It's a Girl

In case anyone missed the hints, rumors or announcements:

Coming (approximately) 10 March 2015

Last Wednesday we went to get a better look at this little one, and we were pleased to learn it's a she.  I will confess that I was really excited that our newest addition will be a girl (I was perfectly ready to adore that child either way, but I can't deny that I was hoping for a girl, mostly because I wanted to be sure we would have a girl SOMEday, and so then I was just relieved that I KNEW and wouldn't have to wait and wonder any more in the future, and anyway, it's funny because I was often subconsciously making lists of pros and cons for either, and in the end all I can say is that God answers the righteous prayers of His children).  Eventually I had to just stop guessing and second-guessing because the fact is that the child was what it was and no lists or wonderings or theories were going to change that just because we hadn't found out yet.  Still, I just had a feeling, which I didn't really pay much attention to, since I had the same feeling the first time, which feeling turned the other way partway through, and I just saw a little girl in our family when I imagined it.  It's interesting to note that it seems to be a season of girls, kind of like it was a season of boys when The Boy was born, and we seem to be following the trend of my sister and several friends.  That day at work after we had our ultrasound, I typed "girl" into my search on iTunes and listened to the playlist that resulted, which actually led to a pretty interesting variety of songs and artists, some of which will become great songs to sing to her when she finishes baking and gets here.  (In the meantime we can only hope she'll be just as good a baby as her brother was.)  It's funny to think of what our little family is going to be like and how it will change when we throw a little miss into the mix, but oh, I cannot wait to find out.

Anyway, that's the news!  The child to whom we have been affectionately referring as The Poppy -- short for poppy seed, which is how big she was when we learned of her impending arrival -- is looking on target as far as size and weight go (I'm always amazed at how much they can tell and see and measure with the ultrasound these days), and she's already showing a lot of personality and movement and activity.  It's fun that she's due just before my birthday, when CAG was due right around The Wife's, and once again the timing could have been better with the move and everything, but how it goes is how it goes!  We're certainly glad to be past the halfway mark (The Wife especially), and to have a nice empty room just waiting for her to fill it (house/move blogpost still pending).  Just look at that little face!!!  It's hard to imagine having more love to go around than I already feel for this woman and this little boy around me, but I'm quite sure I'll find a big chunk of my heart that's been waiting just for her.  We're so looking forward to meeting the darling girl who appears already to have her mother's beautiful profile, and Bobo I'm sure will be thrilled to be a big brother once he figures out just what's going on.

...


XD XD XD

Thing the First: Moving

I have three things I've been meaning to blog about.  (There are actually a few more than that, but these are three more noteworthy recent events that have been on deck for a while.)  So, thing the first is moving.  We moved!  For those who haven't seen already, The Wife blogged yesterday about this as well, including a very amusing animated photo tour (seriously, go look at it, it's hilARious!), but I wanted to document the process a little too.

(Just now I wrote a couple of nice long paragraphs detailing our moving history for the last two years, when I realized I just blogged about that a few weeks ago.  Good thing I noticed, that would have been an embarrassing repeat.)

So yes, last you heard we were about to move.  And then we did!  And I learned a few things:

• Having assistance from friends and family makes a HUGE difference, even if you're only moving half a mile away.  The first night we were working, it was just me and The Wife boxing things up and loading up our lil' car and taking stuff over one carload at a time.  This was VERY slowgoing.  Once Julie's visiting teacher and my parents showed up, it was a completely different experience.  We were almost completely finished packing and moving within a couple of hours.  Thanks, Mom and Dad and Mary!  This has inspired me to be a good helper whenever possible when friends and family are moving.

• Having a family member with a truck is ALSO a huge help.  It spared us the trouble of relocating our couches by hand (again).  Thanks, Jonny!  This has inspired me to have a truck someday so that I can be a Godsend for someone in a similar fashion.

• Sometimes, no matter what precautions you take to prevent a lapse in service (especially since your livelihood depends on being connected to the technological world), there just might be some complications in transferring your internet or TV or electricity or gas service (and issues there were with all of those listed).  There were some serious headaches, but I only had to go to the library to work once or twice.  This has inspired me to take even more precautions in the future, and try not to be too bothered if even those added measures turn out not to make the transition perfectly smooth.

• Cleaning checks are rotten, and even if you spend hours getting your old apartment in far better condition than it was when you moved in, the inspectorlady may nonchalantly wander about and point out things that you spent considerable time cleaning and say it's not clean enough.  Then she'll come back to recheck it after you have another chance to fix it up some more, and probably charge you for the recheck (but she probably won't tell you there will be an extra charge until she takes it out of your deposit).  This has inspired me to be picky about cleaning checks like I was when I was a student, and also to be annoyed by that lady.

• There are a few differences between renting from a big company with lots of properties and from a family that owns just a few.  There are pros and cons to each, but for now we're looking forward to the latter situation.  This has inspired me to try to find out in the future if we were charged extra fees before it's been two years and it's pretty much too late to do anything about them.

• In Provo, moving half a mile away means not only a new ward, but also a new stake.  This has inspired me to, um, keep going to church?  Yes, that.

And those are some of the things I learned throughout the process this time.  And now I'm going to show some of my favorite amenities!  Like I said, The Wife already posted a great tour, so I won't post a lot of pictures, except of my favorite things about living here.

• THIS:

 

I heard someone say once that you should be careful what chores you pick up during the first few weeks of marriage, because then you'll basically be doing those chores for the rest of forevermore, and it seemed perfectly fair that I should handle dishwashing anyway, especially since Julie usually makes (delicious) dinner.  Nevertheless, after almost three years of washing dishes by hand, and discovering some weird and annoying dryness and sensitivity of my hands due to prolonged exposure to water or something, I was just getting kind of vexed with the process, so I was SO ready for this little baby.  I don't know how we ever functioned without it.  I love so much loading it up and turning it on and walking away.  May I never take it for granted.  My hands are already so much happier.

• THIS:

Our old place had coin-operated laundry, but that's annoying and can get expensive, so we mostly spent the last few years loading up our dirty clothing and taking them to Mom and Dad's house.  This was a pretty good arrangement for a while because 1) It gave us a good reason to visit Mom and Dad at least once a week, 2) It was free (less the travel expense, which balanced out, again because it doubled as a visit to the folks, but also because of...), 3) Mom and Dad usually made dinner for us, so we scored some foods out of the deal too.  Still, after a few years of this, planning for the commute and the subsequent wait started to wear on our schedule.  It seems like such a huge luxury to be able to just throw laundry in whenever and then go about your business right there at home.  And it's not in a hallway or bathroom, like so many of the other apartments we looked at!  It's in its own room, a fact with gives The Wife (and me) much glee.

• THIS:

Anyone who knows me well knows of my aversion to summer (or, more accurately, summer heat).  I just hate feeling sweaty and hot and unable to cool down.  Our old place had a very small and fairly ineffective wall unit in the living room.  It actually worked pretty well, as long as you were standing RIGHT in front of it.  Step away in the kitchen and it's basically a big oven, and don't even think about the bedroom or bathroom.  (We discovered during cleaning that a virtual wall of dust might have had something to do with its ineffectiveness, but...  oh well.  It might work better for the new kids who moved in there.)  A standing, rotating fan helped on summer nights, but mostly I felt nasty and sweaty every night.  Once I started working at home, I knew that something HAD to be done, I simply could not survive the long summer months sitting at that kitchen table all day.  This was one of the amenities that we turned down a lot of nice apartments for, and it was the right decision.  I love to hear that AC rumble as it turns on.  Luckily, it's also been a pretty mild summer (some days we don't even need to turn it on, it's been so nice), but still, there have been a few days that were pretty gross, and I don't have to deal with it!  XD  (Until I get in the car to go somewhere, then I still have plenty of opportunities to gripe, ha.)

• The second bedroom is also really nice.  At the moment it's the office, and it's great to be able to shut the door on work at the end of the workday and not be confronted by it and reminded by it at every turn, but in the future this room has the possibility of being multipurpose.

So there you go!  We love our new townhouse place (it has stairs!  We've never had stairs before!  That means no downstairs neighbors!).  We've already had a few visitors for a few nights, and it was great to have space to put them and not have to apologize for how hot they were going to get during the night.  So, friends and family, if you are coming to town and need a place to stay, hit us up!  We're glad to give you a tour and pull out the new air mattress.

Moving blows...

... but having moved is glorious.  Details to follow.  There's been just so much going on for the last couple of weeks that I haven't had a chance to document everything properly here on the blog, so for now, here's your teaser and first look at our new apartment.

We love our new place!

P.S.  Props to me and my Photoshop skills, exhibited above.  You didn't even notice, did you?  I guess that's the point.  But I wanted to make it known for my own purposes. :D

Exciting, Excellent News

I don't want to leave that rant at the top for very long at all, so I decided to follow it basically immediately with some awesome news that counteracts the unpleasantries of the previous one.

For quite some time now, over a year really, we've been in the market for a new apartment.  At the time we started looking around, we had lived here for a year, and our contract had run its course, so we were renting month-to-month.  We wanted to move somewhere a little bigger, but we also wanted to move somewhere we really liked, a place that had all the things we were looking for now that we're both working and feeling much more financially stable, somewhere we could live for a good few years and that would really feel more like home (preferably somewhere just a little farther from Student Town...  We've really liked this area and ward, but there's so much turnover due to the number of students and proximity to campus).  We looked and looked, and never really found anything, and then I was called to be the choir director and Julie was called to work in the nursery, and we did like our apartment a lot, and it was a good deal, and there wasn't nearly the sense of urgency that there was the last time we moved (from a place we couldn't even stand living for six months), so we thought we might as well just keep our eyes open and stay at our current place to save a little money until we found the exact right new place, which apparently I have mentioned here on the blog before.

Flash forward about a year.  I had by this time started actually working from home, commandeering the dining room table (while we have been relegated to eating dinner in the living room), so we thought it was time to start looking again for a place with another bedroom I could use as an office (and, in the future, as a place for a wee one to spend its nights, as it were).  We had done a little apartment hunting here and there throughout the year, taking a few months at a time off, but always checking the listings to see if Our Place ever appeared.  We looked at so many apartments that we started to recognize a handful of really common layouts and amenities, and we found quite a few places we were sure we would have been mostly satisfied with, but we never left a place saying YES.  We thought after a while we were being a little too picky, but then we thought, if we're going to make a move and make it last for several years (maybe our last place before finding a house?), and since our current contract allowed for it, we might as well wait until we can find the place we want!  Still, we adjusted some of our requirements and tried to be a little more flexible.

Then, just as it was starting to look more or less hopeless, and with the unpleasant prospect of another sweltering summer in this oven (especially with me baking in it all the livelong workday), Julie casually mentioned an ad she found on Craigslist.  I was hesitant when they didn't include any pictures (tip:  When you are trying to rent your apartment, POST PICTURES.  Seriously, they really make or break your ad so very much of the time), but I called and made an appointment to swing by anyway, just to take a look.  Through some unfortunate circumstances I actually missed meeting the tenants (because I was looking at another place) and couldn't find the right apartment (I had the number wrong), but I looked at the place from the outside, and was pretty much thinking that we had to see the inside as soon as humanly possible.  I wrote a few emails and made a few calls and after work we had a chance to swing by on our way up to Park City for the weekend.  We walked in, looked around, talked to the wife of the house and her adorable child, and walked out saying YES.  By the next day we had been contacted by the landlady and two days later we had signed a contract (we even scored a discount on rent for signing for two years).  Apparently we were the first to look at it, so they took the ad down right away.  This place has pretty much everything we were hoping for!  It's probably twice as big as where we live now, and IT HAS AC.  The amenities are delightful, but I'll save them for a later post.  For now, this is just breaking the great news.  I actually don't have a picture (like I said, they didn't post any...), but I yoinked this one from Google Maps.  It's the gray one, second one from the left:

I'm trying to convince myself that it's not actually smaller than the apartment surrounding it, it's just sort of sunken in so it looks a little smaller from this angle.

We're moving!  Next week!  XD  And now when family come to visit we will have a place for them to sleep and they won't die of sweating in the night!  And, of course, neither will we.  And I can have my work in a separate place and close the door on it after the workday is done!  We had hoped to move outside of Provo, but this place is just so right that it's worth the possibility that there are still a lot of students around (not that we dislike students, it's just that we both finished school years ago, and that kind of area seems so transitory and impermanent).  It's actually really close to where we live now, like half a mile, but it is a little further from the central radius of campus, and in a little more established neighborhood with seemingly less student-type apartments.  It seems like each time you cross one of these major Provo streets it makes a big difference.  We've basically go about a mile northwest each time we move.  I contacted our current landlord and let them know we're on our way out, as I know our contract requires notice of 30 days, and they told us we would be responsible for rent for May, unless we found someone to take over for that month.  I posted an ad online (with plenty of pictures!) and that very night we had a young engaged couple come look at it, and just a few days later THEY had applied and were approved.  This really has been a good place, and it's a great deal, so I felt bad telling the other interested parties that the place had been sold, but mostly I was just glad there was so much interest, it made my job a lot easier.  That weekend in Park City we could think and talk of little else but how excited we were.

Patience and persistence and perserverance and prayer.  Those are the four Ps that made this possible.  And I guess that's a fifth P.

So yes!  That's it!  Great news!  Details to follow!  Very shortly!

Tomorrow!

I guess most of those who actually read this blog probably already know this, but I decided the time had come that I better make the official announcement.

Before we were married, The Wife made me promise that one day I would take her to England.  Of course, it's always been a true desire of mine to visit the UK as well, and I had no problem making this promise (though I hesitated to agree to the stipulation that it would happen before we had any kids...).  Little did I know that within a year, SHE would be taking ME.  That's right, a temporary position in London at Julie's work opened up, and we decided she might as well apply for it, and a few weeks later (wouldn't you know it?), her MLS paid off yet again and she was chosen as one of two to do some work on location from mid-July to Labor Day.  Her ticket is paid for by the company, as well as our housing and a tidy living stipend.  I contacted my employer to ask if it's all right if I relocate (since I basically work from home as it is), and she thought it was a fantastic opportunity and a perfect time in our lives to have these kind of adventures.  And of what adventures we're planning!  We're basically taking the evenings and weekends and running ourselves ragged all over the European countryside!  (We also may or may not be determined to visit Disneyland Paris for our anniversary in August...)

So, brand-spankin' new passports in hand (which came just in time, and at dear cost...), we are heading out tomorrow evening, stopping in Chicago, and thence to London!  We'll both try to keep up with blogging now and then, and post some pictures as they come.  Wish us luck!

Only in Sheboygan...

... Does this make news.

If you ask me, the owner of this poor creature shouldn't have been arrested for animal neglect for leaving his dog out, he should be arrested for allowing the dog to get that big.

Coming Out (and Related Stories)...

Well, I hesitated for a moment before posting this, but I figure it's going to be pretty much public knowledge by the weekend anyway, so...


A few related incidents concerning relevant events have happened in the last few days. First, on Monday, Dad went to the Affirmation press conference in Salt Lake City. For those who are unaware, Affirmation is a group of GLBT LDS people which insists that the Church change its time-honored and God-inspired doctrine on homosexuality in the LDS Church. This apostate group promotes false ideals, maintains that the Church is incorrect in its standards on this issue, and are trying their darndest to pressure the General Authorities into changing true doctrine so they can validate and rationalize their indulgent lifestyle and the anti-Atonement doctrine of accepting sexual abnormality as natural and even preferable, rather than believing in the power of and ability (and necessity) to change. They believe in the Church, somehow, yet insist they are mistreated and that the light by which the Prophet et al. are working is incorrect (??). They apparently had a meeting scheduled with Church leaders, and even though it was canceled (could be just postponed), they decided to hold their whiny press conference anyway. Here, as predicted, they responded to press questions and spouted loaded rhetoric and overblown statistics. Dad was in attendance, and was able to observe their false and half-true statements, as well as ask some questions of his own, and they actually revealed a rather significant part of their agenda--the eventual allowance of gays and lesbians to be married and sealed in the LDS temples. As shocking as this may be for some people, remember that this has been a goal of theirs for quite some time, and they truly believe that President Monson is the chink in the armor that they need. With new leadership came a renewed effort to pressure the Lord's kingdom on earth into accepting errant sexual behavior as normal. I feel for these people, and can actually even understand part of their point-of-view, but they need a reality check--it's not going to happen. Read for yourself. Later in the day, after Dad handed out his card to some of the audience, including press, he was contacted by Katy Carlyle of Fox News to do a short interview on the street in downtown Salt Lake (apparently the Church was either unwilling or unprepared to present a statement on the subject at the time...). Part of it appeared on the 9:00 news that night, in a short but positive segment,which can be seen here, and the interview in its entirety later appeared online, which can be seen here. I think people are starting to realize the seriousness of these groups, as well as the ludicrous nature of their demands.


Second, as a result of Dad's appearance at the press conference and on the news, he was contacted by Brandy Vega from KJZZ, asking him, me and Mom to appear on their Sunday morning show, Utah Matters. Apparently, they had a fellow from Affirmation on last July, and it was time to show the other side. Let me say here that such a show of balance is all but unprecedented, as far as we've experienced. We've been interviewed for radio and newspapers and such, and once even were interviewed at length in our own home for TV, but the powers that be always seem to cut us at the last moment ("too controversial", they bleat). Now, at last, it seems that our side is going to be heard! It was a slightly disconcerting decision to remake, trying to decide if I'm going to "come out", literally as out as you can be, appearing on public TV, but I decided that it's worth it. And besides, with the book coming soon, the revelation is ultimately inevitable. (For those who still don't know, our story can be read here.) I think it's time to step out from the shadows, as it were. Heaven knows the Affirmation fellows aren't hiding out. So we had just a short amount of time to get across a lot of our thoughts, but they inform us that we will definitely be aired on the Sunday morning segment at 9:30. For those who are otherwise occupied and are still interested in seeing quite a revealing and truthful bit of TV, it will surely be available soon after on the website for our foundation, The Standard of Liberty. Brandy was quite lovely, and really wanted us to have a chance to get our main points across (refreshing, from the press), and even mentioned the possibility of having us back for future appearances. She was sensitive to the subject, but we assured her we were ready to discuss it. A few plugs for our books, and we'll be on the air! An interesting coincidence is that one of the guys behind the cameras at the studio was Chase Cheney, a longtime family friend. It made it even that much more personal to talk about everything in front of a camera.


And finally, on the way home from the studio, we heard that the Church has released a new official statement on the divine institution and true nature of marriage. It is great to read, and is definitely a step in the right direction. A clear, unambiguous statement regarding the nature of homosexuality is still somewhat absent (meaning, one that groups like Affirmation couldn't possibly twist and manipulate, which, believe me, they do, to further their causes), but it will eventually just have to appear. Elise also found a website that states uncategorically that no one (period) has ever changed from gay to straight. Uh... yeah, do your research.

Again, I really hope the best for people who are troubled by this. My views may seem harsh, but I'm talking about behavior here, not people. And make no mistake--there is help for those who want it, and don't you dare tell me I don't exist.