Ahhh, Now I Know I'm Home

I posted a blog last year when T and I had to register our sweet '97 Ford Contour in Idaho. I mentioned putting the Idaho plates on the car was one of the most depressing events of my life. No offense to all of my Idahoan friends, but there's a Oregon pride thing going on. Oregonians are right up there with Texans when it comes to pride for their stomping ground. Lately, I had the car registered back in Oregon and today I put the new plates on (the ones with the Douglas Fir tree). It finally feels like I'm home and things are back to normal again. Sorry Idaho!

What The Heck Have You Been Up To?

How come you never blog? How come it's like a month between each of your posts? What's the point of having a blog if you never post? How is everyone supposed to know what you're up to if you never write?

To all the followers of this blog I know what's going through your head. I can't stand it when people take forever to blog either but sometimes you just get busy.

We've had a crazy month. With Christmas, family visiting, having all finals from the Fall quarter canceled until the beginning of this current quarter, and a whole mess of trying to get crap accomplished I just haven't had the time to blog. I was just telling T today that it feels like the only thing I do when I'm at the apartment is sleep.

So here I go...

The Holidays

The break wasn't a break at all, really. Though it was fun and eventful I think I put over 1500 mile on the cars in two weeks and never left the Portland metro area. It's crazy that such a task is possible since almost a whole week was spent without leaving the apartment due to the blanket (or six blankets) of snow we had. We spent Christmas Eve with T's sister and her family. Then woke up Christmas day and watched her kids open presents. Then we headed to my Grandmas house and had dinner with her and her husband. She isn't in the best of health right now and it's pretty sad. She has always been a wonderful grandma and I have great memories of visiting her when I was little. I love you Grandma.

New Years eve we spent at some friends of my sister and we pretty much ate or brains out and played Rock Band until the cows came home. No joke, I think we played for about 8 hours straight. At any rate, I know we played until 3 in the morning. Wow!

Back to School

Because most of my finals got postponed I had to take them the second week of school. I did well. In fact, the only B I got on a test all quarter came on my last biochem test. Luckily, it didn't keep me from get an A in the class. So, I am proud to announce that for the first time ever I got a 4.0 GPA in a term. I don't mean to brag but I have always had a goal to get straight A's in a term and I was finally able to pull one out, and in grad school of all places. We'll see if I can do it again.

Best Wife on the Planet

I know most people know how awesome my wife is but I don't know if you really know how awesome my wife is. When it comes to letting me buy things she is always more willing to give in then I am for her. To be honest, I rarely give in to letting her buy anything...but I'm working on it because she gives in for me. Speaking of...

I have been getting more involved with golf and have been wanting to get a new set of clubs for some time now. I have had my eye on the new Nike Victory Reds, yep, the same sticks Tiger Woods now has in his bag. I, of course, wanted the full cavity irons unlike the blades Tiger plays. They are more forgiving then his. When T's sister's husband got a job with Nike the possibility opened up for me to maybe get some new clubs at a Nike employee price, which is about half off. So the wheeling and dealing began. I asked T if I could could get new clubs as a graduation gift from chiropractic school. She was pretty quick to agree. I then asked her if I could get an early graduation gift. She was not as quick to agree but eventually did. Also, through Nike I not only could get employing pricing but Nike offers a custom fitting at a local golf course. Last weekend I spent 2 and a half hours with a golf pro fitting some clubs. On Friday they finally came.

The full set: SQ Sumo woods, Victory Red Full Cavity Irons,

and Nike Tiempo blade putter

Nike SQ Sumo 5900 driver, SQ Sumo 3 wood, and SQ Sumo 3 hybrid

Victory Red Full Cavity Irons, Gap wedge-4 iron. Aren't they pretty?

I went golfing that afternoon and realized I'm the same old crap golfer with a very expensive set of clubs. I now need some lessons and more hours on the course to improve my game.

Not only is T the greatest wife ever for letting me get new golf clubs but she has been willing to try some of my hobbies as a way for us to do more things together. I tried picking up her hobbies but running a million miles a day isn't my kind of fun. So T came up to the mountain with me this weekend and tried her skills out at snowboarding. She was a typical beginner for about the first minute and then she was picking it up rapidly. Anyone who has snowboarded will never forget their first time. It's rough, tiring, cold, hot, frustrating, scary, annoying, and painful all at the same time. And the morning after is much worse. You'll be lucky to get out of bed the day after you try snowboarding the first time. Ahhh, not T! She was a champ. Yes, many of the above characteristics of a first time snowboarder occurred but she was still amazingly good for a newcomer. And the morning pain thing I described...a sore tailbone was her only complaint. I'm so proud of her and am super excited, because if T likes snowboarding enough, that means I get to go more. Now that's worth spending a few bucks on.

T ready to tackle the mountain

Are You Freaking Kidding Me?

This is the same as an "Are you serious?" blog but I am so struck by how much Oregonians over react when it comes to snow that I had to show my true reaction by a slightly different title.

I wanted to post a news video but I couldn't find one that was good enough. So, I'll have to explain what's going on.

The Oregon weather peeps have been predicting this "Arctic Blast," they call it, for about the last week or so. It was the leading story at every hour no matter what else happened in the news. It was an even bigger story than a bombing at a bank that killed two cops and critically injured another. Are you serious?...the weather is more important than the killing of two officers of the law by a bomb? Something is seriously wrong with that. Then again, it is Oregon and people here think when it snows in the valley all hell has broken loose...and let me tell you, after it snows here, all hell really has broken loose (or frozen over, whichever one you feel fit the situation).

The storm was said to hit sometime Sunday morning. T and I were assigned to give talks in church this particular Sunday and I was tempted, when given the assignment, to ask for a rain check because I knew it was finals week starting the Monday following and I knew preparing a talk would take away from vital studying time. I decided to accept the assignment putting my faith in the good Lord above that I would be blessed by my willingness to serve...maybe blessed with a few A's on exams. So T and I prepared and we showed up to church early ready to speak. The Bishop announced the proceedings of the meeting but strangely only announced up to the first speaker, which was a young lady in the ward. She gave a very fine 5 minute talk and sat down after which the Bishop stood back up and said the snow was picking up and he was going to error on the side of caution and cancel the rest of church. Now, we've lived in Idaho for the last five years and we've had the unfortunate pleasure of dealing with a considerable amount of snow. We saw a few inches in Portland while in Idaho we often measure snow fall in feet. Never in my life have I ever seen church canceled. For all our Utah and Idaho readers, can you imagine if church was canceled because of snow? You wouldn't go to church for 6 mouths out of the year or more.

Oh, and as I was walking out of the chapel a fellow stopped me and said, "I don't know how many times I've prayed to have church canceled when I had to give a talk and it happened to you."

It's Tuesday night now. School was canceled yesterday, we had class today, another storm (can I even bring myself to call it a storm), another flurry is said to blow over us early tomorrow and I just received confirmation that school is now canceled for tomorrow. This is absolutely ridiculous. A few inches of snow falls, a little ice forms and mayhem breaks out in the Portland metropolitan area. Tons of snow could have fallen and thick ice could have built on the roadways in Idaho and business as usual.

Though Idaho schools do get out for Potato Harvest...that's another one I don't understand.

Are You Serious?

This is the second post of the "Are You Serious?" series. I have to admit when I stated this series I thought I would have much more blogs to post under this subject...shoot, a lot of people do a lot of stupid things that cause me to say to myself "are you serious?"

Well, have I got one for you. I have a class mate who is about 30 years old and originally from Colorado. I don't want to name names in case he may bump into this blog in the future. So I will call him RC.

RC dresses nice, is not a bad looking fellow, and seems to have an alright personality. He is not the brightest chap but he's not stupid either. All in all, RC is a good guy. However, RC has a serious hygiene problem. He blatantly refuses to apply deodorant or antiperspirant to the under portion of his arm pit. He happens to be in my cadaver dissection group and his B.O. is so horrendous that I would rather smell the formaldehyde of the cadaver than his pits.

I should also explain that RC is not absent minded of the issue. He knows he smells and he doesn't care. When he introduced himself to another friend of mine in the class he straight up told my friend that he didn't use deodorant as if he was proud of it. He also openly bragged to the guys in the lockerroom that he wanted to be "the guy" who doesn't ever wash is scrubs from dissection lab. Note: we have lab for three quarters. With three months to a quarter, that is nine months spending 6 hours a week in lab and never washing his scrubs. I wash mine, as does the majority of the class, every week; and the smell still doesn't completely go away.

I'm not sure if RC ever wants to be married or if he ever wants a girlfriend, but if so I guess he has come to the right place. Portland has plenty of hippies just like him. If anyone has any suggestions on how I can get RC to wear deodorant I would greatly appreciate the advice. For crying in the night, I think the cadaver can even smell his B.O.

Ode to the Hair

Well, the days of growing my hair out are over. T finally got her wish and we spent this Saturday cutting my mop. I grew it out for almost a year and I have to admit that I kind of liked it long. I thought I would blog and give one last hurrah by posting some pictures of the many hair styles I tried during the growing process.

Not one of my finest hairstyles (but T looks cute)

Hiking hair with bandanna

Cowboy hat hair (looks pretty sweet, I'd say)

Shaggy, messy hair

Slicked back and parted hair (one of my favs.)

Straight hair, aka lead singer of a hit band hair

And here is the conclusion. That's a years worth of hard work. Compare the pile to the clippers and also realize it's a good solid 2-3 inches thick on the floor.

The result! I'm pretending to cry, but if you look hard enough you might be able to see a real tear squeezing out of my eye. I'm not to happy to have a cold head again.

Moving, Cruising, and Schooling

I know you're all thinking to yourselves that it's about time T and I update our blog. I would apologize but life has been a roller coaster for about the last month. We have been here and there and everywhere...literally. A lot has gone on since we last posted. I hope after this post we'll have more time to post more often.

Moving
We moved from Rexburg late in September. We finished up our jobs, packed our stuff and loaded it in a truck in a matter of two days. I don't think I ever realized how horrible moving is. I've moved myself around but that consisted of only my stuff. Add in another persons things and a whole heap of other pointless crap and we had a mess of our hands. T and I really don't have much, for crying out loud, we only lived in a 600 sq. foot apartment. You can't cram that much in that space, plus if you've read our previous post we sold our couch. However, while packing it seemed the CRAP never ended and the packing never ceased.

We were finally off on September 18 and we were a bit sad to leave a wonderful place and many of our closest friends. To add to our moving woes we were not able to move into our apartment right away so we had to store our things at my parents house for over a week (by the way, we would like to thank my parents for storing our stuff in their house. It was not very convenient for them but very much appreciated by us). Finally, after over a week we loaded a moving truck for the second time and unloaded it for a second time at our new apartment in NE Portland. Our new joint is older than our previous place and still a one bedroom but it is 135 sq. feet bigger which is easily noticed...we are able to fit a couch, love seat, and recliner chair in the living room. In our old place we only had a couch and that barely squeezed in. All in all we are happy here so far and we feel it will be a good neighborhood to live in for now. It is quiet and surrounded by residential houses so it keeps the foot traffic away and gives the area a safer feel to it. Hopefully we'll enjoy our time here as much as we did in Rexburg.

Cruising
OK, enough of the boring stuff, let's talk about our cruise we went on. While my folks were watching our crap T and I went on a cruise to the Caribbean. We left from Florida and spent 7 days cruising to the Bahamas, St Thomas of the US Virgin Islands, and to St. Maarten. In general it was all beautiful, it was mostly relaxing and the food was delicious--at least the food that didn't make me sick--(I'll explain in a few). Cruises are definitely ALL that they are cracked up to be. And Carnival was awesome too.

The only downside was getting food poisoning. I'm not really sure why I couldn't win money through Bingo or win the drawing for a free watch but I could be the one person on the ship to get food poisoning. I let me tell you, did I ever get sick.

I'll begin to describe the situation by explaining that I have always wanted to try ahi tuna. So many people have told me it's good and cruises are the perfect time to try new foods because it's all free. So I have waited many months for this cruise and passed up many ahi tuna at restaurants so I could try it on the cruise. So, I did...and it was NASTY! It was served with a cube of watermelon and it did not satisfy any of the craving I had build up over the months. I didn't think anything of it considering I had never had ahi tuna and just figured I wasn't too partial to it. Well, after a nap and a small bowel of strawberry ice cream I was not feeling so good. Again I didn't think anything of it due to the fact that I had gorged myself the previous night at dinner by eating a New York strip steak, a full rack of baby-back ribs, some shrimp concoction, and a dessert or two. I just figured I had a bit of a case of indigestion...go figure. At this point all I was concerned about was feeling better before dinner so I could gorge myself again. Well, the uneasy feeling became a really sour gassy feeling and shortly after became painful. Dinner was rapidly approaching and I knew I had no chance of getting over whatever I had before dinner so I settled in for the night. T finally got hungry herself and went to get a bite to eat. Soon after she left all hell broke lose inside my digestive system. I had diarrhea every 20 minutes. Though it was horrible I can handle diarrhea every once in awhile. But of course that couldn't be it. About an hour after the squirts began I started to throw up. Remember, I had gorged myself the previous night, and in fact, the whole time we had been on the boat so I had a lot of food to barf up. Throwing up was so horrible that I would like to describe it as follows (if you are the least bit easily grossed out I would skip the rest of this discussion). As, anatomically accurate as I can explain it, it is a good thing my digestive system is attached to the outside of my body via the anus to the rectum or else I might have thrown up my whole GI tract. I was heaving so hard I was literally asking Heavenly Father to take me from the earth right then. I have thrown up many times in my life but no other time was even remarkably close to as bad as this. Anyway, enough of that. The rest of the cruise was good once I cleaned my system out and I recovered a bit.

Here are some pictures

T and I on the outside deck of the ship

When we arrived on the Bahamas

Breathtaking picture of a Coci beach

Hundreds of fish seen while snorkeling at St. Thomas

(Taken above the water because we don't a waterproof camera)

After we debarked in St. Maarten

T and I with our evening servers. Orlando (L) Antonio (R)

T about to dive in at a St. Maarten beach

Schooling

I started Chiropractic school at the beginning of October. It's crazy but awesome. I love that I am learning things that will pertain to me as a Doctor of Chiropractic. I also get to do a full dissection of a cadaver and I love it. I'm starting to think I would have been a pretty good surgeon. I am excited to meet new people and so far they all are fun and interested in studying and learning. I'll leave it at that right now and give a more in depth overview next time I post. This blog is long enough as is.

Update

I have to apologize to all our readers for not posting in awhile. With all the work T and I have been doing to earn extra cash and with all the tasks to accomplish in preparation for our move to Oregon life has been busy. However, I wanted to sympathize with our readers because I know what it's like to check someones blog and never see an update. So here is an update on our happenings since we graduated.

Metcalf Family Reunion
T's family had a family reunion in Malad, Idaho the week after graduation. It was nice to see her family and especially her Grandpa. He came out from Virginia so see the family and it was nice to have him around. We played a lot of games including a lot of volleyball. The best day was when we went to Lava Hot Springs and played in the big pool they have with a three level high dive and water slides. Below are a few pictures of T and I jumping off the high dive.

J jumping off the highest platform

T jumping off the middle platform (she has much better form than I do)

Moving Prep.

In Preparation for our move we sold our couch to make the move easier. It was a bit sad to see it go. After we posted it to be sold on the BYU-Idaho website we debated whether we should actually sell it. The first person we invited over to see it took one look at it and said he'd buy it. T and I said to the fellow, "Are you sure, you haven't even sat on it yet." So, he sat down and said, "Yep, I'll buy it." He then left and came back 10 minutes later with a truck and away went the couch. It's a little sad to see something you bought when you first got married being sold away. Oh well, we can get a new couch and start new memories.

Good-bye couch, we probably won't miss you when we have a nicer one

Table Rock Mountain

Just this last Monday we went on another hike to try to get our Eastern Idaho fix before we move. We hiked Table Rock which is one of the tougher hikes in this area. After the experience I'm wondering if the spelling of the name should be Tab-hell Rock. It was a beast!

The hike started out fairly easy; we walked on pretty flat ground through some meadows and wild flowers (just a teaser compared to the 50% uphill grade we would eventually get to). After awhile I started to form a blister on the back of my heel and had to change my walk a little to relieve the pain. (I knew I should have not put on the socks that have a hole in them...what was I thinking). The changing of my walk was a serious mistake because it caused my hips to really hurt later in the hike when we were about a mile from the top and walking straight up hill. T practically bounded up the mountain with no trouble whatsoever which just added to my fury. I should take a minute, in my defense, to remind all our readers to go back a few post to when T ran her marathon. She is in much better shape because of that training than her pathetic husband. Though, during the whole hike I never had trouble breathing it was my darn legs that were causing the problem. I the last few years I have noticed a growing pain in my knees and have told T that I will probably need to get my knees scoped before I am 30. I blame it on being a catcher in baseball for 10 plus years of my life. Anyway, the knee situation only got worst.

Once we reached the top we rested, ate, took in the amazing view, and shot some photos of the breathtaking picture before us. Then it was time to make the decent and for the real hell to begin. If T thought I complained a lot about my legs and knees going up she got an earful coming down. We found out on the way up from a few people that there is another way up or down (depending on how yo look at it). It was called the face trail and everyone said it cut about two miles off the distance but was straight up or down. I'd like to add that every person we talked to recommended coming up that trail and going down the one T and I came up. T was not interested in taking that recommendation so we went down the trail every encouraged us not to.

Let's just say once we started down the mountain the hike got a whole lot worse for me. It was straight down with a ton of loose rock for the next two hours. If my knees were hurting on the way up I don't even remember...I thought I was going to loose every ligament in my both my knees on the way down. And do you know what T was doing on the way down, singing and whistling to herself as she practically skipped down the face.

After it was over you can imagine how I felt...I wanted to DIE! T on the other hand, when she was finished she said to me, "Ready to go to Jackson Hole and walk around."

Here are some pictures

The little nob on the right of the photo is Table (Tab-hell) Rock. The tall peak in the middle in called The Grand, the tallest peak in the Tetons.

T in front of The Grand and at the top of Table Rock

J thinking, "If I pose like this maybe no one will know how hard this hike actually was for me." This is about as close as you can get to The Grand without actually hiking it.

In my defense, T took this picture to show that the trail she chose to come down was not recommended, not only by the people we talked to on the trail but also by the state of Wyoming. I think I might go back to that site and post my own sign saying, "Dido!"