Gladys Knight

Sunday night I went to Charlotte to the Gladys Knight fireside. It was awesome! It was unlike anything you'd ever expect to experience in an LDS church. People were clapping, standing up and moving to the music, shouting their amens and catching the holy spirit. I loved the choir's arrangements of "I Am A Child of God" and other hymns, as well as other songs I'd never heard. I will definitely be getting the CD. My mom got to go when Gladys was in Phoenix a year or so ago and told me how great it was, so I was glad to experience it for myself. The best part was Sister Knight's sweet testimony. She has such a cute personality. If you get the opportunity, make sure you go!

Happy Earth Day!

To celebrate Earth Day, we decided to reduce our energy consumption by converting all of our incandescent light bulbs to fluorescent ones. They were dirt cheap at Big Lots and so we stocked up and replaced lights all over our house. Just to give everyone an idea of how much energy we are saving - the fan above was outfitted with three 60 Watt incandescent bulbs before. The new fluorescent bulbs are just as bright - but are only 14 Watts a piece! So every time that we turn on those fan lights - instead of 180 Watts, we are only using 42 Watts.

Since we posted a picture of dirt earlier, we decided that we should show how our garden is turning out. We planted six different tomato plants, every color of bell pepper (red, yellow, and green), jalapenos, other peppers, squash, cucumbers, zucchini, and a bunch of herbs (cilantro, basil, parsley, and more). And we planted somewhere around 25 strawberry plants because we bought what we thought was a four-pack of plants at Costco - but it turned out to be four packs of 15 plants in each pack. We gave two packs away and planted as many of the rest as we could. Anyway, we are going to be eating some great garden fruits and vegetables.

Easter

We had a great Easter! We went over to our friends, Brett & Liesl's for an Easter egg hunt.

Mike worked so hard to make our Easter dinner... at least he tried to take the credit. We went to Matt and Sarah's for dinner. All the girls cooked while the boys played the Wii.

I was so proud of my rolls. The Thanksgiving ones I made were horrible. I was glad to finally redeem myself.

Almost Ready...

So it's been a little chilly here in NC lately. Luckily, we haven't planted our garden yet, but we finished getting the soil ready yesterday. So once this cold moves out of here, we're going to plant some tomatoes, cilantro, jalapenos, pumpkins, cucumbers, and much more. We can't wait - we had a lot of luck last year with just two rows of tomatoes, peppers and some squash. This year we have decided to live off the garden and not use any electricity. We are also going to be walking to work and school to reduce our "carbon footprint" to zero. Well, maybe we aren't going to that extreme, but we are planting a garden soon. :)

This week...

My boss took me on a 15 min break from taxes to see spring flowers. They were beautiful, but it made it hard to go back to work when it is so pretty outside.
We decorated Easter eggs! Every year I make Mike dye eggs with me. I think he actually enjoyed it this year!

NC - Perfect place to live

Tired of the Arizona heat? Living out West getting you down?

Well, if so, we have the answer.

What do you you think this beautiful home costs? $250K? $350K? More? Well, as a special offer, today it is being offered at $220,000! That's right - $220,000!

But wait! If you act now - the real list price is only $189,900!

189,900

Well, that's our little advertisement for North Carolina for all those out in the West that are priced out of the market. We went on a walk this afternoon and took some pictures of spring and checked out the houses that are for sale. We thought this was one of the best looking homes that was for sale - nice landscaping and big front and back yards. Oh, another thing, if you ever come out to NC and say that you are from AZ, the first thing people will talk about is how the Arizona heat is nothing compared to the heat out here because it is humid here for a few months. They talk about 110 degrees in AZ as if it were the mid-70s because it is a "dry heat". We try and tell them that anything over 105 or so starts to get really bad, and that every degree over that is progressively worse. But, it doesn't faze them - we talked with one lady last summer that said that she flew into Scottsdale and it was 115 and she didn't even feel it. I was amazed. Oh well, either way, summer is hot - but a perfect time for grilling outdoors (I would have said "having a barbeque" - but that means something entirely different out here). So yeah, an update on our lives for this week: Mike is learning a lot about the brain and the rest of the nervous system and Emily is working about 50 hours a week during "busy" season for accountants - all while studying for the CPA exam. Emily has taken one part of the four part exam so far, so she's one-quarter CPA (if the results come back like we want them to :) ). If we see any other good houses for sale - we'll make sure to post some more pictures - just in case we can sway anyone to come out to where the "real" heat is. We hope everyone is well and having a great time during this spring season (or I guess it's already summer if you're in AZ).

Birthday

I had a wonderful birthday! We had a combined celebrated last night with friends for Matt Grace's bday and Liesl Einerson's getting into grad school. Mike got me a pink lemonade cake (yum!) and beautiful pink roses. But my absolute favorite was my happy birthday song over the phone, sung by my cutie pie niece Carys!