Things about Arizona

As our time in Arizona draws to a close, I thought I would make a summary of some key points I would like to remember, and also a list of things I will miss.

SUMMARY:
During our 2 years in Arizona.....

-- We lived in 2 different apartments.
-- I had 4 different jobs.
-- Brody traveled to 3 different continents for school related business (Europe, South America, Africa.  Thunderbird IS an international business school, after all).
-- We visited and/or stayed the night in many different cities in AZ including: Mesa, Scottsdale, Tucson, Flagstaff, Holbrook, Winslow, Sedona.
-- Brody flew in and out of the Phoenix airport 3 times, and every member of my immediate family flew in and out at least once.  Me???..... I never stepped foot in the airport.  For me it was always long, dreadful car rides to get in and out of here; never short, peaceful plane rides.
-- We became good friends with people from all over the world including: India, Tanzania, Thailand, China and the Netherlands.
--  I thought I'd see a scorpion while living here, but I never did.
-- We listened to former US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, speak.
-- I met and chatted with William Joseph (an amazing piano player who my mom and I saw in concert in Logan a few years back).
-- We took part in one of the events that Arizona is famous for and went to a Spring Training Game.


THINGS I WILL MISS ABOUT ARIZONA:

-- I never saw one spider while living here
-- QuikTrip gas stations
-- The cool landscaping along the freeways
-- Speedy drivers!! (85% of drivers here go 20 mph over the speed limit, ALL the time! The other 15% are snowbirds)
-- The smell of orange blossoms in the spring.
-- Seeing hot air balloons on the horizon at sunset
-- The many amazing Pizza and Mexican Food restaurants

-- Enjoying drive-in movies / movies-in-the-park with perfect weather every time, mostly year-round
-- Palm trees
-- The huge malls and movie theaters (always at LEAST 20 screens per theater, which is definitely not the case in Utah)

-- The trees on the side of the road that are cut in a perfect square so the cars driving beneath them won't hit the branches, like so.....

We have had a wonderful adventure living in Glendale, Arizona for the last two years and I know we will look back with such great memories!!

Stay tuned for more posts to come about graduation activities, fun with the fam, and saying good-bye to our friends, home, and life in Arizona.

Thunderbird Campus

These are some pictures I took around campus that I want to remember....


The Main Entrance:

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The Welcome Wall (which says 'welcome' in 11 different languages):

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The Administration Building (where I work):

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My path to work:

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I made good friends with the creatures I saw each day.

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The Library (International Business Information Centre -or- IBIC):

the other side

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The Commons (cafeteria):

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The Tower:  This building has been restored from when the campus used to be an airbase during WWII

this is what it used to look like

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The Coleman Lounge: (Brody and his friends always come here in between classes to play pool)

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Plant life: (cacti)

check out these crazy palm trees!!!

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The Socrates Quote
(I am not an Athenian or a Greek but a citizen of the world):

(This is on the wall on your way out of campus)

It's a pretty campus, in it's own unique way.  And that ends our little tour!

Other random events

Here are some other random events that have happened in the last few weeks...

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LOGAN FRIENDS
We have 2 sets of friends that we knew in Logan that are now living in Arizona, so we got together with each of them one more time before we left. (I totally forgot to get a picture with Brooke & Garrett, I'm so sad!)

Liz & Devin Daniels

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BABY SHOWER

Meghann and I attended a baby shower last Friday for our good friend Vanessa who is having a baby boy in June!

Me, Vanessa, Meghann

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WARD PARTY

Saturday morning, before we left for Sedona, we stopped by our ward's Easter party.  They had a yummy breakfast, a touching display of pictures and messages about the death and resurrection of Christ, and an Easter Egg Hunt for the kids.  It was fun.

PS- I took this picture by hanging my camera from a tree branch!!  
Ha ha.  Turned out pretty good, don't ya think?

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BRODY'S D.C. TRIP

For one of Brody's classes, he and two other students have been working on a project for a company in DC called the Inter-American Development Bank.  On Sunday they flew the 3 guys out for a couple days to give their final presentation to the board of directors.  Brody said it went really well and was a cool experience. 

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PACKING UP THE HOUSE
Every day after work for the last week or so, I go home and work on packing up our house.  I actually quite like doing this, because I like the puzzle of trying to get things to fit nicely together in the box and I love getting rid of items we don't use.  Since we've moved around so much (this will be the 7th since we've been married!!) we thought it would be easier to use those gray bins from Wal-Mart, instead of bothering with the cardboard boxes, so we've slowly started a collection.  It's so nice!!  Also, I'm trying to keep our apartment looking as normal as possible for when our families are in town, so I'm stacking everything out on the balcony.  (which I wouldn't have been able to do if we were still on the 1st floor, so that is also very nice)

 

It's been an extremely busy week, but an exciting one as well.  Our families both get in tomorrow, graduation is on Friday and we leave on Sunday!!!

Beautiful Sedona

On Saturday, Brody and I took a day trip up to Sedona.  We had been trying to do this trip for about 2 months now (things kept coming up, or the weather was bad), and Saturday was basically our last chance so I'm extremely happy it worked out!  Now that we've been there though, I'm sad we didn't go more often.  It's only 1 1/2 hour drive, a lot cooler than Phoenix, and tons of fun!  Sedona is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to!!  Seriously.  It is a cute, quaint little town completely surrounded by gorgeous red rock mountains.

When we got there, we had a picnic lunch that I had packed and then we got ready for a hike.  We hiked around for about 2 hours and saw some beautiful scenery!!

{{ Along the path, we passed a family with 2 little boys.  At one point, one of the boys pointed at Brody and said "are you a REAL hiker???"  

Ha ha!!  We had a good laugh at that. }}

I thought these two trees below were pretty interesting.  One looks like it was made out of tiny little legos or something (does that look weird at all to anyone else?? Or is it just a normal tree?)  And the other had a funky bright orange fungus thing all over it.

The weather was great!! Low 70's, mostly cloudy and a little breezy.  (We were actually a little worried it might rain on us, but it never did)

After the hike, we drove around town and saw some very interesting things.  The first was this really old looking Harkins Theater.  From the road, we thought the building was so old it was falling apart, but as we got closer we realized that not only was it not falling apart, but it was a fully functioning Theater showing the newest movies I could think of!!

We also saw a green McDonald's!!  I've never seen such thing but after a while, we realized these places were probably built this way to keep Sedona looking as 'natural' as possible.  I thought that was pretty cool.

Further along down the road, Brody spotted a store he thought I might like, so he pulled over and I'm so glad he did!!!
Within this one building, there were 3 different stores and each one was completely awesome.  The first was a cake store that has been featured on the Food Network!  The cakes were the most intricate, amazing things I have ever seen.  Brody even let me get a $4 cupcake and it sure was tasty!  Next was this cool wedding store that displayed some beautiful table settings and other things for a wedding.  After that was a cute antique home decor store.  I loved everything and I'm so glad Brody knows me well enough to pull over!

More cakes: that middle thing (which I think is an urn) is a cake and is completely edible!

After that, we went to the downtown shopping area and walked around the tourist shops for a bit.  I just love how the red rock mountains are in the background of pretty much everything!

We ended the day with a yummy dinner consisting of a buffalo burger and pulled pork BBQ sandwich.  It was delightful!

One more scenery picture....

We had such a fun day together and I am so happy we worked it out to visit this lovely city!!!

Movies, goodbyes, sun and fun!

This last weekend was packed with excitement!  I think the next few weeks will be the same as we try and do everything we want to before we leave here forever!!  Here's a look at how our weekend went:

Friday--  No pictures, but we went to a drive-in movie and saw 2 great movies for $6! (Limitless and Source Code). The weather was great, and I still think this is such a fun and cheap activity!

Saturday--  In the morning, we said goodbye to our good friends Dave and Claire (and helped them pack up their things).  They are moving to Germany where Dave will work for Lufthansa for the next few years.  We are so excited for them!

After that, we headed to the Wet 'n Wild water park for some fun in the sun!!  It actually wasn't that hot outside (95*) and the water was quite cold, but we still had a lot of fun.

That night, we went to a party-- Thunderbird style!  It was at a bar, so me, Brody, Dan and Meghann had fun drinking our soda's and watching everyone else get drunk.  There were about 70 + Thunderbird students there!  We've become great friends with a lot of the students that Brody goes to school with and we always enjoy getting together with them... even if it is in a bar.

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Sunday-- After church, we went to my cousin Jordan's house for dinner, along with my other cousins Dave and Courtney.  It has been so fun living so close to them for the last 2 years.  We've had a lot of fun getting together with them on occasion and I definitely appreciate all they've done for us!

4 years!!

Yesterday, April 14, Brody and I celebrated our 4 year anniversary!!

We didn't do much to celebrate this year-- just went out to eat at one of our favorite restaurants: Macaroni Grill, and then stopped to get frozen yogurt for dessert on the way home.

Each year spent together just keeps getting better and better.  I absolutely love my life with Brody and I'm extremely grateful to be married to such a wonderful guy!  He makes me so happy.

"Random"

I have a bunch of random pictures that aren't exactly the best quality and don't display anything too exciting, but I had enough of them that I figured I could compile a "random" post.  So here we go. (And by the way, there are a lot of words with quotations in this post and I'm not really sure why....)

In the spring time, Phoenix puts on a thing called "movie-in-the-park", where they play old 80's movies in the courtyard of a big mall area for free.  That sounded like a good time to us, so we grabbed our blankets, some snacks and our friends and went and did that one night. (sorry for the blurry picture- night time photos are always hard)

We went to Abuelo's with Dan and Meghann a while back to celebrate Meg's birthday. Brody and I ordered "The Grande Combo" to split and it sure was GRANDE!!! That plate had to have been at least 2 feet long. And I'm not going to say whether we finished the whole thing in one sitting or not..... Ok, we did.  But it was sooo yummy!!  (Also, can you say bug eyes?? It looks like my eyes are about to pop out of my face!)

One Saturday afternoon, Brody and I decided to take a little stroll around "Downtown Glendale" and it was actually pretty entertaining.  There are about 10 antique shops within a 2 block radius, so we had fun looking at all the old, neat things inside.  One of them had a display of the 2nd largest polar bear ever to be captured.  The thing was huge!!

During some of my "down time" at work one day, I decided to set a goal of winning the game of hearts with zero points and after many, many, many tries, I finally did!! (As you can tell, I have a LOT of down time at my job.....)

I was recently introduced to the popular southern dish of "chicken and waffles".  Apparently it's a big thing over there to serve them together, which I found to be a little strange.  When I heard there was a restaurant in town that did just that (Lolo's Chicken and Waffles), we had to go.  And it was surprisingly very yummy! (Especially the waffles.  They were probably the best waffles I've ever had in my entire life!)

Future plans...... FINALLY!!

Now for the post you have all been waiting for (if you haven't already seen on facebook)........

We have finally figured out where our life will be taking us next.........

It has been many weeks of waiting, wishing, waiting, hoping, waiting, wondering and more waiting!

Drum roll please...............

This fall, we will be moving to Fort Collins, Colorado for Brody to get his PhD at Colorado State University!!!  We are super excited and very much ready for this next big adventure!

BUT, before that big adventure takes place, we have a few summer plans that some of you may not know about yet.  (Or should I say Brody has a few summer plans....)

1.)  Brody is going to sell alarm systems for APX during the months of May and June in Oklahoma City, OK.  I may or may not be going with him (I'm hoping to get a summer job in Logan in which case, I would stay there).

2.)  Brody will then be going to AFRICA during the months of July and August for a school project.  Ghana, to be specific.  (He IS graduating this month, but won't technically receive his diploma until after this project).  I will NOT be able to go with him, which I am super bummed about.  This project is a very short-term consulting job.  Brody and his team will be working with a real live company, helping with real live problems.  He doesn't get paid for it, but he does get school credit and they pay for his flight and living expenses.  Not to mention this will look great on his resume.  (They would not pay for my $3,600 (!!) plane ticket, which is why I'm not going)

So, it's going to be a loooong summer for me, but an exciting one for Brody.  We're just happy that everything worked out the way it did and we're so excited to start our next chapter in Colorado!!