Broken in Baker...

So I've decided that if I try to catch the blog up linearly it'll never get done.  So I'm going to start with the last 3 days or so, because I don't want to forget the feelings and experiences we've had this weekend. (This is now almost two weeks ago...)

About a week ago Dave and I were trying to decide which day we should drive back to Provo after spending Christmas in California.  We knew it had to be Thursday or Friday because there was going to be a storm coming and we wanted to miss it.  For some reason I was having a really hard time deciding which day we should leave.  I felt like we should leave on Thursday, but I also wanted to stay the extra day with my family and enjoy California for as long as possible.  We kept putting off the decision until Wednesday when I felt pretty strongly that we needed to leave on Thursday even though I didn't really know why.  

So much in the back!!

We were hauling a bunch of old furniture my parents were giving to the kids up here in Utah in the bed of the truck.  It was loaded to its maximum capacity without a doubt (imagine Tetris with couches, chairs, and tables).  Since we left on Thursday we weren't worried about the storm hitting us because it wasn't supposed to come to Provo until Friday night, and we were planning on getting to Provo on Thursday night.  Since we were so confident in our timetable we decided to leave the furniture mostly uncovered so we wouldn't have to deal with flapping tarps for 10 hours on the road.  

About an hour into the drive (Victorville) I heard a funny noise and asked Dave about it.  Now, you have to understand that I'm the type of person that freaks out about every little noise I ever hear in a car.  Since my mind always jumps to the worst case scenario we tend to just ignore my fears when we're in the car together.  But I kept hearing the noise and asked, "Are you sure we shouldn't be worried about that?".  Dave assured me that this was just an old car and old cars have "character" in the form of weird noises.  

One hour further into the drive (just outside of Baker, now) we heard a cyclical swooshing sound that sort of sounded like a flat tire.  We definitely payed attention to this noise.  We slowed down and moved over a couple of lanes just in case, and as we were gliding to the right we heard a huge "CLUNK!" that sounded like something metal hitting the bottom of our car.  We pulled over to the shoulder and slowed to about 25 mph.  We continued to drive at this speed until we could find an exit to get off on.  The next one was Zzyzx Road so we pulled off and tried our brakes to see if it was something going on with them.  The wooshing sound became more distinct as the brakes were engaged and we thought we were zeroing in on the problem.  We wanted to see what would happen if we tried to come to a complete stop so Dave tapped the brakes once more and the car skidded to a screeching halt right in the middle of the Zzyzx Road offramp on its own.  Awesome.

At this point we were at a loss.  Either our brakes had seized on us, our transmission had died, or something else we didn't even know about was going on...We got out (in the middle of the road, mind you) and looked at the car.  You could see the black skid marks on the road from where the brakes had kicked in of their own accord.  We called our car insurance and asked for a tow which wouldn't be there for another hour and a half, unfortunately.  We then proceeded to troubleshoot the problem.  We called my parents and my grandpa who once was a mechanic in the military.  Dave and them all had a fun time trying to find the problem while cars (and SEMI-TRUCKS!!) were squeaking by us on the shoulder since our car wouldn't move forward or backward and we were literally right in the middle of the road.  woops.

It turns out Dave had worked on the car a few months ago and removed and then replaced the front right wheel.  I don't know much about cars, but I've heard the same words thrown around all weekend so I'll try to do my best to describe what happened.  The caliper in the wheel has two bolts that hold it in place and apparently these two bolts were missing on our front right wheel when Dave looked under the car so the caliper had come loose and jammed itself in the wheel well causing our wheel to get stuck and refuse to budge.

This was taken under the car behind the wheel well...

The blue stuff is the lock-tight.

At this point Dave had to admit that his workmanship was probably the culprit...a very humbling experience indeed...The bolts had been tightened to spec, but Dave just used the same bolts that he'd removed and the lock-tight which comes on new bolts was missing.  (Lock-tight is some sort of glue/thing that makes sure the bolts won't come out?)  See the picture to the side.  Anyway, without the lock-tight, the bolts will work themselves loose over time (4,000 miles to be exact...) and it seems like that's what happened to us.  Luckily, the bolts came out clean and the threads in the holes were still perfectly intact, our rim hadn't been damaged at all minus a scratch (a miracle!), nothing else was damaged in our car, and once we replaced the bolts we would be good to go.

Just to prove I was actually there...and smiling!

Poor Dave.  Or should I say "poor Dave's pride".

Look how low the back of the truck is...so scary.

So we got towed to a mechanic (the only mechanic in about a 100 mile radius) and we nervously eyed the furniture now precariously bouncing up and down while sharply angled toward the road during the entire tow-ride.  Luckily we were just 2 miles or so outside of Baker so it didn't take long to get there. 

The mechanic was really great and stayed open pretty late.  When he looked at the truck he told us our assessment had been correct and we just needed the two caliper-retaining bolts and we'd be on our way again.  We called around to all the shops in the area ("in the area" being a 100 mile radius, of course), but these bolts were specific to a '97 Ford F150 so no one had them except a Ford dealership all the way in Victorville.  They were going to close in an hour so there wouldn't be any way to get the parts until the morning. 

Aside:  At this point it had become crystal clear why I'd felt like we needed to leave on Thursday instead of Friday, and we were grateful we had.  

Good 'ole Will's Fargo Motel :)

So we looked around for a hotel (who are we kidding? Motel) and there was just one still in business.  The mechanic was really nice and drove us there since it was dark, cold, and we had to bring our big suitcases since we didn't have overnight bags or anything convenient like that.  The motel was incredibly creepy and sketchy, but it had a king bed (win!), so it could have been worse.  It was relatively clean and had a heater so I was happy.  And as a cherry on top, March of the Penguins was on CNN on the TV in the room!

We spent the evening eating dinner at Denny's forever to use up time, trying to get my hot spot to work in the motel so we could check the weather to make sure we'd still beat the storm the following day, calling my parents and convincing them that there was no need for them to drive up and come rescue us, and watching March of the Penguins.  It was actually pretty relaxing knowing that there was literally nothing we could do except rest until the next morning.

--------------------------------------------------

Come next morning I was not feeling as relaxed as the night before.  I was a little more anxious to get out of Baker and get on the road.  I was worried about the storm and didn't want to have to worry about stopping mid-drive to tarp all the furniture because the snow might ruin it.  I was also having bad feelings about how early the mechanic had told us we'd get the part that morning.  His son was supposed to be coming up from Victorville with it around 11:00am so we would be on the road by 11:15 hopefully.  

All this happened at Denny's the next
morning, mind you...

We called the Ford dealership like 5 times that morning to ask whether or not the parts had been picked up and when they hadn't been picked up by 10:30 (remember it's an hour and a half drive from the dealership to Baker still) we decided we needed to figure something else out.  Dave had the thought to ask the dealership if they might directly deliver the parts for us and so we called them yet again to ask, but they said no.  Baker was too far for it to be worth their time.  We pushed a little and told them we'd pay them for the time and gas if they could get it to us and they said, "Well, I'm not really doing anything around here, so let me ask a manager if it's okay."  He came back and told us if we'd pay $20 for the delivery he'd be on the road as soon as we hung up!  We were ecstatic!!

Turns out our motel was right across from the
famous thermometer, we couldn't see it the night
before in the dark.  

We called our mechanic and told him we were having the parts delivered directly and he didn't believe us.  He said they had never delivered before so there's no way they'd deliver 2 $10 bolts all the way to Baker.  But we had faith in the dealership :)  We headed back to our motel for a quick rest before we had to check out and then walked the mile with our suitcases and backpacks in hand down to the mechanic shop.  The parts were delivered within about 5 minutes of us getting there and our mechanic's jaw dropped as he uttered a curse word under his breath.  He actually didn't believe they were going to come until he saw it himself.  

Once we got the part, the job took a total of 5 minutes.  That was what we waited all night in Baker for.  $20 worth of parts, and 5 minutes of labor.  We checked the tire pressure, made sure our straps were secure, and we were on our way!  And only and hour and a half later than we were hoping.  If we hurried, we'd still beat the storm!

I don't know if I've ever made that drive with so few pit stops.  Who knew my bladder was so capable?!  We were very go-go-go as we were racing the storm, but we made it in time to get home and unload all the furniture into the garage before we saw any weather.  It was an absolute miracle.

On the road again, finally!! 

----------------------------------------------------------

Throughout the whole experience with our stay in Baker, both Dave and I couldn't help but comment on how certain we were that Heavenly Father had been watching over us.

 We were so grateful we'd left a day early so we didn't feel overly stressed about the timing of everything.  Looking back at the series of events, it makes no sense how we made it all the way to Zzyzx road if we'd been missing that bolt for 2 miles already.  We should have come to a skid in the middle of the freeway and been in a much more dangerous situation.

It doesn't even make sense that both bolts both came out so cleanly leaving the threads in perfect shape in the holes.

Our mechanic told us that we were so lucky the bolt hadn't torn a hole in our rim and we were grateful that we could drive home with just a $20 dollar fix plus labor.

The Ford dealership that would never even deliver from Barstow to Baker was willing to drop everything to deliver our parts to us from Victorville as soon as we asked them to.

Somehow we didn't hit any bad weather during the entire drive up from California to Provo.

Miraculously; none of the furniture was damaged or even scratched during the entire ordeal.  We could not believe that after all of that it was all in perfect condition.

Overall, it was yet another testament to me of Heavenly Father's love for us and how much he truly does care about each and every one of our pains and struggles.  It's been a year of a lot of physical pain and emotional struggle for me and sometimes it's easy to feel forgotten, but how could I ever deny such an explicit example of his watching over us?

Overall, we were pretty grateful to be home safe and sound after the entire ordeal, but we knew we'd been blessed with a little (a lot of) extra help :)

11/22/13: Gone Fishin'...

I wish I was gone fishing, that's Dave right now.  I'm actually sitting here in isolation in an office on campus attempting to write my first draft of my lit review for my thesis.  It's due tonight and I haven't started writing yet...so your regular Friday blogging program will return when said paper is finished.  Wish me luck!

Until then, please enjoy this little gem of a philosophy I'm choosing to live by right now in spite of being taught to rise above this temptation during my English undergrad years :)  What can I say?  Grad school is just a different ball game.  Sometimes mediocrity is all we can afford to achieve if we want our sanity to remain in tact!

Maybe I'm Being Judgy, But....

Is it just me, or does it seem unreal that some people are past level 50 on Candy Crush and up into the 80's??  Don't get me wrong, I was a very dedicated candy crusher for a few months there too.  I waited for my lives when it told me I needed to wait, and I cheated the system just enough to not have to pay for any future levels, but once I hit about level 45, I was so done.  

How are these people doing it????

I thought this only happened in movies...

So I realized why I don’t blog very much anymore.  It’s because I have someone to tell everything to.  After having told Dave my stories from the day, there’s little motivation to write them all out again…But since Dave is backpacking in the Grand Canyon this weekend with no cell service, I finally have a story that is just too good not to share.   And he’s not here to tell it to, so I’m finally going to blog.

So…Dave’s mom is a twin.  And my mom is a twin.  And they say that twins skip generations, so basically—we’re doomed.   I’ve never wanted to have twins.  And after this weekend, I feel validated in not necessarily wanting to struggle with double trouble as a new mom.

So there’s these two twins I have been babysitting lately who are 4 years old.  They’re adorable.  They love anything they can do with a ball—soccer, football, I just taught them volleyball, and handball.  But they also love to dance and perform (and scream).  You get the idea, right?  Incredibly high energy, loud, and constantly vying for my attention as I’m babysitting them.  These girls are also very sneaky, however.

You have to know before I write this that I am a pretty attentive babysitter.  I don’t typically turn on the tv for hours and let the kids watch until bedtime, I don’t fall asleep while the kids are still awake, I don’t forget to feed them, I don’t lose them.  And I have never had to call a mom while I was babysitting her kids to ask for help with something.  Everything yesterday was a first for me…

We were downstairs in the family room just having a good time playing with the camera on my phone.  They love to take pictures of themselves and me and flip through them over and over.  We were playing with the phone when one of the twins decided she needed a drink.  I went with her to the kitchen to grab her a glass of water while the other twin sneaked around the corner with my phone. About 5 minutes later I called out to her, “Where’d you go?”  And she came running back oh so innocently showing me all the pictures she had just taken of the stairs.  Looking back, I should have known something was up when she came running back so quickly, but at the time, I thought nothing of it. 

Everything went well for the rest of the night while we played at the park with our bikes, razors, balls, and Frisbees.  We ate dinner and they went down with just 2 bedtime stories and a half-asleep, “Will you come back tomorrow to play tea party with us?”  Once they were down, their mom called and told me I could go because their older son was going to be home to just keep an eye on the house until they arrived home. 

I was happy to have successfully put the girls to sleep and done everything with no mishaps when I walked right out the door to my car, my hand sifting through the contents of my purse for my keys the entire way down the driveway and across the street to my car.  When I got to my car I realized my keys were nowhere to be found.  I shamelessly knelt down and emptied the contents of my purse on the street searching desperately for my keys, but alas, they were not there.  I resourcefully flipped on my “flashlight” app on my phone to search through the windows of my car to see if I’d accidentally locked my keys in there.  But I couldn’t see them so I concluded I must’ve left them on a counter inside somewhere. 

When I went back to the house at 7:30 expecting to find my keys carelessly laid on the kitchen counter, I found a house completely void of my bright blue BYU lanyard attached to my keys.  At this point I started to realize one of the girls had probably taken and hidden them, so I retraced our steps for the day.  I searched the toys in the garage, the refrigerator, the lawn chairs outside, the dress up room, in between the cushions on the couches, the pantry, the dirty clothes, under the girl’s pillows and sheets in their bed; everywhere I thought possible.  I called their mom and asked about secret hiding places, I even splashed the girls with water and woke them up to ask if they knew where my keys were.  I turned that house upside down before my parents called wondering where I was around 8:30.   Luckily, I had a spare key at home in my backpack so my mom came to bring it to me hoping my keys would be locked in the car, but when she arrived, they weren’t there.  At this point I was terrified, remembering the time one of the girls went to the bathroom by herself while we waited for her outside in the garage.  I was convinced she had dug to the bottom of my purse, pulled them out, and flushed them down the toilet.  My mom even stuck her hand in there to check (thanks mom!).  We continued to search the house for another hour until at about 9:40, we ultimately gave up. 

I had decided I must have dropped them in the street and one of the neighbors had picked them up.  I texted the mom and told her I was leaving and hadn’t found them, asking her to check with her neighbors tomorrow.

So this morning, I woke up to a text at 8:30 telling me they had found my keys!!  One of the girls had hidden them in the library of the house.  Unbelievable!  We thought we had checked every possible place, but were still outsmarted by a 4 year-old.  I didn’t know that kids actually played tricks on their babysitters, but it looks like they do!  I think I should take it as a compliment—they hid my keys because they didn’t want me to be able to leave, right?  At least, that’s how I am going to look at it J

P.S.  Last time I babysat, they managed to flood the family room by plugging the bathroom sink, turning it on, and closing the door so I couldn’t hear the water.  Yeahh…This kind of thing happens in reality.  Who knew?

Dang it...

...I had so many clever/possibly witty things I wanted to blog about, but at the moment, none come to mind...So we will have to settle for a slightly less intriguing story that may provide you with a moral for the day.

It was a dark and stormy night in Salt Lake City...just kidding...I honestly don't remember, I know it was night time, but I'd guess it was probably moderately warm and beautiful because this only happened a few days ago and we've had great weather here lately. So I went up to Salt Lake late one fateful night planning to finish my Mastering Chemistry homework.(the bane of my existence currently...) For those of you who are wondering, "What in the world is Mastering Chemistry?" Allow me to explain...It is the most ridiculously time consuming invention ever created for college Chemistry students. It does help us learn the concepts thoroughly, but only because we have to do an assignment every night, and each one takes about 1-2 hours. It's ridiculous. Anyway, so I figured I would get to Salt Lake around 10pm, and finish my homework before it was due at 12pm.(hmm...is midnight pm? or am? I think a.m...) Reasonable, right? Well it would have been, except karma attacked me whilst I was attempting to finish it.

Time out for explanation...Every single Mastering Chemistry problem (and there's a lot) can be found on the internet. For each question, someone somewhere has always posted it to a chat board and received help to find the right answer. I resort to this method of finding solutions when I am completely and hopelessly lost as to what to do...it's foolproof. Never fails me. Possibly cheating? I don't really think so because on homework you're allowed to use any resources you want, as long as you learn the concepts.

Back to the story...So as midnight was drawing near and my computer was threatening to turn into a pumpkin (or something like that), I got stuck on a problem and resorted to the "Yahoo! Answers" boards to find my solution. Unfortunately, I clicked one that looked legit, but turned out to be infected with a virus. As I realized that I had about 25 minutes to finish the rest of my hour long assignment, my computer started to tell me I needed to do all sorts of things. My home screen no longer resembled my home screen. It had lots of little threatening pop-up boxes. A fake scanner started running and looking back on it now, I guess this is when it was wiping out all the documents on my computer...unfortunate...

Luckily, Jim had done the same thing recently to his computer, so Christi knew the anti-virus solution. They helped restore my computer and there was basically no harm done...Except that now I am afraid to ever cheat on a homework assignment ever again. And all my pictures and documents have disappeared off my hard drive :(

So there ya go...lesson for the day...just do the work, don't try to cut corners on your homework. It's really not worth all the stress of a computer-life-threatening virus on your hard drive.

-The End-

Poor Guy...

We've all done it. I won't pretend I'm exempt. Every one of us has experienced the humiliation and the shame that accompanies the intense confusion when one tries to enter the bathroom of the wrong gender. It has been a while, however, since I have witnessed one of these precious moments since most of us here at BYU have particular restrooms we like to use and have gotten used to the location of the doors.

But while I was spacing off procrastinating writing my paper about Herman Melville and his commentary on American Society, my eyes wandered to a secret bathroom on the fourth floor of the library! Now, just as I was contemplating the shock of finding a second bathroom on this lovely floor, a boy walked up, put his hand on the door of the girl's restroom and then quickly jumped back as if burned. He looked around quite confusedly for a moment, and then proceeded to hang his head in shame and enter the boy's door.

...poor guy...

In his defense, the girls' side has 2 doors! Why would anyone do that? It's as though they intended for people to get confused by their poor design. I propose that bathrooms never have two entrances, that is just ridiculously and unnecessarily confusing...come on, people, really? Give us a break...will ya?

Haha, he just walked out of the bathroom texting...trying to play it off totally cool...nice one, guy. I saw it...don't worry :)

Give the man a glass of Malk!!

Sometimes I forget I'm a college student.

These are great times. I feel like I'm all grown up and really doing something with my life.

Other times, the harsh reality of my status as student at BYU is thrown back into my face.

Like this week......................

..........................................................................................................................................................................

..........................................................................................................................................................................

I've been out of my precious 2% milk for about a a week now and since my roommates are all convinced that skim is the way to go...my fridge has been completely unproductive for me in the milk department. As much as I hoped that by pouring a bowl of dry cereal and opening the fridge three times in a row, milk would magically appear in my time of need...the milk shelf remained barren for me.

So...why does this remind me that I'm a college student, you ask? Well, the lack of milk itself is one thing...that never happens when there's a mom around, but mostly, I think my response to this desperate situation qualifies me as a bona fide college student...

Vending Machines!! Instead of simply driving up the street to the grocery store to buy a new gallon 7 days ago, I have been making daily trips to the vending machines in the basement of the JFSB every day or two after class buying these cute little pints of 2% BYU Creamery milk. I average about 3 bowls of cereal per bottle :) I thought it was a clever solution.

Probably not the most effective use of my money, but it's just so darn convenient to have vending machines that replace my need for a grocery store--how can I not take advantage of that, right??