Yes! Christian has a job! Final answer!

Biggest news of the week: (drumroll...........)

CHRISTIAN HAS A JOB!!! For real this time! Hooray!!!! The computer lab assistant people (who have been torturing him by offering him jobs multiple times then refusing it).... have finally given in! Christian is now a computer lab assistant at BYU, and has a picture nametag and everything! He starts work tomorrow. He will work the late evening shifts, because those are the ones they needed and that would work for Christian's busy school schedule. So usually he will be working about 7:00 pm til midnight. I have decided I will go with him to work and just chill in the computer lab that he's assigned to, and use that time to do my homework and go on Facebook and whatnot. It'll be kind of nice to have 5 hours of scheduled homework time, because that way I won't feel guilty about not doing it as soon as I come home. It'll also motivate me to study more, because I won't have much else to do in the computer labs besides study and do homework.

Needless to say, we had been getting concerned about his job in the past while (actually, pretty much ever since we got married). Job searching had been unsuccessful for a long time, and we were getting worried about it. A few weeks ago, we decided to fast and pray and go to the temple about it. We got the answer that right now was not the time. We were disappointed: we both wanted Christian to have a job, and we wondered why not now, but eventually came to accept "thy will be done" and to put the matter into the Lord's hands. I guess that was all He wanted us to do, because just a couple weeks later here comes a job! We also think that maybe it was also because Christian might have just needed a few weeks to get settled into his school schedule and get into his routine. It could be a combination of those, or just one of them. Either way, we're super excited that he has a job now!

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We have been counting our blessings this week. Although we know we don't have much comparatively to many others, we know there are many, many people who are worse off, especially as we keep hearing at church about the pioneers, and all their challenges. As the gypsy's song "God Help the Outcasts" from Hunchback of Notre Dame goes, "I ask for nothing; I can get by. But I know so many less lucky than I." We also think that not having much right now will help us be more grateful once we do get to a more comfortable financial situation. We have caught ourselves saying "Won't it be awesome... when we actually have a COUCH???" and "Man, I can't wait till we have a CLOSET! And CARPET in our bedroom!" Lol.

But we love our little tiny apartment, and we are grateful for having a place to live at all, grateful that we have our trusty fans to keep us cool (and an oven that we can turn on in the mornings to keep us warm), grateful that we have a bed that's bigger than twin size, grateful that (almost) everything in our house functions like it should, grateful that we have clothes to wear, grateful that we live in a great city with super nice people, grateful that it only takes us 5 or 6 hours to completely deep clean everything in our entire home... the list goes on and on. We even figured today that we could live on even less, if we had to. Really, if the pioneers could survive like they did, we can too. BUT..... we are very grateful that we DON'T have to survive on a pioneer budget. Hooray!

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This week's recipe:

Baked Lemon Chicken (about 35 min start to finish, including prep time!)

Ingredients:

3 Tbs butter, melted

2 Tbs lemon juice

1 garlic clove, minced

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp pepper

1/2 cup seasoned bread crumbs

4 boneless skinless chicken breast halves (4 oz each)

Directions:

1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2) In a shallow bowl, combine the butter, lemon juice, garlic, salt and pepper. Place bread crumbs in another bowl.

3) Dip chicken in butter mixture, then coat with crumbs. Place in a 13x9 baking dish. Drizzle with the remaining butter mixture.

4) Bake, uncovered, at 350 for 25-30 minutes or until juices run clear.

Yield: 4 servings

We thought it was super good. The chicken came out very moist and tender! Christian even said he didn't usually like lemon chicken because it was too lemony for him, but this recipe was just the right balance. If you have a lot of butter left over (from having small chicken breasts), I'd suggest not drizzling it all over the top at the end, because our chicken came out a bit soggy because of it. However, Christian said he liked the sogginess. I didn't. I guess it depends on what you prefer.

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Oh - one funny thing to hopefully put a smile on your face this week:

We were driving down the road, making comments about how many posters there were advertising the flu shot. We thought they must desperately need the money from it or something because of how heavily it's been advertised around here. Then we saw one advertisement that we deemed the most desperate of them all, by far. It simply read: "FREE BAND-AID WITH FLU SHOT!"

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Anyway, we love you all and we are so excited for Mike and Alayne to come up here this weekend, as well as my dad! It'll be so fun! Have a great week everyone!

Love,

Brittany and Christian

Life in the doldrums

So this will be a short one, (twss) as we didn't really do anything spectacular this week. Life moves on in our days of school and homework and, in Brittany's case, actual work. She's been sick this week with a cold she caught from the boy she works with. It's mainly just sniffles and a nasty productive (as the doctors would say) cough, but hopefully she'll be better soon. I don't know if I'm getting it from her, but I've started getting a sore throat. I think it's mainly just exhaustion on my part.

One reason for the exhaustion is that marching band has been stepping it up a bit because we had our first home game yesterday. We've been hard at work preparing our half-time show. This week we played the theme from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and also from the original Star Trek, Hernando's Hideaway and Amazing Grace. It was a fun show, but the crowd didn't really react to it. People were kinda preoccupied with BYU losing 14-30 at the end of the first half. Unfortunately the losing continued and we ended up with 54-28 loss, bringing our AP ranking from 7 to 19. Sheesh. I'm not even going to rant because the players probably already feel bad enough about themselves.

Monday there was a party for the French horn master class. This is a class I'm taking with basically all the horn music majors. We all met at the horn professor's house and ate pizza and chatted for a while with everyone. It was raining pretty hard and we lost power for about 30 min during the middle. After dinner was done, the majority of people went home, but Brittany and I stayed with a few others to watch a movie on Dr. Lowe's HD 60" flat screen. It was even Blu-ray lol. We watched I Am Legend. It was fun to watch it again, but Brittany was a little freaked out because they kept jumping in through windows, and she has a thing with windows in her nightmares. It's ok though. We know that the monsters aren't going to come get us for another couple years. (The movie was supposed to take place in 2012, with the "cure" supposed to be happening this month actually).

Anyway, nothing else has really happened. We're boring, we know. Love everyone

Christian (and Brittany)

P.S. the shake and bake chicken we posted last week went well. It was delicious. So go try it. NOW!

P.P.S. Recipe this week is Cline's Shepherd's Pie

2 lbs ground beef, browned and drained

10 servings of mashed taters, hot

2 cans of condensed veggie beef soup

about 2 cu of shredded cheese

Preheat oven to 400000000000000 degrees (or just 400). Mix ground beef with the veggie soup and put it in the bottom of a 9x13 pan. Cover it with the taters and then sprinkle cheese on top. Cook for 15-25 min, until cheese is melted and deliciously gooey. Doesn't really need to be salted or anything because the veggie soup takes care of that. It's good.

Kbye

Food, glorious food!

We actually had an eventful week this week - yay!!!

At the end of last week I got a call from a Mary Kay consultant saying that one of my old roommates (who is into Mary Kay) had chosen me to receive a complimentary Mary Kay pampering session at our home. I got to invite 5 friends to come and get in on the pampering, but as some people couldn't come I only ended up with 4 friends there. It was hilarious trying to fit everyone in our tiny apartment, but it worked out and it was lots of fun. Christian (surprisingly?) was not inclined to participate in the Mary Kay pampering session, so as soon as the mob descended on our apartment he left to go hang out with his friend Chris. They did manly things (or at least that is what I assume) like watch manly movies where things explode and there are lots of car chases, and talk about BYU's pwnage at football.

Christian is taking a music dictation class that starts at 8:00 am Tuesday/Thursday, and they took a mock final exam on Tuesday. If they got a good enough score, they could take that grade for the semester and not come to class or do any assignments anymore. Christian, the amazing musician that he is, got an A! So he receives an A for the entire semester and doesn't have to wake up at "stupid o'clock", as he calls it, to go to class Tuesday/Thursday anymore.

On Friday night we went to the BYU "Fall Fest", which was free with your BYU ID and boasted fun free activities like a dance, free food, a rock wall, free food, live bands, free food, a magic show, free food, a comedy show, free food, showing of Pixar's "Up!", free food, and oh, did we mention free food???? Can you guess the main reason that we went? Pretty much the entirety of BYU showed up. Probably all 30,000 students were packed into the Wilk and Brigham Square. This is what happens when you offer free food at a college function. People not from BYU also showed up, because it was only $3 without a BYU ID, which is a great price for free food and all those fun activities. It was fun, but we ended up going home early (after we had gotten food, of course) because all the fun activities were packed full, leaving no room for us. We had our own party at home with ice cream and Triple Chocolate Mess (see last week's post).

On Saturday there was a stake activity themed after the Olympics. 8 married-student wards divided into 4 countries (Greece, Italy, China, and Brazil) to compete in lots of fun games for the winning medals (made from York Peppermint Patties taped to appropriately-colored ribbons). There was a football toss, free food, a water balloon toss, free food, cantaloupe bowling, free food, 3-legged race, free food, a wheelbarrow/piggyback race, free food, tug-of-war, free food, a donut-on-a-string-eating-contest, free food, and even activities for everyone's babies (people helping them blow bubbles, mostly). Our ward was assigned Greece, so we were supposed to wear blue (since Greece's flag is blue/white). Christian and I actually did surprisingly well at the 3-legged race, and I surprised myself by doing better than average at the football toss. During the relay race at the end, combining all the activities, Christian pwned at the cantaloupe bowling; he got all the pins down with only two rolls while his 3 opponents stayed at the station for 7 or 8 rolls trying to get all the pins down. This gave our team a huge lead, and even though we had the slowest donut-eater (the last station) of all the teams, the lead was big enough to easily give Greece the victory! Originally we went for the free food (obviously), but it ended up being a really fun activity. We even found out our newlywed cousins J and M are in our stake. We were so excited to see them!

Today in our ward a girl gave a talk about provident living. She gave an old pioneer quote that we thought was really good: "Fix it up, wear it out, make it do or do without." We have decided that that will be our motto... pretty much for the rest of our lives as we are both in professions that aren't necessarily the highest-paying of all. But that's just fine with us. We're very happy together, and money isn't the most important thing.

We hope everyone is doing well and look forward to reading all your blogs or just hearing from you.

Love,

Brittany and Christian

P.S. We haven't tried this recipe yet (we planned to, but with all the free food this week our planned meals have been pushed back), but we are pretty pumped about trying it. It looks really easy and really yummy. Hooray for all-recipes.com! Here is the link to "Shake and Bake Chicken". http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Easy-Shake-and-Bake-Chicken/Detail.aspx We will try it soon and let you know in our next blog how it was. :)

I just lost The Game!!!!!

Hi everybody! Another week gone, but what a full week it was! Lots of exciting things going on.

First off, school started this week! It was way fun going to classes after three years of being away from BYU (no offense to North Harris and Tomball, but it's so much better going to university than to community college). Brittany and I have signed up for an LDS marriage and family class. I think it should be fun. We've already gone over some really cool stuff that has brought up lots of discussion between us. We decided not to take biology together because Brittany's teacher likes the things I hate about biology and hates the things I like. My teacher likes getting into the cellular stuff, which is what I enjoy most.

Marching band has been going great. We got about 2/3 of our show, which we're playing for our big performance in October, on the field. For that show we're playing Spanish Fantasy, Calm and Malaguena. It's some crazy hard music and drill, but lots of fun. We've also gotten the first movement of our A show, which we'll be performing at the Florida State game in 2 weeks. For that we're playing the theme from Star Trek, Hernando's Hideaway, Hey Good Lookin', and Amazing Grace. On the Star Trek song, we actually make the USS Enterprise on the field, and it moves across and blows up the Borg cube on the other side of the field. I'll try to post video as soon as I can.

Auditions for performing ensembles were on Monday, and I was kind of nervous because I'd been playing my lips off the week before for marching camp. When I picked up my concert horn on Monday, I sounded terrible because of marching camp, and also because I had my brass workshop class (where basically I learn to play all the brass instruments) and had been playing trombone all morning. But I was smiled upon by the powers that be, and on Wednesday I found out I was selected as principle horn in the symphony orchestra. For those of you who don't know music lingo, that's first chair in the second orchestra. I was hoping for an orchestra, and couldn't have gotten a better placement. It's going to be an exciting year and I'm excited for another crack at BYU performing ensembles.

Last night, Brittany and I went on a double date with my friend, Chris, and Brittany's old roommate, Joy. It was a blind date for them, and it went really well. Chris and I and Chris's other roommate (who helped us just for fun) made spaghetti with Chris's secret family recipe meat sauce, and garlic bread. It was very delicious. After that we watched The Sandlot, and played Risk 2210 (the futuristic version of it). It went really well and we all had fun.

Anyway, it's late and we're going to bed. Hope everyone is ok. Love lots.

Christian and Brittany

P.S.

Triple Chocolate Mess

1 chocolate cake mix

1 chocolate pudding mix (any size)

1 pint sour cream

6 oz chocolate chips

3/4 cu oil

4 eggs

1 cu water

Spray 4 qt crock pot with non-stick spray

Mix all the ingredients together in crockpot

Cook for 6-8 hours on Low

Serve over ice cream

It's good, but hard to clean up, so wash while it's warm.

Kbye