learned this mostly from my Dad. Not that my Mom isn't a good cook, because she is and she makes amazing pies, but when your husband is willing to help out in the kitchen, you don't let that opportunity pass you by. So my dad was usually the one to make the pies and I watched and learned. Here is a picture of my amazing Pi day pie.

The one downside to making amazing pies is that they get eaten up right away. This is a picture of the pie before it was cooked. There is no after baking picture because I think it lasted all of 2 seconds after it got out of the oven before it was devoured. Somehow I managed to have one piece of leftovers and I'm eating that for breakfast right now!

An Update on our Boring Lives

I'm sorry we haven't posted anything in a while. We're not very good at this. We've been really busy with school and work, and haven't had time for anything exciting to write about. Although, Ryan is doing some really cool stuff in his optimization class with genetic algorithms. Apparently they have nothing to do with humans and genetics. I figured this out about halfway through Ryan trying to explain it to me. Ryan has also been busy with car maintenance. I don't know what we would do if he wasn't so handy. We've saved a lot of money by having him do all the maintenance. Here is a picture of Ryan working on the car. I help by giving moral support and taking pictures.


I've been loving my new job, well, as much as you can love a job when you don't like to get up and go to work every day. Everyone there is so nice and I'm doing real engineering. Right now I'm working on designing a test fixture to test part of our tool that we're making and when I finish it, I get a bonus! I'm pretty excited. So I guess our lives aren't that boring, but that was about 3 weeks summed up into 3 sentences. It sounds better when you lump it together like that. If I'd been updating you day by day, you would have been bored to tears. I know I was.

Another bizarre thing that happened is I got a very strange rash. I know, it sounds disgusting. I had these little red bumps all over my entire body. They didn't itch, they actually kinda hurt. I went to the doctor to figure out what was going on. Now that should tell you something right there about how bad this rash was, because I hate going to the doctor. Our doctor especially! They never have any idea what they are talking about. You pay for them to tell you exactly the same thing you could have looked up on the internet. Or they don't tell you anything at all, and you still have to pay for it.

This is how my doctor visit went. I showed up and the nurse took me back and weighed me and took my temperature and did all the nurse things. This took about 8 minutes. I spent about 3 minutes waiting for the doctor. The doctor came in, took one look, count them, one look at my hand and said, "Hmmmm, that's interesting. You say it doesn't itch? Okay, this isn't an allergic reaction, what's going on here is your body is reacting harshly to something." Cause I couldn't figure that out on my own. Thanks Sherlock! I couldn't tell that my body was reacting to something. Then without looking at the rest of body, even though I told him I had it all over my body he says, "Let's just watch it. If it gets more wide spread let me know." More wide spread?! It's already all over my entire body, including on the roof of my mouth. So I said that to the doctor and then proceeded to strip off my clothes so I could show him how it was all over my body. I was so mad that he couldn't at least take the time to look at everything before saying "let's just watch it". The least he could have done was say, "I have no idea what's going on, if it gets any worse, you should go see a specialist." So finally he looks at the roof of my mouth, my back, and my legs and says, "Let's just watch it, let me know if it gets worse." The whole visit took 13 minutes. That means I couldn't have been in there with the doctor for more than 2 minutes. I was ticked.

Eventually the rash just went away and I still have no idea what it was or what caused it. I've already been asked by everyone under the sun if I changed lotions or laundry detergent or got new clothes or tried a new type of food, and I didn't, if that's what you were wondering. I had it for a little over a week. Ryan never got anything so it wasn't contagious. Aside from being bizarre and a bit annoying, it really wasn't that bad. People just didn't want to touch me or get near me. Now I've added a couple pictures so if you are easily disgusted or you don't want to look at them, I promise not to say anything interesting after this point so you can stop reading. This is mostly for my mom, who is very curious and interested in all things medical.

These pictures do not do it justice. I promise, it was much more obvious and disgusting in real life.