New mattress!

After months of pain in our backs and legs (and Mark getting chronic tension headaches), we spent a week sleeping on a decent mattress at my parent's house. That finally sold Mark on what I have been trying to convince him for weeks--we needed a new mattress! He was actually more insistent on it than I had been before.

I had already shopped around and knew which one I wanted--from Sam's Club. Best price for the kind of mattress we wanted.

Of course, Mark didn't want to pay the delivery fee, but since we don't have a truck/big SUV and neither does anyone we know, I told him to stop being cheap and just pay the fee. But he insisted, and he strapped that baby on top of our little car and drove it home (I put on sunglasses and hid my face. Some BYU girls walking down the street pointed at our car and laughed, and Mark stuck his head out the window and laughed back at them. That actually was pretty funny.). So we brought our new purchase home without paying any delivery fees or getting pulled over, so I have to give him that one.

At least we used rope.

Speaking of cheapness...

Our landlord is having new doors installed on all the units, and while they are very nice doors, I am a little annoyed he got rid of the screen doors. I liked having a screen door. While the note the landlord left us said that he was having a friend install the doors, I don't think his little handyman friend thinks too highly of him.
He was this little old Cambodian man with a very thick accent, and he was pretty funny. Now, I learned pretty quick that our landlord is a DIY kind of guy when I realized that to get the outlet to work in the bathroom the lights had to be turned out, and Mark says the texture on the wall looks like it was done by an amateur. He also comes around and mows the lawns himself once a month, and hand delivers the gas bill instead of mailing it like a normal person. But our little Cambodian friend was like, "What kind of landlord mows own lawn?! You ever see that? He very cheap."

The landlord didn't even want to pay the guy to paint the wood around the doors (now bereft of screen doors, boohoo), saying he'd do it himself.

The handyman wanted us to realize just how rich our landlord was. I was like, "Yeah, I know. I send him a check every month."


But, our landlord does keep the place up really well. I almost feel like something is wrong because I'm not calling in work requests every other week to report some new disaster.
It is nice to not live in a place that is constantly threatening to tumble down on top of us.

Still, I do wish the the guy would spring for bigger water heaters. I haven't shaved my legs all week.

awful blogger

I've been terrible about blogging lately! It seems like there's nothing really interesting for me to say.
Mark asked me the other day why we don't have a "couple" or "family" blog, since this is really my blog. I told him that if he wanted one, that meant he had to write in it too. He didn't like that idea too much, hehe.



I'm loving my new job as a Copy Editor for the campus newspaper, The Daily Universe. It's so nice to have a job with a purpose instead of just pretending to dust the same picture frame day after day like at the MTC. Also, I don't work with a bunch of weirdos like I did at the MTC.

Lots of people ask me, so I will explain what a copy editor actually does. While the mechanics of even a smaller paper like the DU are pretty complicated to explain (actually, I think someone told me once we have a circulation of like 18,000 so that makes us a medium-sized newspaper, but I don't know if that number is accurate), basically we get design the pages of the newspaper.
We work with a program called InDesign a lot, which I love since it was my best friend when I went to BYU-I. We place the articles on the page, add pictures, edit the articles.
Newspapers follows a format that is called AP style, which has lots of rules for how you abbreviate states, spell certain words, and use commas, among many other thousand things. On top of that, there are many rules to design--which fonts to use where, size of headlines, spacing, etc. On top of are all the annoying things that go along with working on computers, like when your dang picture won't stop stretching itself out and you can't figure out why.

It seems like a lot, but it's really not that bad. I had experience in InDesign before, and after I design my pages, at least two other people look them over and tell me what I did wrong so I can fix it. I'm loving my job, even though now every time I pick up a magazine or newspaper I am obsessing over the design and layouts instead of reading the articles!


In other news, our new apartment is awesome. We enjoy sitting on the floor just because we can--we just aren't used to actually being able to walk around without bumping into things! And we eat at an actual kitchen table instead of sitting on the couch for dinner. Weird.

Sorry it's been so long

but I'm done with finals now. and I have a job.

oh yeah.

The Tale of the Horrible Apartment

When Mark and I first moved into this apartment, we decided to go with it because it was really cheap rent.
But you get what you pay for, unfortunately.
You get wonderful things like:

• Ginormous nasty bugs The first three months I stored pretty much everything in the fridge. Cereal, sugar, flour. After it got cold, the bug invasion slowed down, but they would still hang out in the sink at night ans scatter when I went to get a glass of water at midnight. Once a bug fell from the ceiling right in front of me while I was brushing my teeth.
  
• Bug spraying Because those delightful bugs have infested the whole apartment complex, they have to spray all the apartments on the same day. I think we've had it done, oh, about 4 or 5 times. It's so great because you get to wake up at 7 am to clear every single thing out of your kitchen and bathroom cupboards. And since this apartment is the size of a shoe box, everything is crammed onto the living room couch and armchair. We love it when we see that little note hanging on our door that notifies us they're going to spray the very next morning. Gee, thanks for the warning.
• Crumbling walls One day the ceiling started leaking in our bathroom. Dripping water. Even better, the wall underneath it started crumbling away! I literally touched it and it crumbled away in my hands. All along the length of the wall. And when they had a repairman come, he told us he didn't even fix a leak, just re-plastered the wall. There was a fine coating of white dust all over everything in the bathroom, and all over the bookcase in the hallway.
  
• The lovely neighbors The people who live next door are Indian, we think. It took us a while, but we figured out that it is a mother and her twenty-something son, who goes to BYU (we think--definitely some college somewhere, at least) who live together. In a one bedroom apartment. Yikes! But the best part is that this lady loves to make what we like to call her "sacrifices" on the wall outside by our back door. The concrete is permanently stained with the oil she pours over her little leaves and tree branches, and there's always a nice pile of crumbs that about a dozen birds come to feast on every day. She also has a creepy picture of a snake hanging on her back door. She also has a shopping cart she took from Smith's sitting out in the back, full of pine tree branches. We think she stripped the trees at the park.
  We like to blame the people upstairs for everything that goes wrong. If we can't find the remote, we say the people upstairs probably took it. If we run out of milk, the people upstairs drank it all. If there's dishes in the sink, the people upstairs made the mess. We mostly don't like them because it sounds like they purposefully stomp around up there. They also like to sing annoying show tunes. And at 7am on Saturday morning, they like to smash two trash can lids together as loudly as they can. (Just kidding. I don't actually know what the heck they are banging up there but it sounds like two trash can lids.)
  
• Sewage coming up the kitchen sink One morning Mark walked into the kitchen and the kitchen sink was overflowing with orange water. It smelled so nice. Turning off the water didn't do anything. It did stop eventually, but not after flooding the whole kitchen. It was truly horrible. Mark cleaned it up really well though--the whole place smelled like lemon cleaner for a week--no joke. When the repair guy came, guess what he said the reason for the flooding was?
  
  THE PEOPLE UPSTAIRS!!!!
  
  Apparently they dump everything down the sink, even though it doesn't have a garbage disposal. And it all backed up into our kitchen. I glared at the back of their heads in church that Sunday.
  

The day of the flooding was pretty much the breaking point for us. We had had enough and withing two weeks we found a new place to move into and sold our contract to some other unfortunate couple. I felt bad pretending that the place was so wonderful, but I'm pretty sure the only reason they wanted it was for the cheap rent. Some lessons have to be learned the hard way.

The decision to move out was reaffirmed on Wednesday when our apartment started filling up with smoke. Turns out, two of the washing machines located just downstairs from our front door started smoking. There was so much smoke I'm surprised the things weren't on fire. Mark stopped the machines and I put a note on them saying "Broken. Don't Use." I called our manager because she wasn't home, letting her know what happened. Not an hour later the crazy lady everyone avoids (because she will complain about her life to you for 15 minutes) went down to the laundry room, ripped the signs off and threw them in the garbage, and then threw all her clothes in the machines. Yep.
Lucky for her, the machines have yet to start smoking again.
The manager never did call me back.

But it's ok...
Because before this month is over, we are GONE.
FOREVER.

I CAN'T WAIT TO MOVE!!! YIPPEEEEEE!!!!

I go to college

When I Walk Down Hallways:
In my head:






In reality:

Oscars

Mark and I went to see Harry Potter 7 again at the dollar theater tonight. I loved it even more the second time, I think. But when it got to the part where Ron joins them again and Hermione is mad at him, all I could think about was this:






That was from the Oscars on Sunday, in case you missed it. ;)
I mostly watched the Oscars because I really like Anne Hathaway and wanted to see her host. I think she did a pretty good job, except they made her act so ditzy the whole time. But she really had to ham it up I guess because her co-host James Franco was so DEAD. I mean really, I thought you could act? I wonder if he was high the whole time or what.

But I did like this part:



*snort*

and this part because that is totally what I'd do in that dress.

Little Things

--The song ending right as I park the car

--Long naps

--Funny commercials

--Being caught up on all my homework

--Finding a good book to read (that I haven't actually read before!)





It was nice and warm today, which made it feel like spring. However, I don't WANT spring to come.
It's only allowed to come after I get my SNOW DAY!
Also, I think I'm turning into an insomniac. :(