Running faster

So I ran the Habitat for Humanity 5k on Saturday. I ran it last year so I knew what to expect and trained well. I ran a well thought out race and finished with nothing left--it felt great. Last year I finished 73rd overall and 10th in my division by running a 23:59. I haven't lost any weight since then but have gotten stronger and faster and wanted to clip a minute off my time. I didn't... I ran a 23:14, but that was fast enough to place 27th overall and 3rd in my division. I think this might be the first time I've ever placed in my division (been in the top three). I didn't stay for a medal or anything because I had no idea I had done that well. I was definitely the 1st 200+ pounder across the finish line. So I guess all of those miles are paying off. We'll see for sure this weekend when I run my first half-marathon. My goal is to do it in 1:50.
In other news, Natalie has been commissioned to illustrate a book (10 pictures). It's a book about the Italian immigrant who started Bank of America (a company we have stock in by the way). She's been waking up early with me and working on that while I do reading for school. I also got a small digitizing project that I'm working on to make a few extra dollars.
In more other news, Natalie set up her sister Kim with an Elder from her mission. So we're excited to hear how that went... occasionally set-ups work out.

Good thing fast sunday is only once a month!

It was our fast Sunday today. We had a good turn out and barely had enough food. No shortage on desserts though! I had the ward sign up to bring a side dish or dessert and desserts are just funner to make I guess. I made gravy from ham drippings. That was interesting. The boys said it was good. Can you imagine that I had a hard time getting rid of leftover brownies and cookies! No one would take them home. Next month we will be doing breakfast foods. I am excited for that.
I finished my last week of multisystem failure rotation. I was in the ICU. It was pretty nice there. You only have two patient. Both of the patients that I had were sedated and we didn't have to do much. It is learning what to say to the families that I have a hard time with. My patient died my second day there. It was an unusual experience cleaning her up and putting her in a body bag. Next week I start my vulnerable families rotation where I will get to be with the pregnant ladies and babies. Yeah! It is more enjoyable to see the start of life and not the end of it. One of my days I will be at the birthing center. It is the only place where you can have a water birth which is something that I have always been interested in learning more about.
I had a great spring break. It was fun to have mom and dad come down and see where I live. The Grand Canyon is cool but we couldn't really do anything there but drive along the rim and see it at different view points. We talked about getting a trip together and backpacking from rim to rim. I think it would also be fun to go down the Colorado river. I went to Aunt Lauryl's house on weds to see Anika. She was visiting but was sick and had been sleeping all day. I was good to see her.
Well I am going to bed because I have a paper due tomorrow and I still have a ways to go before I am finished. I hope everyone has fun going to conference next week. I am excited to hear from President Monson. That is still going to take some getting used to.

it's still winter

it was another snowy sunday here in salt lake. but yesterday was sunny! i went snowshoeing with my neighbor. he had never used the running man setting on his camera, so i showed him what cool pictures you could take with it. i kept cutting off his head on the pictures i took of him though. but i thought this one was fun. it was so beautiful up there and we could see some of the skiiers at brighton. i'm really getting ready for spring though--i'm getting tired of being cold :) i don't really have anything exciting or noteworthy to tell you all about. but i did get to make a model of a treehouse that they are going to build at the clubhouse where i am getting my townhome. that was kind of fun. they aren't going to use my design or anything, they just wanted something in the 3d model to show the client. it was really fun to work on though. i got to look at a lot of treehouses that have been built all over the world to get ideas. then i read the first presidency message in the ensign where pres. monson tells the story of the boys that build the treehouse but once it is built, they have no interest in it. hopefully that won't happen in our clubhouse! hope you all have a great week!

my weekend trip to zions

here is a picture of us at the top of observation point. it was a beautiful hike and some of the trail was covered in snow and ice. made for an adventure! kasey and i drove down friday morning and met carla and her two sisters. we did some hiking on friday night and then stayed in a hotel and hiked this hike on saturday morning. it was an 8 miler and we finished in the afternoon. we were pretty tired when we were through, so we came home. good thing, because we got to spanish fork just as the sun was setting. since i lost my glasses in zions and only had my prescription sunglasses, i was glad that we made it home before dark. i had a nice time at home and today (sunday) had to leave before dark again. on the way home i got a rock chip in the rental car that i'm using while my car is getting fixed. good thing it's almost april. hopefully my string of bad luck will end! have a good week one and all!

Easter week

Yesterday we were stuck inside most of the day (it was cold… snowing again) so we watched movies and read books. This morning we did a little Easter egg hunt that Eli enjoyed even more than last year. He likes candy almost as much as his dad.

The rest of the week has been pretty busy… lots of meetings for all of us. Natalie has been meeting with a lawyer, drawing up an offer for a townhome we would like to buy. She also took Eli (and Sharon) to Indianapolis on Monday for a routine doctor’s appointment and they went to the museum while in town. The Lees are moving to Utah so we’ve been trying to have them over as much as possible.

A note about blogging...

We entered the blogging world last August and things have gone pretty well. We’ve discovered that this is a much easier way to keep contact with family and friends (than maintaining our own website) and we’ve found some friends that we thought were lost, so it’s been really great. It’s also nice to have an easy way to post pics of the kids. Anyhow, we’ve decided that we dominate the “KimWyn” blog (this one), so we’re going to start our own where we post regularly and we’ll continue posting periodically on this extended family one. Our blog posts will be at www.tyandnat.com/blog.

Here we are enjoying a beautiful sunset at the Grand Canyon. That would be Kim, Kira, and Sarah from UofA(nursing friend). They drove up from Tucson and we spent the afternoon touring the Grand Canyon. Then we spent the night at a wonderful stereo sound train thorough fare in Flagstaff. The breakfast was great. We went to the Crater of the Moon and Pueblo Indian ruins nearby and then headed down to Tucson just in time to see the Phoenix rush hour at it's finest. We ate dinner with Lauryl out on her "courtyard" and saw the beautiful full moon as we took a brisk walk through her many great jogging trails nearby. The weather was very warm coming from Utah and the Grand Canyon...we just missed a storm of 5 inches the night before at the GC. We did a downtown tour, a mission tour, a wonderful furniture place where everything is hand made and hand painted, ate at one of my faves "Beyond Bread", hiked through desert, hiked a beautiful canyon with lots of water and had great visits with the Fikes where Kira lives and with Auntie Lauryl. The drive back flew by as we read our scriptures, Jesus the Christ, The Mayflower, and I got most of a hot pad crocheted, and my Primary lesson all cut out. We were happy to find all well at home. Ghelfi had not died of starvation and it was still cold. Happy Easter to everyone. It is such a great time to reflect and learn about Christ and what He did for us. Brooke stayed overnight on Saturday after Zions and Ghelfi enjoyed having someone to talk without doing charades.

calling all di shoppers

greetings family. i don't have a picture to post with this entry. but i did take some pictures of my car with my phone, and i sent one to those of you with a phone that can receive picture messages. i guess it really doesn't look that bad in pictures, but it looks bad in real life! i'm just glad that it wasn't my fault. it was definately a wake-up call though, and i'm a really cautious driver now.

so i've been thinking a lot lately about decorating my new place. yesterday i went to home depot and got paint colors so i can pick out colors for my walls. it's all very fun and exciting. i have decided that i'd like to get some bookshelves and fill them up with books! so i was hoping that you all could help me out with that. could you all look for books for me at the di? i will totally pay you for them. i just thought that some of you go there a lot more often than i do. well, actually you all do since i never go, but i'm going to start going to look for books! i would prefer hardback books, i'm thinking of church books or classics and books like that. i think i can pass on the harlequin novels and such. anyways, hope everyone is doing well and had a great weekend. i actually am feeling better so i was able to get out and do a few things so i am very happy!

Trip to Amish Country

I will write about our trip shortly but just wanted to get a few pics/videos up now while I am thinking about it.

Negotiating as a non-negotiator

This week we got some snow, so here's a picture of Eli playing out in it... his favorite thing to do is knock down ice cycles off the neighbors' cars. He also likes to simply walk on snow and see the designs his footprints make.

Here's my story about negotiating...

As I was going for a long jog this week I realized that Spring break was nearly upon us. I had completely forgotten—I’ve been pretty busy with work lately—so I hadn’t made any plans. Fortunately, because I have been working so hard, I will really have the entire week to take off.

There are two vacation-type things we’ve wanted to do for some time now. Ever since we were married nearly five years ago we’ve wanted to stay in a fancy shmancy Bed & Breakfast. Money has always been tight so we’ve never made the splurge. The second thing we’ve wanted to do (since moving to Indiana) is to visit Amish Country, whether that be here in state or in Ohio or Pennsylvania.

Anyhow, while on my jog I decided it would finally be time to do these two things and started making tentative plans. I remembered reading in Richard Paul Evans’ “Five Things a Millionaire Taught Me” that when making a major purchase you should always ask “is that the best you can do?” I decided to implement this tactic in getting a better deal on a B&B in Amish Country. The problem is that I really don’t like negotiating, and I have a fear of phones. I do, however, believe in research so when I got home I looked up all of the Bed and Breakfasts in Northern Indiana. I then narrowed my search to all those that had big rooms (so we could partition off the kids) and a Jacuzzi tub. I came up with three and send each of them an email explaining that we were interested in coming up for a couple of days so what kind of a deal could we get and could they accommodate children (the websites weren’t very clear on this second point).

I got a near immediate response from one of them saying they would let the children stay for free and they would knock $40-60 off their regular rate and get us a room for $99/night. That sounded pretty good to me but I wondered why they were so anxious to sign us up so I checked the booking for each of the three B&Bs and saw that almost all rooms were available for next week. Apparently this is the very off-season time of year for Amish Bed & Breakfasts. So I didn’t book with the first but waited to hear from the others. The next day a 2^nd B&B emailed and said they would let the kids stay free (normally $25/child/night) and recommended we call and they would give us a good deal. We didn’t call but they really wanted our business and the next day emailed offering buy one night get one night free. At this point we were sold and Natalie called them.

We ended up getting their biggest fanciest room for $220 for the two nights. During the regular season this same scenario would have cost us just under $500. Pretty good deal, especially since we didn’t really haggle or negotiate at all, we simply let them outbid each other.

Weekend happenings

The weekend is almost here and I have just started to write about last weekend. We had a wonderful time being with family for Ben's blessing. It was very special to be together as family and hear the powerful feelings and experiences shared from family members. Ben is so very sweet. Kim and I also had a great time breaking our past distance up Aspen Loop ...going where no Christensen has gone before and having a great run down. You can see the stopping point in Picasa ( my pictures). We had a visit from the Wollenziens on Sunday night and Mary got to tell us a little about her mission in Mesa, Az. She brought a friend from her mission, "Gelfie"...that is his last name and his first name is Cesar. He plays soccer and goes by his last name and he is going to live here while he gets ready to serve a mission. He is 23 yrs. old and speaks a little English..very little. I am excited to bone up on my Espanol. Dallin and McKay have made trips out this week and helped us eat some of our food. I am so appreciative of that and also having someone to visit with since Kim rushes off each night after inhaling his food. I took my mom to Park City yesterday for the funeral of Debbie Huckstep's 91 year old dad. We were grateful to be able to be there since they haven't lived in Park City that long and the attendance was small. Again this Saturday we are going to try and break a new distance on the Aspen Loop for anyone game.

Nat's birthday

Natalie turned 29 on Sunday and we had a good time celebrating over the weekend. On Saturday we played couples volleyball and then the Lee's watched Eli while we went out to eat at Chiles. We were living it large--getting drinks, an appetizer, main course, and desert. Wahoo. We watched the movie "Martian Child," which was good despite its predictability. On Sunday Nat had Raisen Nut Bran for breakfast (our favorite cereal that never goes on sale and cost nearly $5), and we went to church. Afterwards I made her cake (lemon pudding cake) and we had taco soup for dinner. It was a pretty fun weekend. Natalie liked not having to do any cooking or cleaning and I am really glad the new week has started because I'm exhausted.