Congratulations Dr. King

I am so proud of Nate and i have to brag a little. He decided to walk in graduation last week (even though he is not officially done). I am so glad he did and i think he is too. It was incredible to see him up there on the front row during commencement and on the stand at his college convocation in his very cool, distinguished looking robes. We had lots of opportunities to applaud all his accomplishments. At his convocation he was the first PhD to be hooded. It was so awesome to hear him referred to as Dr. King. Everyone laughed when they read his dissertation title, Vapor-Liquid Equilibrium of Polymer Solutions During Thermal Decomposition of Rigid Foams. I will admit that it made me a little teary with pride and happiness. He has worked so hard at this. He has overcome a lot of frustrations with equipment and processes,etc. He has learned a great deal.
Monday morning at 5:00 AM he turned in his complete dissertation to one of the professors on his committee. He will do many revisions this week and turn it into the rest of the committee next week. Nate will defend his dissertation on May 15th. Anyone who is interested in Vapor-Liquid Equilibrium is welcome to come to the pre-defense presentation. (If you're just interested in being impressed by his knowledge you can come too.) Then we will be officially done and moving on to Oklahoma.
Congratulations Nate! We always knew you were fun and kind and wonderful now we have proof that you are smart too. We are so proud of you! We love you tons!!

A Dissertation, a House, a Graduation

I just have to say "Yeah", because I turned in a draft of my dissertation to one of the professors on my committee. I have been working very hard to get it ready to give to him before he left for Peru yesterday morning. He will be gone until the day before I defend my dissertation, so I had to get it to him. I have been staying on campus writing until late in the night for a while. On Saturday and Sunday I stayed until 5:00 in the morning! Even though I was a little worried for my safety while I was driving to my professor's house after my second all-nighter in a row, it did feel good to leave it under his front door mat and go home to sleep.


Just in case you're wondering, no I'm not done. I still have a lot of work to do (those 30 pages that I wrote in the middle of the night aren't of the highest quality). But I do feel somewhat relieved. Now I just have to get a better version ready to give to my sponsor from Sandia National Labs this Friday.

For your enjoyment I posted one of my favorite graphs from the dissertation. Isn't it pretty?

Now I'll mention a couple other big things that normally would have been on the top of my mind under other circumstances, but have been relegated to lower status because of the "Big Paper". First of all we are now the proud owners of a mortgage - I mean of a house! We signed all the papers and handed over a huge check last Wednesday, while the official closing was on Friday. The week before that we transferred all our savings from our high-interest online savings accounts (that haven't been so high-interest of late with all the rate-cutting the Fed has done - but at least the rates were high while we had money). It's amazing how you can not even having miss tens of thousands of dollars! Of course, all that money was only in our checking account where we would actually pay attention to it for a couple of days. Now, instead of having money that doesn't seem real to us, we have a house that doesn't seem real to us. Hopefully it will seem more real when we actually move to Oklahoma in a couple weeks and get the keys from our realtor. And luckily we will start getting a real paycheck by the time we have our first real mortgage payment due.

The other big thing was that I graduated. Well, at least I walked at graduation. It was fun to wear all those big, heavy robes that come along with getting a Ph.D. For a couple minutes I felt proud of myself - until I remembered that I had to go back to writing as soon as I took the robes off and turned them back in to the rental company. (It was a quick reminder that we shouldn't be "lifted up in the pride of [our] hearts, and wear stiff necks and high heads because of the costliness of [our] apparel", especially when the costly apparel is just being rented.)

Well, I guess I'd better stop since my lunch break is over. I have to get back to writing.

Cool Contest

Check out this website for a chance to win some cool toys. Good Luck.

Princess Girl

I don't know what happened, but ever since we got back from our trip to Oklahoma Emma feels that she has to wear a dress everyday. Every morning she hopefully asks if it is Sunday so she can wear her fancier dresses and shoes. She wears as much pink as possible. One day she wore two skirts and three pink shirts, at the same time. Since it is so cold she has to wear pants under her skirts so she doesn't freeze. We have to set rules about taking off her princess dress-ups before we eat or leave the house. When did she become such a princess?
This has also started me thinking - were there princess girls like this when we were little. I'm sure i played dress-ups as a little girl but i don't remember playing with anyone who had crowns and jewels and high heels and princess dresses like Emma's friends do. I was more of a pioneer-girl or a dramatic writer. Have the times changed or was i just out of the princess-loop as a girl? I'd like to know.

In-Law, By Choice

I have great in-laws. We have spent some time at BYU with each of Nate's siblings and i love them. We even lived in two apartments in the same house with his sister, Michal and her husband Connor. Jamie and Carrie have been at BYU for the last four and three years.

It has been so great having them close by with lots of opportunities to have them over for last minute dinners and as our favorite babysitters and to drop by their apartments unannounced. Last weekend i had my first cry about moving to Oklahoma when i realized that we would not have one of his siblings within 5 minutes of our house. My mom-in-law and dad-in-law came to town this weekend and we had a great time. They were very helpful with the kids and considerate of the things we needed. It's not just Nate's immediate family either. There is a whole army of cousins-, aunts-, uncles-, and grandparents- in-law that love and support us. When i hear about people having difficulties getting along with their in-laws i am shocked. I feel so blessed to not just get along with but love and enjoy every part of this family i married into. I was blessed to be born into an excellent family and feel so grateful to now be blessed with a wonderful second family. Thanks to all of you who bless my life.

My Freezer

Since we will be moving in just a few weeks i thought i had better catalog and try to use all the food in our freezer. So in the spirit of blogging and sharing way more than anyone really needs to know i thought i would post the list. It may be an entertaining glimpse into our home and maybe some of you can give me ideas of how to use it all before we leave.
In my freezer there are:
*11 frozen waffles
*10 1/2 lb. bags of ground beef
*1 long smoked sausage link
*1 large pork roast
*1 pan cheesy chicken manicotti
*2 jars Mary Kelly soup
*14 pumpkin waffle cookies
*1 bag peas
*2 bags mixed vegetables
*13 cans frozen juice (apple, grape, cranberry, and orange)
*1 bag blended kumquats
*1 pack chicken nuggets
*3 small steaks
*4 containers homemade raspberry freezer jam
*6 frozen rolls
*2 packages hotdogs
*4 chicken breasts
*1 box vanilla ice cream
*1 container whipped topping
*3 bags cooked squash
*2 tilapia filets
*1 box gold n' soft marjarine

So if anyone has any tips on how to cook tilapia or any creative recipes using ground beef please help me. I didn't catalog what is in my fridge but things of note that i do need to use include a large jar of dill pickles chips and a #10 can of hot fudge. Dill chocolate hamburgers anyone?

Ooooklahoma!

Well, Leslie and I just got back from looking for a house in Oklahoma.  We were there for almost a week while Morgan and Emma stayed with Leslie's famly.  We were worried about being able to find a home that we liked in that amount of time, but apparently it can be done.  We got there last Thursday and then met our real estate agent and started looking at houses on Friday morning.  We saw 22 houses the first day (even though we had to drive three hours from where we had stayed the night before and we took a fair amount of time out to have lunch with some people I will be working with)!  Then we saw three more the next day and afterwards started into our second look at our top two houses.  We really liked the layout of one of them, but as we looked at it more closely we found out that it had been a pretty quick flip job and it looked a lot nicer on the surface than it actually was.  The pictures are of the other one.  It had been on the top of our list.  A lot of that had to do with the awesome back yard.  The lot is over half an acre, which is about twice as big as most of the others we looked at.  There is also a little creek beyond the back fence that sometimes has turtles and crawdads in it.

Well, we decided to put in an offer that afternoon (of the second day) and by that evening we had a counter offer.  The sellers agreed to pay our closing costs like we requested, but wanted the full asking price.  We came back with a counter-counter saying we would be willing to pay that if they left some appliances and furniture (we're afraid of moving into an empty house and having it stay that way for a long time - after we close on a house we won't have any money to fill it up with anything).  We decided to ask for the fridge, the washer and dryer, the patio furniture (including the glider swing), and a dining set they had.  I think our agent was a little worried about us when we told her all that.

The next day was Sunday, so we didn't do anything about the house, but we got to go to church and meet a lot of people.  On Monday morning we found out that the sellers had accepted our offer, including leaving the things we had asked for plus the red furniture in the living room.  We found out that our agent had just decided to add that to our list when she communicated our counter-counter offer since the worst they could say was no and we couldn't ask for more later.  When we went back to look at the house a third time, we realized that the red furniture is real suede leather (besides the two pieces in the picture, there's another chair and an ottoman).  The owners might have figured that it wouldn't look good anywhere else but in the yellow living room of this house.

Anyway, we're really excited about our new home.  We've met some of the neighbors and they seem really nice.  The next-door neighbor already offered to let Morgan and Emma come play on their swingset.

Now, we're just working on doing everything else that goes along with buying a house, like getting the appraisal and the inspections and homeowners' insurance (and of course you have to get quotes on auto insurance, too, since everyone makes their homeowners' insurance go down a lot if you have other policies with them).  And all of this has been done in just a few days.  The house we ended up buying was not even really on the list of houses we were interested in from the pictures online.  The two that we had liked most before we actually saw them both got crossed off our list pretty quickly.

So, now we're back in Utah and living the student renter's life for a little bit longer.  It is really nice to be back with Morgan and Emma again, though.  We sure missed them while we were gone, and we're so thankful for all the help we got from Leslie's family.  Now, I'm trying to get my dissertation finished up in the next few weeks so we'll be ready to go do something with this house we're buying.