Jess is going to NYC (again and again...)

So it looks like Jess's trip to NYC to visit L'Óreal paid off... Today she got a call from them to say that she totally got the internship for this summer! Since we just barely found out about we still are going to need to work out a lot of the details, but we are crazy excited and looking forward to our next big adventure. Congratulations Jess!

San Francisco, we already miss you.

What does my birthday + long president's day weekend + no missionaries for me at the MTC equal? A road trip out to San Francisco of course! Wahoo... Sarah and Christian were kind enough to let us stay with them over the weekend and it was way fun.

The first day of our trip was spent driving until we got to Reno, NV were we spent the night. When we walked into the hotel we were staying at we were put off a little at first by the purple rainbow carpeting in the lobby area, but fortunately it didn't match what was in our room. Our room was way nice and it was nice to just get to relax.

The next day we got onto the road again, fortunately for us it wasn't snowing and we made it through Donner Pass just fine, though the snow banks on the side of the road were absolutely huge! We made it to Christian and Sarah's house in the afternoon.

It was way exciting to see Anna, Kate, and Blaine! The girls were running around for about the first hour or so we were there showing us EVERYTHING and we loved it...

After just a little break at Christian and Sarah's house, we all rode the train into town to meet up with Christian after work. Here's Jess and my niece Anna riding the BART (I definitely think Jess is the favorite of us two).

We picked up Christian from work and made our way through the city until we got to Chinatown. I thought it was so cool. We went to a chinese restaurant there to celebrate Chinese New Year (it was a couple days early, but this year Chinese New Year fell on both Valentine's Day and a Sunday). I thought the food was excellent and I felt quite at home in the restaurant. I even did my best Chinese grin while I was there.

Saturday was just as exciting as Friday. We drove into SF on Saturday to see a few of the sights. We went to the Golden Gate Bridge, Pier 39, and Lombard Street (which was CRAZY steep, I totally thought we were going to roll backwards in our car every time we had to stop). Pier 39 was a lot of fun I ate Clam Chowder and I actually liked it. That night we babysat so Christian and Sarah could have a night out.

Sunday was Valentine's Day and we celebrated with some delicious french toast that Christian made from his home-made sourdough bread. It was amazing. We went to church and I got to hang out with Blaine throughout the meetings. He was super good the whole time and went to me without hesitating, at least with him I was still the favorite.

One of our favorite things about Christian and Sarah's house was the lemon tree in the backyard. It was soo cool! We even had fresh lemonade for dinner on Sunday.

It was so much fun to get to go out to SF to hangout a bit with Christian and his family and we were really sad to leave. Anna and Kate were so funny and we loved hanging out with them. Christian and Sarah were the best hosts and I would highly recommend going out to visit them if any of you get the chance :).. Thanks Christian and Sarah!

Seven Days without Jess...

(I know this is a little late in coming, but I've been planning on writing this blog for a while, bear with me now because a lot has happened in the last 2 or 3 weeks and I have a lot more blog posts coming.)

For those of you that don't know (which is probably few), Jess went to New York. A few months ago she won a marketing competition called Brandstorm at BYU which is sponsored by L'Óreal and passed on to the national round of the international competition. As a part of the competition L'Óreal flew Jess out to New York to meet with a marketing team/advertising agency to work on their project and to meet with L'Óreal in a recruiting trip. This was the first of two trips out to NYC (the second will be the actual competition in April).

Jess had an absolute blast, visiting stores, eating at fancy restaurants, getting blisters from walking around the city all day etc... I'm super proud of her and think she is absolutely amazing.

Now, for me, I wasn't quite as busy as she was. I didn't realize how long 7 days was until this last week (mind you before this the longest I have been a part from Jess since we've known each other was about 3 days, being married I've never been away from her for even a day)...

So just for your information 7 days is exactly 168 hours, 10,080 minutes, or 604,800 seconds. Here are 7 of the things that I did during that time:

1. Went to school

2. Slept

3. Went snowboarding

4. Beat like 3 iPod games

5. Watched 3 1/2 seasons of 30 Rock

6. Thought about Jess all the time

7. Sent Jess a million texts

That's really about it and needless to say I was very, very happy when she finally came home. Seven days is a really long time, something I had never realized before...

I think next trip I'm going to go out with her...