Creativity At Its Best...

I feel like we've been celebrating Halloween for the past two weeks! We've had so much fun with friends at family (and students!), and had lots of opportunities to get in touch with our creative side.

For those of you who don't know, I started a Spanish Club at my school (the third club I advise!). For our first meeting, we made "papel picado" and Day of the Dead skulls out of rice krispy treats. They had so much fun, and so did I. But I have to admit, it wore me out! Good thing we only meet once a month! I picked up Travis on the way home from school and we both decided we were too exhausted to go to our ward party that evening. We had dinner and went to bed at 8:00. Yeah, we were pretty beat.

We made up for it the next night when we carved pumpkins with good friends. I love how our pumpkin turned out. I also love how Travis's face turned out. :)

Since it's "uncool" NOT to dress up for Halloween at my school, I decided to go in my cop-out costume- a train engineer. Sorry, Husband. This is about as close as I'll ever get to being an engineer. I also got "in character" a couple days before that for our Explorer's unit in my Utah History class. What do you think? The kids loved the visual aide. Even my Spanish students loved it!

(No, I didn't take the hatchet to school...)

Finally, we celebrated Halloween today by going to my parents' house to make caramel apples. As you can tell by the first picture in this post, these weren't your ordinary caramel apples! We're pretty impressed with how they turned out!

After our hard work, we feasted on chili-dogs and homemade root-beer (the dry ice kind, which is the best!). We then came home, and while I was still in a creative mood, made sugar cookies for some friends in the ward and attended the door for trick-or-treaters.

I think it's safe to say we had one terrific Halloween!

Prospectus Is Done!

The last month and a half I've been working a lot on my prospectus, which is basically a document that gives some background about my research topic, details specifically what my research objectives are, defines the scope of my research, gives a basic methodology outline, gives some indication of whether or not the objectives are reasonable and attainable, and lastly describes my anticipated contributions.

The biggest challenge was the size limit: my prospectus couldn't be over five pages of text, and my committee members are not systems engineers, and my research topic is difficult to describe succinctly anyway. And then each committee member had different things they wanted added in, so I had to figure out what else I could remove.

Anyway, I submitted a first draft, and only had to make one additional iteration before they all signed off on it. It's nice having that done, because now it's clearly defined exactly what I need to do moving forward!

Probably nobody but me cares that much, but for posterity's sake, you can read it here.

Homecoming

For my birthday, Travis surprised me by taking me BYU's Homecoming! We first went to dinner, and then had cake and ice cream at his parents house (Travis had secretly stayed home from school that morning to make me a cake!). Travis got this mini, electronic marque for me to wear all night (though I didn't wear it to the dance), that read things like, "I'm the best wife EVER!" and cute things like that. You can kind of see it in the picture below:

After dessert, we met up with Rob and Kim and headed to the Living Planet Aquarium in Sandy, where the dance was held. It was really neat! When we weren't dancing, we'd walk through the exhibits and see the exotic sea creatures. I liked the electric eel, even though it was kind of ugly. It was really neat though, because they put a speaker right next to the tank, and whenever the eel got excited, or was ready to kill something, you could hear static sounds coming from the speakers that measured the electric current going through him, and the more excited he was, the louder the static!

We also saw penguins, seahorses, piranhas, an octopus, and rays. In fact, in the middle of the dance floor, there was a shallow pool of water with rays swimming around the edge. One ray was very active and kept popping up out of the water at the edge of the pool like he was trying to get out! It would always startle me when we would dance next to pool and he'd pop up unexpectedly. Travis and our other friends had enough guts to reach in and touch them, but it took me a couple minutes to gather the courage to do it. After I touched it, I quickly jerked my hand back, shrieked, and grabbed onto Travis as if the ray was some kind of monster. Hey, you probably would've been nervous, too!

But we had a very fun time- the whole night was a blast! We also got to write messages to each other and put them in a bottle. :) It was so much fun, I'm glad we went! Thank you for another wonderful birthday, husband!

Slow Down

One of my favorite talks from this past General Conference was given by President Uchtdorf about "slowing down" and focusing our energy on the essentials in our lives, such as spending time with family and friends! We've been so busy with work and school recently, but have still been able to take breaks here and there for fun moments with those we love.

We went on a double-date with Rob and Kim miniature golfing at the new Trafalga in Lehi. They have a really nice course, and I was just 2 points shy of winning! There were lots of kids running around, and playing right through our courses. Rob had a couple good quotes from that night: (To a couple of kids running through our course) "Do you have parents?" and "Let's not have any kids." To which Kim said, "Um, too late!" :)

And speaking of kids, I became an aunt again! Last Friday, my sister and brother-in-law had a beautiful baby boy, and he is the cutest!

Britian Talbot Sharp

Kannon meets his cousin

the proud uncle and aunt

I'm so happy for Sessely and Chance- they will be awesome parents!