I know, right?

The recipe for this week is one we invented ourselves, when we discovered that we had like 3 extra lasagna noodles (not enough for a recipe, but enough to feel bad about throwing out). We mixed two cultures when we invented it. It is called.... the Yummy Lasagna Quesadilla.
Ingredients:
Lasagna noodles
Italian blend shredded cheese (mix of parmesan, mozzarella, and asiago cheese, we think)
Italian seasoning
Garlic powder
Directions:
Boil some lasagna noodles (however many you want). Drain them, and lay them out flat on a plate. Sprinkle a good amount of the cheese over one half of each noodle. Sprinkle Italian seasoning and garlic powder over the cheese (to taste). Microwave just until cheese is melted. Fold each one over and eat.
It is surprisingly tasty. I suspect that it might be even better if you spread some kind of red sauce over the noodles before you sprinkle the cheese. Christian doesn't think so. Try it yourselves and see how it turns out.

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Christian this week has been trying to pressure Paradise Bakery & Cafe into giving him a job. However, on Saturday he found out that they did not accept his application. So once again, he is on the hunt for jobs. He has an interview tomorrow for an on-campus job as a computer lab assistant, so we are hoping that that will work out. He thinks his experience with OfficeTeam will help him get that job.

I interviewed a while ago for a job in Alpine School District as an aide/shadow (once school starts in the fall) for the autistic child that I currently do therapy for. I got a call back from the lady I interviewed with, confirming that I could have the job on Tuesdays and Thursdays (which is when I asked for, because I scheduled my classes all on MWF). Another of the therapists who works with me is going to do Monday/Wednesday/Fridays as the aide. I have four training days to go to, and then I'm set!

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Christian and I have signed up for Netflix's free trial period (no obligations and no fees if you cancel within 2 weeks). Don't worry, he's tried it before and there are no catches. So we can have 3 movies out at a time, as well as watch any of the thousands of movies they have available online instantly (we've already watched Charade and Wall-E). So I pulled some strings and I convinced Christian that we really needed to get Gilmore Girls Season 7 (discs 1, 2, and 3) for our first 3 movies. We also signed up for disc numbers 4, 5, and 6 to come when we send those back.

I made him watch them with me (don't worry, I'm sure he's secretly loving it, heheh), and I have actually gained tons of insight into the male realm by listening to the comments he makes while we watch. For example, (**SPOILERS!!!**) Lane and Zach (who are bf/gf) are in a band together with 2 other guys, and Zach is the main songwriter. Zach keeps making all these songs with other girls' names in them, and Lane is getting kind of sad that he hasn't written a song with her name in it. So she tells him that (in front of the other band members), and he refuses to write a song with her name in it because he says "It sounds dumb. And what rhymes with Lane?". So, another member of the band (Brian) goes home and starts writing a song called "Lane". He brings it up a few days later, and Lane is ecstatic. Zach, on the other hand, gets furious and won't tell anyone why, and Lane is trying to figure out why he's so upset.

So when we were watching it, I was sitting there trying to figure out exactly why he was mad and concluded in my mind that he must be mad because Brian wrote the song when Zach had said it would be dumb, and now when it didn't sound dumb, Zach looked like an idiot in front of everyone. However, Christian burst out, "Come ON!!! It's so obvious!!! Another guy wrote a song about his girl, THAT's why he's mad!" I must say that that never even occurred to me. (**END SPOILERS!!!**) Apparently guys are very possessive about their girls-- even more than they want to uphold their male egos. I figured the male ego would dominate in that situation, but apparently not. Christian ended up being right, as we found out when the episode progressed. Anyway, I'm learning alot about how a guy's mind works.

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On the bus to and from work, I have learned a valuable life lesson: Never sit in the front of the bus. There are multitudes of creepy (most of whom I am assuming have some kind of social or mental disorder) people who always sit at the front of the bus. I've wondered about why there are so many creepy people who ride the bus, and this are the steps leading to my postulation:

1) People usually only ride buses because either they don't have a car, or they are too poor to afford gas.

2) People who ride buses are poor.

3) Poor people who end up having mentally challenged children cannot afford to pay for any therapy or anything to fix it.

4) Poor people also need their children to work, even if they are mentally challenged, so that they can have enough money coming into the household.

5) Poor mentally challenged people need to have some way to get to work.

6) Poor mentally challenged people have to ride the bus.

Although I still haven't figured out quite why they always sit in the front. But they do. Anyway, there have been quite a few of them. One of them was waiting at the bus stop at night when Christian and I were there, heading over to BYU. When we arrived at the bus stop, a Hispanic guy about 28ish eyed me up and down, leered, and said, "You verrry pretty." I mumbled some sort of reply and avoided eye contact. Then when the bus came and we got on the bus, he came and sat down near us, looked at Christian and said, "You got nice a**. Nice an' round." I don't think Christian said anything. We just avoided eye contact the whole trip. There have since been others, like the 35-year-oldish guy who sat next to me, took off his smelly shoes and socks and shoved his incredibly nasty, calloused, fungus-infested, toenails-haven't-been-clipped-in-years feet in my face and wouldn't stop talking for half an hour about how his shoes were worn out and he had blisters, and he wanted me to tell him why he had blisters because apparently he couldn't connect that fact to the fact that his shoes had holes in the bottom. He wanted me to feel his blisters too. That was awkward. I have resolved to never sit in the front of a bus again.

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Christian played Ultimate Frisbee all yesterday morning with my old roommate, Joy. Christian likes playing ultimate, and when Joy and Alicia came over a few weeks ago she invited him along to play. He didn't really know anyone there, but still had lots of fun. Being out there for two hours running around is good for him and I think he's going to make it part of his routine to play a couple times a week. The only down side to this is that he comes home and the next day ends up being really really sore. Today he's sat around and complained that it hurts too much to do anything. That will pass though as he starts using those muscles again like he used to back in high school marching band.

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We love you all!!!

Brittany and Christian

Chergoggagogmanchogagogchibunigungimar

All right. The recipe for this week is.... *drumroll*... Creamy Chicken and Broccoli. This makes 2-4 servings (more on the side of 2, if they are hungry adults). You cut 3 boneless skinless chicken breasts into strips, and brown them in a pan until they are done. You add 2 cups of cut-up broccoli (fresh or frozen) and 2 cans of cream-of-mushroom condensed soup. Stir that up with the chicken and cook it over medium heat till the broccoli is done. Add a seasoning packet of chicken ramen noodles to that. Then in a separate pan, make 2 packages of actual chicken Ramen except don't add any seasoning to it. Drain the Ramen. Then all you have to do is serve the chicken-broccoli-mushroom gravy over the Ramen noodles. It's pretty good. We found that we wanted more Ramen. We ate all the Ramen and only half of the gravy sauce stuff. So make twice as much Ramen, probably.

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Christian had an unfortunate accident early this week. He was washing dishes like the excellent husband that he is, and he accidentally broke a glass in his hand (I guess he just knocked it against the sink in just the right spot). It caused a 1-cm wide,

1-cm deep cut in the webbing between his thumb and first finger, on his left hand. It was a nice clean cut because he had been using hot water and dish soap with his hands, and he'd already cleaned most of the glass. But it was bleeding and stuff.

We decided it wasn't deep/big enough for stitches, so we just wrapped a clean rag around it and had him keep his arm up in the air and put pressure on the cut. It stopped bleeding pretty quickly (within half an hour, probably), and we went to the store (with the rag around his hand) to get one of those big long bandages that you can wrap around your wound. He's been using that pretty much all week, just to keep dirt out of the wound and to keep himself from overextending his thumb and opening the cut back up. It's basically just a scar now, and he says it barely ever hurts now, except when he overextends his thumb.

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I started work back up again this week (the family I work for took a week-long vacation last week), and I'm enjoying it. (For everyone who doesn't know, I'm a therapist for an autistic boy in American Fork.) But Christian and I decided we shouldn't be using so much gas, and since I work a good distance away, we got

bus passes. The closest bus stop to my work is about a mile away, so I get to walk at least 2 miles every day (bus stop to work, and work back to bus stop). That doesn't include the 3-4 blocks I have to walk to get to the bus stop from home, and 3-4 blocks back home at the end of the day. I ran during some of it yesterday morning (because I was going to miss the bus), and my legs were sore all that afternoon and night, and still a little bit this morning. So I figure it's doing me some good. I'll run a little bit of that 2 miles every day, and I'm going to have legs of steel by the end of the summer. It's good, because that's really the only exercise I get.

OfficeTeam hasn't been giving Christian very many assignments, and the few they do give him are in Salt Lake (which, by bus, takes 3 hours and like 3 transfers). So he turned in an application to a place called Paradise Bakery & Cafe (coincidentally, just a couple blocks away from the bus stop where I get off for my work), and they seemed interested in him even though they don't currently have any spots open. Probably because they know he used to work at Panera Bread in Houston, which is very similar to Paradise and happens to be the business that bought out Paradise Bakery and Cafe not too long ago. They told him to call them again on Monday and they'd see what they could do about a job. He is getting really bored at home all day while I'm at work, and

he's feeling unproductive, so I'd love to see him have something to do.

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Last week I took my wedding ring in to be soldered to my engagement ring, and to be dipped and cleaned. My finger felt naked all week, and they finally finished it on Friday. I'm so happy that I get to look like I'm married again -- for some reason, I felt like people were judging me like "Oh, I bet she's lying about being married, she doesn't have a ring on her finger". It's so shiny now and beautiful and it doesn't fall apart anymore (the engagement ring separating from the wedding ring)! I'm so excited!

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We were also so excited yesterday to have dinner with Aunt Becky and Uncle Marty and their kids, plus Uncle Tenn and his kids (Aunt Nicole had to work), Grandma and Grandpa, and Aunt Laura and Kira! It was like a huge party! Plus, the bonus feature is that Aunt Becky and Uncle Marty brought up the boxes of stuff (mostly wedding gifts) we left in Houston! We were soooo excited to unwrap everything and finally be able to use it all -- we were dying without a strainer, and we got lots of fun picture frames and stuff to hang on the walls, and cool kitchen gadgets, and oh it was like Christmas!

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We hope everyone is doing great!!!

Brittany and Christian

Creepy Pants All the Time Get Some

Hokay, so, here's our recipe of the week: Crockpot Lasagna.

First you take the peanuts and ya squish em ya squish em

No jk. for real, here it is.

Break 12 uncooked lasagna noodles in half. Place half of them in the bottom of a greased 4-qt slow-cooker. (It looked like a LOT of noodles, but it was good.) Cook up a pound of ground beef, drain and stir in 1 tsp of Italian seasoning. Put half of that in the slow-cooker. Combine a 28-oz jar of spaghetti sauce with 1/4 cup water and put half of that in the slow-cooker. Then put one layer of each 8 oz of cottage cheese and one cu of grated mozzarella over that (we used an Italian blend of mozz and parmesan for it. We thought it was a better choice). Repeat the layers again and then cook for 4-5 hours on low. Don't cook more than 5 hours.

The book (101 things to do with a slow-cooker) says that it makes 6-8 servings, but Brit and I finished it off in 2 meals. Oops! :)

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I got a couple days work this week. We're extremely thankful that I was able to find some work. My assignment was up in Salt Lake City, so I had to leave like an hour before I was supposed to be at work, but that's ok. I worked for AMS, which does a lot of close-out warehouse sales and whatnot. Specifically it was a giant sale of stuff that Disney had discontinued. (It's a good thing Maddy wasn't there or she would have gone CRAZY with all the princess stuff.) If OfficeTeam can't find any more assignments for me, I'm going to apply at a shoot-off of Panera called Paradise Cafe and Bakery up in American Fork near where Brittany works.

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Friday night, a couple of Brit's old roommates came over for dinner and fun. We had "Easy Bean Soup" (another recipe out of the crockpot book, but not as good as the lasagna) and we played Hearts and Catan. Brittany played amazingly at Hearts (she won by a landslide with at least 80 points more than everyone else :-p (yes, I mean MORE points)), and I became Lord of all Catan after I won a huge victory over the girls. It was an interesting night being somewhat a part of "girl talk," hearing them talk about boys that Alicia and Joy were pondering over and kissing and blah blah blah blah.... It was fun though. She had some great roommates. But now she has a better one :-p

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Oh the fun things of our own place. I was washing the dishes last night after making some burgers on our Foreman grill last night. We were trying to quickly wash dishes so we could go to the creamery and finish our date night with some ice cream, but dur-de-durr me knocked over a burning candle that had a bunch of liquid wax in it. Luckily no glass broke, but we had wax ALLLLLLL over the kitchen. Luckily we have hard-wood floors and not carpet, but it was still a pain in the butt.

P.S. a good way to get up wax is to steam it with an iron (hold the iron slightly above it, don't put it directly on the wax) til it melts and then wipe it up with paper towels.

(EDIT by Brit--- We also iron-steamed a spider that decided to come crawling out while we had the iron in hand. Heheh. Serves it right, coming into our house trying to scare me.)

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We love our new ward! We're actually starting to get to know people. July 31 and Aug 1 they're having a ward campout that hopefully we can go to. It should be way fun, but we need to figure out if Brit is working on the 1st. We only have her July schedule and her hours tend to vary quite a bit. But we're excited to get more involved in our ward. I got my home teaching assignment already (even though our records aren't even in the ward yet haha!). We're looking forward to callings and talking in church (especially Brit who loves talking in church ----(EDIT by Brit: PUAHAHAHA YEAH RIGHT). :)

We are impressed by how many babies there are in the ward! It's a student married ward, but we didn't really expect THIS many. Out of 66 couples in the ward, 17 of them have at least one baby. That's more than 25% with young babies. Most of them aren't even nursery age yet, so Relief Society and Priesthood both have lots of babies crawling around and being distracting. We do have maybe like 2 or 3 little Sunbeams so we have a Primary, but that's it. A good number of couples have more than one baby, and many are expecting one soon. We've already had multiple baby blessings since we've started going to the ward, and a few announcements about even more babies who have been recently born but aren't at church yet. It's made Brit a little baby-struck, but I'm keeping her in check :-p. She looks over at a cute baby and then looks at me expectantly. All I say to her is, "Nope, not even funny." *SIGH*
(EDIT by Brit--- but they're SOOOO cute, you have to see them all, they're adorable! I hope we have a baby girl so I can dress her up in a little pink baby headband with a big bow on it, and a cute frilly dress with frilly matching panties to go over the diaper, and lacy white socks!!! Awww....)

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Anywho, now I'll turn the computer over to Brit who will probably edit all the stuff she doesn't like out. (EDIT by Brit--- no, I just added stuff in. I didn't take anything out. Don't worry, you didn't miss anything.)

Love yall,
Chris and Brit

When you fall down a bottomless pit, you die of starvation.

The original plan for July 4, since I had to work Saturday morning, was for me to go to work, get off at 1:00, then we'd drive up to Logan. So we drove up to my work and discovered that I wasn't working that day after all. So we drove two hours up to Logan to spend time with the Cook family... and the other Cook family (both on Christian's side). First we went to Bryce and Karol's, ate breakfast/lunch and swam in their pool. Then we went to Bruce and Karla's (you'd think they were twins or something), ate some burgers and Christian swam in their pool (I was pooled out). We chilled awhile there, then went back to Bryce and Karol's to play games. We played Nerts, in which I discovered that I am very not good at card games that emphasize speed. Christian was pretty good. It was fun though, and we had a good time. We watched the Macy's fireworks show (in NYC) on TV and then drove two hours back home. It was about 1 AM before we got to bed.

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Hooray for finally finding our right ward! Last Sunday we looked up which ward we were assigned to on lds.org. But apparently it lied to us. So long story short, we ended up at the wrong ward at the wrong time (8:30, and we were complaining about how early it was). Luckily, the bishop of that ward told us where we were actually supposed to be. They (our assigned ward) meet in the same building, but half an hour earlier at 8:00 (God punishes those who complain). So this week we actually showed up to our assigned ward at 8:00. It was rough getting up (and staying awake) because of the activities of yesterday.

It's interesting because only in Utah have I ever been to a ward who didn't have sacrament meeting first. I guess it's because it's Utah where they have to maximize building usage because there are so many people. Two wards can meet at the same time if you do that, so six wards per day can meet in the same building. Our building was twice as large and had two chapels, which brings it up to a whopping 12 wards meeting in the same building on Sunday. And there are two more buildings just a few blocks away. Hooray for Provo, the Mormon capital of the world.

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Today for dinner we tried a recipe out of our new (to us) Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. I don't know whether it's because it was Fast Sunday or not, but we thought it was exceedingly delicious.

Basically you cook a few strips of bacon till they're crisp, then set them aside and use the bacon grease to saute a chopped medium onion. Then you add 2 cups of milk, 1 can of cream-of-mushroom soup, 2 cups of corn, 1 1/2 cups of chopped cooked potatoes, 1/2 tsp thyme, and a dash of pepper, and bring it all to a boil. Let it simmer for 2 minutes, then crumble the bacon and serve it on top of the soup.

We tried it and we decided we'd make a few changes: first, to use sweet corn, second, to crumble the bacon into the soup before serving it, and third, to add salt. It was a little lacking in the salt department. It makes 4 good-sized adult servings (it's very filling). And it's very tasty, everyone should try it. We did accidentally chop 2 whole large baked potatoes into the soup so ours was very potatoey. We decided to actually go with the recommended amount of potato next time.

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We hope everyone had a great 4th of July!