It's not my fault

Here is a little preview of our anniversary. Fall has definitely hit Park City. We had such a great time up there. The Stein Erikson Lodge was once again amazingly amazing...more on that in a future post.

Here is the problem though..it kind of looks like two caterpillars crawled up on my face and built their cocoons above my eyes. Ok, maybe it's not quite that bad, but I need to pluck my eyebrows real bad. I'm kind of lazy in general, but this is probably my most hated grooming habit. At least this time it isn't my fault. Yeah, that's right...it's Hal's fault that my eyebrows look like I could be Sasquatch's kid. Now I know you may be asking why this could possibly be Hal's fault since he is practically perfect. Well, let me tell you. For some inexplicable reason Hal is obsessive about plucking his unibrow (I know, sexy, right?). But the messed up thing is that because he likes to pluck said unibrow he always takes my tweezers out of my makeup bag and for some also inexplicable reason he is incapable of putting them back into the makeup bag. Is it really that hard? Apparently not because I find myself doing it like twice a week afer he has used them. We all know by now that I'm not plucking that often.

Stein Erikson had one of those awesome magnified mirrors that even lights up in our room. I know, awesome. I was stoked. So I look into it and think 'Man, I need to pluck my eyebrows.' Now the funny thing is once Hal discovered this mirror he turned the light on and looked into it he said 'Hun, I think I know where Stephanie Meyer got the idea for the eyes in The Host'. (The light from the mirror gives you a ring around your pupil) (I know, sexy, right...sorry he is taken ladies). I was so stoked to use this awesome mirror. By now you must be able to see my forshadowing...when I opened my makeup bag low and behold my tweezers were not inside! Blast ye Hal! So pretty much I have decided I don't feel like plucking my eyebrows since my plans were thwarted. Just kidding, that is kind of gross...I'm sure I'll get around to it eventually.

Free Thinkers

After reading that amazing blog I posted about below and laughing my butt off(what if I really laughed my butt off, that would be awkward. More on that later, maybe, if I remember) I decided to ramble a whole lot more on this blog. I am in my head, lots. Maybe it would be good for me to let it out more, or maybe I am REEL bored at work and I ramble in my head, so why not ramble here?

Yes, I did just answer the phone with food in my mouth. That's what happens when the receptionist goes to lunch and I am sitting here grumbling to my rumbling tummy about how I'm hungry when a secretary offers me a free lunch. Score!
Well, guess what song is stuck in my head? "Yackety Yack, Don't Talk Back." That may be because I listened to it a lot when I was little, or because I feel like I'm gonna yack. That vegetarian sandwich got a little too brussel sprouty for me real quick. And now my tummy hurts...so what do I do? I go back to eating the chips that I was eating before the sandwich, because that's going to help lots....yup.

Ok, how weird is this...imagine someone you are talking to laughing really hard and then all the sudden their butt falls off onto the floor. Pretty sure there is a commercial that is kind of like that. If I remember, it was funny. I think it was more along the lines of people losing weight so their love handles or relief society arms fall off.
There are definitely some people and things that make me laugh my butt off...so lets make a list
-Hal, he is seriously one of the funniest, randomly funny people ever
-The Office....is on tonight, woo!
-Heather, we have done some crazio things together
-I guess this should include my besties
-My random texts and phone calls from Dane (Who can help laughing when your brother-in-law calls you and asks if he can taser your husband if he makes a taser out of a digital camera and a battery)
-putting too small of shirts on our cat
-Michelle's kids (p.s. I have an awesome video to post of Kaleb eating a doughnut)
-My sisteritos
-Isa when she 'liz-es"
-When I remember something funny and laugh to myself, and then I realize I am laughing out loud to myself...
I'm sure there's lots of other things that make me laugh my butt off. What makes you laugh your butt off? Pretty sure this must be why I have a little bum. Maybe one day I'll have a teacher bum, you know where they sit a lot...and it's super flat like a pancake. You know? Either way, I still think it would be weird if that actually happened. It kind of makes me laugh to think about though.

The End. Sorry if my mind scares you.
P.S. I am afraid to call the lady at Challenger to follow up on my last interview. maybe I'll make Hal call and pretend to be me do you think it would work?

Funny Times

Pretty sure this is the greatest blog post ever.
I don't know the girl who writes this blog, but she kind of stole my mind.
This is how I think...
Her whole blog is amazing, especially the newest post.
Go....read it and laugh.

Family Reunion

Here are the pictures from Hal's family reunion. We had a blast up in Idaho. The Nielsen family reunions are intense, so many people come and the last two years it has been so much fun. All of them put so much work into it to make it great, and it was. It was our first time camping together. It was freezing, but it was fun.

Do you like our huge flash light? It is seriously huge.
We hitched onto the Peterson's campfire. Thanks for sharing your smores and starbursts!

Hal and Dane are so nice to each other

I thought the smoke from the campfire made this picture turn out cool. This is Traci and Scott with Vaughn's daughter Ella? I think that's right.

Look at Hal's face! He was grumpy that I wanted to take a picture together before church because he thought we were going to be late.

So here is another summer adventure for Sam & Hal. Hal loves camping so he was happy we got to do it a few times this summer.

Happy Birthday.

Today is my mother's birthday. She would have been 58 today. My favorite thing about the headstone, and the one thing I actually requested for it is that it has a flower vase attached to it. She loved flowers and so on her birthday and the anniversary of her death and sometimes on my parents anniversary I put flowers on her grave. Today after work I found the most amazing flowers to fit her. They were awesome huge sunflowers that were partly died. They just screamed my mom, especially on such a rainy day. It was raining so hard! I was in shorts and a t-shirt...not so good for stormy weather. I love the rain so it didn't bother me so much. Hal is amazing and accidentally left a coat in my car yesterday, so I didn't get completely soaked, just mostly soaked while I was at the cemetary. It was really nice.

We were so lucky that they had taken out a road in the SLC cemetary soon before my mother passed away. It just so happened to be really close, actually right down the lane form my great-grandmother's grave. So, I took some flower petals off of my mother's sunflowers and sprinkled them on her gravestone.

Here is me getting super wet in the cemetary. I was more wet by the time I left. My shoes were soaked completely through! That's ok, I have been dying for it to rain, so I am alright with it. I am glad that I work downtown and was able to be close enough to the cemetary to go for her birthday. Happy Birthday Mom, I love you very much and it's comforting that sometimes I can still feel you around.

When I loaded my SIM card on my comptuer I realized I had a ton of posts to make, but I thought this one was important enough to make on her actual birthday, so you'll be getting some posts from earlier in the summer soon, hopefully.

Tid-bits

Just thought I would share this nice little tid-bit for your enjoyment....I believe this is actually a dog shirt. Look how fat it makes her look because her fur poofs out! In this picture she looks like a couch potato. Yes, we're mean 'parents' as we put it on her for our enjoyment.

My interview at Challenger went really well! I couldn't think of a time that I was treated unfairly. The only thing I could think of were small petty things at work, and I didn't want to bring that up...Other than that I think it went really well. I have another interview on Thursday. A teaching interview. I have to give a 15 minute teaching bit on history or geography in a kindergarten class. Hal gave me the good idea to do something on the Founding Fathers as it is a really conservative school. Hopefully it goes well!

P.S. There is a rhinestone rainbow and heart on the back of her shirt :) Even better, right?

Fortune Cookie

There was a lonely fortune cookie sitting on the break room table just calling out my name. For those of you who don't know me well, I like fortune cookies. It literally said: EAT ME! Well, the post it note on it said that. Anyway, it gave me a fantastic fortune.

Take that chance you've been considering.

How great is that? Not only is it great because it's an actual fortune, kind of sort of, better than most of the fortunes you get now a days, but it's also great because I have an interview tomorrow, so it fits!

Thank you fortune cookie for igniting my excitement.
You'll be to blame if I don't get the job. Yup, that's logical.

Challenger Tests

Here is a little update in my job process. It took so long to update, well because there wasn't much to update about. The woman I sent my resume into apparently never received it. Her husband works with Hal and he was talking to Hal and said she was wondering what ever happened to me as she never received my resume. So, 3 weeks later I called her and re-sent it.
Boy, did she get the ball rolling. She sent my resume to both Farmington and SLC Challenger Schools and told me I would probably best be a teacher intern for right now, and man after taking some tests I agree with her. I think I would want to be a teacher intern anyway to kind of get the feel of how they teach and how their classrooms work.
Less than a week after she e-mailed my info Farmington called me to set up an interview, so I have an interview there next Thursday! Yay!
A woman called me to set up a time to take some test. What? I didn't know this required test taking?! I thought I was done when I took my last final on May 7th. This is where I realized I am really stupid. She said there isn't really a way to prepare for the tests as they cover a lot of information. I kept telling people I was scared of them having information like sentence composition on them...you know the stuff you learn in 3rd grade and then don't use anymore unless you're playing mad-libs...
Well, I'm stupid...maybe me thinking that was the Lord saying: Sam you need to study this. Yeah, it was on the test. The biggest section of the test. So I had 3 different tests, well, one of them was really more of a questionnaire on your views, then I had a 12 minute timed test and then I had the motherload test.
It is meant for them to see which grade you should teach. So they had a grammar, math, reading, and history section. The grammar section was the longest and obviously hardest for me. I mean REEL hard. Here is an example so you can see what I had to do in order to properly feel bad for me.
Example: The elephant looked thirsty, but Ben had already put away the barrel. Then each word had a line underneath it and I had to label the parts of speech each word was. Just to make it harder it said. If you label verb, please indicate whether it is an auxiliary, helping, linking, or action verb...I will spare you even worse examples of grammar I didn't even remember existed.
I am a little bit ashamed to admit that I wrote a note with my awesome white Challenger pencil at the top of the section saying:
Note: I honestly couldn't finish this section.
Sad, huh? Well, my math actually went surprisingly well up until like the last two problems when I made up answers. History and Reading went pretty well and were a lot shorter than math and grammar. Well, I guess if I am going to teach English I will need a lot of training and I won't be teaching 8th grade math any time soon. Blasted fractions and how they confuse me. (Seriously, how am I supposed to figure out what 3/5ths of 1/2 is. I should just get points for understanding that's what the story problem was asking...and if you can figure that out, you suck).
I did have a lovely conversation with the Director of all Challenger schools in Utah, Nevada, and Idaho. He told me a crazy story and I told him I thought everyone's values are equal because they honestly believe them and we can't condemn them just because we grew up differently and want to impose our 'right' values on them(guess that's the Anthropologist in me). Anywho, the woman helping me came in also and talked to me for a bit. She said Hal was a smart man for giving me Glen Beck's book, Common Sense to use for the basis of my essay on my views of America. (Challenger is a conservative school). She also said she would keep an eye on me and make sure I didn't get stuck somewhere in the process.
So, I am pretty excited for my interview, and sad for them when they have to see my grammar score. I'm always worried when I see how much I have written that it won't make sense because I don't remember writing that much. So if it doesn't make sense you can just laugh and blame it on my lack of grammar skills.